warp_factor

I already think that Uber and Slack are not really Silicon Valley: those are businessy companies but not really tech companies.

WeWork is even taking it one level further. They still have close to thousands software engineers to build... Things though.

Fully agree. And this is actually a well known fact. People following the rules perfectly as seen as losers in business. You are expected to break the ice with a more personal non textbook approach and therefore showing you are "street smart".

Paying for books is the old model.

I really believe that books should be mostly free and people should//would pay based on usefulness. I will gladly donate 200$ for a book that helped me. I would also never have bought that same book if it was 10$ to start with.

For what it is worth I love my local libraries.

I'm able to hold any book online so as soon as I hear about a book I place a hold on it. They have most books even new ones and if not I can request it for free through all libraries in North California.

I stop by the library once a week and pick up all the holds of that week (typically 3-4). I love to have the physical medium around.

I typically renew my loans 2 or 3 times and as such I keep the books close to 3 months. It allows me to fully read the ones I find interesting and just go over quickly the ones I don't care about.

Once a month I bring back all the books I got.

And all of this is completely free. I love my local libraries and cannot believe it took me that long to find out about this wonderful service.

From now on I go out of my way to never buy a single book again and avoid all DRM and other nonsensical digital medias like that.

They are the ones selecting the "members" and they will have a huge influence on any updates or any controversial topic or potential fork.

Don't fool yourself, this whole thing has been carefully orchestrated to look like if it was an open community but it is very tightly controlled by Facebook and friends.

I will not touch this with a 100 foot pole.

That's the way they marketed it. They know they had to do this little concession in order to get Libra to pick up so that people would repeat tirelessly that it's not controller by Facebook and therefore it's good.

But it's controlled by Facebook and friends and the influence they would get over any decision is absolutely huge

I'm crossing my fingers that this pseudo crypto money never takes off. Having Facebook control this would be so terrible and the proof that we didn't learn anything over the last couple months. Don't fool yourself even though they released a white paper and some pseudo decentralized schemes this is no different than a casino chip.

Unfortunately I feel like it might pick up and become a thing.

I have also always wondered what would I do if I have an emergency and I only have access to internet, not to a traditional phone line.

Is there even 911@police.com? or some type of service that can be reached like that? I'm sure this must have happened a lot in the past.

Seems the most reliable would be to ping a friend over internet so he can call the emergency services

GPS signal can get reflected on buildings ans put you off by a couple blocks.

It's a well known issue in big cities with narrow streets (NYC for example)

by hacking the reward circuits of your brain with immediate interactions? The issue is that those are counterproductive in the long term.

The exact same reason why people initially loved Facebook and spent so much time on it?

you put it better than I did in my initial post. They managed to hack that reward part of the brain with immediate interaction at the expense of deep meaningful work that require long periods of reflection before producing anything.

Congratulation to them. I think what they did is absolutely amazing and will be seen retrospectively as one of the biggest fads of history.

- They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate.

- They managed to change chat from a set of open protocols to a single closed app terribly written in JS.

- They managed to make a lot of people absolute convinced advocate of Slack so that a lot of hyped startups have now to use Slack de facto or risk mutiny and have people create Slack channels on behalf of the company without any oversight.

So yeah I don't blame them but I blame every company that falls for this. I'm convinced that we will see Slack retrospectively as something that destroyed productivity. I will agree that Slack can be useful when used correctly but I never saw a place that used it without it becoming that "attention driven" growing monster.

Bolting is an ethical issue that is discussed at length in the climbing community. The ethics are very strong in Yosemite and therefore there are almost no bolts and all the climbs are done using removable gear. (also called trad gear). I'm also baffled that you compared a couple micro pieces of metal to the disruption that a road provides to the environment. Or even compared to skiing resorts, mountain bike trails etc. In my experience climbers are some of the most ecologically respectful people out there.

This. And committed parents.

This is a lot of training and committed parents. I'm doing a lot of aid climbing myself and anyone could be good at aid climbing if enough training and commitment is put inside it.

Only because it also could potentially endanger other people.

And it is legal to have a 10 year old as a passenger in a car which is what happened in this case on the climb.

I had a friend die in Silicon Valley due to a car crash. he was wearing his safety belt too.

Aid climbing is not jumaring though. It means you use tools to get up. Most of the time the face is blank and you still need to get up painfully and add all the protections to go up little by little (aid climbing leading). Sometimes for higher grades of aid climbing (C3,A4,A5) this is very scary as there is almost nothing to hold on and you are literally pulling on very small hooks that barely rest on the side of the rock.

In this specific case I'm pretty sure that the two adults took the leads and the girl followed jumaring behind.

This is a bet on the future price of the home. And a lot of simulations have shown that you will come ahead in stocks unless you are in an exceptional growing market and not moving for at least 5 years.

There is a huge lobby in society to convince you that owning a home is the way to go (banks, real estate agent, other homeowners and people repeating this nonsense all the time). Don't let this fool you and make the calculations before buying anything.

you should search what "opportunity cost" means. The market is highly inflated compared to other investments because people are blindly buying without thinking at almost any stupid price. Your comment is a perfect example of that.

Yes, Home ownership is seen as the pinnacle of social status. This is stupid and people should rethink this preconceived notion.

In the bay area for example it doesn't make ANY sense to buy right now (Price to rent ratio, google it) but still people are flocking on every shitty apartment on sale. That's because they want to feel that little ego boost when they say they are "homeowners".

this whole leveling thing is very sad. It makes you realize you are simply a number: a small pawn that falls into a predefined category and that will do a predefined job without too much opportunities to go out of its way.

I'm missing the craziness of studying at university where I felt everything was possible. I had sometimes similar feelings in startups.

In big companies that created that level structure it's shocking how boring everything becomes. People define themselves based on their level. That becomes the only goal together with the TC (Total compensation). It really feels like a rat race sometimes.

Not sure if you are being sarcastic but they still need to keep their algorithm secret so client side wouldn't work.

Sure. Depends which VP position you end up getting. And even so, I would say that most VPs at VMWare are a more "prestigious" and "important" position than the COO of Github (which as most COO position is a not fully defined position in between other CxOs)

I agree and I'm always surprised to see how complex the backend of very simple businesses are.

I'm always amazed to find 10 Infra engineers and 15 backend engineers to maintain a very simple webApp for example.

I was highlighting that the "famous" and "cool" name of GitHub doesn't tell the whole story

VMWare has annual revenue of about 9B$. Github.... 300M$

Github is way more hyped accross engineers but VMWare is 30 times bigger! VMWare is simply one league above Github.

Github is a Business Departement part of Microsoft. VMWare is a huge company.

This is the typical fallacy of B2C vs B2B. Consumer products are way more hyped and therefore people think they are way bigger than other less famous B2B Enterprise products

do you imply that it's better to be COO of Github? Because I would disagree with that.

You got it slightly wrong: He made investors believe that there will be bigger more stupid investors that will eventually buy out the shares for a higher price than those investors.

(Also, see Uber, Lyft and other ponzy scheme based companies)

> For instance "equity is a better way to get rich than working". Is it, I bet the average googler accumulates more wealth than the average start-up founder.

His point more specifically is that if you want to scale above a certain point the only way to achieve it is to own equity of something successful.

your average startup guy doesn't own equity of anything really successful.

Good point.

What I meant is use an open protocol to which simple applications (or whatever you prefer to use) can be plugged.

Because my company uses Slack I now have to use their stupid UI proprietary implementation.

I'm also annoyed that popular open source projects like Kubernetes moved to Slack because it's "discriminatory" to use IRC apparently.