jib

Privacy is a protection and insurance for the future.

Things, like say, recording the religion of someone in an open, embracing and understanding society that has full religious freedom, so you understand what your population identifies seems harmless, right?

It certainly seemed like it to the Jews in the Netherlands in the 1930s.

The stats piece is close to nonsense as well, if you measure ASA from your phone system's call duration when you have a virtual queue you are lying to yourself at best.

The math of say 10 sec max queueing vs say 5min wait time is pretty straight forward but maybe not intuitive. You pay significant (30%+ sometimes, depends on volume) overhead for those last minutes (queueing theory, Erlang C formula). For that reason, it's nice to do something like this. Low customer effort cost but high savings.

Virtual queueing through the phone is a bit meh, you still have to pick up the phone in the first place. Doing it through the web though gives imo a less annoying experience - wait time less visible and only have to pick up the phone once.

I think that most people would be a lot happier if they saw life as a series of low probability events rather than trying to create a story of accumulation.

Life does not accumulate things (luck, good fortune, bad fortune, karma, any other crap that feeds the story of continuity).

Life is about maximizing your exposure to positive low probability events, or the probability of them, and minimizing your exposure to negative low probability events, or the probability of them.

You're not working hard in work to get a reward, you're working hard to be exposed to more chances of possible rewards.

You're not exercise to avoid bad health, you're doing it to lower the chances of a series of low probability diseases.

I think this is the same thing you were saying. I think realising that life is a series of low probability discreet events, not a continuum that accumulates based on past events is a real life changer.

All you can work on is the process of finding the right events to be exposed to - having feelings about the outcome of those events is irrational and leads to unhappiness.

I agree for what it's worth.

If you read Stephenson for character or environment description, or even a coherent story, you will have a bad time. If you want to read about strange ideas from a guy who spent way too much time thinking about submarine cables, you may have a good time, if that's your thing and you like the topic he is currently interested in. I am (usually) in the latter category.

Reynolds is a different guy. Better story teller, more conventional ideas to me. (I like and have read about all his books too).

If you like Reynolds, try Peter Hamiltons series, especially the Nights Dawn trilogy.

Swedish social security numbers are public information btw, just to clarify the insanity - I can call in to the government register and ask for anyone's number, there isn't even any obfuscation or semi-privacy about it like US SSNs.

That is Stephensons style though. I think what Seveneves needed was a proper ending. It felt like he got bored and just threw together an end in like a tenth of the space it would have needed. Balance between the stories was off by a lot. Outside that, enjoyable.

I enjoyed all of Anathem and would have happily read another 500 pages of it. Not sure if Stephenson is the best example, his long book style is quite unique. Usually it works for me (Anathem, Cryptonomicon, I've read both at least twice) other times it doesn't (The baroque series I haven't finished). Snow crash and Zodiac are examples of him writing shorter good books too.

This is an argument that a lot of people make in a lot of business cases. It is not a correct argument.

Find huge amount. Say "if only X%" (usually 1% or something else low) then increase of 1%*huge amount which is still a huge amount!

Somehow the argument of "if only X%" is meant to avoid the need to prove that you can, in fact, do X%.

1% of extra revenue is hard. 1% time save across the board is hard. If you claim 1%, you better have some strong arguments as to how you can achieve 1%, not do "handwavy do something with synergy or extra information - even if we just get 1% which is a low number, 1% of something huge is still huge. We think we can do more than 1%!".

It is almost as pervasive as hindsight arguments that ignore risk costs. "I put all my money on black at the roulette table and my business is up 100% in the last year - I will bring huge wins to you".

Uber for food is logistics. Cleaning is trust.

I would argue that a recommendation engine would be a far better thing for cleaning services than a logistics solution is. Facebook are a lot closer to the solution for cleaning services than uber is. I want a cleaner who people say are trustworthy and who is reasonably local. I want a driver and food delivery guy who is very local and somewhat trustworthy. Very different domains.

