rebootthesystem

Good, but a better idea would be to flag sites that auto play video or audio and penalize them in search.

Seriously, this is a frigging plague. I can't understand how designers rationalize the idea of blasting someone with a video or sound without their explicit approval. At the very least it is incredibly annoying. At worst it can be jarring and even inappropriate depending on time, place and context of the person doing the browser. And then there's the consumption of cellular data if you happen to be on a mobile device.

I would like search results to include a nice bright red warning saying "WARNING: Site auto-plays video or audio". Even better, drop them down to the tenth page in search results until they stop being assholes.

That will fix the problem. I don't want to have to go around a bunch of tabs and mute them.

It's worst than this. Every large Internet company has this flavor of totalitarian customer-NO-service relationship with their users. It's like you are an ant that they can step on any given Monday at 1:45 PM and Google couldn't care less. And it will not change until either the government intervenes (I hate this solution) or people do exactly as you and I are doing, we do not do business with them no matter how much candy they want to throw our way.

I have exactly zero interest in doing business with Google ever again. I don't even look at their new product announcements. I saw what they did to one of our clients about a decade ago. I have never since even looked at a Google service nor recommended them. Search, maps and AdWords are the only things I use. I won't touch anything business critical.

When a company deals with their clients the way you might expect a prepubescent third world country dictator might treat his subjects, well, the best idea is to just stay away.

Yup. I am currently studying the idea of designing better (more efficient) mining hardware. That's the arms race. I have a few ideas. Not intelligent enough yet to know if this makes any sense as a business venture given the current state of the art.

Not doing much with deep learning yet other than spending as much time as possible learning. Need to identify opportunities.

I did jump into the iOS fray years ago. It proved to be a bust. The App Store is so bad in terms of discoverability, building relationships with your users and the race to the bottom that it became impossible to make a profit.

I think you are reading it wrong. It isn't about greed. It's about recognizing an opportunity and having the drive and interest to jump on it, sometimes at great personal risk.

I have failed to recognize and/or act on a number of opportunities so far in my life.

One was when the consumer Internet was "waking up". Domain name registration was free. And, even later, as Network Solutions started to charge for them, domain names, good one's, were plentiful.

And so, there I sat, living through the technical birth of the Internet, fully understanding it from an engineering perspective and yet, due to my lack of experience at the time, never made the mental connection to the opportunity that lay ahead. While other less technical people gobbled-up tons of good and very valuable domains I was geeking out making use of the embryonic consumer Internet. These people made millions. I did not.

Another missed opportunity happened during the economic downturn of 2008. The market crashed. I had been a day trader a decade earlier and have always kept a level of awareness about the market. I was on the phone with a friend and made the comment that Ford was an absolute goldmine as it had dropped down to about $1.50 per share. The company had none of the problems the other auto makers had. It just got dragged down with the rest of the market. It told him I should get off the phone and buy 100K shares of F.

In other words, I recognized the opportunity and had the ability to take advantage of it. Yet, I did not. I would have made somewhere in the order of $1.7 million inside of a year and a half or so.

I'm sure people who also recognized the opportunity and brought themselves to pull the trigger made a killing. I, for some strange reason, did not.

I look at cryptocurrency and your comments the same way. You probably recognized the opportunity yet did not act. This has nothing to do with being intelligent or dumb. I have no clue what it is but it happens.

I wouldn't feel bad about it at all. Plenty more opportunities ahead. Just try to grab onto of one when the time comes.

I've seen a different kind of behavior. It consists of taking a project that could be done in six months and stretching it over two to five years. And, yes, it looks pathetic and absolutely ridiculous when viewed with the eyes of a "get shit done every day" entrepreneur, yet it seems that in some of these environments this can become acceptable behavior in some strange-as-fuck way. I think it's soul-sucking depressing.

Well, above all, you value experience.

Seriously, the degree to which age discrimination is an accepted reality in tech today is a great failing, and one that has enormous hidden costs over time.

