lemax

These incident role names are fairly common in product companies these days. I guess you are correct that they do suggest a certain culture around incidents, but in my experience is definitely a good thing. It's a "don't blame people, let's focus on the root cause, get things back up, and figure out how to prevent this next time" sort of thing. People try to meet SLAs and they treat each other like humans. We focus on improving process/frameworks over blaming individual people. And yup, think this comes along with, "incident yesterday was intense, I'm gonna catch up on sleep".

It works because you put your watch on, unlock your watch. Your watch remains unlocked until you take it off. I was under the impression if you’re wearing your watch and it’s unlocked, and then you pick up your iPhone, it acts as the key to your phone.

My Face ID is completely broken after getting water on my "waterproof" iPhone X. I downloaded the beta in the hopes of using my Apple Watch to unlock my iPhone without Face ID enabled. My employer enforces a device policy with passcode required immediately and auto-lock in 1 minute, so this would have been really nice. Unfortunately this feature only works a) with Face ID enabled and b) while wearing a mask. Not exactly just "Unlock with Apple with Apple Watch".

We don't refer to companies in the plural. The correct phrasing is "Apple isn't your friend". Apple is one company. It makes things.

Axios really needs to bring on some literate technical advisory.

"Cookies are considered third-party data, or user data that's collected indirectly from users via browsers or websites."

This statement seriously requires qualification. This is exactly what contributes to unreasonable regulation and confused users.

Yep, we use NSSM as well, it does the job.

We use vercel/pkg to distribute our product as a standalone executable that runs in on-prem windows environments. Our product is actually comprised of multiple NodeJS servers that are spawned as child processes in one master Node procees, and that module gets built using pkg. We also have a windows installer that configures a windows service to run the executable/keep it up. It’s proven to be a really simple way to distribute our app to the enterprise that’s been working for a few years. It doesn’t really protect source code, but provides a decent enough level of obsfuscation for our needs.

National security, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (Cfius), has gone as far as requiring the repatriation of Grindr after it approved a deal for it to go to a Chinese company.

https://www.ft.com/content/30408b0e-50e2-11e9-b401-8d9ef1626...

edit: not the FTC, it was Cfius

Susan Sontag sums up the ultimate social achievement of the artist well. It's about the Aesthetics of Silence. The more withdrawn an artist becomes, the more celebrated. The ultimate level according to her, is not communicating, and not even creating anything.

> So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the “new” and/or the “esoteric.” Silence is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.

– Susan Sontag, The Aesthetics of Silence

PM is all about impact and effort. Priority goes to the high impact low effort stuff first, and low impact high effort generally goes the way of the bin. Strategic alignment is also import whenever priority is evaluated.

> Hint: good PMs won't just base it on gut feelings or anecdotal evidence.

Sure, good PMs tend to collect great evidence from customer interviews, usage data etc. However, getting too hung up on data is sometimes a trap. I've seen some great ideas from teams - some even fully implemented - shot down by other PMs because there was no research.

What if you don't have the data, but the idea is something you know will generate massive value? This is the exact issue startup ideas face... no one knows if an idea is valuable until it's tested and a product hits the market. But early stage founders and great product managers might just know something is the right idea yet have zero data to back it.

Any product a product manager has ever worked on was initially created from nothing. Data wasn't generated until people took a risk and delivered.

Until recently Japan had very few foreign nationals, on the order of 1% even in 2005 [1]. Compare that to 10-12% in the US. That has recently been changing as Japan tries to bring in more foreigners to address its shrinking workforce [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Foreign_...

[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/23/japan-immigration-polic...

Open Street Map is a nice analogy for what could work. Aside from the open source maintenance of the map, there's also tons of corporate help in the background. Companies that are delivering OSM as a service or relying on it for their own services have an interest in making it better. MapBox, for example, apparently pays tons of people a salary who are contributing upstream to Open Street Map. If we can get an Apple/Microsoft/Other players collab maybe a venerable alternative can actually be built.

Sorry but no. The dominant perspective on writing in academia teaches people to do exactly what you are saying. This is what is taught in undergraduate English classes. The unconventional wisdom is to Write Like You Speak. So it's more about unlearning popular things like "bureaucratese" and corporate speak. Poetry and literature aside, most of us are better off writing in plain English if we want to do well professionally.

The Plain English Campaign lays it out well:

"The main advantages of plain English are: it is faster to write; it is faster to read; and you get your message across more often, more easily and in a friendlier way."

http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/how-to-write-in-plain-english....

I have used similar editors in the past and since stopped. But, I found that the way these tools tend to train you to write has a long term impact. One of my newer colleagues often seems to choose the most complex words possible. I'm not sure if it's an imposter syndrome thing, maybe they feel the need to overcompensate, or they actually never learned the benefits of simpler word choice. I wish more people would learn the art of Writing Like You Talk.

http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html

I can cook quite well but honestly living in NYC and going to the grocery store to serve my partner and I ~2 meals a day every day of the week is nearly impossible with our work schedule. If I wanted to do nothing else with my day but work and cook, that might be fine, but Doordash et al. are making life a whole lot better. When we were launching our company, we joked that it was often just a stream of delivery drivers bringing us stuff to sustain ourselves.

The Economist recently had some great analysis on Ant Group's evolution and how it does internal credit scoring https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/10/10/what-ant-group...

If build includes a git pull, maybe it did.

Ahh... labor alienation. One of the great drawbacks and geniuses of our primary modes of production in modern society. As we become more and more separated from the things we actually work on, what are the drawbacks though? The general trend becomes if we want to do more, we create more separation. The social impact, for one, is in general a large extent of estrangement from our human essence. Tangibility is intuitive, abstraction, not so much.

