human20190310

The outgoing product is nevertheless fully determined by the incoming work being done. It would make more sense to group a set of tasks into a deliverable than a time period. You have to do that anyway to deliver anything coherent.

Sprints to me seem completely contrived.

In reality, there are only things that people are working on, and things that no one is working on. There's no need for a third category of "things that are in the sprint" as long as someone (anyone!) keeps the task queue sorted in priority order.

Moreover it might not just be developer time vs. latency that's being traded off.

Maintaining a stateful websocket connection on the server side isn't cost-free, and that connection would be idle nearly 100% of the time. The bandwidth consumed via Google's polling solution might well be cheaper than open socket file descriptors of a websockets solution.

> There is no good way for a person to identify another person without first mutually agreeing on Brand identities.

How is this absence not a good thing? If someone wants to be identified, they have to go through the trouble of creating an identity. In fact, it would be preferable to also not have a permanent or consistent personal identity with respect to brands either.

> if they pump out people that don't have skills over time their "Prestige" doesn't amount to much

I think you're underestimating the degree to which corrupt, inept institutions can maintain their influence over society.

Hippies are at least as greedy as anyone else.

Anything that is more advanced than necessary is too advanced to be comfortable with.

It's a great, succinct post. Deeply uncool. A programmer should be modest about their skills, skeptical about new-new things, eschew bullshit, and terrified of dependencies. I buy the whole thing.

Moreover, I trust the advice of someone who rates themselves poorly more than someone proclaiming that they're a hotshot.

While I agree that in many cases JSON parsing is not the largest consumer of resources, it really sucks when it is.

At some point it seems like a general mindset shifted from making things efficient at every level to assuming things don’t matter if you’re probably doing something worse anyway.

At risk of embarrassing my self statistically, what exactly happens when you do this?

I.e., if you're controlling for country, that means you're bucketing by country, and looking at each subset, right? So if country is represented by a non-discrete value... what exactly happens?

> However, if the top-level politicians, who remain technically inept, are the ones giving the orders, confusion will remain.

The converse would also be true though; a technologically adept leadership that didn't understand society's principles would also lead to confusion, likely worse confusion.

Deeper still, a militarily adept leadership, or any other narrowly adept leadership, that didn't understand society's principles would also lead to confusion.

Politicians have to deal with society as a whole, and as long as no one can master every area of expertise, they need to have someone doing analyses on their behalf.

If I recall correctly, one theory is that octopuses are such voracious cannibals that a swift demise after reproduction evolved to keep them from eating the next generation.

Wow... if dreaming evolved twice, I don't know what to think.

I found it incomprehensible from the start.

EDIT: The first five sentences invoke Uber, the author's previous article, the Wall Street Journal, Gurley, Damodaran, and two different dubious valuations.

I really wish the author had sensed the limits of his argument, because I think the point he's trying to make is basically correct. He's just stretching it to the breaking point by invoking Amazon and the subprime crisis.

If he'd left the stretch goals out of it, it would have stood as a perfect foil to the avalanche of "meta-meta-meta analysis of everything except where the money's gonna come from" in the Stratechery article [0] also up on HN now.

[0] https://stratechery.com/2019/neither-and-new-lessons-from-ub...

If the VCs are being bankrolled by Saudi money (via Softbank) that has noplace else to go, because no one wants it, the money might not dry up. With this in mind, Khosrowshahi may be right about Uber's sustainability.

I like Chrome for Javascript development/debugging, but I don't use it for anything else.

At what point do these deranged estimates start damaging the credibility of the estimators?

Indeed; I should have been more specific in referring to people already working in the Bay Area technology scene, where salaries are quite high.

It's always surprising to me how many people in tech need to seek investment. Saving some scratch over a few years of paid employment, then bootstrapping, seems like a seldom-traveled route.

The question makes sense rhetorically, to establish that the machine is still only as good as its operator, just faster.

Even assuming outrage is selective, the question remains: was the outrage inappropriately withheld before, or is it inappropriately applied now?

If indeed it was inappropriately withheld in the past, I don't see any moral necessity to remain consistent, even if the flip-flopping turns out to be politically convenient.

If the previous administration's opponents had called more attention to the issue, maybe Chef would have acted at that time.

Being late to recognize a problem is not a reason to ignore it.

> they're about preventing competing products.

The purpose of a business is to make money. Crushing the competition helps.

> Technology amplifies our nature. It is a neutral force.

Technology might be morally neutral, but since amplification can bring things to an unrecoverable limit, it isn't neutral in the sense of producing balanced outcomes. If we manage to cure cancer, and blow up the world, we're all still dead.

It's a company's job to be anti-competitive, in the sense of vanquishing its competitors. It gets pathological in the case of regulatory capture, but I don't think Apple has managed that.

Indeed. I suspect that the things we know almost nothing about (e.g. the nature of consciousness), and perhaps things we don't even suspect "exist", end up being far more important than physical expansion for intelligent beings over the long term.

Communication itself might be of little interest to such beings.

In general I think companies have a duty to their shareholders to fight to stay in business until it's literally impossible to do so. As long as there are resources left, those would have to be allocated to preserving the business, rather than to smoothing the process for their customers.

I think there's more informational value in hearing goog-anon's perspective than in condemning it.

Does a person have an obligation to respect the rules of a system that, at best, only pretends to treat them fairly?