incision's comments

I find this to be pretty typical behavior when representing Government to vendors.

It doesn't impress me as being dismissive so much as indirect sales pressure.

A vendor knows that the typical Government agency can and does regularly piss away 10-100x that amount on systems that never see the light of day.

They're betting that if the initiative has any real support someone will find the funding to make it happen.

Problem is, this is probably worst possible tactic to take with someone in your position who is trying to enact change without substantial/any budget to command.

The people on your end are happy to walk away, they've already done it twice and they were surely just looking for a reason to do it a third time.

Word to salespeople working with Government:

When you're dealing with a lone "champion" inside some organization you should be thinking in terms of cheaply seeding for the future and having friendly eyes and ears inside - not booking a sale this quarter.

Also, as the OP points out, you're going to be dealing with entirely segregated procurement departments who are likely out of their comfort zone to be handling the task at all - not the sort you should be at all impatient, demanding or upselling with.

Now, to be fair I should point out that I think there are some valid reasons for vendors to avoid small deals.

The main thing is perception. The naysayers are going to attack any new installation the moment it hits the floor. If a minimal install isn't defensible against a hostile environment like that seeing it fail will kill any potential future business for the vendor.

A simple way to mitigate this is sign an agency up and leave them fully-featured and uncapped - no friction to grow the product internally. Then, this is important, resist the urge to demand a huge true-up once things have taken root, just ramp up gradually and understand that the social proof of your having your product fully-established in one such agency will open the door to sales elsewhere.

I agree.

Thing is, the "when to downvote" debate is ancient at this point and no closer to consensus.

These days, I'm given to thinking that any voting system should assume the behavior of least resistance, that it's thoughtless, reflexive and therefore only potentially valuable after being sanitized / aggregated / weighted.

I get this sense as well and think the signaling theory is a solid one.

I'm thinking this is a part what frequently turns me off of topic specific forums - people have a tendency to want to sort and differentiate themselves. The higher the baseline - whether it's income or knowledge - the more pedantic the self-sorting.

What I'd really like to know is whether this thing will have some form of speaker recognition - identifying who is speaking, not just what is being said and further whether the learning functions will make that same distinction.

I have a family, including a small child. That's at least three people who would conceivably use this device.

Tech companies and Amazon in particular have been awful about these things. It took forever for Netflix to start accommodating multiple viewer households, the Kindle Fire shipped with no parental controls plus 1-click ordering and Android didn't add multiple user support until 4.2.

Echo needs all these things to be more than an experiment / gimmick.

(I notice this post fell directly to the middle of the page - not the typical behavior. Am I tripping some sort automatic moderation? Using the world 'gimmick' perhaps? Is this how posting 'height' works on popular / heavily commented stories? Just curious.)

Clearly.

Problem is, in my experience...

1.) No one wants to get involved.

2.) It's easier to be accommodating of assholes when they're directing their behavior at someone who isn't "one of you" on some level or another.

3.) It's easier to be accommodating of an asshole who also happens to be a "great engineer", "would do anything for a friend" or has their childish nonsense rationalized as "lacking people skills".

I'd wager someone, likely many people in that situation knew exactly what was going on yet did nothing for one or more of the above reasons.

As a group we just need to recognize that those people among us, our friends and coworkers who are shitty to the loner on the team or rude to the cleaning lady, but wonderful to their peers - they're assholes and deserve to be held to account for it.

I absolutely identify.

I've experienced a lot of this, but I'm a man as well as forthright and according to some - intimidating.

Thing is, I expect those things carry their own challenges - being rejected outright rather than given the opportunity to suck it up.

Interestingly, I'd always thought of remote workers as either high-end technical specialists working as-needed or cheap bodies being delegated to.

These folks all fall somewhere in the middle with the common factor being soft / niche skills - they work for sort of places that most people would run away from and work on things the most people haven't touched in years.

Two of them started out on-site, but were so valuable the company was happy to allow remote work in order to keep them on staff.

>"1) Yes, engineers and other in-demand workers have ready access to jobs. I remember when I was looking for a good engineering job out of Amazon, I was basically spammed nonstop by virtually every party on the planet."

Do you think that might say more about the social proof of working for Amazon than the market for engineers in general?

Certainly the job market for engineers is great, the market for good engineering jobs, not so much.

Having been successfully vetted by a big name certainly impresses me as a golden ticket to the good floor.

>"2) But the opportunity cost for poor job selection is enormously high."

I could not agree more.

This is pure truth in my experience [1].

Yes, all of it, but it's not just your forms - they'll scour phone calls too. Anything you've communicated can and will be used against you.

