luka-birsa

Look no further than Portugal and their solution to heroin problem - decriminalization of drugs. This enables NGOs to work with people more easily, removes the stigma, provides access to save consumption sites and safer drugs, allows for funding of new drug-abuse programs (such as better access to anti-opioids for medical staff), etc...

it's not hard to figure out that whatever you're doing in the US is not working. I've been to SF and just walking past Tenderloin is not a preety sight.

- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/portugal-dec... - https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/59eqqk/ungass-portugal-w...

Call me a cynic, but I don't trust anything IBM puts out on AI. There have been so many bullshit PR articles, with lots of nice working packaging bullshit. This one feels the same.

It's so discouraging hearing all about Watson and health for past X years and then reading AI insider articles refuting the work as total bullshit and a PR job to keep IBM relevant today.

Don't know why this would be any different.

I like the look of Azure as well, but getting something done is such a chore. Eg: firewall.

You need to drill down to the network card primitive, figure out which subsection you need to configure and applying the same rule is again an exercise in clicking.

In GCP: Apply a tag. Create firewall rule that targets the tag.

But then again, this is higly subjective and I do understand that somebody would prefer Azure way.

Re: tooling, when I was using CLI was in both Node and Python, docs were lacking and the strange Resource Manager vs. Legacy had so many quirks we had to run windows to get proper powershell for configs of VMs.

For me support is: 1. Reasonably priced (especially now, with role based) 2. Fast 3. Helpful

That was my experience when we needed something.

Dont get me started on docs and operations.

Eg: Using Azure we found out the hard way that the Firewall was cutting connections after 5m of inactivity. Changing that setting? Their docs are wrong, stack overflow kindof helps, but to fix it we had to use windows based tooling in a vm since their linux based stuff didnt work.

I know this will happen sooner or later with anybody, but on average the experience with GCP was superb.

I do agree re: certs. That is the only thing I really hate, doing LE when they could run this for you. But they will launch an SSL solutio since they have one now for AppEngine.

I would really hate to see anything bad happen to GCP after the changes in leadership.

Based on my own experience as the CTO: After being an Azure shop for a year we've migrated ~50-100 VMs to GCP and I love the GCP products.

GCP is:

- Simpler to use

- More tailored to people with Linux environment

- Leader in K8S

- Has good support

- So much cheaper (in our case we saved ~60%)

- Has great UI and understandable primitives.

My only pet peeve is the fact that exporing your spend is practically impossible unless you're a BQ guy that can work directly with report exports.

PS: We're building our future infra on K8S to allow us to migrate more easily to a different could if something goes awry with GCP, I really hope there won't be a need to migrate back to Azure and its arcane and high pricing, strange UI, worse tooling...

Come on guys, they are just ripping us off. There is no sane reason for removing m2 connector. SSDs can run pcie over m2 and there is no way they run something custom there. Its bullshit marketing that enables them to sell you overpriced ssd and mem upgrades or make you replace your PC faster.

Interesting study, but this totally falls under Betteridge's law of headlines. No, influencers aren't overrated.

There is no way in hell I will get the message across as effectively as if I have an influencer spread it. This should not even be a question. If I have a story and I tell it to 7 people at random and convince them to spread it vs. convince Paul Graham to spread it - no contest.

We just did a test with one influencer (6M followers on Twitter) to promote our products - bang for buck way better than advertising.

The connection asymmetry (good influencer has magnitudes more connection) and trust/influence (I trust/believe information coming from PG) are important. It is however hard work finding good influencers, and just having a lot of followers does not mean a thing if they are not engaged etc... But worth it.

A couple of suggestions:

- If you enjoy going out, like laidback attitude - Berlin. Not super cheap, but way cheaper than SF.

- If you like the sun, sea, surfing - Portugal.

- If you like outdoors, security, ecology, arts - Ljubljana (Slovenia).

I'm biased since I'm a Slovene, but work-life balance is insane in Slovenia, the environment is super clean, everything is super safe (as in no murders). If you're remoting you'll be earning top dollar, but even mediocre senior tech job will net you enough to support a family living in Ljubljana and live very comfortably (long vacations, travel, eating out, nice apartment)...

Nobody in their right mind would invest 100M in a production line that is likely to be shut down.

We shall see if you are correct very soon (for display tech anyway). Key (initial) patents have already stared expiring and will continue to do so quite quickly (1-5 years).

Check : - https://patents.google.com/?assignee=E+Ink+Corp - https://patents.google.com/patent/US6422687B1/en?assignee=E+...

Is it anything like the Chinese credit system? Seems the two could share the notes.

You're basically arguing that CTOs mostly cause damage and it's better to hide various vanity metrics from them with the purpose of them not meddling in the process.

My view is that looking at scrum metrics will provide you with additional insight into the development process. I understand that shitty managers will simply take those and decide on top of that. Proper managers would look at the numbers and go ask the line manager what is going on.

