jsdwarf

Boah... fallacies everywhere in this piece. Let's start:

> Picasso, Jeff Bezos, Mozart, Steve Jobs, Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk, Robert Oppenheimer, Peter Thiel, Leonardo [... would be amazing PMs]

I beg to differ. Mozart died at 35, completely indebted after years of excess drinking. Jobs ousted from his own company after poor strategic decisions and intolerable behaviour. Picasso / Leonardo were geniuses of their own without need for co-workers.

> None of them [geniuses mentioned before] were motivated by OKRs, KPIs, data, or other people’s opinion.

Wrong. We know from another genius, Kurt Gödel, that even intellectually brilliant people struggle with procrastination. In Gödel's notebooks we find a multidimensional planning system (goals for the day, week, quarter, next year) and clear OKRs ("finish preparation of Princeton lecture until end of this month").

> The enormous mistake you can make is to adopt a model that requires tremendous people, without having these tremendous people.

Again wrong. Great discoveries are made by employing great discipline over a long time, not by hiring some rock stars. Why else would Elon Musk call one of his most ambitious ventures "the boring company"? Why else was Katalin Kariko, who "invented" the Covid-19-vaccine and received the nobel prize for Medicine in 2023 ousted twice from Penn University, because her research was deemed "not sexy enough" for grants?

Trucking startup? Convoy sounds like an ordinary freight exchange to me, where truckers trade available loading space against transport orders. For each assigned order, the trucker pays a transaction fee to the platform. Plus there are additional services like factoring: get paid immediately by the platform instead of 30 days later by the shipper, platform usually keeps 5% commission for this.

Dozens of platforms like this exist in Europe, not sure why everybody makes a fuss about it.

Its very common for people from Salzburg/Austria to shop in the Berchtesgaden region, however with bigger distances from the border this doesn't make sense.

Re Austrian products cheaper abroad than in Austria - there was the curious case of a beer drink from Gösser, that was sold cheaper 700km away from the brewery in Berlin than in the town of the brewery itself: https://twitter.com/KernNiko/status/1692954540293947408/phot.... Gösser argued they wanted to promote the drink in Germany against local competition and that this was a temporary price drop.

Again, Germany made a smarter move by developing beer powder concentrate (https://www.wa.de/verbraucher/bierpulver-klosterbrauerei-neu... German). This allows them to remove the 90% water share of the beer when exporting it to Asia and still sell it as "brewed in Germany".

It is indeed true that we have a lot of supermarkets in Austria, which might make logistics more expensive. But nobody ever explained why we need so many supermarkets from just 3 chains (REWE, Spar, Hofer - everything else is neglectedable). My only explanation is that the big 3 want to squat every possible spot to keep competition out. The other argument from the chains is that they are forced to buy brand products from Austrian distributors that are more expensive than German ones due to lack of volume (think of making a wholesale contract for M&Ms with Mars Germany, not Mars Austria). Again shady argument, because they could have sued against these practices years ago.

Germany has the luck of being a big country with scale effects and healthy grocery store competition.

Fellow Austrian here. Nice price comparison project, but the elephant in the room is that grocery store prices in Germany are 20-40% lower for the same product. Explanation from the supermarket chains are shady at best (more stores per capita compared to Germany, they are forced to buy from more expensive Austrian distributors etc). I heard similar things from Belgium (higher prices than in France)

My point is: we need a Europe-wide price comparison if the situation should change.

Use cases? Examples?

Looking forward for part 2 / postgres vs elasticsearch. One application at my company uses PG for CRUD on objects and elastic for searching them. We completely underestimated the effort of keeping the two datastores in sync and are actually contemplating to get rid of elasticsearch.

Past performance is a poor indicator for the future performance of a company - just look at the Top Nasdaq 100 constituents for '00s,'10s and 20s. Google is in maintenance mode and not necessarily the best company for rapid promotions. Even worse, there might be a decade without a rising superstar corporation that could provide such an environment.

Also don't forget the side effects of early retirement: you "age" faster as most of your companions during the day will be actually retired people. You will loose the connection to your working friends etc...

A sales contract is always a bilateral agreement between two clubs. Hence you cannot stipulate that the selling club will earn a share in ALL future sales of the player. Only a law could do that.

Hm... The back cover of the data mesh book reads: "Data Mesh: Architecting Data Infrastructure for Agility and Innovation with Data Mesh" is a groundbreaking book that presents a new paradigm for managing data at scale. Written by Zhamak Dehghani, a software engineer and thought leader at ThoughtWorks, the book ..."

