kinkrtyavimoodh

Google feels like a bunch of headless chickens running around.

it's painful to see what was once such a loved and admired brand be reduced to this. :(

i am no apologetic for the messy git UI. But i also know that any competent software engineer can be given a sufficient understanding / mental model of the basic git way of doing things in 1-2 hours, after which they can Google for the exact syntax of the commands they need (if they are doing complicated things). i feel that if they are unwilling to invest even that much time, then they are going to waste an eternity on endless tools and GUIs.

it's like tar or rsync or ffmpeg. Yes, it's hard to keep track of all the command line flags etc. but thanks to the internet we don't need to. it's far more useful to understand the underlying concepts.

Thanks for sharing this! i feel this is a cautionary tale for us HN-minded folks since i see a rather unusual love for the look and feel of the "old internet", and what i like to call the Craigslist style of design. As someone who remembers the internet of the 90s and early 2000s before it was taken over by ads and SEO spam, i understand the nostalgia, but as a web developer, also know that i need to do right by my clients and build things for them that make their businesses successful. An old outdated website turns away many customers.

> A film that exists is better than one that never gets made.

Some might disagree. The democratization of content creation that happened with the internet and social media was in general a good thing, but it can't be denied that it also resulted in a massive reduction of the Signal to Noise ratio in content quality. The reason the Google search result page is much worse today is precisely because there exits tons of content today that should never have been made.

It's hard to say whether it _should_ go to journalists. Even before the digital era, newspapers largely made money through advertisements, not subscriptions. They were monetizing eyeballs just as much as the Facebooks or Googles of the world do. In their case they brought in the eyeballs through their content (whether responsible journalism or tabloid-trash) and monetized them through also showing ads to the same eyeballs.

The difference is that journalism no longer has a pseudo-monopoly on the kinds of things they historically did (content, distribution, eyeballs etc.).

My grandfather read the whole newspaper every morning. In one day I think I read a LOT more content than him but it is spread over a wide variety of surfaces, print, websites (no single author) etc.

> "recognize that trying to parse any meaning from an email address' local-part is blatantly ignorant of IETF specifications and almost certainly will create bugs"

I am sorry but this makes no sense. You do realize that the only reason you are able to use aliases is because your email provider chooses to parse meaning out of the supposedly "opaque" text right? If your email provider is free to "break" the spec, so are people you give your id to.

Unlike programmers, their work doesn't generate revenues as easily, otherwise every blogger would be rich.

No thanks, we don't want another Prop 65 nuisance, this time for photos.

Contacts in what sense?

Probationary periods could work but it's a coordination problem. Such periods are the norm in Europe (coz it's very hard to fire someone) but for an at-will place like the US, given that the industry doesn't really do probationary periods in general, any employer who starts doing it would be at a disadvantage.

Job training is not as much worth it for companies when employees can switch jobs at the drop of a hat.

You can't force a private entity to sue another private entity. The regulator (government) can sue it if it finds it at fault. And a private entity can choose to complain to the regulator if it wants. The agreement here between MSFT and GOOG is to try and resolve disputes internally if possible without suing each other or complaining to the regulator. There's nothing illegal in that.

Just... wow. The jokes write themselves at this point. So instead of posing a simple question to the customer that even the most tech-illiterate customer can understand and answer reliably (Is your router next to a microwave oven or aquarium by any chance?), you make them download an app (which would ask for god knows how many permissions), ask them to take a photo, which may or may not even have the necessary information you need and could be in terrible lighting, blurred, or a hundred other failure modes, then run image processing on it which has its own precision and recall issues.

All of this, instead of asking a simple question. If this is not technology fetishization I don't know what is.

I think it's not obvious but it reduces to a relatively 'common' integral.

1 - cos(x) can be written as 2*cos^2(x/2)

Take the logarithm and you get 2ln (cos(x/2)), which is relatively common and the solution is https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-integrate-log-cos-x-from-0-to...

I think when people say processed food they are referring more Doritos than canned corn.

Regardless of my personal feelings about Bezos and Musk, the fact of the matter is that SpaceX is at least an order of magnitude to being able to actually land on the moon than Blue Origin.

BO hasn't even launched to orbit yet, why are we considering their bid?

On the surface "zero-tolerance" sounds like well, "zero-tolerance".

In reality, it's just shirking of responsibility. Schools neither care about creating an environment where bullying will be reduced nor about actually resolving cases fairly. Their attitude to bullying is to just close their eyes, plug their fingers into their ears and go laah-laah-laah

> Individual people aren't diverse, teams are.

Yes, which is why I said he was the 'source' of diversity. If 7 data points have value X and one has value Y, then Y is the 'source' of the variance, else the variance would be zero.

> Diversity doesn't mean "non-white," it means "varied."

It's funny that literally the sister comment of my comment links to how someone at Apple was driven out of their job for saying this. For your own sake I'd recommend you don't express these opinions at your workplace.

I am an Indian engineer in a tech company in Austin and out of the 8 people in my team 7 are Indians / Asians in their late 20s / early 30s who all followed roughly the same career trajectory (Undergrad in India / China from one of 2-3 universities, followed almost immediately by Masters in the US followed by joining tech jobs in the last 7-8 years).

