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Trapped in the Technologist Factory
- karmakaze 6y agoThis is a fantastic read in terms of the tech it touches upon, the personal journey, and the products. > My next job was at Factual, a more established startup that had built their product using Java and embedded Javascript, and were beginning to adopt Clojure. Their product was an index of all the places in the world, generated by applying hundreds of different heuristics to web crawl data. Each entry had a canonical id and various properties like name, address, and hours. More interestingly, it also had the equivalent ids from different platforms like Yelp and Foursquare, and we offered an API that could resolve an an incomplete (or even partially incorrect) set of properties to the corresponding entity in our index. This sounds amazing like a dream job. So many possibilities. It's hard to face that in a capitalist society capitalism prevails. The best that can be done in the setup is to align capitalist goals with a 'good' one for as long as it lasts.
- brundolf 6y agoThis is incredibly well-written. This sentence in particular: > Chesterton notwithstanding, the fastest way to learn why a fence exists is to tear it down and see what happens.
- m463 6y ago> dynamic pricing ... offering targeted discounts based on individual shopper behavior. In practice, we offered a fixed discount to anyone who abandoned their shopping cart. Ha, that sounds like all kinds of projects, like games that use real physics (at the start of development)