Sadly I know a number of extremely talented older engineers who have been discarded like trash only to be constantly rejected in their search for new employment, until some of them just give up. It's remarkably ignorant and short-sighted of employers who practice this kind of discrimination.

I find it so strange. I can understand them having preference or even a mission but it isn't aligned with the reality of what their user base is doing. They are trying to shove something down people's throats even when their behavior, as evidenced by their history, shows they have no interest in what they are trying to sell whatsoever.

If I didn't visit KS every so often on my own I would not find or support a single project on the site.

The power of a data driven business is that your users can tell you exactly what they want. All you have to do is listen. KS doesn't seem to give a shit.

It's what they find interesting rather than what I am interested in. Which is a really odd way to approach users.

Ancient history few people know. AutoCAD started life as a CP/M application. When you bought ACAD you had to buy an 8087 math co-processor card as well as a 512K RAM drive card.

I ran ACAD for many years on such a system using a DEC VT-100 terminal, an early magnetic tablet with a wired puck having a coil for pickup and a large CRT-based graphics monitor. Memory restrictions were such that you had to do things like unload modules from memory before plotting and write clever code in Lisp to use less memory while drafting. Cool stuff.

It would be very good to have one or a few solid legal decisions relating to scraping. Today, as far as I know, the entire segment is still in limbo.

It is important to understand that, legal or not, in the US anyone can sue you for anything. In another comment people were discussing the legality of following or ignoring "robots.txt". I tend to be pragmatic about this stuff. If you fabricate your own legal interpretation and end-up being sued by LinkedIn, it could end-up costing you $250K.

When facing large corporations law firms often ask for sizable retainers ($100K+) and proof of cash-on-hand to go beyond that, $250K total not being an unusual number. They don't do this out of greed. They do it because litigation at those levels can be very expensive. If you only have $100K you could find yourself burning through all of it quickly. If you don't have more cash to continue you'll lose the lawsuit and the $100K you spent will be burned for no reason at all. In other words, the law firm is protecting you by asking you to have enough cash to litigate.

A few years ago we started to develop a very extensive product based on obtaining data from Amazon. Some of the data is available through their API and other data had to be scraped in various forms. The product is extremely valuable yet the issues pertaining to scraping made me decide to put it on hold. Even if you can make millions a year the prospect facing a monster like Amazon in a lawsuit, as improbable as it might be, is scary enough to go look for other pastures.

Of course, restraints let the structure around you disintegrate without you being part of the spectacle.

Yet it is true that airbags have probably saved millions of lives as well as untold people from painful, expensive and life changing injuries.

There is no way I would buy a car without airbags. This is one reason I am not into vintage or collectible cars, they are simply not safe and I do not care to drive them.

Well, there's a limit, right? The point of a highway is to move people from point A to point B as quickly and safely as possible. In other words, we need to optimize for both. If we optimize only for safety we'd crawl at 5 mph.

They control deceleration.

The spread of personal information across myriad services is, I think, becoming a huge problem.

I recently had a case with one such services. They store personal information that could be very damaging if it got out. SSN, driver's license, name, address, phone, credit card info, etc.

I decided I no-longer needed the service and so I asked to close the account and clear all of my data from their servers and backups. I was particularly interested in the information that could be used for nefarious purposes given a data breach or a sale of the business.

They refused and gave me some bullshit reason.

I moved immediately to arbitration per their own TOS. Within a couple of days they became very responsive and have, in theory, cleared all my info from their service.

And that's the issue. How do you know? They could have lied to me just to get me to drop arbitration. Hard to know how far to pursue something like this. No company should keep information on you that you do not authorize them to keep. A consumer ought to have the right to have any and all traces of their personal data erased from databases with absolute certainty. Privacy ought to supersede everything else.

What if you want Facebook to clear all data related to your account? I don't think that's possible in the US, is it?

