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punk rebel ecks posted:You can laugh at this but it is only a matter of time before things end up like this: This is already happening. Oracle, Sales force and Microsoft to a lesser degree are hoovering up a lot of the B2B marketing space. I don't know to what extent this is happening in the B2C world, but I imagine there's some of it going on (by Google if I had to guess).
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Feb 10, 2016 13:21
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The laws on commercial kitchens aren't THAT intense anyway and are usually easy to work with. Even up here in communist Canuckistan having a home kitchen certified isn't outside of the realm of possibility and I can rent a fully licensed gigantic kitchen for like $20 / hr. Here's an idea - maybe the company profiting off of literal child labour and the poor disenfranchised home cooks should foot the bill or provide the facilities to prepare food safely? "Thousands" of dollars is for sure not a minor amount for a poor grandma who wants to cook, but it's routine for any business. Especially when California already specifically has relaxed regulations for home-based food operations (that Josephine readily admits it's cooks don't meet)
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Jun 7, 2016 12:40
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enraged_camel posted:Before I posted my original comment I didn't know she was successful. All I knew was she had founded HuffPo and sold it. That's it. So when I saw her on Uber's board I got confused and subsequently assumed (based on what we know about Uber) that she got hired because of her gender and money. Founding HuffPo alone would make her more qualified than the typical board member. Generally speaking, board members aren't expected to have deep domain knowledge, just be well connected and have money. From a quick look at Crunchbase, 90% of Uber's board members' qualifications are "has / manages lots of money", the same as any other board. Theranos is a bit different because healthcare in general usually has more of a focus on a knowledgeable board, and it was less that the board members themselves didn't know what was going on so much as they didn't get people who did have a clue to do due diligence during funding. enki42 fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Jun 14, 2017 |
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Jun 14, 2017 01:24
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Having been involved in the crafting of these contracts, I think 99% of the time for startups at least it literally comes down to there being extra cost and no upside whatsoever for companies to have different contracts for low-level employees vs. executives. You won't get in trouble for demanding someone's first born son in a contract, it's just not enforceable, it's extra effort to make and especially track multiple versions, and then you need to worry about things like "what if a low level person gets promoted to the point where a non-compete is legitimate?" The same thing happens with literally every business contract - whoever initially proposes asks for the moon and it's whittled down. The only problem is for employment contracts specifically the new candidate usually doesn't have the knowledge, resources or power to do any real negotiation. I don't want to downplay the shittiness of it, but it's absolutely done out of laziness / cost control than any malicious intent. enki42 fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Jun 14, 2017 |
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Jun 14, 2017 23:23
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Analytic Engine posted:No intelligent young coder is wasting time learning desktop-specific app frameworks. I think you have your terminology messed up. Progressive enhancement means that your site is perfectly functional with plain old server generated HTML, and JavaScript is used to augment the user experience. It's been pretty out of Vogue since the days of jQuery (react / backbone / vue / whatever largely supplanted it) Unless I'm misunderstanding you. Are you saying that everything should be done in JS for the benefit of people with poor network connectivity? I guess that sort of makes sense in theory but in practice SPAs are far more likely to poo poo the bed with a poor network connection in my experience.
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Mar 9, 2018 14:21
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mobby_6kl posted:Hey assholes guess who's back! Hating on Marissa Mayer seems almost quaint now. She did what, took a garbage fire of a company and maybe poured a little gas on it so it could burn faster? Compared to Theranos literally pretending they know how to test blood, Facebook tracking your entire life and conveniently packaging it up for the Russians, and I can't-even-sum-it-up-in-a-pithy-remark that is Uber, she's practically a saint. enki42 fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Apr 21, 2018 |
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Apr 21, 2018 14:27
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Foxfire_ posted:They're private, so no public balance sheet exists. They've previously said they break-even at about $1b revenue. They've missed that some years, exceeded it others. So they're probably not losing money, but also not matching the return the investors could get if they had invested elsewhere (ignoring equity growth since it's made up until the equity becomes liquid). No VC in the world gives a crap about investment income in the form of dividends, so their profitability is important to investors only in the form of how it will ultimately affect their valuation. I agree whatever valuation they currently have is made up (somewhat less so since SpaceX is at the size where secondary markets are somewhat relevant), but what that valuation is going to be is going to be the only thing that matters to VC investors. Profitability is a means to an end, and often not the best one.
