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samontar

130 karma · joined September 27, 2018

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samontar··on Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
I imagine you Venmo or equivalent like you do in America.
samontar··on Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
That’s anti-fraud to stop someone from stealing your card and using it elsewhere. You can usually pre-empt that by informing the bank of travel.
samontar··on Why ‘Free Trading’ on Robinhood Isn’t Really Free
Well, if you receive your shares at the limit price, it hardly matters to you, does it?
samontar··on Facebook chooses Canada for Dating feature launch
Well, they’re making a product choice to bias to aiming at one direction. That’s just a product choice that’s a useful differentiator when the most recent successful dating apps have been hookup apps.
samontar··on Sundar Pichai: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’
All you have to do is live unemployed and take money from the government, thus draining it of killing money.
samontar··on Sundar Pichai: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’
Both you and Google are helping with the killing because it helps you make money. That’s okay. We all do terrible things for money.

You can withhold taxes by dropping your income below the minimum threshold.

samontar··on Ford Buying San Francisco-Area E-Scooter Startup Spin
Interesting scheme. You corner a scarce resource and then sell it. I wonder what new permit schemes we’re going to see and how we can capitalize on this.
samontar··on Sundar Pichai: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’
And yet you fund the killing with your taxes. You know they kill, you know they need money to build the killing machines, you give them money.
samontar··on Sundar Pichai: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’
Those are government agencies you voted for. American citizens want leaders who bomb countries. Go vote a non-interventionist or isolationist if you want someone else.

Face the truth. If you want no killing, Your enemy isn’t Google, it’s your neighbour.

samontar··on Crazy Work Hours and Lots of Cameras: a group from Silicon Valley visits China
Maybe just because it’s hard.
samontar··on Crazy Work Hours and Lots of Cameras: a group from Silicon Valley visits China
Eh? This comment makes no sense. Wesley Chan is American, dude. He’s amazed at what people are doing in China. If anything he’s bringing the cultural habits of a 9-5 job from the US to China and being surprised by it, hence ‘we’ and not ‘they are lazy in the US’.
samontar··on How Hillsong Church conquered the music industry
Well, it most certainly is, isn’t it? You get an additional double digit percentage. That’s going to help your margins.

They aren’t scammers, though, because most people want this. Of course it is unfair to you, but most countries have their laws originate in their dominant religious culture and consequently favour that culture.

For instance, the San Francisco MTA legalized parking along the median on the street for church services. It’s just the way that people want it to be, and in democracies, they will inevitably get their way so it’s best to take advantage of the laws they make. Being upset is less profitable than playing the game.

samontar··on How Hillsong Church conquered the music industry
Is it really a scam if it’s what taxpayers want?

I don’t think this is interesting because any conservative trend. It’s a cool business hack that allows you to make money without taxes.

samontar··on YouTube CEO says EU regulation will be bad for creators
The skill barrier is low. It’s all turnkey now with cloud platforms. Literally just a web tutorial away. The hard part is the audience and the fact that video hosting is expensive for individuals.
samontar··on How Hillsong Church conquered the music industry
It’s a pretty clever business niche and a way to run tax-free. The end result is a cultural machine that may well have changed the nature of Christian worship. Interesting, no?
samontar··on Status.github.com: “We're failing over a data storage system”
It’s just a variant referencing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failover
samontar··on Status.github.com: “We're failing over a data storage system”
If you’re paying for GHE you don’t have any trouble. That’s delivered as an appliance you host.
samontar··on Not exercising worse than smoking, diabetes and heart disease study finds
But we aren’t average are we, Bruce?
samontar··on Understanding Quaternions
It wasn’t when we learned it in high school, but it’s just that it’s a story that’s easy to tell. Just like the Königsberg reference for Eulerian graphs; Kekule and the Benzene ring; Lorenz, the weather, the butterfly, and deterministic chaos.
samontar··on Not exercising worse than smoking, diabetes and heart disease study finds
A regular personal trainer at a top gym is $12k/year. That’s not that much. It’s approx $23k pre-tax which isn’t a game changer tbh.
samontar··on Uber’s Big Data Platform: 100+ Petabytes with Minute Latency
Are you using this in prod? I’d be very surprised. I wouldn’t use this for prod data.
samontar··on Uber’s Big Data Platform: 100+ Petabytes with Minute Latency
Well, I’d expect there to be aggregate result stores as well for other dashboards that may store the same data sorted and aggregated a different way.
samontar··on Uber’s Big Data Platform: 100+ Petabytes with Minute Latency
In California, you soon won’t be able to keep 6 months max. You have to hold a year.
samontar··on Anti-Tax Fervor Closed Their Libraries. Now Residents Are Trying to Go It Alone
Singapore?
samontar··on Anti-Tax Fervor Closed Their Libraries. Now Residents Are Trying to Go It Alone
They can do that. But I’m not paying for them either. Pull federal funding for their police and libraries. No LSTA for Oregon.
samontar··on Elementary OS 5 Juno Is Here
Elementary always looked nice but I moved on because I needed modern libraries.
samontar··on How Employers Track Their Workers
How about training? Training is beneficial to an employee. Employment itself should count, I’d argue, because the law of comparative advantage means both parties could (and probably do) benefit but even setting that aside, training should count.

Still agree with the monitoring, though.

samontar··on Do We Worship Complexity?
You get that with Java 8 and later because you can just define a FunctionalInterface and then use a mapping table to function-to-use and it gets really compact. If you want to decorate arbitrary functions that should be fairly trivial too.

Wrote something small like that for a random data generator for an in-house properties tester in Java a short while back. It makes it easier, in my opinion, when you have all the code available in a single screen than if it’s spread out.

samontar··on Do We Worship Complexity?
That’s what I feel too. It’s like in The Goal by Eli Goldratt. The machinery of building product is all cost. Inventory is cost. Machinery is cost. Only finished sold product is revenue.

Analogously, code is cost, infra is cost, only our sold product is revenue.

A thing I did not understand for a long time is the effect this has on value. Something that produces a low value over a long time may well have been value-negative over the period because of the hidden carrying cost.

samontar··on Flight rules for Git
Honestly have found it nothing but a pleasure to use. Not at all upset by the UI. It’s fine. Hg is fine. They’re easy enough to use that I never think about it and I rebase interactive daily and am comfortable with the reflog. It surprisingly didn’t take that long.

I’ve never found myself backed into a corner and I suspect this is part of its success: some people have codebases where it’s a problem (branch names which are files, for instances) but most people don’t encounter this sort of thing and it works just fine.

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