The eighth guy is a white American guy in his 40s who grew up in Alabama, was in the US Air Force for a bit, then did his undergrad in an unrelated field from a relatively unheard-of university, then self-taught programming and worked a few odd IT jobs before landing here.

If you ask me, he is the true source of diversity in the team, but pretty sure none of the teams tasked with increasing diversity see it that way.

Companies don't care about theoretical definitions of talent (which for that matter this author fails to provide either, despite tying themselves up in knots to somehow try and discredit the notion of it).

Companies do care about performance / output, and anyone who works in a group setting can see that there is often a clear difference in this metric for people, and for many people this difference is consistent (it's not a matter of having high days or low days, their highs are consistently high or above average).

In my current team of 8 engineers, 2 are clearly way above average in their overall performance and output. They pay attention to detail, they actually think through their designs, they care about code quality, they are diligent in code reviews (while others mostly just rubber stamp each other's shitty code) and hold each other accountable, they are useful sounding boards for design discussions while the others just nod along, and they are generally proactive with finding bugs and fixing them.

As a manager, I want more of these people on my team, except there is just no way to actually find this out by interviewing. All these people did similarly well in their interviews, and in fact one of the so-called 10x candidates did less well, because they are a bit more polite in nature, that causes them to sound non-committal at times.

The only way thing works is a direct testimonial from someone who has worked with them, but this is not scalable, and these days we are told we shouldn't rely on that anyway as it favors candidates with 'networks' and disfavors candidates from underrepresented minorities.

References rarely talk ill about a candidate, but when you ask a reference about a good candidate, they literally start gushing with praise, while for the average or mediocre ones they say generic things and are relatively muted in their praise.

Many industries work this way. In the legal industry, for example, interviews are mostly perfunctory / nominal, because they work through a chain of strong recommendations. Of course, the flip side of that is that it is extremely credentialist.

The Tech industry is the opposite. Most generally smart people can get in by doing a few hundred hours of Leetcode but you have no idea how they will actually be on their jobs.

And perhaps countries do it because it benefits them that random companies can come and incorporate themselves in their country, but it doesn't benefit them (and often hurts them) when random people can?

After all, there ARE countries where more or less anyone can relatively easily become a citizen, it's just that most people don't want to actually live in those countries.

Some countries give people easy visas on arrival. Others make you jump through several hoops. Why? Perhaps this works out best for both groups of countries. The first group benefits from the tourism dollars, the second group perhaps sees benefits from not having the country flooded by tourists who might or might not leave easily.

I am not sure if that's a bad thing? In some sense, that is the point of having different countries.

It's nothing conceptually different from the US deciding to tax its citizens on their worldwide income even when they are living abroad. It's "completely independent of where they're actually doing business or living"

I think we do need a more consistent standard. Right now it feels like it's a popularity contest judged almost entirely by which industry the media has decided to hate on.

It might be so, but I don't work in that field, so my perception will be guided by what I see. Which is my point, unless you are intimately familiar with how ACH etc works it's natural to assume that these transfers are near instantaneous.

I AM a techie and even I would take RH on their word when they say 'instant'. When I send money to India from a US bank account via an intermediary (so that neither the US bank nor the Indian bank are first-party to the transaction) it is removed from my US account (in USD) and reaches my Indian account (in INR) within seconds, and I can see the balance in my Indian account and spend it right away, so I have no reason to believe it can't happen domestically when it doesn't even involve a currency change.

It's like this in most parts of the world. It's only the perversity of the American banking system where money transfers in this day and age routinely take 2-3 days and no one thinks there's anything bizarre about that.

> The world doesn't revolve around Facebook.

Well said. However, if you are a business owner today who wants to be able to put out their app to half their customer base, your world does revolve around Apple, which is what those of us who don't agree with the way Apple runs its App Store hegemony don't want to happen.

Robinhood doing anything unilaterally about this sounds and feels extremely sketchy and screams illegal to me (if it isn't it should be). It's one thing if the SEC stops all GME trade coz that would be fair across the board. But Robinhood effectively being able to block trades for retail while institutional investors do whatever screams market manipulation.

To play the Devil's advocate here, my personal intuition is that App reviews should be for how the apps perform, and shouldn't be used as proxy for reviewing those businesses. If the app is buggy or broken or whatever, it makes sense to give a low rating. I am not sure it makes equal sense if people suddenly realize they don't like the company who has made the app.

Unfortunately anti-trust has become synonymous with whatever scores the administration at the time feels like settling.

My guess is to be inclusive to both genders. Showing only a guy's body would be implicitly biased.

Why did Jan Koum and Brian Acton sell Whatsapp? They should have tried to monetize it with their $1 a year (or whatever) fee and see how many paid.

The truth is that they became big in geographies like India (population 1.3 billion) because they didn't actually enforce the fee for most users, and because Whatsapp worked very well with low data usage across all platforms including Symbian and offered free messaging at a time when Indians were used to having to pay per SMS.

It's convenient for the founders to grandstand now that Whatsapp is someone else's responsibility, but it was their responsibility once, and they never converted it into a profitable company, and when they got a offer too big to refuse, sold.