2,679 karma · joined February 26, 2012
Some of my hobbies include helping people unlock creativity using LLMs: https://conjori.com/
And trying to revive a dead MMO: https://www.swgemu.com/
I work for Amazon, and all opinions I share on this handle are my own.
When we first moved here we were surprised at all the openings, it seems most of the financial companies have folded up or left the area and it's being rapidly developed as a residential area.
The building I live in is something like 9 years old and all around us new buildings are going up with signs all over them about new residential housing. Still many other buildings are being refurbished to support residential housing and "fully furnished" housing.
When I heard Conde and Media Math were moving in I told my wife "Here it comes Silicon Valley on a single campus". I recently learned of another very large tenant in Media and Tech that's moving in (can't share the name) along with several others related to the media and tech scene in NYC.
My wife and I had been considering moving to another part of the city until we realized I'd have a 10 minute walk to most of the tech and media companies I'd either work for or consult for.
Maybe the buildings are filling up slowly, but if they keep filling with tech and media companies the surrounding residential spaces will fill up quickly as the employees snag walking distance housing. This could create a really nice synergistic geographic location for tech and media innovation.
I know this won't be a popular comment since most of HN is valley based, I spent 5 months of 2014 in the SF area, working for a start-up and consulting for clients in the valley. I burned so much time on the road my wife offered to commute with me so I could be in the carpool lane. Our company sold and I came back home to NYC. I've enjoyed being back home.
One of my frustrations with "The Valley" is having to own a car to really be able to move around. Yes there is some transit but nothing like NYC. I lived most of my life in Los Angeles so I am overly aware of how horrific the car culture becomes. You lose so much time in the car, you're less productive, you have less family time and you're stressed and burnt before you even sit in your chair in the morning at work. When you have to start your own bus company to get your employees in and out of work something is amiss.
I am hopeful that downtown could become the next challenger to the valley and do it with less people stuck on a freeway somewhere.
"Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
"Your computer can keep your secrets as long as it's dead".
"Computers will keep secret anything you don't share with them."I find it interesting when people wax poetic about how one language is better than another and how if we just did x, y or z then we'd have this perfect solution.
That said I appreciate the author's write-up of some challenges with Go. In the end the reality of any "product" is building what the user's need not what they ask for. That said I do worry that the Generics argument seems to be slowly approaching a religious war that will distract people from the other enjoyable aspects of Go. Worse yet it may calcify the Go development team in a way that will keep them from addressing the basic issues that generics might help solve. Either way Go is just another computer language and I'm happy to use it often to solve problems I'm working on. That said I use a lot of computer languages every week when I'm working on stuff, none of them are perfect and my solutions to the underlying problems are fragile and constantly evolving as the problems unfold. This is the nature of our business, to constantly do battle with poorly understood problems using imperfect tools in a world where we are fooled into thinking everything is black and white because at the core of our technology everything is a 0 or a 1.
"One Computer Language to bring them all and in the darkness bind them".. LOL
I'm curious did they know this in advance or discovered it after the fact?
I often wonder about business models where the core expense is "unlimited and free". The reality is there is nothing unlimited or free for the service provider. It seems with a business model like this you open yourself to people abusing your service either by accident or by choice. Imagine poor Mr. Customer here who most likely was having horrible problems thinking to themselves "These guys can do it and for free, if I go to X service they'll cost me a lot of money".
I'm a big believer in business models that incentivize both parties properly. I'm sure in general this service provider is arbitraging the 99.9% of domains that barely need any services. That said it only takes a couple of "opps" customers to drive your operational costs through the roof.
I travel a lot and it doesn't take much time to figure out the right schedule including stuff like +/-X days and length of stay etc.
I love my children but they've all sort of gone various directions none of them are quite the uber nerd I am. They call me once in a while "dad my sound isn't working" etc. I've always sort of been their tech crutch, providing them with answers, trying to teach them each time but in general they just say "Yea dad just fix it please". LOL
The greatest gift of being a father is knowing just how much mine had to love me because he didn't kill me while I was growing up. I'm sure it was no different for your father as clearly he wanted to share his wonderment with you and hoped like I do that for just a small flash of time that you understood a bit of what excited him in his life.
I've often joked about Digital Archaeology[1] to my kids, told them they'd have to get a masters degree in it to review all the digital cruft I will leave behind. I thought this was all good and fun until she passed, and wading through all this stuff just tears at me. This trail of floppies, some I couldn't recover all of, some blank but I could see files that were deleted in hex dumps of the raw images. It was all very surreal like looking at old photographs of our life together but much more visceral for some reason. It’s like digital items don’t have dust on them, they look exactly like they did when you made them 30 years ago. You don’t boot an old floppy and see a fuzzy or yellowed and crinkled screen. It’s perfect in every detail, like the second it was last booted.
Logging into her MMO account and seeing the toons she was playing when the cancer started to take over her brain just killed me. I knew how much she loved these games both of us were gamers over the years and she loved to level to the end game and join guilds, run raids.. To be the center of attention in her online world. We deleted the toons, figured it was the closest thing to reality, she was gone now her digital form was gone, nobody would login and play those characters ever again and no need to make others wonder where she was. She had a large list on-line social network outside of Facebook, guilds in all sorts of games where she was a central figure. Her passing is known to us and those who where on Facebook, but out there somewhere is someone who she touched who’s wondering why she’s not logged into the game for a couple months.
