meatysnapper

liVIn la VIda loca

There have been a number of little rounds since summer 2014.

Hop Schweiz!!!

But seriously, let's not forget about Luxembourg or Lichtenstein!

Since the stealth layoffs last year at the same time, Twitter has been bleeding engineers left and right. The writing has been on the wall since August 2014.

Of the people I knew well when I worked there, the more talented ambitious has been gone for 6 months already.

The other benefit of a microservice is you can understand it. You can have the entire thing in your head. It's easier to maintain. With a monolith, good luck.

Strongly agreed with your sentiment, but eyewitness testimony is far less reliable than 24/25, so it's not just the conviction rate that's totally screwed up.

I assume getting death penalty is also big-swinging-dick status for the prosecutor.

Management has two goals: 1) Make themselves look like they contribute value: Micro-manage projects, track time spent, etc. Even if there's nothing achieved, they can claim to be doing something and organizing meetings. 2) Swap out programmers like cogs in a machine. 3) There is no incentive to have good quality code because chances are everybody will be off the project in a year or so, so you take credit for the success and place the failure on the poor SOBs who have to maintain the system.

Here's the problem. Twitter has to decide whether it is A) algorithmic (facebook style, they show you content they think you'll like an optimize it by the time you are engaged with it), B) curated - someone else decides what you may like and it is suggested C) you organize it yourself.

Lots of people at Twitter are all about (C), and have ideas how to improve it. However, management has never really been hot on it, and prefers (A) because it is easier to "measure" and optimize for. If (C) was done well, and allowed users a good way to find content they though was interesting, it would be super helpful.

Another problem is that Twitter still sucks for media. Michael Sippey, then head of product, was against anything but text. He was out within a year. Text is hard to create (well), but photos are very easy- snap, apply a filter and bam, billions of food photos on Instagram. One of the appeals of Snapchat and Instagram are that they allow you to broadcast photos/video very easily. In essence, they are a better Twitter for 99% of the population.

Almost certainly. Twitter's user base is not growing, and their product basically hasn't changed in 5 years. They have a valuable brand, but they need to figure out how to fundamentally improve the ease of use of the whole thing and make a decent value proposition. Photos, messages, videos, search... make the app not suck.

Snapchat and Instagram are very quickly taking over the celebrity/new/sports one-to-many angle from Twitter. Once celebrities depart, Twitter will have only news, and that's not enough most likely.

I'd be very interested in the bullets recovered from the scene, but it sounds like that's not happening. The whole talk of long guns and a police trap sounds sadly totally expected with American police.

Soylent?

Yeah, the electronics slipped my mind. I was chatting with a sensor guy the other day, and he said by far and away the best stuff for a particular application he had was Bosch. Nothing from out east or the US could touch it.

What about a Bayesian search?

The US has almost no precision machinists. Those guys are in Germany, Swizterland and Japan.

There are all sorts of things you can't build over here or in China because we don't have the people who can do it precisely enough.

I know at least 5 people off the top of my head who gave up with Google maps because of battery life. Apple Maps is not great, but it doesn't totally kill my phone.

Shade and water would go some way towards that.

To your point though, the big desert cities (whether in Texas or Arizona or elsewhere) would not exist without AC.

If I remember right, the team that wrote Heron was most comfortable with C++, and that was a major reason in choosing it.

because the Bart, which better than most of what the US has, is basically a shambling 3rd world disaster. It's slow, uncomfortable, constantly delayed and doesn't go that many places.

That's nothing. In 1998 (I'm pretty sure) Seattle had 96 days of light drizzle with nary a ray of sunshine. The suicide rate went up massively, and I decided to move to CA as soon as I had the means.

The gypsies would like to have a word with you. Now it's true the modern nation state puts a damper on them (the essential conflict between nomadic and sedentary societies) it can still be done.

For people who like big dense cities, you have NYC and SF. That's it. SF has all the 99% of the good tech jobs and great weather.

However, as soon as my employer opens up an office in Berlin, I'm out of the US. Even denser, even cooler and way better public transit.

If I was very very rich and I really hated other people, I'd start a company making miserably slow, unintuitive project management software. Say what you will about the Aussies, their software is slightly less awful.

What about the pollution, road maintenance, time spent commuting, and accidents? I think you are making a similar argument to taxpayers footing the bill for stadiums.

Clearly you aren't a Calvinist.

The cost of 1) transportation 2) education 3) healthcare is insane, in the US. Unfortunately, I don't see any of these changing anytime soon.

If I become a billionaire, I will hire my own personal metal band to follow me around and rock out extremely hard. Alas, I am not a billionaire... yet.

Go is definitely a good language for high turnover chop shops. A Cobol/Java for the 21st century, if you will.

Strongly agreed. If you are running an 1) illegal cab company or 2) illegal hotel company, you have to expect this. At a certain scale you are tolerated, but when you are a major player you will get some scrutiny that cannot just be "disrupted" away.

Open plan offices are the work of the devil + management + architecture. Probably the worst idea since "Let's delay our invasion of Russia a few months later in the fall".

I've given up and just gotten used to it. I loathe Apple's desktop management system, but here we are :(

I stopped using TotalSpaces a while back to some bugs (cannot remember which, but did contact them).