I probably have a dozen email addresses across five companies that I need to manage. I thought Zimbra would be the answer but server requirements sky-rocket quickly.

You missed my point: Speed does not kill.

Going off track at 120 MPH was not fun. Dirt, rocks, slashed two tires. Beyond that it was uneventful. The speed just makes it last longer and probably contributed to the huge holes on the tires.

You can have a crash on the highway at 100 MPH and have it be just an uneventful other than a crunched-up car. It's a function of the delta in speed AND the delta in acceleration, angle, forces, etc. In other words, if the car in front of you is decelerating gently vs. violently, etc. Too many permutations to list.

What you don't want is this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No7v2ps6ukI

It doesn't even look like they are travelling fast at all.

This is simply not true. What causes damage and hurts or kills is rapid deceleration, not speed. Sure, speed is a necessary component in order to achieve the most violent deceleration but speed alone does guarantee damage at all.

The racing world proves this conclusively. Watch Formula 1 or NASCAR and you'll see 200 mph crashes where everyone walks away. Watch motorcycle racing and see guys fall of their bikes at all kinds of speeds and just glide on their backs until they stop, get up and walk away. I went off track at Willow Springs raceway doing 120 mph, no big deal.

I've been looking a Zimbra [https://www.zimbra.com/] for a while. I like the general idea of the product. Even the free version is feature-filled. My only problem with it is that it seems to be a resource hog. You'd have to get a fairly fat Linode to run it.

I've used garden variety email hosting auto-magically setup on VPS's from such luminaries as GoDaddy without problems for many years. I have never worried about how to setup an email server, just get a cheap VPS, setup email addresses and you are good to go. Given this experience I have to admit to not understanding why Zimbra is so fat.

Send an email to:

<phone_number>@<your_provider's_sms_gateway>

For example, with Verizon:

8185551212@vtext.com

Doesn't address the self hosting part but this is an easy way to send SMS from a desktop/laptop.

I thought Amazon had the concept of picking-up shelves and moving them about locked-up due to Kiva patents. Is that not true?

To go further than that, embedded projects more frequently than not have one and only one software developer. It's not like building a website with a team of several developers.

In this context the "nobody" in your scenario is the only person on the project. Which, once again, brings us to the idea that it isn't the language or procedural vs. OO at the root of the problem at all if things are done wrong or misused.

I must also point out that hypothetical examples are rarely meant to cover all possible scenarios, much less corner cases. They are simplified examples to facilitate an explanation. As such it is always possible to find holes in the hypothetical.

A colleague taught me a very important lesson about twenty-five years ago. He was about ten years older than me and had far more experience. I had just finished coding an electronics component management system for our manufacturing department where we worked. It was really slick and fast at a time when text-only apps and menus reigned. I was proud that my six month effort had produced such a product.

I was showing it off. When it was his turn to be dazzled he let me do my "look at this" tour of the software and said virtually nothing. When I was done he said "looks good" and proceeded to plant his palm on the keyboard and run it back and forth about four times, pressing as many keys as he could at random. The program crashed and he walked away.

It took me about a month to make it robust enough to have it react gracefully to such an attack. Learned a lot in the process about dealing with the real world. This gave me the mindset to write code defensively.

A function such as "set_immediate_rpm()" should be bulletproof, and this has nothing to do with OO vs. procedural. A good implementation of "set_immediate_rpm()" would have a rate-of-change evaluation such that you could call it a million times and yet not violate the maximum desired rate of change (presumably set through a different function or defined as a constant somewhere).

You don't need C++ for that. Let's say we are talking about a serial port and a motor driver, all in the same MCU. A programmer would have to be pretty sloppy to use motor controller functions to try and talk to the serial port.

If I write a function called "set_serial_baud_rate()" and another called "set_motor_rpm()" it would be alarming if someone tried to use it to set the set_motor_rpm() to change the serial port's baud rate.

