HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

timfrietas

468 karma · joined April 27, 2012

submissionscomments
timfrietas··on Rewind: The Search Engine for Your Life
I've been a beta tester for a few weeks now. And as a Search and Discovery person I have plenty of granular feedback and feature requests for Dan, Brett and team that I still owe :)

Overall it has helped me in a couple situations. I will say when I was onboarded I don't believe audio was mentioned and a quick search for things I know I said in Zoom recently comes up empty--perhaps that functionality is new?

For now, I've found that I haven't yet hit the equilibrium point where I've forgotten something badly enough to replace my instinct to use Spotlight, browse Finder, or even search Google Drive (shudders). The Fitness app on iOS needs 180 days of data before it shows you trends; I feel like Rewind is similar in that I need a critical mass of data and time before I truly don't know where to look and go to Rewind first. Audio support would greatly reduce that window, however, so maybe I am missing out.

Overall I definitely recommend trying it out, however!

timfrietas··on Roku tells customers it is unable to strike a deal with YouTube
I am sure of this. I help lead search for Hulu and Disney+ and own a RokuTV. Roku already allows you the option to voice search inside the app you are already in (this has to be enabled by the Roku app developer I believe).

This definitely refers to the universal search Roku offers, and, if true, is an absurd ask on Google's part.

timfrietas··on Daves Old Computers – Robotic DVD Loader
I worked for a company that had 100 of these, AMA
timfrietas··on Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
GIPHY has agreements with pretty much all the major content studios, including ones historically protective of their content, such as HBO, the NFL and Disney.
timfrietas··on “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
And undercut them offline in Amazon Go, Whole Foods and whatever other physical grocery initiatives are coming
timfrietas··on Ask HN: Has anyone ever got contacted from the “Who Wants to be Hired?” posts?
Yes. I only posted once, but did get a few replies.

I will say that more than one of them was by people who were not hiring managers but rank-and-file employees fishing for referral bonuses.

The number of good leads I got was effectively zero.

timfrietas··on DigitalOcean is laying off staff
You mean Vultr is pretty similar to DO :)

When I worked at DigitalOcean all we could do was shake our head and laugh at how blatantly hard Vultr tried to copy what we did.

timfrietas··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2020)
Ha, nice domain name!
timfrietas··on Show HN: One Page Calendar 2020
I am guessing that people outside the US do not have as much trouble, as the format is naturally dd/mm/yyyy instead of mm/dd/yy, so reading left to right is more natural.

It took me a brief moment to acclimate to this, but after I did I felt it was pretty straightforward and elegant.

timfrietas··on 16-inch MacBook Pro
I'd want the touch bar to sit on top of the function keys, but I agree.

I also would be much happier if it was just easier to turn it off or if it at least made each touch action take 200ms or so so that I don't accidentally hit it all the time.

timfrietas··on Homebrew removes MongoDB from core formulas

  And now the community's hard work is licensed under a new 
  and restrictive license which, due to legal constraints, 
  cannot be used in entreprise setups.
Sure it can. It is fairly narrow in that it targets reselling it as-a-service. Many large companies are still running MongoDB for enterprise workloads, the SSPL does not change that.
timfrietas··on MacBook Pro Keyboard Drives Me Crazy
I really wish this was the top comment. I feel like HN is turning a little too much into an echo chamber dunk fest sometimes.
timfrietas··on Domino’s launches e-bike delivery to compete with UberEats, DoorDash
Cars are often not faster in dense cities. In NYC most deliveries are by e-bike.
timfrietas··on Domino’s launches e-bike delivery to compete with UberEats, DoorDash
We noticed that too having recently moved here from NYC where Dominos is still largely available :[
timfrietas··on Ask HN: Tools or sites you use to scope out a workplace before taking a job?
I've had people find me on LinkedIn and reach out to do due diligence on companies I've worked at, which I thought was pretty smart.

I would do the same if I were looking at a small company with potentially astroturfed Glassdoor ratings.

timfrietas··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2019)
Position: Product Manager

I have over ten years experience building products and product teams at companies like Amazon, DigitalOcean and GIPHY.

You can read more about what I look for in a company here: https://www.timfrietas.com/writing/employerdescription.html

Location: Los Angeles or Seattle preferred. Would consider the Bay Area for the right opportunity.

Remote: Yes (on a case-by-case basis)

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Powerpoint (kidding!)

Résumé/CV: https://www.timfrietas.com/assets/work/frietas_resume.pdf

Email: timfrietas@gmail.com

timfrietas··on Amazon Plans to Split HQ2 in Two Locations: NY and VA
Amazon had a chief lobbyist even when I worked there years ago and they now have the largest in-house lobbyist team in tech: https://www.ft.com/content/56ddca24-3752-11e8-8eee-e06bde01c...
timfrietas··on AWS icon quiz
This is a bit of a myth.

Yes, there was a mandate for everything to be SOA. However, AWS built almost every service from scratch. For example, S3 and EC2 were NOT used for production in Amazon until well after launch (it was a huge migration when the company did it years later).

My team built a world class transcoding service for video and were surprised to find later that AWS had built it's own (much less good) transcoding service. As part of that we also built a 5-10x optimization to multi-part fully-encrypted S3 uploads with a user-friendly client and the response from the S3 team was a shrug, they just weren't interested.

