The law once mandated that you hire the services of a licensed electrician to replace a lightbulb. Imagine if the same laws where applied to tech. Need to update Microsoft office? No way arround it you need to hire the services of a licensed IT professional! You might get electrocuted in the process not being a professional. So it all makes sense.
It's not really possible to burn down your apartment building if you fail at updating Microsoft Office, so that's one big difference for gas/electrical laws.
Actually it is the law at every trade show I've ever exhibited at, just about to the point where you can't plug in anything without a union electrician doing it. One can usually get away with plugging in a laptop, but certainly if you need anything more than the single standard 10A 2-outlet power drop, expect to pay and wait for the official electrician (and they will kick you out of the show for violations).
Edit: I've seen this at least in NY, Florida, California
To understand that you need to understand “if”, “or” and assignment expressions. You think this is hard to understand, and that’s fair, but the hard point here isn’t the assignment expression, it’s the short circuiting or-statement. You’d have the same issues with debugging “if f() or g():...”
So are you arguing that the language should not have short-circuit or-statements?
That just seems like you are sacrificing tons of usability only to slightly improve on the expectations of those who are just starting python, like the first 1-2weeks of trying to learn it.
I am arguing for short circuiting and against assignment expressions returning. You save one line per assignment while also making everything more confusing. Next thing you know we will be debating why a++ is a thing and how it that now returns so you can use it in if statements.
As a listerne og the Starup podcast almost since the begining that would be such a wonderful “end” to the tale. “And they bought by a giant and everyone lived happily ever after”. Also from a
Historical point of view it’s such a great line of podcasts chronicaling first hand the actual struggles from inception to exit.
Docker, cloud hosted VM from templates, vagrant, Azure, AWS, it doesn’t really matter much to me. The important thing to me is that I no longer have any need for anyone else doing company wide infrastructure.
We have several department heads engaged in a battle about who’s going to “own” our “cloud infrastructure” they seem
Oblivious to the fact that the only thing we need from them is to negotiate an Azure or AWS subscription and after that they will loose any utility.
A lot of talented people are going to find them self in a problematic situation because the area in which their talents lie is only going to be handled by low wage jobs at google, Azure and Amazon. Even big companies won’t bother setting up their own hardware because the people are costly even if they have slight savings on private hardware.
> they seem Oblivious to the fact that the only thing we need from them is to negotiate an Azure or AWS subscription and after that they will loose any utility.
I've seen similar and they tried the following:-
- We'll provision VMs for you. Raise a ticket.
- We're doing "Hub & Spoke". You're not allowed to route any internet traffic except through our inspection proxies.
- We've disabled the API. You can only use the Console.
Basically, a couple of old school guys will do anything they can to disable automation, as otherwise they'll be accepting they can't really contribute anymore.
The old-school guys also think (rightly in some cases) that they have an added value. 10 years ago I was building a cloud platform and explaining to the security team that they would no longer receive tickets to manually configure routes on firewalls, the customers would do it from a console. I thought they’d be happy to be relieved of a menial, boring task but their reaction was “when we receive a ticket requesting to open all ports from any IP address, we can explain to the customer that it’s a dangerous idea. If they can configure it themselves, who will tell them?”
I'll second this. My company does everything via AWS, and the personnel overhead for X00,000 users and regular major updates to everything is... maybe half of a full-time position, and it will be less than that when we finish overhauling the hard-to-scale legacy parts of our system.
I have the feeling that you have literally no idea what you are talking about. Like at all. This usually comes from self entitles semi-decent full stack developers building same old crappy systems that break apart as soon as they get any decent usage.
Guys not all of you are the mythical 10x engineers working on the ground breaking stuff. Deal with it.
We have had most of these technologies way before they became commoditized. What we have done is that we have made them cheaper and more accessible to your average joe.
Containers ? Give me a break. We have had Solaris Zones provisioning mechanisms at large telcos before any of you even knew what a container is. People have been provisioning jails/zones with a click of a button for ages.
It's funny to me because just 10y ago people like you were yelling and screaming about losing jobs to offshore developers in India and Eastern Europe. There's no apocalypse anytime soon.
Things are getting revamped, they are better, faster and what's more important they are accessible.
Just because you know how to use docker does not mean you are able to manage a production ready infrastructure.
AWS or any of the big providers are not a silver bullet. Never will be. They are at the end of the day very costly services not suitable for all business.
