rycfan

Why an exponentially increasing rate? A device like this doesn't use much storage, any logs it keeps can be rotated out after a certain duration, and the cost of storage goes down over time, not up. So storing the same amount of data 5 years from now will be less expensive, not more expensive, than today.

In addition, there are things called annuities, where the purchase price today can have enough set aside to be self-sustaining. Not saying they've done that in this case, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.

He's working on his "Switching from Caddy to nginx article" right now.

If you deliver the same value to the company in 6 hours as you do in 8, then you should get paid 100% of your salary. You (should) be paid to deliver "X" value.

Auto mechanics have this figured out -- we (developers) should be able to as well. They get paid a certain amount for a certain job (say, 3 hours for a brake job on a certain model of car). If they can do it faster/more efficiently, they still get paid the same amount even if they work fewer hours.

You probably should have spent some time fixing that hole in the firewall that let you bypass your company's download restrictions. ;-)

Why would they charge the equivalent of transaction fees when they (Apple) pays those fees? How would they make any money if they only charged transaction fees?

I've run the numbers on products like this before. In order to absorb transaction fees, build your own product, and support it, fees need to be in the 10-15% range.

Also, note that almost no companies charge less if you pay out of app -- the company just keeps more for themselves.

FYI, since 285 is a loop and 75 runs all the way through Atlanta, there are two 285/75 interchanges. While I think you're correct in your selection, here's the other one for completeness: https://www.google.com/maps/place/33°37'55.6%22N+84°24'02.8%....

That's a better reply to the OP, or perhaps directly to Dan Lyons. I didn't come up with the title of the book.

As others have pointed out, that's not unique to startup culture and completely demolishes Dan's point. Corporate America gave us "downsized, right sized, offboarding, redundant, outsourcing, reduction in force)". It might not be right, but it's not the fault of startups.

Great point on this actually being part of corporate America. I had neglected/forgotten that point, when I'm pretty sure buzzword bingo predated the rise of startups (synergy, touch base, strategic alignment were all part of the lingo when I worked at larger companies).

I wasn't really commenting on the healthiness of the startup culture, just how out of touch and corporate Dan was (apparently so out of touch he doesn't even realize he's out of touch). But you make some really good points about this trend. I'll have to think about that some more.

True, but the article implied at startups it was weird and wrong, when (as you correctly point out), it's actually part of corporate America as well. Which defeats his point that startup language is cultish and weird/wrong.

Two reactions to this article (and I say this as someone near 50):

1. Dan's obviously not cut out for startup life. When he meets Zack, he assumes Zack must be someone's assistant because he is young. Dan has no concept of the fact that someone might have their position because they are skilled and perform well. In his mind, the only way to have a fancy title is tenure and age.

2. Sure, the language of startups is interesting (graduation as a euphemism for quitting or getting fired), but the clear message is that this is odd, and thus, wrong. As though normal corporate America is the one true way and is just fine. Bullshit. Let's make sure to keep the workplace exactly as it's been for the last 100 years and never evolve.

How is it superior? Simple.

How do I systematically make sure that I have the latest version of every stackoverflow code snippet? If it's a new post, it may not have all the edge cases fixed yet. So now I have to check back on each of the X number of snippets I've copied.

In the npm approach, I can easily tell if there's a new version. For prod, I can lock to a specific version, but in my test environment, I can use ^ to get newer versions and test those before I put them in production.

If the edge case of new version of a package breaks my code, I've learned that I'm missing a unit test. Plus, the question isn't whether this bad thing might happen on occasion, the question is whether this approach is, on balance, superior to cutting and pasting random code snippets into my code. I think the downside of the npm approach is less than the downside of the copypasting from stackoverflow approach.

And every moderately useful npm package I've looked at has very good to great documenation.

Yeah, there are a few shitty examples on npm. It's an open system and anyone can upload anything. The market speaks on how valuable those are. Cherry picking poor modules says nothing about the rest.

Plus, if you think that's too small, write your own broader module that does a bunch of stuff. If people find it valuable, they'll use it. If they find it more valuable than a bunch of smaller modules, you'll get 10,000 downloads and they'll get 10.

