awillen

33 ms·

361.
by awillen 5y ago
That's not true - evolution is about the best genes for survivability and reproduction continuing to be passed along. The evolutionary perspective here wouldn't be that there are downsides to this, but rather that people with this
362.
by awillen 5y ago
Yes, I'm aware of that, but BuzzFeed started as a company that made dumb viral listicles then turned the brand awareness and money generated by that into an organization that's doing serious, important journalism.
363.
by awillen 5y ago
oh believe me, I believe you
364.
by awillen 5y ago
Can you imagine if someone had told you BuzzFeed was going to win a Pulitzer in 2007? Kudos to them - from listicles to some really important journalism.
365.
by awillen 5y ago
No, this logic is circular. You're defining a company as a thing that we've legally defined as a company, ergo you must have legally defined something as a company for a company to exist. That's not true, though - the non-leg
366.
by awillen 5y ago
"so yes, one starts a company to make money but that is not the reason we have companies." I don't understand this at all. The reason people create companies is the reason that companies exist. They're by definition the
367.
by awillen 5y ago
It's amazing how attractive of an ecommerce website you can create with free Shopify templates and good-quality photos. You can make something that's incredibly slick and looks very professional for a template that's <$200
368.
by awillen 5y ago
Comcast once charged me a $5 self-installation fee. As in I set up the equipment in my house and paid for the privilege. My other option was to not have internet.
369.
by awillen 5y ago
That depends a lot on the context of who's saying it, which leads back to the same problem of a lack of nuance and understanding. If you're Donald Trump saying that people decrying the fact that you caused the attempted coup on Ja
370.
by awillen 5y ago
How else would you describe the issue?
371.
by awillen 5y ago
But isn't this just what ML should be good at - taking a huge number of data points and finding the patterns? Or are you saying it's not an issue of ML working poorly but rather one of there not being a good enough data set to tra
372.
by awillen 5y ago
If you found this interesting, I highly recommend the book Street Fight by Janette Sadik-Khan. She was the Commissioner of the NYDOT, and she was able to make really meaningful improvements by looking at relatively easy, low-cost solutions
373.
by awillen 5y ago
Maybe a dumb question, but does this mean the whole thing about SF having the best sourdough because of its water is/could be true?
374.
by awillen 5y ago
"In too many engineering teams, sprint planning and daily standup are centered on the sprint board and backlog. Stories (tasks) are the focus of attention; discussions are focused on achieving pointing targets, the mechanics of how to
375.
by awillen 5y ago
The main reason Amazon is paying a $15 minimum wage is because of substantial pressure from progressives - there's an extensive record of this. The media reporting has largely been coverage of Bernie Sanders and the like, so it's
376.
by awillen 5y ago
"Amazon’s 2018 wage increase from $11/hour to $15/hour resulted in an average local unskilled low-wage increase of 4.7% suggesting those local markets didn’t need to meet Amazon’s wages in order to compete with them." I
377.
by awillen 5y ago
People's attitude towards Amazon is the biggest counterexample of this. They have avoided a lot of taxes not through nefarious means, but by constant reinvestment (items 1-5). At some point, when a company is bringing in enough revenue
378.
by awillen 5y ago
As someone who's implemented a usage-based billing system for an enterprise SaaS company, I think this leaves out an important practical consideration - what's the cost of building and maintaining the systems you need to support u
379.
by awillen 5y ago
Sure - that's absolutely fair. But with that said, I do think that a lot of people would agree that a lot of the incentives are good (I for one am glad that the government is trying to get people to move to electric cars) and would wan
380.
by awillen 5y ago
It's lazy when it doesn't come with a proposal to replace the stuff that you want to burn down. It's like the US tax code... it is insanely complicated and in a lot of ways doesn't serve the public well (because rich fol
381.
by awillen 5y ago
I don't get why this is so easily glossed over all the time... yeah, absolutely you should be able to control your data and know how it's being used. You should be able to opt out of unnecessary data collection. But the idea that
382.
by awillen 5y ago
Unfortunately this isn't as easy as you think - even if there's no monetary cost, it's still not free to the organizations you're giving it to, because it takes their time and effort. Someone has to spend the time learni
383.
by awillen 5y ago
Don't trivialize domestic abuse with this kind of comparison.
384.
by awillen 5y ago
But people who are at Stanford Law School, which is where the Stanford Federalist Society exists, would have heard of it. Whether you can identify it as satire is irrelevant because you are not the audience and you never would have seen it
385.
by awillen 5y ago
Until you have some reasonable way to quantify the likelihood that the CEO will see something shiny and insist on changing course, this just doesn't seem like it would be useful in the real world.
386.
by awillen 5y ago
This happened at Stanford Law School... these are highly educated people who can recognize satire. None of them were going to engage in violent insurrection because of this. He was also very obviously not trying to pass it off as truth.
387.
by awillen 5y ago
I exercise for my blood pressure (you might've caught that in the comment you were responding to), but thanks for the suggestion! He specifically says classical music is the only acceptable kind, and the vast majority of the history of
388.
by awillen 5y ago
There's just so much of this that is the author insisting that his preferences are right and anyone else is wrong. "Modern music is like junk food." There's amazing modern music, and total crap. Labeling the millions of
389.
by awillen 5y ago
Your violence comment is totally irrelevant. If you thought going to work at Uber was going to be normal-ish, then you just didn't do your homework. That's on you. No reason we should make policy to protect people who won't d
390.
by awillen 5y ago
"If you are not an unsophisticated reader, you truly do not enjoy reading." Just... no. Don't tell me whether I enjoy reading based on your standards of how I do it. Your way is not the only way. This is just an arrogant auth

More ›