ctb_mg

> one of the most innovative car manufacturers in the world

Off topic, but I'd like some more specific thoughts regarding what you are aware of for specific automotive technologies that GM has innovated over the past decades, to make this statement.

Intuitively, GM cars do not do well internationally, have been known to have creaky interior build quality, have silly features like turning the reverse lights on when you unlock the car in a parking lot, and are not competitive on a scale of luxury compared to their European and Japanese counterparts.

I've experience working on a team for one GPS fleet management solution. Our SIMs were usually provided in a bulk PO from a top tier wireless provider and were all locked down to a certain very small (on the order of 5mb/mo) bandwidth plan. This cuts cost and risk.

I have to say I agree fully and it's kind of disappointing how much chaff makes it to the HN front page. This is ostensibly an interesting article, but at second glance doesn't really hold up to any scrutiny as anything really novel... folks buying used cars for decades have been doing detective work on 3rd party aftermarket modifications that have been left in. Instead, show me a door chime that has been converted to Toto's Africa using an arduino or custom fab board with STM chip.

I propose that Walmart needs to use their bulk purchasing power/clout, in combination with the efficiencies that Amazon has put in place, to provide lower prices. If you're going to unseat Amazon, it has to be on price.

> Aren't at this point you doing the job of two people? ... our company is worth X Billions of dollars, they can afford to hire a Business Analyst/ Better Product Manager.

Yes, definitely. The difference is that in my situation we are a software contractor, not a software development company that owns its products. If we don't work with the customer to discover and build what they want, then it doesn't get built, which means we've lost potential work.

I work with a customer who is notorious for not defining requirements. Their culture is that everyone is either too busy or not knowledgeable enough of all the working parts of a system to define requirements. It's a culture problem over there.

The tool I work on generates reports. Rather than defining requirements for reports, the only way to make progress is to understand their general needs through conversation, then provide them a draft report - your best guess. They tell you what to change or what they don't want, then you make changes and provide another draft. When enough tracer bullets are shot, you arrive at the report they actually need.

We tried Platejoy for 6 months. We found it was useful, but found a few caveats:

It was very easy to back ourselves into a corner with food preferences such that you see the same set of 20 or so recipes recycled from week to week. This is probably our fault more than Platejoy's, but we are not especially picky eaters.

Some recipes required ingredients that we just couldn't source. We live in the midwest and the closest major city is 1.5 hours away. Try finding tahini paste at your local midwest walmart or smalltown grocer. In these cases I'd have loved substitution suggestions.

We don't have particular dietary restrictions. We also preferred old fashioned pen and paper tracking of our grocery list/pantry, so that feature wasn't something we used. We didn't really harness Platejoy's unique features. So for our particular situation Platejoy ended up being little more than a recipe suggestion tool.

I'd definitely suggest platejoy for people with dietary restrictions who don't want to think about or go through the hassle of finding recipes.

I wonder if Pokemon Go is using this, supposedly it is built using Unity.

Good insight, I wonder how many nefarious plots were thwarted by surveillance rather than old-fashioned police work.

Just to add, Zojirushi are top of the line rice cookers and I would expect that they outlast most other appliances.

These browser vulnerabilities have got me thinking that I should start browsing in a VM. Has anyone moved to this level of isolation? Steve Gibson on the last Security Now podcast said he's been experimenting with Sandboxie...

Sandboxie looks like a paid closed source solution, I'm not sure they give me a compelling value proposition over something like a light linux distro under VirtualBox.

I would argue the Tor example is not a valid comparison. Tor is a very complex system. It has a vast attack surface for holes, especially if you ignore boundaries like assuming there is a globally omniscient adversary.

Contrastingly, websites sanitizing inputs has been done for quite some time; it is hardly new, difficult, or complex. It's fundamental. I would guess most people's answer is that this is not a sufficient effort to protect privacy or security.

Could you not potentially retire earlier? In that way you're basically "back-loading" all of your vacation time, if one could freely exchange salary for time off.