2,147 karma · joined November 2, 2012
With Apple products, you're putting your privacy entirely in Apple's hands and assuming that their executives will continue to follow the same branding and product strategy that they've been pursuing for the past few years.
That said, Apple is probably the least bad option for phone + cloud for most people. But it's sad that that's the case.
In other words, product management work needs to get done, one way or another.
Saying you don't need product people, you just need engineers who can do product work, is like saying you don't need engineers, you just need designers and salespeople who can code.
Sure, you could ask engineers to do all the product management. But then they'd just be PMs, except with engineering titles.
All that said, it sounds like you've worked with some pretty bad PMs in the past. And a bad PM can certainly be worse than no PM - kinda like how a bad engineer can make their entire team less productive.
Why wouldn't lenders just charge higher interest rates to offset inflation?
All the Apple apps that are pre-installed on an iPhone have a massive advantage over third-party options in the App Store. Most users just stick with the pre-installed Apple apps for email, web browsing, using the camera, looking through photos, and taking notes. There used to be third-party flashlight apps in the app store, but Apple used their platform power to crush those apps when they included flashlight functionality for free in iOS 7.
Of course, one can argue that Apple has used its platform power for a worthwhile goal - creating a better user experience. People made a similar argument about Walmart back in the 90s and 00s when they were in the news for crushing small businesses - it's fine because Walmart is just trying to give customers lower prices.
All that said, it's also not really true that "your boss" can read your private messages, in practice most of the time. Most companies that do this kind of data export just dump it to a warehouse and hold it for safe keeping just in case. Some random director of engineering probably couldn't get access to it unless they were willing to jump through a lot of hoops. Though, Slack's Discovery API does seem to make it easy to create user-friendly interfaces for searching through private messages. But I doubt a lot of companies are doing that.
[1] https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204897248-Guide-to-...
You probably shouldn't expect privacy in any workplace app, or even when connected to a company network, given how many companies route traffic through proxies that inspect packets for data exfiltration and who knows what else.
Have you read the text? Nowhere does it target only the likes of Alphabet (Google and YouTube). The exemption threshold for small companies (50m revenue, 43m balance sheet, or 250 headcount) is orders of magnitude below Alphabet's revenue and headcount. Sure, hobbyists and truly small companies are exempt, but the threshold is so low that far far more companies than just the tech giants will be affected.
The problem is that there are fixed costs associated with building a unit of housing - city approval fees, construction costs, land - which are more or less independent of what kind of housing you're building and how 'luxury' it is. So there is a floor on the cost of housing in any given location. Then you have to factor in lenders and their requirements - how much interest they'll charge and what % of the project cost they'll lend you. Since lenders almost never will lend 100% of the project cost you need equity investors too, and they generally have expected project returns. Of course you can find non-profit entities at all these layers who will help you refuce costs it's hard to out together a project in a major city that is anything less than expensive these days.
Rent control is not need-based. People across the wealth spectrum enjoy the personal benefits of rent control (in SF there is no shortage of housholds bringing home several hundred thousand dollars a year who pay way below market rents on their rent-controlled apartments).
The problem with getting rid of it is that the benefits of more housing supply relative to demand would probably take decades to come to fruition. But the pain of suddenly losing rent control (for the percentage of people who actually do need it) is felt immediately. Who cares if your city will have lots of cheap housing in a decade if you can't pay rent next month?
He clearly describes how he got access to their Slack instance, which required finding a way to receive an email at a @target-company.com email address. He did this by signing up for the target company's service using feedback@slack.com, in order to trick the company's support desk software into making the email from feedback@slack.com visible to him in the customer-facing support portal. The target company's helpdesk software thought the email confirming ownership of support@target-company.com was from the new user who just signed up with feedback@slack.com, so it made it visible to him in the user-facing support portal as a ticket he had opened. That let him access their Slack instance.
The question was: how was he able to read tickets created when an email was sent to support@target-company.com, such as a password reset email from Twitter. Just joining the company's Slack instance wouldn't let him read emails sent to support@target-company.com. And he says he was able to do that by getting access to their Zendesk instance.