I can give you a very practical example - before we had scrum and burndown charts our team leads had limited tooling to detect problems and even quantify problems in the development process. Now we can use that to improve our process with the purpose of us being more efficient and making the development process less stressful.

I never look at burndown charts - I'm the CTO and my purpose is strategic. VP of Eng might look at them, but only if issues are detected, while team leads need to use them daily to help them improve how they work.

I really don't get this "management can micro-manage developers". Sounds like you work at a very shitty company / unhealthy environment. Dailies are for the actual working team, so they work better together and not a tool for team externals to shit all over the process.

I really can imagine your scenario - do you really have your CEO standing there on your daily meeting? Or are you bothered by your Team Lead?

I'm a CTO and I've never been on a daily. I don't care about daily tasks. I care about shit breaking. It can be our tech, our infra, our people, etc.. That's what I need to solve. I don't get it why in the god's name I would attend a daily. What value would I get out of that?

If on the other hand, I see shit going down, I dig in right away and talk with the Lead and/or Team if shit got real.

We actually massively profited from implementing standups and agile-ish process and we really do not feel the downsides mentioned in the article.

Standups:

1. The standups are held in very small groups that work on the same thing and where it is important that they are coordinated.

2. Standups are not a place to discuss priorities. Those were set way before. It's for you to tell everybody what you're working.

3. Standups take 5-6 minutes per day. It's less than one foosball game. Some teams actually do their standups while doing a plank, so that they're very short.

4. Standups help us achieve team cohesion. Everybody knows what everybody is doing, so people can help each other when needed + leads can detect issues sooner (especially valid for introverts, since they sometimes lock up and grind away without telling anybody).

5. If you're bored during standup and not getting any value then you should not be part of the standup. Standups are considered optional, but everybody attends.

Agile process:

1. 14-day scrums are to sync priorities and discuss the development process. Generally speaking, we set up quarterly goals (and we have a rolling forecast for the next two quarters) so its clear what people need to do. We do not change the quarterly goal, except if external forces force us (example: things failing).

2. The schedule also gives the leads a clear tool to block any "non-urgent" but important tasks that would meddle in the development process. Instead of caving under the pressure of product teams or high-level management they can clearly state when they will start working on the task. I think the schedule needs to be set so that management can handle the lag between request and start of work on the request. I've heard of 3-day sprints since that was the most effective way of blocking daily priorities changing until management got on board.

Huge fan of what Google is doing with SRE, we're mandating that everybody that works on production systems reads this book. So many insights that point you in the right direction on how online services/products are properly deployed. Even if you can't implement everything now, go read the book.

We're a small team and we started implementing SLOs for services, we're slowly building our SRE teams, with the purpose of "SRE embeds" in existing engineering teams.

A must read for anybody that wants to do systems engineering / devops / whatever sys admins are called these days. A must read for any technical lead.

Article is paywalled. Can somebody do a TLDR of why exactly do Kochs want to do this?

I've been a user of gitlab for 4yrs+. Its a great tool and a nice alternative to github for all us crazy "i want to have code on-prem" folks.

That being said gitlab ce and its relationship to ee is more and more complicated. What started out at missing select features is now full out armaggedon of lacking features. See latest releases and youll see that all the cool stuff is comming out only to ee.

Whats even worse, the pricing is insane - some nice features are in the extreme tier that costs insane ammounts od money.

There was a time when we considered dropping all other tools and moving to gitlab. Now were actually migrating to jira for issue tracking. We're considering jenkins as alternative to gitlab ci. And if we see the rift growing too large, we'll move to phabricator (kindof sad we didnt go that direction 4yrs back).

Yes.

ICOs give investors (better said: "token purchasers") no security rights. This is a point of contention between people running ICOs (tokens have utility value and are used to pay for services) and regulators (ICOs do not pass the Howey test [1] and are securities).

Right now token purchasers are either buying the tokens for the purpose of use or buying them speculatively with the purpose of the price going up over time as usage increases. Token issuance vehicles (companies) are oftentimes separated from the entity that is running the business to reduce legal exposure.

[1]: https://consumer.findlaw.com/securities-law/what-is-the-howe...

True: Crypto as in cryptocurrency community.

Doesn't seem a mess to me.

Was Color raising 400M to buy color.com domain a scam?

How much did the AR guys that are showing 3D renders raise again? The ones that everybody is calling scam?

I can also present to you an alternative viewpoint (non-scammy) on Telegram:

Telegram has the leading mindshare in crypto space communications which could mean that they will be able to drive day-to-day adoption. Imagine paying back your friends through Telegram. And most of your Telegram friends are anyways crypto savvy and would love to use this. I can fully reason TON being very relevant if they get the tech right.

About getting the tech right - they've built Telegram, right? It's an app that's being used daily. And it works great. And the founder is a very successful serial investor. I wouldn't bet against Telegram that they actually pull this off. With so much money they could easily buy a crypto team to give them the missing skills.

Let's crunch some numbers:

- They've sold for 1.7B USD of tokens. And let's say that they sold 50% of their tokens. This gives them 3.4B market cap.