That sketch annoys me. Sure, marketing/sales/PM/design guys are idiots, whatever.

Here are 11 things "I can't do it" can mean:

I don't have time

I don't want to

I don't have anyone who knows how to

I want someone else to do it

I don't want to maintain it once built

I want to work on this other thing

Doing it would take away job security for me

I think it is beneath me

You're not going to use it anyway

I don't think it is worth doing

I think it is too expensive

I think it would be easyish to fill out another 10 reasons for what "can't" really means that are more common than "it is flat out impossible regardless of budget/resources".

I disagree on Uber for Cleaning Services being the same.

For a cab company, I want a large fleet of cabs, so that I can get the closest one fast. I dont need huge levels of trust in my cab driver. Get me where I want to go, dont kill me in the process, dont rob me.

For a cleaning company, I'm letting those guys inside my house. I need a lot more trust, and I dont want new guys every time. I want a reliable guy that I can use over and over again.

One of those is well suited to a distributed model with interchangeable parts. Uber provides that distributed network, and that is a moat of kinds. Yes they can be replaced, but you still need a comparable distributed network in place to be competitive. That isn't free.

Their power is in their existing network, and the fact that being a network is a value add to what they provide. For a cleaning service, being in a network isn't a competitive benefit - I'm not looking for the closest cleaner, I want one I really trust.

Caring about dressing nicely is a Moneyball thing to me.

If you care about how someone dresses when you hire them, odds are you're using bad criteria for your decisions. That's not to say that you can't get great people, but you're probably paying over the odds for them, if "dresses nicely" is one of your factors for selection.

I think I will hire better if I dont care about dress code - I think odds are better that I will find a good hire if one of my criteria is not "do they own a suit or a dress".

The weather app example at the start annoys me. I want a weather app for data, not decision making. I want to consume a couple of data points easily, for various needs. 7 of those 8 apps do that.

Rain amount (bike or bus today?) Wind amount (can I bodyboard today? Rain coat or umbrella?) Temperature (gloves for the wetsuit? Jacket when biking?) Sun amount (can I do a cliff walk this weekend or will the trail be muddy?)

Etc... I don't want an umbrella app, a surf app, a walk app, a bike app... I just want some data that I will use in a multitude of ways.

There's a class of interviews that are like this though. Knowing about that class is important because it's in heavy use. If it says "competency based interview" anywhere, don't do theory or generalities, prep as many specific examples as you can, and know the Situation/Task/Action/Result format.

Hygiene factors vs motivation factors. Some stuff will make you happy, some stuff will make you unhappy. They are not on the same scale. Pay is mostly hygiene - not enough, absolute, or more importantly relative will make you unhappy. It won't make you super happy to increase it over enough though. (Yeah yeah, it totally will for YOU, but in reality... Not really. Increases and relativity matter a lot more than what you really are paid, even me and I'm really cynical about it).

Healthcare, same deal - needs enough to not make you unhappy.

What you work on - can actually make you happier.

Being smart (and intelligence in general - I dont know if we need to establish exactly what definition we use for that, but something like an ability to quickly see and adjust to logical patterns) is a great secondary ability in my view.

You can simulate a lot of actually useful abilities by being smart. Being smart doesnt have a lot of value in and of itself, once you're over some certain threshold though.

Getting stuff done, not being a dick to people (or even possibly getting along with them), following up on commitments - that's abilities that are useful. Being smart can let you find easier ways of doing so, but it doesnt have any meaning in and of itself.

The truly smart people I know seem to know that and tend to be a bunch of slightly weird, but nice, people. The people who want to be admired for their cleverness (or admired in general) typically don't (and typically aren't as smart, in my experience).

I'm ok with that. Perception matters. I dont think it is cold as much as realistic. I would much rather have my contributions to the pension cut.