It is actually really common at Amazon for five teams to be building almost the same thing. Some of it is on purpose as a sort of insurance policy or bake-off.

But almost every AWS service was built in the AWS org, even if there was something similar in place at Amazon, at least when I was there (2006-2015).

timfrietas··on Ask HN: What can you do today that will be significant in 1000 years?
Religion and/or morality is a cultural change that has definitely proven to be not neutral to our species in the long run, so far.
timfrietas··on Artwork Personalization at Netflix
All due respect for the authors and engineers that worked on this, but this solves a problem that does not exist. In fact, it has produced confusion as my wife and I can't find a title if the artwork has changed or is different on mobile vs web vs FireTV, etc and the sands are shifting on each depending on whose account we are on.

You're gonna get higher click through in the short term but lower satisfaction in the longer term. This "up-and-to-the-right" disease will erode your credibility by not treating artwork as canon in subtle ways and alienate your audience who are disappointed Good Will Hunting, in this example is more drama/romance than comedy, and that Robin Williams, (usually) a comedian, is the most serious character (he graduated from Juliard).

tl;dr Long time personalization product manager here, don't do this: it will hurt you

timfrietas··on Array of Things
Agree; I went to a smart cities event where one of the leaders who helped make it happen admitted essentially "we had no goal going into the project except to install a bunch of sensors and see what happened" with no goals at the beginning. Seems like an expected result, sadly.
timfrietas··on Bitcoin passes 10,000 USD
Gold is only a store of value, even less so than Bitcoin. With Bitcoin I can actually buy things, both via e-commerce and locally if I am motivated enough to.

If I walked around with a bunch of gold coins I would have a harder time.

Cashing out is even more difficult (as someone who grew up in California's gold country and knew many a gold bug, it involves humans and haggling).

The difference, of course, is that gold used to be currency, then was the backing for currency, but then that was abstracted away. Bitcoin essentially replaces rare-earth mining with it's own, in theory "repairing" this abstraction with cryptography.

The total value of gold ever mined is about $8 Trillion, something like 50 times more than Bitcoin. There's probably a lot more value just stored in gold that isn't being exchanged every day for goods and services than the total market cap of Bitcoin.

timfrietas··on Bitcoin passes 10,000 USD
Personally, I disagree with your premise and I do think the killer app for Bitcoin is to be transactional--unlike Ethereum you can't build anything on top of it, it's just "money" or "wealth" which do need to be spent, although you can think of the current incantation of Bitcoin as "wire transfers" (a few hours to a couple of days to get your money) instead of a "debit card" (instantaneous transactions).

However, I do not at all understand why you are apparently being downvoted for a calm and logical counter argument supported with good use cases.

timfrietas··on Bitcoin passes 10,000 USD
How it (generally) works now: intermediaries pay the restaurant in fiat the equivalent price in BTC on the time/day of the transaction. They facilitate the trade without the restaurant needing to worry about price fluctuations or digital currency exchanges.

How it may work in the future: Off-blockchain processing solutions like the Lightning network (1) have been proposed to decentralize some degree of transactions.

However, this inevitably takes some of the power away from the miners/those who make money off every transaction fee. This has in essence been the struggle/division behind many of the most recent forks or proposed forks; a tradeoff between scale and economics for those that are generating coins or facilitating transactions.

The Bitcoin drama is far from over, and for it to be anything other than (primarily) a store of value in the longer term will require significant technical changes. In fact, at this point, no existing cryptocurrency can support the scale of, say, VISA. It's early days and the race to solve this problem (or fail) is a fascinating drama to watch.

1. https://cointelegraph.com/explained/lightning-network-explai...

timfrietas··on Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
Tough love:

You've done too much reading on the subject already and will learn nothing from reading even more by indulging yourself in the comments here.

And although good teams can find good ideas they have to "try and fail" at things, not just "consider and not try" things. I'm not sure how long you've been at this and which ideas you have considered and rejected and for what reasons, but if it has been longer than a couple of months, you don't have the right team makeup. You need someone with a strong product background immediately to find the intersection of product market fit and what you all are actually good at and will be passionate about building.

I'd love to hear more about what you've thought of and dismissed.

timfrietas··on Disney acquires own streaming facilities, will pull Netflix content
It already was, though. HBO, Cinemak, Starz were all in that range.
timfrietas··on Disney acquires own streaming facilities, will pull Netflix content
Been done: https://www.kaleidescape.com/products/premiere/#disc-vaults
timfrietas··on Disney acquires own streaming facilities, will pull Netflix content
Yes, beginning in 2019
timfrietas··on Disney acquires own streaming facilities, will pull Netflix content
This may be an even more strategic move than the press release suggests, as MLBAM powers other streaming services like HBO Now:https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/4/9090897/mlb-bam-live-strea...

It allows Disney leverage not just over Netflix but others like Time Warner.

timfrietas··on Disney acquires own streaming facilities, will pull Netflix content
People said the same thing about HBO and Hulu and Amazon. Add Netflix and ESPN/Disney and we are still talking less than the average cable bill.

Addendum: I think you updated your comment as I replied with the note on balkanization, but subscriptions are "set it and forget it"--it's why paper magazines still exist.

Page 1 of 4Next →