I understand encapsulation very well but it simply isn't necessary in a lot of embedded cases. I can't remember a single instance in thirty years of product development when we had an issue in development because code was NOT object oriented. Product development never slowed down due to not using OO. More bugs were not introduced due to not using OO. Code was just as maintainable and extensible using C or C++. It truly does not matter at all as far as I am concerned.

What I look for is "done for you" code. Libraries that can produce power-of-two or order-of-magnitude gains in developing a product. Show me gains of that magnitude and I'll code in COBOL if necessary. I truly don't care about languages any more. Just like I don't care about code editors (counting milliseconds in vim). Give me a decent IDE like JetBrains products and life is good.

I know this puts me at odds with most of what they teach today. Kids come out of school and automatically reach for objects for even the simplest of problems. OO has it's place, of course, but it should not be the first tool one reaches for unless it is well justified.

A CPU couldn't care less if you wrote the code in machine language or Python. The facilities provided by these languages are for the programmer, not for the CPU.

One of my favorite interview techniques: Ask someone to solve a problem. If they are on the younger side they'll immediately define a class, members, properties, maybe multiple classes. When they are done, ask them to do the same in procedural form. I've seen people get completely tangled-up by this simple request.

EDIT: To be clear, I am NOT saying OO doesn't have it's place. Of course it does. I've written a bunch of iOS apps in Objective-C with a good mix between OO and procedural when justified. For example, a genetic solver done in procedural form on iOS is miles faster than the same solver implemented in OO. A lot of it has to do with using layers of data objects rather than the raw data types typically used in C. In other words, there's a cost associated with using an object to store and manipulate what would otherwise be a simple array. You might be surprised to see just how dramatic the performance improvement can be.

Well, "Embedded Systems" represents a continuum ranging from simple non-smart programmable thermostats to microwave ovens, televisions, engine controllers, navigation systems, high performance servo controllers and more. I have always found discussion about programming languages to completely miss the reality of what it is to deliver, support and maintain these products.

I have developed embedded systems in the context of a real business manufacturing and supporting these products using everything from assembly language, through Forth, C, C++ and, yes, Python.

There was always a good reason to make an choice at the time. For example, an embedded system running a sophisticated control panel with dozens of knobs and buttons was done entirely in assembly language eons ago. It didn't take long for that to become a very bad idea. It was very difficult to maintain, improve and evolve the system. We ultimately decided to bite the bullet and port the code to C. The difference in the ability to express ideas was massive.

The only two languages I would avoid today are assembly language and Forth. The first because it is a nightmare to support, maintain and evolve outside of trivial systems. The second because it is impossible to find good Forth programmers these days and the ecosystem (libraries, etc.) is nonexistent. That said, I still think everyone should learn both.

I have yet to see an embedded system that can't be done well (and by that I mean the entire life cycle of a product) with plain-old C. Nothing wrong with the language. No magic. It works and it can produce clean, reliable fast code.

C++. Well. If you came up through assembler and Forth you learn to despise waste. And that's what forcing an object oriented approach tends to be when there is, in the end, no real need to take this route. Sometimes I see OO as a tool lazy programmers reach for. Some of the funniest code I've seen are things like erecting a complex OO solution to implement a state machine when a simple lookup table and minimal procedural code could do exactly the same, run faster and with less resources. I also do hardware in FPGA's so that's a formula for being keenly aware of resources and not wasting them.

As for Python. Well, frankly, it's about the libraries and nothing else. If you need to do an advanced embedded system with, for example, vision, you almost can't beat the Python ecosystem. Not because of the language. No. I couldn't care less. I care about time to market and the Python ecosystem offers a cornucopia of solutions covering just about any field one might care to name. You can hire Python programmers and anyone who knows C-like languages can learn it fast. That's important.

In the end we build products and all that matters is to build said products as cost-effectively as possible and the ability to support, maintain and evolve them just as effectively.

> as someone who does research in the field

> ...

> there's currently no other commercial password manager that I recommend.