- Let us look at the coinmarketcap.com - you can see that EOS, which has not launched the mainnet and has an ICO ongoing for the past year (raised ~2B so far). They don't have any real-world usage (remember - they do not have a public blockchain running) and they are currently valued at 14B.

- It's not unreasonable to expect that you will profit from buying TON tokens.

In the end - these are big boys that are investing. They understand due diligence. It's going to be hard for them to scream "its a scam".

And just to be clear, my definition of scam is: "I am lying about what I will do with the purpose of taking the money from you." Here its more of "I have a wish list of things I want to build, but I'm not experienced enough to know that this might be harder than expected." But this is what startups do daily. The only difference is that Telegram (and other crypto projects) is able to get cash at a much larger scale.

PS: I still don't like TON ICO.

It's more likely due to the fact that the Telegram founder is waging a war with Russia and publicly denying them access to Telegram.

PS: I'm still not convinced all of this is not some charade, but then again I don't trust anybody that build communication tools, so do take the charade comment with a grain of salt.

I can't put this in nicer words than what a shitty article.

- Telegram might have opted to cancel the public sale due to recent events on how SEC and CTFC perceive tokens (they are more and more viewed as security) and in that case, it's better that all tokens are sold to professional investors.

- Just because there is a demand for TON tokens which will, in turn, create a secondary "gray" market doesn't mean that the ICO is a mess. It's just that they decided not to sell to the public.

- You might love or hate what Telegram is doing with the ICO (I'm more on the hate part of the spectrum), but the fact remains - Telegram just raised 1.7B without diluting and it seems that both Telegram and the speculative investors are very happy about that. How that can be construed as a mess is beyond me.

Doing a "me-too" ICO with a bunch of buzzwords thrown in is such an obvious money grab and I would prefer that they simply integrate Ethereum directly in Telegram, but you can't deny their position as the go-to communication tool of the Crypto community (Wechat being the second in line). They are just capitalizing on their position and re-positioning themselves as a Wechat clone, but built on crypto instead.

edit: formatting

It might be that the author likes the fact that GitLab offers free private projects, which might be useful for his other work.

Or likes the interface over GitHub.

Or simply likes going against mainstream.

Full disclosure: I use GitLab since 2015.

Kinda funny that a link called "trusted end node security" pops up a warning about hackers trying to steal my data.

I can second this. Uber did have a positive effect on local taxis, forcing them to upgrade. We now have taxi companies that are reinventing themselves - apps are good, you can pay with CC in the app and the drivers need to adhere to some standard of professional ethics.

Imagine that - they are able to do that without the "Uber" model of ignoring regulation and doing the fuck they want regardless.

My position with Telegram ICO is contrarian. I think it will be massively successful and actually makes sane investment right now.

Telegram is a defacto standard app for any Crypto user and integrating crypto makes total sense. Native crypto integration changes the telegram app into the largest crypto platform.

Too bad they decided to do an ICO, as it would be much better for the ecosystem to integrate Bitcoin or Eth (see status.im). But why do that when you can get a cool couple of B and roll your own.

Looking from afar it really looks like Magic Leap is the largest money laundering vehicle that everybody is using. It's either that or the tech is so freaking groundbreaking that it is literally going to melt brains.

Given my age, the cynic is winning.

Tried a Peugeot 308 2017 that replaces a lot od buttons (ac,..) with a touch interface.

This being a french car maker they obviously skimp on having adequate performance - interface is slow as hell. Just increasing ventilation is a 30s process.

It actually made me rethink my purchase an go for a different brand.

I know buttons are expensive if you want good looking + ergonomic ones (a tablet is a great cost saving measure), but its worse for todays cars.

For cars in 5 yr time touch will be the norm and not a problem since full autonomy vehicles remove the worry of keeping your eyes on the road.

I would really count touch as a minus for tesla, but it sure is visionary. Kindof like we hated iphone for going with touch and no physical keyboard. It's stkll shitty bur we addpyed. Sort-off ;)

Having lived in the valley a couple times for months-long stints I never quite understood how the Valley doesn't get how cities should be built.

I live in Ljubljana (https://www.google.si/maps/place/Ljubljana/, ~300k), a capital of a tiny nation of Slovenia. I live in the city center and have in 5 minutes on foot radius (50m): multiple grocery stores, schools, kindergartens, parks, market, cafes, restaurants...

In the valley, it's impossible to live without a car. Just getting a freaking coffee usually includes a ride. ATM = ride, burger = ride, ... You guys spend hours in your car just to get the basics done. I actually didn't know what to do in Palo Alto until I got a rental.

And SF ain't any better. Sure there are parts of the city that are actually similar to what you would expect in a normal, livable European city, but most of it is not really. And you still need a car to move across town.

I find east coast much better - Boston is quite walkable and New York even more so.

Can anyone explain to me why do you have this shitty setup in the valley? Feels so random that it must be some kind-of wierd policy enforcement that caused this.