surrealvortex

If I had to guess, probably because most people stop drinking coffee after around 7 pm so that they can actually get to sleep at a reasonable time, and it is not economical for the shops to stay open beyond that time because of fewer customers.

At least some of the 30% would go to back-end staff. The article I linked to presents a case where the cooks etc had a raise because of this.

I also don't understand tipping at food carts. Customers stand in a line to pay and get their food, and are also expected to tip (either via Square or through tip jars).

Edit: the expectation is generally implicit, and while standing in line, I can't help but notice that most customers hit the minimum tip percentage on Square, which is usually 15%

Unless everyone decides to kill tips all at once, this will never work out. No server will work for a fixed 20% increment when they have the potential to get a lot more than that, especially on Saturday nights. There have been plenty of examples of this not working out [1].

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/05/15/478096516/why...

Load balancing strategies are also important. For a service that receives requests that take different amounts of effort to fulfill, weighted least conns is almost certainly better than random or round robin.

To supply a counter-point, I'm underweight, and I had sore wrists and lower back pain before I made my workspace ergonomic.

You get used to working in a dense workspace after a while. I think companies mainly like dense workspaces because it costs less, while justifying it as increasing collaboration. I don't need much collaboration at my job.

Working remotely takes a lot of discipline that I don't think I have. I do work from home once in a while, but it's a lot tougher to motivate yourself everyday.

I have a standing desk. So my monitor is visible to everyone in the area. Discourages me from doing anything other than work when I'm at work.

It's not like someone is going to comment that I've been looking at Facebook at work, but it helps trick me into not doing anything unproductive.

You can join/ create a family plan. $15 for up to 6 people.

As a vegetarian teetotaler, I end up partially subsidizing most other people's meals.

We do split checks evenly though (one of us pays), and use Splitwise to register that. It's just better all around to have this kind of accountability. Over the last couple of years, I ended up being owed mid 4 figures on Splitwise (from all my friends combined) even though none of us makes an extra effort to avoid paying checks. This may be a weird outlier, but this goes to show that the small charges add up, and it doesn't always cancel out.

Just one of a long list of arguments against the privatization of the prison system. There are very few things that should be in the exclusive purview of the government, and the prison system is one of them.

Prison, in most cases, should be a way of reducing recidivism. Private prisons have little or no incentive to do that.

Curious about the last part. How does that work? If they make small changes and get patents based on the new formula, won't other companies be allowed to use the original formula?

I'm guessing somehow both formulae are covered by the renewed patent, but that is wrong on so many levels.

I didn't take a position one way or the other in my comment. But if anything, I definitely did not support the company. I was more concerned about the billions of people in other countries who will suffer because they will lose access to medicine even more. Some of the comments below pointed out that India had the ability to break patents if the government considered the drugs overpriced, so I'm not sure that's a very valid concern anymore.

Well, my point was that if everyone decided to source it through India, they will no longer sell anything for $84k. Even if 10% of people did that, their profits will slip enough for them to notice and take action.

Most of the criticism against drug companies is that while they invest x for R&D and actual manufacturing, they earn back at least 100*x in profits. I don't think there are many other industries that allow this to happen.

I'm not entirely familiar with what makes pharma patents that much different from software (you don't really have a monopoly even if you own a software patent), but that's basically what's happening.

Once a company gets a patent, free market rules no longer apply, and they are free to price their drugs as they want.

I'm conflicted about this article. On the one hand, the pharmaceutical companies gouging ordinary Americans is abominable. Doing something to circumvent their greed is something to support.

On the other hand, if enough people exploit loopholes like this, and the pharma company actually felt a significant drain in revenue, they may decide not to license the manufacture of these drugs in India at lower prices. If $84,000 seems unreasonably high in the US, imagine how out of reach it will be in India, where the cost of living is much lower.

> "Dot, a hockey-puckish satellite, extends the range of an Echo or Tap"

No. The Dot is standalone, and is not a range-extender. I think Amazon's tactic of allowing only those people who already own an Alexa device has backfired, if an otherwise well researched article misrepresents this basic fact.

Not entirely sure, but don't credit card companies charge a considerable minimum fee per transaction? I'm guessing the fee kicks in for each month. That'd be a significant marginal cost.

Although a large organization like the Globe will be able to negotiate better rates.

What? Trucks do have a bounded capacity. A truck cannot carry more than x kgs of packages or y liters of volume. Are you arguing against that?

If Amazon had asked for a single truck from UPS at 5 PM from warehouse A (the number of trucks ordered is a business decision), it can only allocate x kgs of packages or y liters of volume to that resource.

Edit: Just to clarify, the number of trucks may often be decided waaay in advance.

That's just sad. I guess I can understand the motivation, though that doesn't justify anything. It's becoming very difficult to monetize online newspapers, and they are forced to resort to such unethical practices to make ends meet.

Newspapers really have missed a trick or two in the transition to the internet.

Um, if someone else cancels, they free up the resource (volume or weight or number of packages). This allows some other package to use the resource. This essentially makes it non-static, since it depends on the number of shipments that will consume that specific resource.

Your reply seems to suggest that you can get a truck to carry infinite capacity just by using more fuel. Not sure if you meant something else.

Or maybe the transportation resource Amazon had to use to ship later in the day had some cancelations?

It's impossible to build a distributed system that has fully consistent results. That is usually the reason for inconsistencies between the detail page and checkout page promises.

That brings up another distinction - profilers don't distinguish between a method that takes very little time to run but is called very often and another method that is pretty expensive, but is not called very often.

Ultimately, we do care about the total time taken, but the approaches necessary for the two cases above are very different. In many cases, the method that is simply called very often will call for some type of caching solution in the caller, while the more expensive method will require retooling within the method itself.

I'm currently using flame graphs at work. If your application hasn't been profiled recently, you'll usually get lots of improvement for very little effort.

Some 15 minutes of work improved CPU usage of my team's biggest fleet by ~40%. Considering we scaled up to 1500 c3.4xlarge hosts at peak in NA alone on that fleet, those 15 minutes kinda made my month :)

One thing to note once you eliminate the easy pickings is that as you go higher up the call graph, the profiler visualization is often misleading. There may be sections of code without safe-points, and stuff that appears wide on the flame graph may just be getting blamed for adjacent code that doesn't have safe points.