hildaman

This is just the beginning. As we see easy money dry up, we are going to see a lot of unprofitable startups go belly up.

I read this book, it was truly jaw dropping to see the "Guanxi" system at work.

From what I could tell, there is a whole system of unwritten rules about how different political factions could collect their "percentage", how these factions compete with each other and eliminate each other and so on.

In a way, it is efficient because everyone who matters (i.e. princelings who control the CCP) has an incentive to "play the game". It is efficient because there are no nasty courts to slow you down, you don't have to deal with the lowest bidder nonsense - it all comes down to connections. The party credibility and the need hold power serves as a very powerful check on the system to prevent the system from becoming too blatantly corrupt and keeps the system going.

But if you aren't someone who matters - i.e. a princeling, you will be forever on the outside looking in.

I seriously doubt Amazon would risk mail fraud (and a bevy of other federal charges) over this. If they get caught in a criminal case (not civil), they could be completely shut down.

I once saw some article about them writing their own rich chat client for their internal tooling because their existing solution wouldn't "uber scale" - whatever that meant.

Soon Java will become the new PERL with 20 ways to do the same thing & developers will have to spend hours on Google trying to figure out what that wierd bit of syntax actually does.

I disagree with this. A good Computer Science program must have enough software development curriculum that people actually learn to write code.

"for eventual integration into PostgreSQL"..

I'll tell you why - try to update one column in 100GB worth of row data.

Postgress makes a copy of _every_ row and you need 100GB of extra space on the hard-drive until you commit the transaction. Now extrapolate to a 1TB table that needs updating.

Oracle has a way of doing this w/o copying the entire row.

Instagram is Facebook owned now.

I don't think they are monopolies.

I use DuckDuckGo for search & Twitter for social media. I find discovering new things/People on Twitter more interesting than the sclerotic family/friends stuff on Facebook.

Huh got me there.

I have started to trust Apple maps - not as good as Google though.

Hope this gets commodotized though.

I switched to DuckDuckGo - it isn’t as good as google, but it is 90% of what I need. For the rest I have to slightly tweak my search criteria - but that is not a bad thing because it forces me to use my little gray cells.

YouTube and Gmail substitutes and then I am Google free.

I got tired of being a cog in the Amazon machine and bought some merchandise from Jet.com last week. It was a sub-optimal experience.

This is what I bought:

-> $4.22 Q-tips Cotton Swabs 500 ct -> $16.32 iPhone 5/5s, iPhone SE, iPod Touch 5th/6th Gen Adidas Nylon Armband Case - Sports armband for adidas miCoach training system -> $6.95 iBungee Stretch Laces (26-Inch, Black Laces with Black Race Lock) -> $4.79 4 Philips AA Zinc Chloride Double A Batteries R6 1.5V Super Heavy Duty Battery -> $8.10 Monoprice Apple MFi Certified Lightning to USB Charge & Sync Cable, 3ft White -> $89.96 ASICS Men's GEL-Kayano 23 Running Shoes T646N

The order for the phone arm-band was cancelled and everything else shipped _separately_ - I Literally got 5 different packages in the mail - over a week with different items.

Had I gone with Amazon, I would have received - one, maybe two packages with everything. Infact, Jet probably lost money on most of the items they shipped to me.

Us techies sometimes tend to forget the real world (in this case customer experience) while playing with cool technology.

To me, an old fashioned optimizer running on a 15 year old AMD Opteron that delivers the appropriate real-world result is worth more than that F# and CUDA thing that seems to have over-optimized the problem to create a bad customer experience (getting 5 packages in a haphazard way).

I don't think this will fix anything. Consider the following scenario.

Employer to (theoretically) underpaid/under-represented minority: I offer you x.

Underpaid minority: accepted.

Employer to market-rate perspective employee: I offer you x.

market-rate perspective employee: nope.

Employer to market-rate perspective employee: how about X+25K?

market-rate perspective employee: sounds good.

This bill tries to fix a symptom of the problem - but the underlying dynamics causing the pay disparity will remain.