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Aug 25, 2018 12:42
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Tech being particularly conservative, or even libertarian is a trope that doesn't bear out in reality, as someone who works in tech and SV startups. CEOs might be a different story, but there's a pretty strong social norm that you're on board with general left-wing causes and overall tolerance and diversity (as evidenced by the fact that all of these memos are clearly being made by the outgroup in Facebook, Google, etc.) There's certain areas where I do think tech clashes with a lot of progressive causes - I think on average tech workers are in support of a regulated free market over socialism, and tend to be more protective of free speech and expression even when it creeps into supporting distasteful views. Obviously there's not a total political monoculture, but I'd say your average tech worker is probably around the level of a garden-variety "free markets but also socialized health care" Democrat.
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Aug 31, 2018 13:35
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In my experience in tech, the Bezos thing is insanely common. Tech CEOs have this huge blind spot where they assume that everyone should be as motivated as they are to work long hours, and give up all notion of a life outside of the company, usually justified by saying that everyone will be rich off stock options when the eventual glorious IPO happens. The thing is, employee stock options are so irrelevant and so prone to manipulation and losing their value compared to a founders that they're practically a scam. I've had CEOs try to get me to do the "we're going to be rich" song and dance to try and motivate my employees into long hours when the CEO has over 10 million shares of the company and the employees have 5,000. Even in the event of an IPO where the CEO gets $100 million (which would be an almost unrealistically perfect outcome), the average employee gets $50,000 - certainly not nothing, but also not anything worth wasting your life over. And that's before stock preferences, early exits by executives, actually paying for your options depending on your strike price, taxes, etc. makes even that not a sure thing and far more likely to be worth $0 than the CEOs stock.
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Sep 3, 2018 10:36
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My experience with people at tech companies, at least among the rank-and-file, is that they are on average more socially progressive than most places, even taking into account where they live, age, etc. Economically, I haven't met many tech people that are vocally supportive of socialism (in the workers control the means of production sense, not the "higher taxes and better healthcare" sense), but the vast majority of tech people I work with are pretty strong social democracy types. In terms of bias and under-the-radar bigotry, I think it would be foolish for any industry to say that they're absolutely free of it, but I will say that almost every programmer I've met makes consistent attempts to recognize their bias and try to eliminate it, and are open to harsh feedback about any biases that they may have. It can seem a little ridiculous seeing how much programmers are stereotyped as having a tech bro culture when most developers actively try to minimize that stuff and the sales department is still seemingly celebrating it. When I think of CEOs in particular my limited anecdotal evidence lines up a bit more with stereotypes - more examples of people leaning towards libertarian or rich liberal types, and all the worst stories I have involving racism and / or sexism invariably feature CEOs or the executive team. enki42 fucked around with this message at 12:08 on Oct 30, 2018 |
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Oct 29, 2018 21:19
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Anticheese posted:What's to stop someone sending automated requests through the web client? As mentioned above, rate limiting is more generous through the API. As well, Twitter almost certainly has bot detection on the front end of some sort that goes beyond just checking if the client says they are using a browser. You'd probably have to simulate a real user in terms of how much you're navigating vs. posting, artificially limiting your posting to what's reasonable for a human, making sure that you're downloading resources like scripts and images in a reasonable way, etc.