Someone decided that providing milk is too much of a pain in my office. We used to have a guy who dumped off a dozen litres fresh milk a day in the break areas. Now I buy my own. That annoys me. Buying milk takes up cognitive space that I could use for other stuff.

No milk annoys me way more than if we were to cut pension contribution cap by 1%.

I save about 500 euro/month or so in the pension (I dont even know exactly how much, I just went with the cap). Lowering the cap by a percent would probably save about 50 euro / month per employee or so. There is no way I spend 50 euro / month on milk.

Cutting the pension contribution cap by 1% would have been a worse deal financially for me, but the milk annoys me way more than a cap cut does.

I went to the same school (I presume) in Gothenburg. I came into the CS classes with a decent amount of math background, and a small amount of programming classes (FORTRAN, C, ADA and other kinds of evil you use in chemistry and physics). Our CS intro classes were Java and Haskell. Haskell didn't feel like a reboot to me, it felt like using math to write programs, so at least for me, Haskell felt a lot more accessible than learning OO concepts in Java did. I am sure lecturers caring more about Haskell also mattered, but at least for my background, getting the Haskell concepts was a easier than the Java concepts.

Sorting long lists is a good one. Filtering of various kinds.

I would also add that a largish company isn't one place, it is many smaller places that only looks the same from outside.

Once you're past that 150 number or so, you will have multiple cultures and environments. There will be the small hot next thing, the big incumbent, the team everyone is waiting on, the hasbeens, the guys in the corner no one knows what they're doing, the guys everyone has to work with even though no one knows why, etc. Some traits will be the same, but environment varies a lot.

See recent discussions on Amazon for instance. Some people disagree completely on their experience.

Swedish average wages are close to the top (if not at the top)in EU. The wage gap is a lot lower than most countries though. Just mentioning since I stated Swedish wages were low not long ago, but when I looked it up that wasn't the case overall, it's just that normally high paying jobs pay less there.

It isn't about individuals though. It is about having a sructure that makes large scale, cooperative projects possible. If you are going to have ventures where large groups of people work a significant amount of time together to create something new you need either state funding, state protection of end result or to rely on some sponsorship program.

For instance - medical research into new drugs isn't something that you sit down and think "I guess I'll do a few hours on the side" right? It is a multi year, multi people job. Either that is state funded, sponsor funded, or you can make money on the end product to pay for costs.

We have postcodes now! Or well, eircodes. Which are totally not postcodes, but rather unique house identifiers that happen to look as postcodes. And that noone will use.

http://www.eircode.ie/

PayPal does to some extent. And then people complain about how expensive PayPal is. In a commodity, race to the bottom world of cc processing I am not sure it would be a good business practise to bundle fraud prevention and processing. Let people be bitten and then willing to pay to avoid it is probably a better practise than charging for it up front. But they do buy them. ACI bought ReD last year for instance http://www.aciworldwide.com/news-and-events/press-releases/a...

You would wish so:). But no. Merchants are on the hook for all costs, including penalties for incoveniencing the cc companies (either a set fee per fraudulent transaction, or high fees if exceeding thresholds of fraud if you are a larger guy).

Finding out what they do is a fairly unusual need though, right? When I look up a company website (rarely) I'm not looking to find out what they do, typically. My use cases are something like: I want to order something, I want info on a specific product they sell, I want support for something that has gone wrong, or rarely I may be looking for info on working there. I typically know what they do before going to their site, otherwise I wouldn't be there in the first place.

Shuffled is also a feature. You almost never buy a 32" TV and a 34" TV at the same time, right? So it is highly unlikely that similar items would benefit from being next to each other. It helps for finding if that was a problem, but finding is solved by computers anyway, so the layout can be optimised for pathing instead.

[url-redacted]

That is 60k (just randomly checking places up north).

Lots of places in Sweden with great internet, great nature and ok prices. If super cheap is your focus, maybe not, but it is quite affordable outside cities. The North for mountains, the west or north for forests and lakes.