The module you roundly ridicule has had 86 downloads in the last month, 53 of which were today (at the time of this writing). I imagine most of those 53 were after you posted. So that's 40 downloads in a month, as compared to the express framework which has had 5,653,990 downloads in the last month.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth over this module is ridiculous.

If I engage in as much hyperbole as the author, where does "write it yourself" stop? If I'm working on a team of two, should we each write our own left-pad? How about a team of three? Four? Five? Fifty? At a certain point, it makes sense for that to be written once for the project. We spent 30 years in software engineering trying to figure out how to get code re-use, and now that's it common and widespread, we want to go back to NIH?

Which is great if you are one person and you fix the bug in your own code. What you're ignoring is that if everyone writes their own version, then the same problem exists. That bug has to be fixed across every (buggy) implementation. A well-defined dependency system where it is easy to discover and update to a new version isn't a matter of hope.

True, but that's for a 50% chance of a collision. In a single system, even a 1% chance of a collision is bad news.

Sorry for taking forever to reply.

That's pretty much what I'm saying. I think the 5 races on the form conform to my understanding of race, so I think that part is right as well.

I guess fundamentally I can't wrap my head around the idea of identifying a religious group and calling that a race. As I mention, we don't do it with any other religious group, so why Jews?

If it was a race as we contemplate race in its current definition, it would be on the government form I posted.

It isn't. It's not a race like that (nor, really, in any other way).

Yes, some Jews have a common genetic pattern.

Many don't.

Either you're talking about the religion, which is clearly not a race (as you said). Or you're talking about a group that generally shares the same religion, that descended from a few groups that lived co-located thousands of years ago. Of course, many are descended from those groups. What makes that a race?

And I didn't mention Christianity to ask if anyone doubted it existed. I mentioned Christianity to show how silly it is to consider Jews a race. If Christianity isn't a race (even though many Christians descend from a common ancestor), then Jews aren't a race.

- Technically, if you are a Christian, you probably believe you descended from Adam & Eve, sort of the ultimate common ancestor.

> What do you have to support it?

Is Christian a race?

Also, this (PDF warning): https://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/sf181.pdf.

The article is from 2013. We've already waited and seen. They're still around, and no reports of them being sued.

"The public has been made aware that programmers can be culprits. This will make it more likely that the next time something goes wrong -- a plane crash, a fire, a flood -- that the public will jump to the conclusion that some programmer caused it. Yes, this is a stretch; but it wasn't so long ago that the concept of programmer implication in disasters was non-existent."

"...it wasn't so long ago..." What?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 -- This has been a thing since at least 1985 and probably far longer.

Sorry, this is actually factually incorrect.

As shown in another thread here, this service does not infinitely auto-scale (the recommendation was to use Kinesis), so you still have to know which services to choose, which is pretty much a full-time job with the number of different services offered these days.

I have lived in Las Vegas for 6 1/2 years, including 7 summers. I'd rather live here than in Florida, where it gets nearly as hot, but which is way more humid and uncomfortable in my opinion. I'm not sure where this idea that Vegas is unlivable in the summer comes from -- it's no worse here in terms of extremes than the winters of some cities. No one would realistically think they could stay outside all the time during the 5-6 month winters of, say, Wisconsin or Vermont. It's already in the high 30's for lows in Wisconsin, for example. But for some reason people accept that without question but think it's crazy living in a place where's it hot (but no shoveling snow!) for 3 months and amazing for 9 months.

As far as Las Vegas getting 90% of its water from the Colorado river, that is true. Which is a whopping 4% of the amount available each year. As bad as things are getting in California, we're not too far from needing desalination there which frees up more than enough water for Las Vegas.

More water evaporates from Lake Mead each year (800,000 acre feet) than is used by Las Vegas (300,000 acre feet) -- http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/lakefaqs.html.

You've just described some possible flaws in a p-2-p system. Are there no flaws in the current cab system? Are there no flaws in Uber?

You've pointed out why it can't be perfect. You haven't proven that it can't work.

Perfect is the enemy of good. It doesn't have to be perfect. I was going to say it just has to be better than our current system. But it doesn't. It just has to be legal. Maybe it's better, maybe it's worse. But we're allowed to give it a try (generally speaking -- maybe not in California, but possibly in another state that doesn't have the same rules).

If the flaws you point out occur often enough, then people will stop using it and the experiment will fail.