mwsherman

Here Comes Everybody.

Based on Rick’s talks, this is the sort of trade-off choice one deliberately makes. Reduced throughput can be understood as amortized GC.

Commoditize complements until you run out of complements (for which one shouldn’t hold one’s breath).

It’s free shipping. I know people don’t like to hear this. The market for mobile “shippers” is more competitive than that in the physical world, in fact.

The analogy is not perfect, but if one objects to this then one objects to Amazon or vendors offering free shipping, which is a benefit that puts them ahead of competitors, and (might) lead the consumer to include it in their decision-making.

This also shows the tension between neutrality advocacy and consumer benefit. In a PR sense, it’s very hard to win, when most consumers only see the benefit. (I happen to side with consumers on this.)

Others have said this well but I’ll emphasize that the article doesn’t present the case that it’s failed or failing – there is a ways to go to find that out. If their service starts to suffer, then we have a signal, perhaps.

This may turn out selecting for the right people. I’ve learned as a manager in a growing company that a lot of people really like traditional hierarchy, and for understandable reasons. I’ve learned to respect and work with that. It’s not my way, per se, but I get it.

This is largely predicted by Daniel Kahneman and Nassim Taleb, would love to see them cited more often.

Yes, but it’s complicated. Cities have become more valuable in the age of the Internet, against my predictions, intuitions and preferences!

Too few companies offer remote, because remote is hard. My experience at Stack is that remote work really only happens when a company supports it “natively” from the start. It’ll take a generation to make a dent, sadly. I’d like to be wrong.

There is a remarkable disconnect between the critics and the users here. Note that no users were cited in the article.

I understand not liking Facebook’s motives, that’s fine. Perhaps we can defer to the preferences of users here, who can choose to accept those motives or not, and to decide if the trade-off is an acceptable one. If we believe that they are unqualified to make this choice, one should explain that position.

Instead, the critics are imposing their preference on the users here, who are poor and (in this article) unheard. Can we please see an article where such people are quoted, and perhaps some numbers about usage, revealing their empirical preferences?

This is about minimizing power-per-range, not maximizing range itself. IoT devices have very local utility, one assumes.

I do like the idea of regular laptop-and-tablet Wifi having better range. But in dense environments, that might be an anti-feature: more interference from more (distant) neighbors. Suburban/rural might be the best use case.

On the political economy side, it’s unlikely that we will displace things like the mortgage interest deduction. What if we were to introduce a renters’ deduction instead?

Yes, this is what I was getting at. Understand the problem first. To merely disapprove does nothing to change anyone’s mind.

This is not hard to understand. Gov’t officials believe that the work they do is different in kind. This is a philosophical belief. The desire to be in government requires this belief to a greater or lesser degree.

So the idea that citizens should be monitored, but not gov’t officials, is intuitive from this point of view. A variation on diplomatic immunity, if you will.

It’s not irrational or uncommon. I happen to disagree with it as much as a human possibly can. But one can understand the position.

I don’t think what you’re describing is wrong. But a belief that something is a natural monopoly causes us to make policy choices based on a flawed assumption. Flawed choices about the inevitability of a monopoly tend to entrench same.

E.g. our municipal broadband monopolies trace back to a belief that wireline phone and TV can only be monopolies. And maybe it’s true! But we might have chosen differently, had we not assumed it a natural outcome.

We might have assumed that wireless is a natural monopoly. Gladly, we didn’t. (Though spectrum policy can be more competitive.)

Agree. “Natural monopoly” is a very lazy term. It’s mostly about looking around at a moment and declaring that it must be so.

Utilities don’t need to be monopolies, necessarily. It’s just that they were designed that way at a point in time. It’s a path of history, but not a natural law.

Wintel too. Which was a monopoly, until it wasn’t. It’s not that their position in the market changed, but the definition of the market itself (i.e., computing became mobile).

Google (a monopoly) is (or was) terrified by both Facebook and Amazon. Neither of which is a search engine, but each of which is a path toward determining what product to buy. The market itself changes.

I don’t see much network effect with Uber. I see a liquidity effect, to a degree, but the barriers of entry are low on both supply and demand side.