Presumably he used the same process, but substituting ZenDesk for Slack. Or else he used a different method that he doesn't describe.
He doesn't say so explicitly, but presumably he did the same thing with ZenDesk as he did with Slack - he signed up for ZenDesk with support@target-company.com and then the target company's service with, say, no-reply@zendesk.com. And then once he had access to their ZenDesk instance he could read all emails sent to support@target-company.com, which opened up all kinds of doors.
In every case it was because they over-complicated things. They came up with elaborate logic that they didn't need and then got lost and didn't quite get to a working implementation. Picture, say, starting to implement fizzbuzz using two tries and an associative array.
I would guess that a lot of the people I've seen bomb these kind of interview questions are actually good, capable programmers, but they just got overwhelmed by interview nerves and got lost.
This is all in stark contrast to the 90s internet boom when, sure, there were lots of speculators and lots of get-rich-quick dreamers, but there were also tons of random people genuinely excited about using the internet who never stood to make a dime from it.
A lot of the grand visions behind blockchain mania are indeed compelling, and I suspect something blockchain-ish will take off at some point in the future. But it will probably be a distant descendant of anything that exists today.
Am I wrong about this? Are there blockchain-based products that have lots of users who are using them because they like using the product and not just because they're hoping to get rich off the hype?
Even after Apple did release the iPhone, the strategy behind Android was entirely focused on competing with Microsoft, not Apple. Google was terrified that Microsoft would get into the smartphone OS market and achieve a dominant position, and then muscle Google out of mobile search and advertising. That's why Android is open source (well, mostly). Google made the Android OS free for manufacturers to use with their phones as a way to get them to use Android instead of a Microsoft OS.
The strategy worked brilliantly. Android has done exactly what Google wanted it to accomplish. Microsoft has never gained any meaningful market share in the smartphone market. And between Android and various deals with Apple, Google has a tremendous presence with smartphone users.
Plus, it sounds like not all of those 180m Snapchat users are interacting with the part of Snapchat where they would see ads, so the audience is smaller.
That said, I completely agree that a lack of users isn't preventing them from having a decent advertising business. It's just preventing them from doing it on the terms they want.
The valuation of a company is determined based on its financial performance and, ultimately, by its ability to generate cash for shareholders. (Keep in mind that, unlike cryptocurrencies, companies generate profit for their owners just from their daily operations).
That overall valuation drives share price. Equity investors consider how valuable they think a company will be in the future and back into a price they're willing to pay per share from there.
Market cap is a meaningless metric for crypto since nobody would ever want to buy all the Bitcoin in the world and hold it for ten years. What would be the point? It won't generate cash flow during those ten years, and it almost certainly won't be worth more in ten years - with one person hoarding all the Bitcoin in the world nobody could use it for any transactions and people would lose interest.
Case in point, nobody talks about the market cap for USD or other currencies. It just doesn't make sense for assets that are only valuable as a medium of exchange.
And crypto exchanges, and all the other intermediaries you'll probably end up dealing with in practice, can be trusted?
I get the usefulness of a decentralized permissionless network for peer-to-peer transactions. But Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies today are looking pretty darn far away from that promise.
What makes you so confident? How do you know Apple thinks of itself as a hardware company whose incentives are aligned with those that buy phones? Their marketing certainly has made a lot of people think that, but, well that's just marketing.
Apple hasn't exactly always stuck with one identity. In 2007 one could have easily said that Apple is "a computer company" and not "a phone company" like Nokia.
Ultimately though, Google and Apple are incentivize to collect data for a lot more reasons than just selling ads. A lot of software functionality on phones benefits from rich user data. Apple may well be collecting data to drive better software experiences, and how much of that data they'll keep in-house vs sharing with third-parties is anybody's guess.
Even if you only consider advertising and hardware in simple terms, Apple is very directly incentivize to advertise new iPhones to current iPhone users. They want you to crave new models as soon as they come out, and to think your current model is kind of lame and old. Why wouldn't they be tempted to leverage user data to do that?
Finally, the vast majority of iPhone users probably aren't so sensitive to data security (the market of people who are is pretty small). So I doubt Apple cares that much about their perception among security-conscious people.