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Oct 29, 2018 21:20
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Do you think in the past everyone lived harmoniously in their towns? Like if you were the one gay or black person in a village or a woman doing a job someone decided was for men only (like whatever the 1400s version of videogame programmer was) do you think everyone was just super nice about it until they invented webpages? The big difference is there's little to no social cost to yelling at anyone on the Internet. In your "ye olde town" example, if you were an rear end in a top hat to someone in a way that the rest of the town disagreed with, you'd be more ostracized than the person you're harassing. On the internet, not only are you as anonymous as you want to be, but even if you aren't, no matter what you're opinion there's some corner of the internet that's going to agree with what you're saying and will support you on it. For sure there were issues prior to social media (like being the black guy that everyone agrees should be harassed), but that's still better than "you can harass anyone at anytime consequence-free and there's probably a subreddit that will cheer you on"
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Jan 3, 2019 14:20
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I don't buy the advertising -> extremism / propaganda connection, to be honest. Absolutely the fact that social media is run by advertising puts a big incentive on companies to increase engagement, and controversial content does increase engagement. But advertising also provides some disincentives to extreme content - Reddit more or less hides all it's dark corners from most people who aren't specifically seeking them out, and very specifically doesn't show advertisements on those pages. Tumblr just incinerated itself mostly to appease advertisers uncomfortable with porn. I'm not saying either of those sites are perfect, or don't have huge problems, but I don't think those problems come from advertisement specifically. The worst places on the internet (voat, 4chan) aren't advertiser supported and don't do anything particularly special to drive engagement.
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Jan 4, 2019 13:17
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Solkanar512 posted:It’s really amazing how far you guys are willing to go to excuse not lifting a finger to prevent genocide. I don't think anyone's really saying that. What everyone is saying is that "nationalize / regulate it!" is sort of a complex problem, especially when in many cases the countries doing the nationalizing / regulating are A-OK with certain types of hate existing on these platforms. Historically, countries regulating what sort of political views are permitted in media hasn't gone terribly well, and the type of things we're talking about go beyond the typical hate speech restrictions of explicitly calling for genocide / using Nazi symbology / direct advocacy of violence against a group. It's a bit naive to say the problem can just be solved by just removing all the content you don't like.
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Jan 4, 2019 13:59
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fishmech posted:4chan absolutely does have ads on it, has for many years. They have a lot of trouble keeping high paying ads of course. Ah fair enough, I didn't realize that. In any case, it goes to prove my point - advertisers provide incentives for controversial content, but if it gets as far as explicit hate advertisers are a disincentive.
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Jan 4, 2019 14:06
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Solkanar512 posted:Once again you can’t loving admit a tech company hosed up. I think there's two arguments here: - Facebook should have enforced their existing rules better and provided better moderation in Myanmar <- I don't think anyone is disagreeing with this - Facebook needs to be nationalized / strictly regulated in terms of political content <- this is where people have objections.
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Jan 4, 2019 14:31
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As someone who doesn't live in the U.S. loving hell no the U.S. government shouldn't get to decide what political content goes on Facebook.
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Jan 4, 2019 18:04
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Steering away from this censorship trainwreck... I think one thing that could be done to rein in some of the problems with Facebook would be to force open protocols on them, like an open messaging protocol and something like RSS for people's feeds. This would enable competitors to exist and challenge Facebook based on user value rather than just network lock-in and inertia, and keeps Facebook from doing nefarious poo poo like listening in on conversations or logging behavior since people could turn to a third party client that doesn't do any of that.
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Jan 5, 2019 16:09
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Solkanar512 posted:I don’t understand how enforcing the current rules or hiring more than a single person who understood the local language is suddenly GOVERNMENT CENSORSHIP, but that’s what happens when folks won’t discuss these issues in good faith. Again, zero people have had an issue with criticizing Facebook for not enforcing their rules. If that's all that people want to happen can we stop this garbage fire of a derail?
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Jan 5, 2019 16:19
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Blood pressure monitors are pretty well established technology, I'd be surprised if they were very off. Could be based on what you had done or the location, I routinely am 20 points above on systolic and diastolic at my doctor's office vs. at home or the pharmacy.