Azure devops was the first to offer Windows based self-hosted runners - if you’re stuck in the drudgery of building Windows software, because your customers only run Windows servers, it was pretty much the only modern devops option for a while. I don’t think Devops is going anywhere anytime soon, I’ve heard utilization is quite high.

Is this really any less ethical than a more sophisticated marketing scheme?

"Black Hat Firm" vs. Expensive Growth Marketing Firm:

– unestablished writer vs credentialed, domain experienced writer (with a salary?)

– spammy Medium.com presence vs Editor Connections at TechCrunch

– network of "dozens" of nearly ineffectual sockpuppets vs dozens of employees with "real" accounts ready to upvote and engage on Boss's call

If you're surprised by this, spend a day in the pits of a product launch in literally any industry. We welcome ingenuity when we talk about growth hacks but criminalize it when it's not classy. This is all a matter of access, Marketing and PR generally comes down to what resources people have and what they can get away with.

People love to throw around the big "Break up" but what they really want is probably much more nuanced. What do break ups achieve? To use an example from Benedict Evans, suppose Windows and Office were broken up... at the end of the day, you'd eliminate cross-leveraging of Windows and Office, but as far as crops of new PC operating systems licensors or productivity software companies popping up go, things would probably have remained more of the same. If the goal of a break up is to eliminate a complete market grip, we need to think a few steps more deeply. Google and Facebook both operate in two sided markets. If you break that up, you'll just end up creating more leverage for advertisers and less power to the successor companies. A better example is probably telecom in Europe, where regulators decided that instead of one big telecom provider, they would build the lines nationally and rent access to those lines to a slew of network operators. This created a rich and competitive market where consumers can get a data plan for a reasonable price and plenty of companies have made plenty of money.

The crux of Evan's argument is that what makes FB/GOOG/AMZ/MS strong is the network effects they possess, not their sheer size. Google failed at creating a social network, Facebook wouldn't even try taking an aim at search. So, any reasonable unit these orgs can be "broken" into wouldn't achieve the intended effect.

Regulators need to look at things like price capping, requiring big platforms to offer up certain data entities for use by third parties, requiring consumers to choose their default search provider instead of selling the position, et cetera. Get over the break up already

I was driving through south Brooklyn a few years back and passed a few teenage boys on bikes. We heard them talking to each other and, if I didn't see their faces I would have thought we were listening to a broadcast from the early previous century. New Yawk English, in all of its glorious preservation is alive and well in some pockets of the city.

Growing up in New Jersey I've learned to subdue my own inflections after realizing most other American professionals seem to view any hint of the accent as low class.

I've had so many challenges with this, to the extent that at some point it began affecting my throughput at work. If I never switch "on" or "off", at some point I run into a place where I feel like I'm always working but never getting anything done. I've also historically had issues maintaining a consistent schedule, and even viewed my unique position of not having to do that as somehow special – after a few years, I can tell you that it's not. Some colleagues I know enjoy working a few hours in the morning, skipping out around 2:30 PM and getting the rest done late in the evening. Eventually and very recently I came to the conclusion that this just doesn't work for me. My manager recently recommended I just work from 9-5 and sign off and shut my computer at the end of the day. It might seem obvious or painfully conventional, but it just works. No more colleagues complaining that I'm off the map half the time or hesitating to reach out because I might awkwardly be unavailable. I'm working less hours, shipping more, and enjoying my life when the work day ends.

I work for a small distributed company (~600 employees) that compensates everyone based on their location. I live in NYC and receive a pretty solid salary given my experience / region. When I was hired, HR made it clear that if I move around or relocate, my salary will be adjusted based on the living costs. The company has roots in Argentina, and about 30% of our engineers live there. We are all paid enough to live comfortably wherever we are located, but I imagine that the engineers in Argentina are making significantly less than the ones in SF. Hiring globally is extremely complex, and colleagues I have spoken to who live in countries where we do not have a physical presence (office location) incorporate an entity and contract with a Caribbean firm that the company contracts through. Day to day those folks are operating as normal permanent employees.

This feels similar to Glitch, FKA HyperDev, Fog Creek's developer playground.

ACM doesn’t talk to EC2. AWS Enterprise Support will tell you with a straight face to let them handle TLS termination on the ELB/ALB, and keep things unencrypted in the VPC. Their claim is that the VPC has much more sophisticated security than TLS.

It would be nice if this didn't function like a virtual panopticon. Being able to manually set your status, just in case you haven't typed a character on your computer in the last 5 minutes, would be a nice feature to bring back from the dark ages.

It's called Intercom

Expensive as they may be, restaurants have terrible margins. James Beard nominated, objectively successful places with >$1M gross are netting the annual income of someone who washes dishes [1]. They are operating on a fine line and I would imagine most of these places do not have the cash to weather through even a minor hitch in business.

https://www.eater.com/2020/3/9/21166993/how-much-to-run-a-re...

The automated copyright filter isn't going to pass revenue onto the artists YouTube and the rights holding giants want to claim that it will. This is a system that Youtube essentially poured $100M into building to keep the big licensors on its side (and avoid any surprise bills from them) and, with Article 13 in the EU under proposal, ensure any new entrants struggle to meet the technical demands and costs of more misguided regulation. Of course, Youtube would prefer to avoid the burden of this sort of moderation altogether, but it will be convenient when it costs around 9 figures to build anything close to what they have just to avoid the copyright regulation landmines. Pricing power will be further concentrated among the few big platforms and the share going to creators will continue to dwindle.