The micro-kitchen location shown in the photo at the top of the article was near a highway. I doubt all of them are in locations exactly like that.
What exactly seems dystopian?
The author sure was trying hard to dramatize these micro kitchens, describing them in commically over-the-top ways - "dark kitchens" near highway overpasses evokes thoughts of secret interrogation sites. But what actual, tangible aspects of these kitchens seems dystopian or bad?
Overall they seem like a great trend. Small-scale infill development can reduce traffic and pollution while also creating a better experience for restaurant customers - more food available with faster delivery times.
It does sound like in at least one case planning regulations were not being accurately followed. That's not good. And maybe some kitchen environments weren't very good. Individual restaurants violating labor laws should be punished, and/or regulations should be updated if there are special considerations needed for these micro-kitchens. (The lack of windows though is probably because they need to use wall space for storage and equipment and not a way to save money; it's also not necessarily a big deal in a small building if you can leave the door open.)
At the end of the day I'm just not seeing how urban infill micro-kitchens are a terrible dystopian trend.
Some, like credit cards and other financial products, are especially bad since the payments per conversion (i.e. person who looks at the review site and then signs up for the credit card) can be massive. But even seemingly innocent niche markets, like light-weight backpacking equipment, can be full of affiliate marketing.
That said, just because a blog or website is influenced by affiliate marketing doesn't mean they don't have useful information in their reviews. They usually are accurate when describing a product's basic attributes. Where they typically bend the truth is when they're comparing products against each other (the one with higher affiliate payments is almost always better), or they simply won't talk about genuinely better products that don't pay for conversions.
> but for what I care about it sucks, its hard to use, and it doesn't dry dishes AT ALL.
I'm confused, it sounds like you wish CR had just told you which dishwasher to buy without going into more detail, but you also wish they had gone into more detail about specific strengths and weaknesses so you could make a decision based on what's most important to you.
Did CR just not talk about the things you hate about your dishwasher, or did they talk about it, but only as part of a complicated, confusing review?
I've generally found CR to be a million times more informative than any of the crappy, sleazy affiliate marketing sites peddling "reviews" that clog up the first few pages of Google search results. That said, I haven't really looked at them for a few years, so maybe they've gone downhill. Their business model does seem harder to sustain in the internet-era.
You're vastly underestimating how valuable access to a person's phone can be. It's not just about quickly wiring money or stealing state secrets but also about building blocks for social engineering campaigns, ad/app fraud, extorsion and all sorts of different things.
And the petty thief who steals your phone doesn't need to have the tools to spoof the biometrics. There just needs to be some criminal organization that does and that's willing to pay petty thieves for stolen phones.
That said, I do think there is appeal for candidates in contracting for companies as a way to get to know the teams a bit better before deciding where to take a full-time offer. At least it's something I've been glad I've done at times, and wished I could have done at other times.
Plus, most developers are not the very best developers, and they won't have four competing offers after only a couple of weeks of job searching. For an awful lot of developers they'll need to spend hours prepping for interviews, working on take-home projects, going to onsites, and talking on the phone with hiring managers and recruiters. They spend a lot of time and effort for which they're not getting paid anything, and which is largely orthogonal to their actual work. When they do get a few offers they have to make a decision with limited knowledge of what working at each company will actually be like.
I dunno. I still think it would be awesome if job-seekers and hiring teams could get to know each other in some more natural and meaningful way than the feats of strength performed in today's interviews. Maybe temp-to-perm is too problematic though.
I agree that work sample interviews are a huge step in the right direction.
Recently though, I've been thinking about taking things even further: instead of giving sample projects, why not give candidates actual work that you need done, and pay them for it, like you would a contractor? Sample projects are inevitably going to be somewhat contrived, and they'll never be evaluated in quite the same way actual code submitted in a PR will be.
This approach lets the candidate and the company "date" for a while, letting each see how the other one actually works, before they decide to tie the knot of full-time employment. I think it's the most natural way for professionals to get to know each other, build trust, and develop well-informed opinions.
Of course there are plenty of practical logistical challenges, but it does seem like a freelance-to-full-time process could lead to better outcomes all around.