Closing all offices enables GitHub to hire in cheaper geographies. Seems that the San Francisco headquarter was their only real office anyway,and I estimate approx 400 GitHubbers were working from there (55000 sqft office space, tech typically uses 150 sqft per employee). Gradually re-hiring those in cheaper geographies plus reduction of perks can mean quite significant savings and is another stab at Silicon Valley.

To me this boils down to Churchhills adage "Don't trust a statistical report unless you fabricated it by yourself". There are so many subtleties when translating business questions into SQL e.g. was the average deal size in the post's "trend" example computed using average/median/geometric mean formula? Should the trend only contain historic or also projected values. No serious report comes without data definitions, then its an exercise to the reader to spot flaws there.

Doesn't backstage offer auto-discovery of docs, ie create docs folder in repo, throw in some markdown files and everything gets picked up? If so, what kind of maintenance was required?

The copy/paste python function looks nice, but why don't you publish this as a package on pip? Would allow for automatic updates through pip vs copying the function manually into my source code every n months.

Transparent license/copyright info is another advantage of a package.

In Northern Austria you find a lot of "no gps" signs at the start of agricultural roads. Seems that many lorry drivers rely on google maps for navigation and those small roads are ill-suited for their vehicles, e.g. due to weight limits or sharp turns.

There is indeed a lot you can do to avoid overcrowded sales departments, e.g. define minimum order volumes your prospects need to hit to let your salespeople interact with them (and refer them to an external reseller otherwise). Invest in online sales tools like product configurators to let you customer do the sales job etc.

What does "open camera" mean? Public webcam? Hacked CCTV? How did the author find those cameras?

GraphQL Performance is abysmal, because query language is completely detached from the way data is stored and encourages you to select as much as possible.

Your "loose-loose" problem can be easily addressed. Simply post two ads - one for a Developer, one for Senior Developer, Senior Developer range being x000 USD higer than dev range. If mediocre candidates apply for Senior, tell them that you can only offer them the dev Position because they lack qualification x. Vice versa, you can "promote" great dev candidates to the senior dev position. In the end, nobody forces you to hire both.

Exactly. Tech-oriented shareholders are longing for growth, so PE firms often acquire tech companies with a large customer base but no stellar growth story. Besides cutting costs, they also charge customers more.

A classic PE game is to declare a widespread, but no longer innovative software product "end of life" just to charge more for "extended support" contracts. Customers often have said product deeply entrenched in their daily workflows and would inccur high customizing costs if they switch to a competitor. In the end, they are better off paying the support premium.

From a funding perspective, PE firms also have an advantage compared to stock exchanges: because their assets are no longer traded daily, the volatility of these assets decreases. The asset value is maybe determined once a year for balance sheet purposes. This means that pension funds and other regulated investors can invest more in the PE sector than in stocks, because technically they are buying "low volatility assets".

Fun fact: German synthie pop band "Münchner Freiheit" used a very similar synth intro in their 1986 hit "Tausendmal du" (a thousand times you). Their song was published just 6 months after Kate Bush released "Running up that hill". Plagiarism or Coincidence?

https://youtu.be/1Py4ORjcpVc

specially if the "bad" pixels are noise that consume most of the bitrate without carrying information.

Objection. Huawei has a webcam coming out of the keyboard: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/25/17050098/huawei-matebook-...

Internal cams in laptops are considered commodities by the laptop manufacturers: they need to put any HD webcam in their product or no customer will buy it, but nobody picks a laptop model just because it has an excellent webcam.

The whole webcam market is in a sad state with little to no R&D and ridiculous prices. How else is it explainable that the 8-year old C920 is still considered a quality leader?

Isn't the SO pageview data skewed by the fact that most remote workers are on their company's VPN, hiding their true location?

In Austria, the situation is as follows: the employees of a company can decide to form a works council, which may or may not consist of Union members. To establish a works council, you need support statements of at least 5 employees. The works council itself is then elected by all employees of the company. They can choose between different candidates, who might be more or less union-friendly. The works council checks for violation of labor laws and is also consulted if employees are set off.

Created a python script that scrapes the holding lists for each of my ETFs and outputs an aggregated list of all companies I am invested in through the ETFs. Can also compute how similar two ETFs are based on their holdings. Has saved me some order fees because it drastically reduced the ETFs I am investing in.

His offer seems like those 19,99$ /month discount gyms that are open 24/7. you can access them all the time but have no guarantee to complete your workout in 1hr due to the large amount of people. Not sure if that works for deadline driven businesses.

Not to forget that you might have multiple part-timers on your team who are doing different work hours. The shared work time dimishes which makes it more difficult to hand over tasks etc.