reading-at-work's comments

A coworker had his work Macbook synced up to his iPhone messages app, and was getting blown up during a meeting by his friends in a group chat ranting about Trump.

It could have been way worse. I've never understood why people sync their personal messages/emails to their work computers. It can and does get watched - gods help you if your friends have a borderline taste in memes and send you something offensive while you're presenting.

That's weird, that's not the case for me. Mine still goes through the length of ringing with the call on the screen.

That's pretty funny, and would be better without the old "blonde" trope. I forgot that was ever a thing.

Not surprised. Tech companies (Facebook and Google in this case, and probably others) have been known to retain Pinkerton agents to monitor employees. Yes, those Pinkertons.

“Among other services, Pinkerton offers to send investigators to coffee shops or restaurants near a company’s campus to eavesdrop on employees’ conversations.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/147619/pinkertons-still-neve...

> My company is generally behind the curve so now people have been bitten by the REST, JSON, Microservice bug. They don’t know why or what it really is but things have to be done that way.

This resonates with me. My first job out of college was with a big, very old insurance company. My team lead became obsessed with using microservices for some reason, even though we were only building internal web apps that would have about 1,000 users on a busy day. There would be no performance concerns whatsoever that would warrant "breaking up a monolith" to make it more scalable. But microservices were a great way for the team to feel like we were using trendy tech despite not having any idea how to really go about doing it or any particular reason for doing so.

> At the end of the day Uber/Lyft will be just another taxi company, albeit with a less professional set of drivers.

What city do you ride taxis in? Because the taxis I've ridden have spanned a range of tolerably annoying to downright abysmal experiences. Uber/Lyft drivers have unequivocally been more friendly, punctual, and professional. No taxi company I've seen can manage to make a halfway decent app or even guarantee that a driver will show up within an hour of me needing one.

Even if Uber/Lyft become the same price as taxis, I'll take Uber/Lyft any day over a traditional cab company.

I think the point of the person you're replying to is that there are other methods of assessment which would render plagiarism ineffective - such as in-person presentations and conversations. But, teachers don't have the time and resources to do that with all of their students.

Effective writing is an important skill, so I don't think in-person conversations would replace papers, but from a conversation with a student who plagiarized their paper you could probably tell that they didn't really understand what they "wrote."

> we all know the project will fail unless someone develops well-perfoming, human-level AGI before Q4/2020

This is hilarious, and makes me wonder how many similar corporate AI initiatives are under way in the world right now.

Surprised I had to scroll this far to find this - same here!

WorldMaker's answer to this comment is great. I would TL;DR it by saying that while there are always multiple phone companies to choose from, there is usually only one cable or fiber internet company, which is what matters.

In every state I've ever lived, for example, Comcast is the only company that provides acceptable internet speeds. DSL and satellite providers don't even come close enough to count as competition. So Comcast has the localized monopoly on the infrastructure necessary to actually provide a good product.

> If preserving wildlife and forests can be equated with preserving suburban lifestyles and property values

It can't, and shouldn't, be equated to that. Denser urban living, i.e. building more housing in cities, reduces suburban sprawl. That's a good thing if you care about the environment.

I wish I had enough karma to downvote this. Snide comments like that are not helpful to productive discussion. Save it for other sites.

I disagree that it's an automatic red flag. 8 hours? Yeah that's too long. But I would rather do a 2 hour take-home project than a 2 hour whiteboard coding interview.

Edit to add: as far as getting paid, nobody expects to get paid for an onsite interview so I wouldn't expect to get paid for a take home project either. As long as it takes the same amount of time that the coding portion of an onsite interview reasonably would, that is.

Yup. When the State wouldn't help communities who needed protection, the Mafia families stepped in to serve that purpose. Of course, that's not to lionize them, but it explains why and how they came to power.

I think the underlying point, as expressed by the author, is that trendy new architecture patterns will never be a panacea for bad engineering, though that's often how they're implicitly sold as ideas.

I disagree. If that were the case many of those smaller species would have gone extinct ages ago due to natural predation from wild foxes and ferrets. Domesticated cats are a new issue because they often hunt with the same voracity of wild animals, but don't experience the natural pressure on their population that wild predators do because they're human pets.

If there were as many human households with domestic foxes as there are with cats, then foxes would absolutely be considered an unnaturally potent problem for wild rodent and bird species too.

I tend to agree with you, but I think this lends itself to a bigger philosophical debate of how much social responsibility a company has when it wields the incredible amount of power that Amazon does. And to that I have no answer.

The linked article heavily implies that legal action could be taken against Amazon for this, by bringing up other antitrust investigations that are happening. Hence the debate about legality.

No one is saying you should be compelled to like it, they're saying that the fuss over it is moot because it's not as big a deal as it's made out to be.

I'm honestly not sure if they're entitled to fairness. Sure, I guess they choose to use Amazon so they could just as well choose not to. But Amazon's massive market presence means that small sellers could take a huge hit by not being a part of it. Sometimes their livelihood depends on their Amazon sales.

But now that I brought it up, I feel like that's a different issue than what's being mentioned in the article: Amazon gadgets getting promoted on Cyber Monday. By itself, the whole issue the article gets after doesn't seem like a big deal to me.