- not if it comes at the price of huge invasion of privacy
- Given the incredible amount of data they have, I'm constantly amazed at how bad FB/Amazon/others are at suggesting what I'm likely to be interested in
I for one support this. Too many people in the thread are just saying a phrase like "Free markets" while making no point foolishly, followed by rhetorical questions. Allow me to be unambigious.
If we agree that overconsumption of groundwater combined with under-replenishment of all frewshwater resources due to climate change implies a coming strategic shortage of water, then yes, absolutely, state and federal government should be severely scrutinizing where water is going and prohibit excess water consumption for luxuries and for exports.
Another way to go about it would be what the person above you said: Create tiered pricing for water such that the reasonable monthly use of water is as close to free (minus upkeep of water infrastructure) as possible, while quickly ramping up marginal cost.
They removed all free tiers is probably the source for this.
But, they also have had little innovation in years, anecdotally the rate of issues is increasing, they released a very uninteresting roadmap, and the future level of investment from salesforce seems iffy.
I agree 100% with your first comment. The best developers care about the impact their work has above all else. Sure, they might prefer Ruby, or Golang, or whatever, but at the end of the day the results are what they are after.
However, somehow we’ve created a world where the tools and techniques matter more than the output. I have no idea why this is, but I see it every day where engineers want to refactor code and try every new trick or tool they can.
Keeping track of what is going on is generally good. Trying to apply every hot new thing to a production codebase is a recipe for disaster!
It's also wrong to say that tools don't matter. If you say try to shove async and multiprocessing python into a system because python is boring and tools don't matter you are going to get absolutely fucked in terms of maintainability. Maybe you can afford that (and many startups can) but there's going to be a lot of survivorship bias that is sourced from non-technical things like "founder had connections" that are not reproducible across to another startup
In my experience, people that insist in never adding new things can only afford to do that because they push all of the flashy problems their "boring" options create onto somebody else. And that somebody else tends to be severely underrated because they lose all their time fixing the crazy problems that come from ignoring tool selection.
But also, people that insist on novelty all the time usually can only afford to to that because they abandon their code as soon as the complexity of joining all new pieces together starts to appear. Usually leaving it for somebody else to deal with.
As a rule, developers that always choose X, for almost any X create many more problems than they solve. But they do make great strawmen to fight against in HN comments. As soon as you see people equating them to the technique, you can know the comment is worthless.
I'm in the USA and on AT&T and use their "$10 a day international plans" when I travel. It's a little expensive, but it just works. My wife and I were in canada recently during the Rogers network issues and I called up AT&T support and then enabled an option to select the carrier for both our phones. Two reboots and we were back on a known good network. We've traveled to Italy, Serbia, France, Spain, Hungary and haven't run into issues with this setup.
Sometimes getting a local SIM as a foreigner is at best a hassle (Ecuador) and at worst basically impossible to do legally (Peru). In other countries, however (such as many EU countries) it can be quite easy.
I have traveled quite extensively in the developing and developed world and in my experience it’s a rare exception not to be able to get a local sim easily. In most cases you can have one before leaving the airport.
Even in the examples I gave (Ecuador and Peru) it is possible to get a SIM at the airport. But you will pay handily for that privilege due to basically skirting government regulations (the most common scenario is that you are given an under the table SIM that is legally registered to some citizen of the country). In a lot of these cases Google Fi or whatever roaming solution you are using is cheaper, and that doesn’t even count the time value of getting the local SIM card and activating it (and I have also travelled extensively and understand that this process can be a non insignificant time sink) vs just turning your phone on and having it work in whichever country you are traveling to.
I can confirm the same with AT&T. Used it on several trips in Italy, Serbia, and Germany. Really easy to use and I didn’t notice any slowness or apparent deprioritization from being a US carrier.
This plan is only available to AT$T postpaid customers. Prepaid customers are SOL.
I use Google Fi when I roam abroad now for the most part, especially in South America where getting and activating local SIM cards is often especially difficult.
Nothing can take the risk to zero. The goal is to take steps to minimize that risk. The average “click rate” for phishing emails is something like 18% (don’t quote me on that exactly) and if you can institute training that brings it lower then you are working to minimize risk. You should do other things as well to further reduce risk, but training is one tool in the toolbox to help.