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Jan 7, 2019 03:43
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FlamingLiberal posted:Vice caught a company selling cell phone tracking data to basically anyone who wanted it I love the super weasely tweet from the CEO. "We don't sell customer location data to shady middlemen * **" * 'shady' is determined solely by T-Mobile ** excludes non-shady middlemen selling data to other shady middlemen, beyond maybe a buried clause in contract which says "hey we're not going to enforce this but please don't sell to shady middlemen" enki42 fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Jan 8, 2019 |
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Jan 8, 2019 19:15
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No, all cartoons from the 1950's are attempts at documentaries and people from the 1950's believe humans coexisted with dinosaurs and had foot powered cars. Seriously though, there were some wacky predictions about technology but I agree that nowhere outside of children's shows and ads for appliances were painting the future as particularly utopian.
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Jan 10, 2019 13:08
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It sounds like the types of things it can help diagnose are things that would be obvious to a doctor by just looking at a person anyway. And saying "it correctly puts the diagnosis in its top 10 list" is barely better than WebMD.
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Jan 10, 2019 14:16
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Trabisnikof posted:Yes, I’m sure Industry never made absurd claims about the future In comparison to the 1950's, the famine statement isn't too out there:  The electricity one is just flat out wrong, and the travel one is pretty iffy (you could make the argument that air travel is available to way more of the population than it was in 1954).
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Jan 10, 2019 19:58
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I'm not disagreeing that climate change will lead to more famine in the future, my point is just that it's not exactly "lol crazy 50's guy coming up with moon technology" when his predictions about famine were largely correct for at least the next 60 years.
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Jan 10, 2019 20:24
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I agree that majority of famine today, and yes some really big ones in the 20th century were more about distribution and politics, but I'm not sure that holds up for all of the 20th century. Are you saying that without the green revolution we'd have more or less the same amount of famine that we do today?
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Jan 10, 2019 20:40
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Liquid Communism posted:Not just year on year growth. Double digit percentages of year on year growth. Any startup with "double digit" yearly growth is an abject failure in the eyes of a VC. VCs usually consider a startup struggling unless it has 10%-20% month-on-month growth. One saying is "triple triple double double double", which means you should triple your revenue in years 1 and 2, and double your revenue for the next 3 years. That's considered a baseline to be on an IPO path. This was on Hacker News this week: https://medium.com/@shl/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-a-billion-dollar-company-b0c31d7db0e7 tl;dr: Company goes through a rough patch, has layoffs, and still afterwards manages to double their revenue over a year (and turns into a profitable company). This is a poor enough outcome that VCs insist that the company buys their stock back. The whole VC game makes sense for VCs and VCs only. If you're a founder who's taking VC money, you're a sucker who's essentially being scammed into putting all your money towards a lottery ticket. enki42 fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Feb 10, 2019 |
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Feb 10, 2019 13:20
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Steve French posted:You omitted the part where the dude started right off the bat with the goal of building a billion dollar company, which is pretty important context and certainly impacted funding rounds and resulting investor expectations. For sure, but my overall point is there's no such thing as setting VC expectations for less than 100% YoY growth (and in the first couple of years, even doubling revenues every year probably puts you on the loser track in a VC's mind)
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Feb 10, 2019 23:17
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normal brain: forcing all your employees (sorry, "contractors") to resolve disputes using arbitration galaxy brain: force them to use your chosen arbitrator universe brain: never actually pay the fees to said arbitrator to hear the cases Forced into arbitration, 12,500 drivers claim Uber won’t pay fees to launch cases
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Feb 12, 2019 18:48
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Apple and Spotify are having a pretty public fight about Apple using app store policies to push out competitors from iOS devices. First, Spotify made timetoplayfair.com, which I think is pretty clearly gets a lifetime achievement award for "best marketing in an antitrust accusation": https://www.timetoplayfair.com/ Spotify's argument is that Apple selectively enforces their policies against Spotify, and that charging Spotify 30% for in-app purchases (with no ability to advertise purchase options outside of the Apple route) is unfair when Apple Music doesn't have to pay that 30%. Apple responded with their normal "of course we don't selectively enforce our policies even though everyone has been saying that happens for 10 years, and also Spotify is mean and everyone else loves paying us 30%". https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/addressing-spotifys-claims/
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Mar 15, 2019 15:39
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Asians being overrepresented in tech is 100% uncontroversially a thing. Google is 40% asian - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-03/google-s-u-s-workforce-grew-more-asian-less-white-and-male This isn't strictly a H1B thing, every small startup I've worked at has had asians overrepresented relative to the population even if they didn't do any visa-type stuff.
