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Wurdan

283 karmajoined 8 лет назад

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Wurdan
·3 дня назад·discuss
I mean for one thing - the placebo effect exists. That's why double blind testing of new drugs is the standard
Wurdan
·3 дня назад·discuss
The article suggests he eats a vegan diet and exercises daily, so it's not like he's just popping pills on the couch between McDonalds meals. He seems like a complete loon in every respect, but it seems a bit unfair to say he just wants to take pills and nothing else.
Wurdan
·2 месяца назад·discuss
How are you counting average distances? Simply as the distance between two points in the carrier’s network, or are you looking at the lengths of each individual flight?

The source for the point I made is a Wendover video - Why Budget Airlines are Suddenly Failing
Wurdan
·2 месяца назад·discuss
The business model works fundamentally differently in the US and Europe due to geography. The US is big, meaning that flights are often longer, meaning that fuel is a bigger portion of the operating cost. And fuel is essentially something airlines can’t reduce the cost of compared to other operating costs where it might be possible to optimize for greater efficiency.
Wurdan
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
At a ratio of 10:1, at least in my experience, there's no time for those managers to be hands on with the work and keeping their engineering skills current. I don't personally feel that's a problem, but reading other comments on this post it seems like many HN readers do have an issue with engineering managers who don't keep their tech skills sharp.

For the past year I've only had three direct reports, which would have been too few to keep me occupied if I wasn't also acting tech lead.

IMHO, if you want engineering managers who can occasionally do hands-on things, you probably want a ratio around 6/7:1
Wurdan
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
They indicate that engineers want to spend less time on (slow) processes. That isn't necessarily the same thing as that they want less (middle) managers. I can say that at my current and previous companies (both over 30,000 employees) most of the processes/bureaucracy aren't things that the horizontal middle layers came up with. Most processes are imposed by vertical corporate functions like HR, finance, legal and compliance.

I'm not the reason my teams need to do software supplier risk assessments, or fill in at least 4 different surveys about their wellbeing and functioning as a team, or provide forecasts of their cloud spend for the year, or manage data usage agreements for the consumers of their data in our data lake. Nor is my people leader. But I am accountable if we don't stay on top of these responsibilities which are expected of all teams.
Wurdan
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
As an engineering manager (and one who's slowly starting a job hunt) these comments don't make for comfortable reading. What we'll never know from a press release like this is whether this is a change that employees wanted, or one which senior leadership wanted. Sure there are companies where management is overly bloated or inefficient. And maybe I'm just flattering myself by thinking that my teams' lives wouldn't be any easier if I got axed. But I'd like to think that "good middle management" is not a self-contradictory notion.
Wurdan
·6 месяцев назад·discuss
I've spent about 10 mins seeing if I can replicate my Nova setup with Octopi. My only missing feature so far is more extensive gesture support. As far as I can tell, Octopi supports a max of five actions, and you can't change the gestures for them. They seem to be hardcoded to "swipe up", "swipe down", "swipe right from first screen", "double tap" and "tap home (icon)". If I could change the gesture for "swipe right from first screen" and "double tap" then I could almost perfectly recreate my Nova setup.
Wurdan
·6 месяцев назад·discuss
I've recently started trying open ear phones for other reasons and I've found the current state of the art pretty good in terms of sound quality. I use Nothing's open ears, but I'm sure there are many others that are equally good. They won't act as cougar alerters, but if you want to listen to both music and the environment where others are around, the tech is ready
Wurdan
·6 месяцев назад·discuss
I think it's what that intolerance leads to which is a big part of the problem. It's natural that we don't like being bored, but these days we have infinite means to keep boredom away that don't involve connecting with others. Why go through the risks and awkwardness of opening yourself up to others when you have a device of infinite rabbit holes and time sinks in your pocket at all times? 40 years ago it was very possible to run out of entertainment, which is quite different today.
Wurdan
·8 месяцев назад·discuss
I don't really get why people are calling it a console. It is a PC to me in all the ways that matter, and it's probably going to save me from spending 1500 euros on a mid-range gaming laptop that I don't really need. The only thing that I don't use my ipad for is playing games with my friends in other countries while we chat on discord. And the last 5 games we've played together do benefit from keyboard and mouse controls, but don't have huge spec requirements. And pretty much everything else for which I'd want a bigger screen than my ipad's can be done in the browser, which I can also happily install on the steam machine because it's just a Linux machine with some extra bells. So yeah, it will probably completely replace my need for a PC, and I'd be plenty happy to pay a PC price for it as a result.
Wurdan
·9 месяцев назад·discuss
Yeah, that's definitely a worry. Also, the fact that you're dependent on them for adding support for future games, and that (like any cloud service) it might not be available right when you want it.
Wurdan
·9 месяцев назад·discuss
Just the mention of pieces of hardware we don't really need anymore (sound cards, modems, etc) triggers a flood of nostalgia. I used to spend DAYs poring over PC part catalogues dreaming of my ideal rig. And brands like Hercules, Creative, Matrox all trigger the same feelings.