> I'm sorry I can't go into more detail than that.

Hmm. OK. Well. How about this?

Without getting into specific products, can you list the top 10 things a good password manager must do, offer or implement in order to secure the recommendation of someone doing research in the field?

I would argue that US manufacturing has had a "boom" because no other option existed.

When you find yourself at the bottom of a deep hole the only way to go is up.

That's what happened with the crash of 2008. See the chart posted by Animats, here again for convenience:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS

As an aside, I love it when politicians take credit for naturally occurring phenomena like this. Industry go pummeled during that crash and every single business worked hard to claw their way out of the ditch. And then politicians proclaim "The sun went down and we made it come up every morning for the last six years!". You couldn't make this shit up.

Cities don't build anything. People, investors, entrepreneurs build. What cities do is prevent them from building.

I've been researching buying some land to put up affordable housing. I can buy the land. The permits and regulations? Almost impossible to deal with. Every single contractor I've spoken to has advised has echoed my findings.

Thanks! I'll read through this.

A quick scan seems to reveal consumers in the US don't have as much control over their private data as I thought we might. Which is bad. If someone has my driver's license and credit card data in their database and I want it completely erased they ought to be legally required to do so.

As someone operating multiple websites as well as a user my policy is to delete any and all private data on request. For me it's a matter of what I would want as a user.

Here you go: http://bfy.tw/CrF0

Writing tiny apps for small constrained systems isn't difficult at all. That's what we did thirty years ago. One neat trick is to use threaded interpretive languages (FORTH).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/4_Pi

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/flyout/flyfeature...

The minute you start touching modern languages and OS's things become significantly more difficult to shrink into small platforms.

Absolutely. There are plenty of companies out there that fit the profile you described. I guess my point is that this isn't representative of the majority at all. It isn't even representative of the top 500, 1,000 or maybe even 10,000 corporations in the word.

There reason, I propose, is the deviant behavior you describe isn't sustainable. If you do not produce real value for customers in the long run you are not going to produce value for shareholders. You can "cook the books" for a little while. Maybe. But not in the long term.

The title of the this thread names Apple and Google. Both of those companies have produced a huge amount of value for users and customers as well as shareholders.

Maybe I'm being repetitive. If someone invests their money in my business I am going to make it an absolute priority to do well by them. And the only way to do this is to do well by customers. One forces the other. And, BTW, I don't think this is a conscious decision. In other words, I don't think anyone says "Dammit, we need to make shareholder returns a priority...let's focus on customer value". A good company is aware of shareholder value being important yet their focus and driving force is and should be a passion to deliver best in class products and services (understanding that the one will take care of the other).

Are there companies out there who behave badly? Of course. Thankfully they are the exception rather than the rule.

A company isn't a charity. It's a business. It's there to make money. It does this by delivering a product that solves a problem for someone (or another business) and, by means of the value it offers, it can generate revenue and a profit. If a company has investors, those investors are there because they want to make money with the business activity they funded. Plain and simple.

So, a business is there to solve a problem for it's customers while making money for shareholders. All ends of that equation derive the desired benefits. A company MUST focus on shareholder value. And the way to do that is to solve real problems and do so as well as possible and as efficiently as possible.

These things are interrelated. Based on the down-votes it is obvious some have missed the point of my prior comment's hypothetical about the three friends funding a business.

These three shareholders are jumping on the deal because they want to make money. Even our beloved YC jumps on deals to make money. That's what business is about. It isn't a bad word. And, yes, there's nothing wrong with shareholder value being a priority because the ONLY real and sustainable way to increase shareholder value is to ALSO increase CUSTOMER VALUE. One feeds the other.

Have a crappy product and there is no long terms sustainable way to increase shareholder value. Have an excellent product that solves a real problem as well as excellent customer support, marketing, pricing, etc. and shareholder value WILL increase.

You actually WANT a company you invest in to maximize shareholder value.