Problem is, it's the sort of thing that seems too unlikely or simply too far off until, out of blue, it hits you on the backside of a routine visit. More insidious is the way the scheme necessarily limits the number of people who survive to talk about it.

1: I spent years fighting this on behalf of a terminally-ill family member and I witnessed the lengths a company will go to in order to avoid making payouts first hand while working for an insurance company.

"Since insurance companies now won’t be allowed to collect premiums while you’re healthy only to yank coverage when you get sick, they have no choice but to pre-emptively cancel plans that wouldn’t be financially beneficial to actually pay out."

1: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/11/obam...

I would definitely use this if I had a need for it beyond changing the default notifications on my phone/desktop.

One suggestion, I think the those little 'devices' are the perfect way to demonstrate why I would want this, but it wasn't immediately obvious to me that they were interactive at all.

A unique color or subtle animation for the play buttons to make them eye-catching might be worthwhile since clicking was definitely a revelation.

Yes, including some that should really know better.

I see this issue with more than one major bank.

>"Whenever I could find the relevant information, I contacted the various people that send me the original email to correct the information."

That's brave. I've had nothing but grief with this - some combination of "Who are you?", "Leave me alone." and "You stole my email address!" in every case.

Contacting the sender isn't much better.

In the case of medical / financial information it seems to me there should be an easy way to report this to some sort of regulatory authority.

"Heinlein carefully points out that all good science fiction writers tell a story first and prophesy second, using arguably the greatest of them all, H.G. Wells, as an example."

There's something I really dislike about evaluating science fiction as prediction in general.

A work of fiction can't be right or wrong, just more or less similar. Flying cars and geopolitics in the year 2000 are no more right or wrong than the color of imagined character's eyes.

I'll hook it up to the one display that doesn't currently have a Roku attached. The discount price of $19 seems worth never using the horrible built-in apps on that display again.

That said, my expectations are low - even at $19. Amazon impresses me as uneven and lazy when it comes to everything but their core business.

It's stuff like the original Kindle Fire launching with the awful combination of no parental controls + one-click ordering or the Android Kindle app lacking basic display settings for ages and still lacking a consistent store experience.

Given that, plugging this stick in to find that it too lacks parental controls or runs some outdated or incomplete version of popular app like Netflix or YouTube would not surprise me in the slightest.

I've long thought that if I ever acquire the means I'd want to take a U2 ride like James May [1]. I'm thinking I'd definitely prefer this.

Also, no wonder his name felt so familiar [2].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJoMDq4AyLc

2: http://pando.com/2014/03/27/how-steve-jobs-forced-google-to-...

It's entirely possible that Assange is a nut, but nothing he says presents quite as nutty as extrapolating that single mention into a tale of innocent students being seeded with delusions of CIA double agents and elite shadow cabals by a scheming madman.

I've always been a bit curious about Schmidt and what sort of measure someone who is neither in awe nor seeking to impress might make of him.

I think the whole piece is probably best summed up with this line towards then end.

>"What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first."

That certainly makes sense.

1.) The crowdsourced and algorithmic solutions seem to be framed in contrast if not exclusive to each other here. I wonder if combining the two couldn't have helped avoid this:

>'However, the crowd was hopeless against a determined attacker. Before the first attack, our progress on the fourth puzzle had combined 39,299 moves by 342 users over more than 38 hours. Destroying all this progress required just 416 moves by one attacker in about an hour.'

I'm wondering if it's easier to create a 'bouncer' algorithm that detects and blocks/reverts aberrant behavior than to solve the core puzzle itself. If that problem is in fact easier - identifying 'hurtful' or unusual moves, could addressing it help the core solution by helping avoid non-malicious 'back sliding' too?

(I have no clue about these things.)

2.) The sort self-importance expressed by the attacker is just awful.

Unlike the author, I don't see it as a concern about "how crowdsourcing puts the collective potential of humans above technology". That almost sounds noble.

This impresses me as plain old envy and entitlement, an overgrown cousin to every "Why is this on HN?" or "Why is this on the front page? I submitted this before and no one voted for it." comment on HN. The whole thing is one big "should" of personal gratification.

Twitter, being Twitter could call this whatever they wanted.

"Yolk" or whatever would make just as many front pages.

I don't see how "Fabric" can do anything but serve someone inside Twitter who likes the name while being inconvenient / irrelevant to everyone else.

1: http://www.fabfile.org/

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched_fabric

Personally, I'd worry less about the headiness of these books than what seem to be common themes of characters whose defining characteristics are innate - birth as a demigod, half-wizard or having a high midichlorian count.

Does anyone still write about 'normal' people doing great things?