thisisnotatest

> The problem is that it's hard to be an informed dollar-voter in this environment of deliberate obfuscation. Spending hours wading through reviews, product descriptions, and so on, just to buy one thing, effectively increases your cost, and there's no guarantee you'll make the right choice in the end anyway. I'd be willing to pay more in many cases for a better result, but there's no way to tell if something that costs a bit more is actually better,

This is how I feel about online shopping. I used to naively dream that a retail aggregator like Amazon would crack the problem. By having large numbers of customers leave reviews (or even return unsatisfactory products), I imagined that the good products would rise to the top. To my surprise, Amazon hasn't seemed particularly interested in advancing this area. Search results are dominated by freshly minted sellers with randomly generated names. I often receive products with a piece of paper inside that begs me to let them know if I have any problems so that they can basically bribe me to keep quiet and not put a negative review on Amazon.

The obfuscation arms race, as you so aptly put it.

To quote the book by Google software engineers, “Software engineering is programming integrated over time”.

Programming is writing code at one snapshot in time.

Software engineering is mapping that code backwards and forwards through time, making sure it works with what comes before and what comes after, in both technical and business aspects.

Check out "Uber is a bezzle" by Cory Doctorow. His allegation is this scheme:

1. Early VC funds are used to subsidize Uber rides at a loss to Uber.

2. The deep discounts made Uber attractive to drivers and customers.

3. Uber's soaring popularity attracts more investment in Uber stock.

4. Uber's early investors cash out. Society is harmed as later investors lose their money, Uber drivers who invested in vehicles can no longer get work, public transit ridership is hollowed out, etc.

Dropbox storage is the lead example in TFA ;-)

A helpful little heuristic that always stuck with me from a Stanford lecture by Andrew Ng was, "log N is less than 30 for all N".

I feel your pain. Two workarounds when Google gets it wrong are to put the term in quotation marks, or to enable Verbatim mode in the toolbelt. (I know various people have come up with ways to add "Google Verbatim" as a search engine option in their browser, or use a browser extension to make Verbatim enabled by default.)

Disclaimer: I work on Google search.

Yes, I think you'd call it a Red Queen Problem:

“Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”

-Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass

I'm no political philosopher, but I'd say, for example, the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution says the government's purpose is to “promote the general welfare." Phenomena like bank runs harm the general welfare, so the government has an interest in preventing or mitigating them.

This is correct. In this query, the '*' is being disregarded. Then, I assume, more people on the internet discuss 48 and 6 in the context of long division than in the context of multiplication.

I see what you're saying -- money isn't useful until it's spent. But I think the argument is that a wealthy person doesn't put that extra 98% of their money under a mattress, they invest it. Now they have passive income on top of their previous income, and their effective tax rate from sales tax is even lower. Until eventually they have so much well that they don't have to work at all, and neither do their descendants, and you have an aristocracy.

"If they can only work five hours a day"

I appreciate the sentiment, but five hours?! That's your example of an acceptable low level of performance for someone working from home with a child with no possibility of childcare?

I'm splitting card of my toddler with my spouse, and on my BEST days, I get 3 hours of actual work done. 1.5 is more typical, and that's only because the toddler takes 2 hour naps.

I'm surprised that you're surprised. Even ignoring Blizzard game players who don't follow the news, and ignoring (presumably Chinese) players that actually support the Chinese government over the Hong Kong protest movement, some percent of players are going to react by saying, "I don't agree with what Blizzard did, but I still like playing Overwatch/Hearthstone/Warcraft."

There are key differences between building more highways and building more dense housing.

I suspect induced demand is more of an effect with highways than housing. People can change their driving habits from day to day more easily than they can change their living habits.

Expand a highway, and more people in the area start taking more car trips on it.

Add housing, and more people don't instantly come into existence to occupy it. (Maybe, over a few years, people stop cramming themselves into crowded roommate arrangements as much, and over decades they have more kids.)

But if I granted that induced demand applied to both...

Driving is a means to an end. People stuck in traffic are suffering.

Having a home is an end in itself. People need shelter, and living near your community/job/family is a huge quality of life improvement.

Plus, when you expand a highway, strictly more mileage is created. It's not like the additional car trips in this city are taking the place of car trips in another state. It's a net loss for society and the environment.

Whereas, when you add housing, even if it induces more people to move into that city, they're moving out of some other city, easing the demand in the housing market there.

For what it's worth, when I do coding interviews, I really don't care if the candidate calls the function at() or get() or find(), whatever that particular library in that particular language actually has, as long as their usage of the supposed function is appropriate in the language.