Cloud doesn't have to be actually better, cheaper, faster, etc, to consolidate and reduce ops, system admin and network jobs. It just has to be highly popular.
So the jobs change. They move into "Developer" category where we will hire Developer with domain knowledge of "networks", "systems" or "operations".
I have seen it many times with big data, chatops (we wont ever need to login to the system! we will do everything via hipchat/slack/whatever), openstack (who even needs aws?!).
The work to manage infrastructure is smaller if most of it is centralized at Amazon or similar. Yes, there's still client side work, but there's an overall shift, consolidate, reduce, pattern.
I have no idea what makes you say that. As far as I'm familiar with these roles, none of them are low paying. These companies tend to pay very well because of the amazing scalability involved in these roles. Any engineering work that scales linearly with the number of users is automated almost immediately and the focus is generally on very high-level work.
When you go from 100 corporations. Each having infrastructure teams of 50+ people to one provider running the same thing with 20 people from that pool the wages go down. While there certainly are well paid individuals behind Azure or AWS, they are rare compared to “the people on the floor”, and those people used to be able to rise to senior specialist in companies before, now they just order services from the big players.
Now don’t get me wrong there will always be avenues for the most talented players, but the crisis will come when the 45 out of the 50 strong infrastructure team at every larger corporation are no longer needed, and the last 5 will end up doing work that’s completely unrelated to their prior expertise.
So.... they aren’t going to stop steeling tips, just limit how much they steal? And they are claiming that it was an algorithmic glitch that cause them to steal a drivers tip that one time... yet they aren’t going to stop it all together just limit it.
They need to come out and say “all tips goes to the driver” or they are going to dies in distrust. No-one wants to buy from or work for a company that downright steals tips from its employees.
But they do say “all tips goes to the driver”, and the worst part is that they _aren't lying_. Some MFA was reading that statement thinking "how can we claw that one back", and came up with the clever idea of guaranteeing a minimum rate. In other words, they can now say "all tips go to the driver" and "drivers are always at least paid X amount" and not be lying. They just don't disclose that they only pay the driver _if the tips don't cover the minimum_. It's a very clever way of taking two positive statements that sound good to consumers and employees and finding a money hole between them.
It's too late for me, I don't tolerate this sort of bullshit. I had pizza delivered once and paid/tipped online (I have ten years in restaurants behind me, on the rare occasion I eat out I tip really well) and the delivery guy gave me a funny look when he dropped off my order. I took a look at the receipt attached to the order and the price I paid was higher plus the tip was not on the slip, I sent him a text with my order confirmation to let him know what I paid he texted me back that this wasn't the first time they screwed him on tips and that hes going to find another job. Every few months I post a yelp review with this experience so it remains on the first page for the restaurant.
As a patient, you don’t care if the drug costs 25$ with 20 covered by insurance or 2005$ with 2000$ covered by insurance. That is what he means. List price doesn’t matter to insured patients.
Let’s say we do this, and you create a state funded company that creates cheap insulin, let’s say they can sell it for 25$ in Walmart. What then happens is that to sell that drug to the insurance companies they negotiate with the Phamacy Benefits Managers they will say to them:”We want a 66% rebate!!” They’ll say errr? At what price? The PBM will say:”we don’t care, insurance covers the price”. So that company ends up putting a list price at 74 but providing a 66% rebate to the PBM so they still get their profit... but then the next year the PBM comes back saying “well, we are going to need a bigger rebate because the competitors where willing to raise their prices even more and thus giving us bigger rebates”
You essentially have a party who’s getting every company to compete on who is willing to sell at the highest list price who’s driving negotiations against the producers who only stand to gain by higher prices.
If a ship is sinking it’s perfectly logical to first save the ship and then criticize the crew afterwards. Calling someone a hypocrite because they critique the captain but didn’t let the ship sink seems kind of odd.
They did more than just “a little reddit/facebook”, there where more posters in busses/metros/buildings than for any other single movie everywhere. They went big on all types of add spending, in addition to pushing it on their own platform.
Sounds like he was too focused on inventing and forgot the production/sales aspect. He literally had the product and had thousands of people emailing him directly ready to buy! And he still complains that he couldn’t sell.
He should have realized his personal shortcomings and partnered with someone who had the qualities he lacked.
This is precisely my takeaway as well. I wonder if there's more to the story than described in the article – maybe he's just really hard to work with? Maybe his prototypes are two expensive to put into any large scale production, and he's not willing to compromise? I feel like this story barely scratches the surface.