How strange “Death” is in a digital age, sure our minds might stop working and our bodies no longer function but the perfect lines we drew in the digital sand continue on forever.. Or at least until a floppy finally gives up that final bit, or a hard disk somewhere crashes. As our digital world evolves into a place where bits really can live forever these thin digital lines left behind will remain forever etched in the digital world.
I often wonder what will happen to the petabyte that will be my digital impact when I go, will some AI some day in the future consume it in a matter of minutes and derive anything of value? Or will it just sit silently being copied from one storage medium to another forever without anyone thinking about why and what is in it?
Many years ago a customer of mine did a storage assessment and they realized it was cheaper to buy more disks then to ask all their employees to delete unused files.
I knew then the digital lines would go on forever, being copied from one storage system to another because it’s just cheaper to keep it...
In the end if you're reasonable and can show you've hit the nail on the head often enough to be trusted then you won't have conversations about sand bagging.
When my clients complain about the estimate I often say we "write software":
1) The way the client thought it should be written
2) Again the way the developer thought it should be written
3) And finally the way is should have been written in the first place
When my teams give me estimates I almost always fudge by this 3x factor when working with my stakeholders and explain how hard it is to really estimate development without wasting tons of time doing massive waterfall charts. Then they ask for the chart and I laugh "but then it'll be wrong two seconds after we publish it."
In all my years of coding there have been "wow that went fast" times on projects and "oh man I'm dying here" and the more room I leave to reduce stress in the "dying" phase the easier it is to break free and get back to "fast" mode.
I don't doubt there is a lot of room to improve, clearly a lot was learned from SPDY and other projects. But I do worry that what we're actually doing is rewarding large companies who can bring all the stuff into one stream and the small sites will be yet more disadvantaged. I could see a world where this is used as a way for PHB's[2] to justify "just move our stuff to Google/Amazon/Apple". These sort of initiatives may incentivize more centralization and IMHO that is not a good thing.
Also being an old guy(tm) I worry about loosing the ability for humans to talk to these services or see the conversation in a textual way. Before you explode on that comment think about the balance of JSON -vs- various binary serialization solutions. How many of us have chosen a serialization protocol because "we can read it". I'm not arguing that as a perfect argument, but if you're already pushing TLS and HPACK then why not at least leave the textual data in there? I guess I worry that now we head down the RFC hell where only large bodies can get extensions in the protocol because we only have 256 options on this header and each bit counts. To be fair I've not deep dove the protocol yet, I suppose theses are just rantings of a guy who read a slide show.. :)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointy-haired_Boss
Is anyone auditing Win8? (Win10 or whatever is next)?
The Eagle has landed: https://soundcloud.com/nasa/apollo-11-eagle-has-landed-1
Reading the very nice detailed instruction manual[1]:
To the avoid hearing damage, always use hearing protection when
you are near a running turbine engine!
A flying model with a turbine can reach higher flight speeds
than ducted fan-powered models, because the turbine’s thrust
degrades less with higher flight speeds. With attainable flight
speeds of over 250 MPH, you can quickly run out if flying room.
There is also a danger of developing control surface flutter
or mechanical overload, causing the model to fail in flight.
[1] http://www.jetcatusa.com/PDFFiles/Instruction%20manual%20V6....
I wonder how this thing handles loosing contact with the controller?
It's no wonder the FCC in US is getting less and less RC friendly, besides the typical "home land security" drama stuff like this in a public park could be a real problem from noise pollution to safety of other people in the area.
All this said, must be quite a rush to play with something like that, I would love to fly it in an open field deep in the desert with a clear open sky.
Looking at public repos for stats is like counting the number of tables on planet earth by looking at satellite photos. You never see inside the buildings, just whats outside in parks etc.
On ATT I see the X-Acr thing but not clear if it's UID like or not in nature, would need to see more of them.
As an example if you sign up for some random blog and they capture UID's they could quickly map your email to your UID and onward into the spiral we go.
IP Addresses are a similar problem for home users, nobody seemed to have noticed that quite some time ago ISP's started making DHCP lease times quite long. Not to put on a tin foil hat, but I assume this was done more strategically then just to reduce load on DHCP servers in their networks.
They were testing it last year, you could clearly see these headers on a large percentage of traffic coming from their gateways.
I'm not expressing an opinion one way or another but they clearly felt the UID is not directly identifiable and thus does not become a privacy issue until they share the mapping of the UID to customer data.
My guess is in their minds if you opt-out they just do not provide your UID to 3rd parties for targeting.
In the ever increasing dream of cross device marketing (think your iPad, iPhone and Laptop) many companies are trying to figure out ways to connect these devices to a single individual or family.
IIRC Verizon quietly started rolling out service wide TOS changes to allow this sort of thing a couple years back. That said I'm not sure if their TOS makes it clear how this is implemented and what potential side effects might be caused by the way they've implemented them.