To the extent Uber has a network effect it’s O(n) at best. I don’t have a connection to other Uber users. I like that there are enough users to make it worth the drivers’ while – again, liquidity, not network.

On Facebook, network effect is probably O(n^2). The connections exist and themselves have value.

Wifi is still not a good WAN (municipal) technology. It has never succeeded. Many NYC public parks offer free wifi and I don’t know anyone that uses it.

4G/LTE/etc is engineered for uncontrolled, outdoor spaces. It works more reliably than Wifi in that environment.

Wifi’s UX is poor in that environment – you’re already connected to 4G but connecting to Wifi requires effort. And one assumes that if one is on the street, one will be walking out of range of that Wifi within a few minutes. I don’t understand the use case.

(The sitting-in-Starbucks use case makes more sense.)

Politicians like the sound of Wifi. Users walking down the street, by and large, ignore it.

One of my physics professors said that a key skill of good physicist is to be able to characterize a system quickly, prior to bringing in numbers or perhaps even equations. I’ve applied that to a lot of things.

It’s a proxy for developing good intuitions, but also for realizing that formalities often follow from intuitions, and not the reverse.

Language (OP) is organic, and formalities follow.

Really great package, I depend on it heavily for my codegen package. https://github.com/clipperhouse/gen

Noise is a particularly complex topic (and spiral) here in NYC.

First, the housing stock is old. It’s hard to build new, mostly for zoning reasons. Old building will be more leaky and creaky.

Unlike most of the country, even new construction does not include central air, and often does not include central heating. They use wall units called PTACs, even in “luxury” buildings. These units are loud.

NYC is dense, which means each neighbor’s noise matters more, including our automotive “neighbors”.

That said, sirens are far and away the biggest problem. They are loud enough to distort in one’s own ears. Well over 100db at street level. Apartments are close to the street. And clogged streets means emergency vehicles move slowly, while screaming.

Reducing this outlier would be the single biggest win, even over car traffic, which is comparatively benign.

[too late to edit] My understanding of what a cracked SHA1 amounts to (per cert, not per user) was wrong. Seems obvious after explanation. Thanks.

This is a classic case of the perfect vs the good. The question is not whether SHA1 is “acceptable”, but whether it is better than the alternative, which is plain text for users that cannot do SHA256. It’s graceful degradation.

The number quoted of $70K to crack SHA1 indicates that it is non-trivial to hack. Which means adversaries could break the encryption, but could only afford to attack a small number of people. Which means that SHA1 is effective for a large majority.

Agree they could have done without it entirely.

Go’s compromise here is that these operators are statements, not expressions. There is no return value. This makes it semantically identical to i += 1. It keeps some sugar while removing some classes of gotcha.

I think Go is optimized around this idea: that the average reader will have an accurate mental model. (This of course implies trade-offs with other considerations.)

As a relatively recent manager (former dev), I’ve embraced the idea that it’s my job to be interrupted. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It signals that the interrupter’s time is more important than mine, which is what I want for people on my team.

Any new manager should embrace this, and moreso, develop the skill to be interrupted gracefully.

Biases are turtles all the way down, one learns. The only “solution” I’ve found for myself is not to “correct” them, but to have a lot less conviction about my own correctness. Big error bars.

Exploiting the type system to handle nulls is attractive (when that sort of thing is not “native” to the type system) but boy that’s verbose.

Fair.

Yes, that was a very old-school way of dealing with the problem. It’s mostly symbolic.

Most problems are systemic, which is a nice way of saying “ultimately management’s fault”.

Most things that most people do, most of the time, are reasonable in the circumstances. Management creates the circumstances. “Human error” is a non-explanation.

Here’s a book on the topic, often called systems thinking: http://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error/...

Getting even more bookish: firing “bad apples” for “human error” is a form of substituting an easier question when presented with a harder one, as Kahneman describes in Thinking Fast and Slow.

Honest question: what is the difference between a “for profit” school and one that ends the year with more than that it started with? If Harvard manages itself such that its endowment increases, is this not a profit? What is the practical, operational difference?