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noamsml | 12 years ago | on: How the world came to hate Silicon Valley

I live in SF, and I can confirm that I'll walk past people and overhear the same fragments of conversation, talking about the buses and gentrification. The tone varies, but just because not everyone is protesting doesn't mean the ideas aren't out there.

noamsml | 12 years ago | on: San Francisco's guerrilla protest at Google buses swells into revolt

Hating techies (and the target of hate, make no mistake, is all tech workers) is easy, convenient, misguided and counterproductive. it is easy, because hatred is a simple, attractive emotion. It is convenient, because it requires no thought about policy changes, urban planning, zoning, transportation, density, parking or anything else that makes a city. It is misguided because it fails to take into account the lack of development in this city that lead to this crisis -- essentially, SF's residents forced SF to be an exclusive enclave, and are now surprised it's becoming an exclusive enclave for someone else. Finally, it is counterproductive because the tech population is not going to leave the city, and the more hate you lob in their direction, the less willing they will be to cooperate in making the city affordable -- why collaborate with the people who actively vilify us?

noamsml | 12 years ago | on: Are The Techno Riche Really Ruining San Francisco? Yes, Says Rebecca Solnit

"I met a guy who lives at 24th and Valencia [Street]. He says the Wi-Fi signal on the buses is so powerful that when the Google bus pulls up in front of his house, it uses all the broadband and his Wi-Fi signal crashes."

That's not really how WiFi works. Chances are his router is on the same frequency as the buses and he can fix this by changing to a different frequency. Even more likely (since one SSID shouldn't make too much of a difference) is that his WiFi router crashes at random and there's some amount of false causation there.

I know this isn't the beef of the article, but this sort of magical thinking that insists on forcing every little thing into a framework of a class war between the upper middle class and the lower/lower middle class is.

noamsml | 12 years ago | on: Why women lose the dating game

I think this is a bit misleading. You hear tons of scandalous stories one way, but no stories, scandalous or otherwise, the other way. Which is truly less socially acceptable?

noamsml | 12 years ago | on: RIP Nexus 4

Had to check the date when it mentioned "Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie".

noamsml | 12 years ago | on: San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

Compare with Seattle, by the way, which just has a Sound Transit stop right on the Microsoft campus, easily accessible from Belltown and Cap Hill. If there's one thing that frustrated me moving from Microsoft to Google, it's the sudden decrease in the quality of inter-city public transit.

Moreover, if public transit to/from SF weren't such a fucking joke, more young techies would choose to live outside the city, knowing they could go in whenever they wanted to.

noamsml | 12 years ago | on: We were wrong

This annoys me greatly. Whether or not the book itself was bad, an open platform shouldn't have to apologize for not immediately censoring its users on public outrage. To the contrary, I would have expected an apology if, given the first blush or public outcry, they suspended the account without a proper investigation into it.

noamsml | 12 years ago | on: The Smears Against Edward Snowden Have Begun

I care exactly zero about who Edward Snowden is. As far as I'm concerned, he could be a dick who loves kicking puppies and taking candy from children. What I do care about is, you know, the NSA spying on my phone calls and emails.

noamsml | 13 years ago | on: Google defends dropping chat federation with inaccurate comments

Yes. Standards should be designed by committee, ensuring as many cooks are helping the broth as possible. Much like UNIX and C came out of large standards consortia composed of many industry leaders, and like the HTML5 standards evolved incredibly quickly until those darn browser manufacturers slowed them down by going off and implementing things. A single engineer or group of engineers trying to solve a real world problem have never done anything good for the world.

(DISCLAIMER: I work for Google. All of my opinions are my own and not Google's.)

noamsml | 13 years ago | on: A “simple” 3rd grade problem

It depends. In algorithm classes, there are often many right answers, including ones you haven't thought of before. Same goes for most college math.
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