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May 9, 2019 12:11
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Freakazoid_ posted:tipping culture... good? Tipping culture is a pile of poo poo that enables tons of sexist and racist crap, but people working for tips don't get to choose the system they work under, and so not tipping as some sort of statement is a huge dick move.
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May 16, 2019 02:10
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I think all of the "smart X" is really less about the founders genuinely believing that technology will somehow revolutionize the way that people make toast, and more that slapping a wifi card on any random device is an easy path to millions in funding. Which makes the VCs look stupid, but in fact they just invest in hundreds of things they're relatively certain are going to fail and so long as one of those blows up, they're golden. The only people who end up screwed in this scenario are employees, who take below market pay and equity that's almost certainly worthless, even in the majority of favourable outcomes.
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May 26, 2019 01:27
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Fair enough, but there's not a lot of evidence of any of these "smart X" type startups having any hope of an IPO.
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May 26, 2019 02:03
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As a rule, the more upmarket the sales process is, the less that the actual thing being sold is involved in the process. Probably 95% of the sales cycle involved PowerPoints that focused exclusively on how much money could be saved by eliminating jobs. That the actual kiosks work properly is a secondary concern. Check out the website of an "enterprise" software product sometime - chances are you won't even see a screenshot of the actual product anywhere.
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May 29, 2019 21:23
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fishmech posted:Gosh guys you're right. We should replace those useless HR people with some algorithms and random managers. That definitely won't cause any problems. Or replace them with bodies that actually represent worker's interests (i.e. unions) instead of a risk-mitigation team serving the interests of the company that just masquerades as representing workers.
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Jun 6, 2019 16:43
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Interesting how rare truely bad predictions are that get wide acceptance, rare and big enough a deal that people pass them down to their children and their grandchildren and everyone is still upset when it happened sixty years ago or remembers a time in their youth they saw it once. Nah, bad predictions are incredibly common and this is far from the most recent one in the last 60 years. Off the top of my head, ones I've heard since the 90s: - Flying cars will be a thing - We'll print most of our consumer electronics via 3d printing - People will chat through VR on a regular basis (this had 2 big waves of predictions!) - AR is a thing that will be commonplace by 2020. - Hydrogen-powered cars are going to be huge - Everyone will carry cash via disposable tap-based cards (to be fair, I suppose this sort of rolled into the debit / credit system) - We'll solve aging in the immediate future (an article on this seems to come out like clockwork every 3-4 years) This is all off the top of my head, I'm sure if I found any random copy of Wired from the 90s I could add 20 more things to this list. enki42 fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Jun 16, 2019 |
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Jun 16, 2019 15:13
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The point of flying car predictions is never "could it be possible for people to create a machine.... that FLIES?!" and more that it will be realistic for average people without specialized training or airports / helipads to use them.
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Jun 16, 2019 16:05
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How are u posted:Oh no, what ever will people do if they can't order a grubhub or take an uber. Imagine being slightly inconvenienced. I think a lot of the problem is less the loss of convenience from losing these services, and more the increasing number of people who rely on "gig economy" money (i.e. basically VC handouts) suddenly losing their income source without any real safety net.
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Oct 16, 2019 06:53
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A company that I worked for had a bunch of smart boards (one of our early customers was the company that made them, and we did a swap deal where we gave them our software in exchange for smartboards), and I can say without any reservations or qualifications that they are 100% horrible, even for the things that they are supposed to be good at (like whiteboarding in remote meetings). The lag between writing on the board and actually seeing what you write appear is way too long, the resolution is noticeably bad and makes it incredibly difficult to actually write anything outside of giant shapes on it, and it was easily the most hated piece of technology in our office.
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Oct 16, 2019 14:56
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