Also, why didn't he start a Kickstarter campaign? I would imagine that crowd-funding would be the perfect approach to something unable to attract investors. He seems like a smart guy, I'm sure he must have considered it?
I agree too, the author really could have dug deeper and asked some questions instead of just focusing on his 30-years of failure (with some uplifting moments).
Agreed. The article also didn't really talk about what it was actually like after 30 years of pursuing his dream and failing. They just told a story without much detail. Seems like there would be a lot more interesting details.
Based on the limited info we have, I would guess that he's a perfectionist. I've known a couple of people who have ruined great ideas and initial traction due to their perfectionism.
I think it's even worse than perfectionism. It's a fear of success. Some engineers have this fear that they've only got a few good ideas in them and once they finish with this one, they'll never have a second one, so they've got to milk this one for all it's worth because once they're done they'll be all used up.
This guy is trying to milk it, because he thinks if he gives it up he'll have no more good ideas for the rest of his life. Mark Z. on the other hand is doing just fine and could start trying to do space travel like Bezos, but he doesn't really lose anything doing what he's doing because it's working.
But there isn't any milk. Zuck is milking it. Zuck could do other things, instead he continues to do Facebook and similar acquisitions. He is milking it.
This other dude isn't getting any milk. He's pulling a teet with nothing in it.
Perhaps it's that he believes he is eventually going to succeed and he's convinced himself of this since he also consciously or subconsciously believes that if he doesn't he won't have any other ideas so he might as well try forever to get this idea to work.
You can see an image of his later iterations later in the article [1]. It does look like there isn't much improvement between them, except what a perfectionist might find to tinker with.
This happens sometimes to inventors who are not willing to cede control of the invention to investors. The investors aren't willing to put in $$$$ and not have control.
I think you're making an incorrect assumption. He had a series of prototypes, not deliverable products. Ramping up production for a complex product requires capital. As I read it He'd been seeking funding to get to the production phase and was using those thousands of emails as essentially M.O.U.s to show that a market existed and the product was desired.
> Ramping up production for a complex product requires capital
For a mass-market product, sure. But there’s no need to go from 0 to mass market. Had he priced his boots at $900 a piece and essentially sold prototypes, he may have been able to hit $100k in sales within a year. That’s the kind of traction investors look for.
Exactly. Going to market and being able to identify if his hypothetical quote “mid-30s” extreme sports enthusiast was his target market, and at the price they are willing to pay, was neglected in pursuit of the perfect product.
As Voltaire said, “Perfect is the enemy of the good.”
I think the only way that this guy could have won would have been to license the invention for a tiny royalty amount just to get the thing made and establish his personal brand. Then, once he had handed the invention off to someone else, he could have gone on to his next product and gotten a bigger development budget that would let him get out ahead of the competition before they could catch up.
Instead, he tried to do everything himself thinking he was a real business genius when he only had the idea and was a decent engineer. This is a typical engineering mindset. Engineers think they are smarter than all these genius marketers and hustlers out there. They think that being good at math means you're good at marketing, but they are really different skills and good marketers and promoters should be respected for the unique and genuine value they bring.
I don't know. There's many people that do practically nothing in that regard and become mega hits overnight. Happens all the time in software. How many sales people were marketing facebook back in the day?
Facebook did things no one else did like allow you to import your hotmail contacts. They rolled out in small batches. At one point you needed a .edu email. The press was great. Facebook did so many things right marketing-wise in the beginning.. even now they always seem to be on the cusp of the next wave.
facebook type products are an outlier. It did not require traditional sales and marketing in the true sense as it did one thing right : creating a tool for college kids like me where I felt like part of the community. The idea was brilliant to keep it to college campuses only. I remember looking at fb for the first time (circa 2004 when it was only on college campuses) and going "wow, they have listed my dorm name" and immediately felt a personal connection. genius!! And of course, the UI was far more engaging than the incumbents. So fb was selling itself but most products don't.
Facebook practically implemented a worse version of MySpace. The only problem with MySpace was security issues which I think ultimately killed it in the end.
Almost every social media site wasn't marketed. MySpace didn't have marketing, neither did Facebook, neither did Twitter, Snapchat is still popular even though it struggles to make any money. Those are just the few that come to mind.
I don't have an exact percentage, and percentage wise its probably low when factoring in all the websites in existence.