Crazy contrast to me having spent the past weekend wondering if cloud gaming services like Geforce Now are matured enough that I can fully move to a thin client - fat server setup for the little bit of gaming I still do.
Wurdan
·10 месяцев назад·discuss
There's a gigantic difference in the ability of the surveilled person to protect themselves in the scenario you sketch versus the one that I sketch. In your scenario the surveilled person has a chance of noticing the fact that somebody is physically following them. And when they have eyes on the stalker, they can call the police to come and address the situation when they predict the stalker might escalate.

In the scenario that I sketch, the stalker runs zero risk while obtaining the information. Hell, they don't even have to log in to this tool, so there's zero record of who accessed location information for which parking warden.

And yes, it is absolutely incumbent upon the creators of tools to take into account how they might be misused. To pretend that all humans are of right mind and incapable of doing harm and only design for the case of ethical use is laughably naive.
Wurdan
·10 месяцев назад·discuss
If you don't think this tool poses any risk to these people let's try walk through a scenario.

Let's say someone sees a parking warden they find physically attractive. They follow them for a bit and when they write up their next ticket, the stalker pulls up this app to get the officer's ID. The next day they pull up the app to see where the warden is working that day - they drive over there, and it takes them maybe half an hour to find the warden based on the lag between last-ticket-location and real-time-location. They strike up a creepy conversation and the parking warden eventually leaves, disturbed. The next day, the parking warden is working a night shift - they've been told to patrol a dark neighborhood where there are plenty of alleyways that nobody can see into...

See where I'm going with this?

Anything which allows someone to get ongoing location data for a person who they've just come across on the street is inherently a danger to the surveilled person.
Wurdan
·10 месяцев назад·discuss
To my knowledge reneging only applies when it's a voluntary decision. A company that has been sold by its previous owner for generating a 800k loss is not doing much of anything by choice. It's just fighting insolvency.
Wurdan
·10 месяцев назад·discuss
The thing is pitching your salary lower doesn’t always make you more attractive as a candidate. If you’re going in lower than market rate then many recruiters start wondering about your past performance, confidence, etc.

As a hiring manager in a big company, salary isn’t really much of a consideration for me. The company has salary bands per role that I have very little control over. If a candidate is above that band and unwilling to come down, then I probably won’t even hear from our recruiters that that person applied. So in our process, somebody wouldn’t accidentally price themselves out of an opportunity.

So it’s possible that job seekers are making themselves uncompetitive via high salary demands, but I have my doubts whether its a major factor.
Wurdan
·10 месяцев назад·discuss
It sounds like they don't want you taking and sharing photos of them now, which is very fair. But it's not clear from your description if they judge you or your partner for any baby pics you took of them which ended up in the cloud. That seemed to be the statement of the person I replied to - "One day your children will be your judge when they are grown up, when they realise what you did to them."
Wurdan
·10 месяцев назад·discuss
Did I ever say that he is?
Wurdan
·10 месяцев назад·discuss
So what's your suggestion for how YouTube could be doing better here?

Especially in the scenario that (as the top level comment in this thread suggests) YouTube didn't actually make any changes and the reason the views dropped is because EasyList added an entry to their privacy filter. Should YouTube have recognized that they're in a quasi-monopoly position as you suggest, done the research to identify EasyList as the culprit behind the view metric drop, and then released a change to their client to add a new endpoint which isn't blocked by EasyList?

We don't know that the EasyList theory is what's really going on here, but if you're going to tar YouTube/Google over this ordeal, then I think you have some responsibility for suggesting how they could have done better.