I'm really not sure about why this comment has been down-voted besides that people disagree with it. This comment and the one above that was heavily down-voted both inspired some relatively interesting responses. It's a shame because the HN that I used to appreciate had more tolerance for civil disagreements. (Maybe this is just a reddit norm leaking here.) So it goes.
You're seeing folks with a certain persuasion downvoted because frankly, there is a right answer here, and it's astounding that people would undermine their own profession.
If Oracle wins, software engineering will be seriously hampered. And that's not hyperbole. If you are on Oracle's side you directly jeopardize the livelihoods of most of the contributors of this board. So not only am I not surprised by the downvotes, I think they're appropriate.
That is actually the very definition of hyperbole. No, software engineering isn't going to be seriously hampered because Google has to pay for what they knew they stole.
Some terms about API use would likely change in some software agreements. Google would fess up about 8 billion dollars. And not much else would happen.
Software engineering is a vital part of the world and the economy and it will not go away because the law got enforced.
Well I suppose an Oracle victory could be good news for AT&T if they own the copyright to the standard C library and the UNIX/POSIX API.
Then they could demand licenses for any C toolchain as well as any piece of code (libc, Linux) that included libc/UNIX compatible declarations.
This could be highly beneficial to software engineering since it would discourage the use of languages like C and Java, as well as UNIX-like systems. ;-)
Specious arguments that provoke well-informed corrections may be better than obvious trolling, but overall they're still not beneficial to the level of discourse here.
Awesome. Thanks for this. I really didn't like the visualization in the article since it was unclear if it was just a seasonal effect and there were no confidence intervals. The report is much, much better.
Perhaps useful to note that the results hold for minor/non-indictable offenses. However, I'm out of my depth on the more nuanced legal aspects in the report.
Until recently I would have agreed with you. It seems to me that Apple is in a luxurious decline. Cook is great at squeezing money out of their product lines but he's done it at the cost of good will.
I was in the market to upgrade, I love OS X and I was willing to pay a premium... but with crappy keyboards and systems that can't be upgraded it's just was not worth the price tag. I recently switched from my macbook pro to a thinkpad X1. I have to say the first week was hard -- especially the trackpad -- but the adjustment so far has been fine. I'm struck by how much better windows has gotten. Even more, I'm impressed by how innovative it and the eco-system has become again. I think that's the challenge for Apple. How can they stay big and remain innovative? Right now it seems they are coasting on good management and design... but they are missing that element that presumably Jobs brought to the table by directing those elements towards a new innovative vision of a product line.
Anyway, I could be wrong but it seems to me that Apple is coasting. These announcements seem more like a big company flailing around to get in on the next big thing. On the other hand, Apple is great at the self-contained devices (ipad, iphone, etc.) with no moving parts. These products seem rock-solid and I think this is where the real revenue is. My concern is that this money is going to allow everyone to hide from the fact that the company is not as innovative as it used to be.
Interested to hear from others though. My work is elsewhere so I don't track this company closely.
While Apple's Mac line is stumbling a bit, the rest of Apple's hardware is pretty spot on. The Apple Watch, AirPods, iPhone, & iPad are all rock solid. The AR headset is a lot more like the Apple Watch and it's basically slaughtered it's competition and is widely considered a best-in-class product.
The big question mark with Apple isn't hardware, its software. iOS 13 and Catalina were both pretty ambitious and deeply flawed.
Just having a hard deadline with an annual release cycle is aggressive. Seems like they should be doing a lot of these releases in point upgrades instead of forcing one giant upgrade per year.
I mean, if you wanted to be maximally confusing, or insist on pointing at what amounts to a pun, but the person you are responding to neither stepped in your joke nor is saying something unreasonable: most people would use the term "design" to mean "how it looks" not "how it works", and while the word can be used for both purposes, it robs us of an easy distinction. To draw an analogy: Apple is still great at making clothing that looks amazing and feels great to touch, but has become increasingly inept at making sure that clothing fits comfortably in different poses or even simply doesn't fall apart / tear at the slightest stress. Sure, these are both part of the "design" of the dress, but there is a reason why in engineering we don't assume a "designer" knows anything at all about how to make a keyboard that doesn't break.
But that's exactly what good design is. It's not just the look. It's also reliability and choice of materials, and likely at least an overview of the manufacturing and assembly processes. And perhaps even the packaging.
Looks-only designers are almost entirely useless. While it's not true absolutely anyone can sketch nice-looking things, people who can sketch nice-looking things and also have an understanding of the practical constraints that can make the nice-looking thing a practical product (or not) are very rare indeed.
Apple used to excel at both. Under Cook/Ives, the balance shifted to style over substance. Arguably it's still stuck there, especially in software, where the UX and the reliability have both become increasingly poor.
So a pre-announcement of a revolutionary product is nice, but the suspicion is it's primarily there to pump up the stock price and deflect from some of the recent missteps.
Unfortunately the recent missteps have been most obvious in software, so I think it's reasonable to be skeptical about Apple's ability to craft a reliable and outstanding UX for not just one but two completely new classes of products.
I think the other cause for inflation is that software patents can be rather dubious compared to other fields. It's easier to claim something is a patent when it is really quite trivial (example: one-click shopping). This is harder to in other fields.
I briefly worked in the insurance industry in Canada. FWIW in my experience the industry is incredibly backwards. I wouldn't expect their prices to reflect anything meaningful about climate risk. Quite the opposite. I rather think that the industry is jumping on the climate change band wagon precisely because their analytics are so poor. (Don't get me wrong, climate change is happening. I just think industries are going to profit from it any way that they can. In this case, this is a cover-your-ass move because the industry hasn't invested in this analytical research. Labeling bad policies that should never have been written at a certain price as climate change is a convenient excuse.)
This is anecdotal, but the one I worked at had no weather/climate modelling and was only just beginning to leverage even the most basic analytics across the company. From what I heard from people in pricing was that their pricing was also a mess for property. They basically just gave up on selling insurance to anyone within 100 meters of water. They did account for elevation to some degree so that they wouldn't insure people in a flood plain, but much of the process was kludgy and ad hoc. The company is a reasonably big player and is (laughably) considered to be very technically advanced in the broader market. Even the biggest players are just moving out of manual data entry so I am not overly hopeful about the broader industry in this country.
On the other hand, Canada has a very sheltered insurance market and it desperately needs more competition. It's very protected though so I don't expect that to happen any time soon. If there was more competition, I would expect the analytics to be better and yield a more accurate picture of the real climate change costs based on the existing science.
> and misery the news (Twitter) was bringing into my life.
That's because you were not getting news. You were getting social media. It amazes me that comments here don't distinguish between these. Facebook, twitter, google news, hackernews etc. are not news. They may all use or perhaps disseminate "news" but they are not sources of news.
Following news -- a large city daily paper, CBC, BBC, NPR, ABC (Australia), commercial national television news, local television news -- is much the same.
Information is wrong, irrelevant, intentionally aggrevating, or all of the above. Sometimes more so, sometimes less, but very nearly always.
I'd started buring out on a noncommercial radio news habit by the late 2010s. Yes, that corresponded with an increased use of social media -- mostly Google+ and Reddit, and not Facebook or Twitter. My social life was entirely offline, I've long had the view that the Internet is for acquiring and discussing information, but not personal details.
I began reading more books and articles. And finding that what was revealed through those was that much of what is encountered through news, journalism, and broadcast ... just misses massive amounts of relevant information. You spend so much time caught up in the malinformed focus on the present that you lose any sense of connection with earlier periods and thought, much of which informs the now.
There are exceptions; there always are. But they are the exception, and the bulk of news really isn't worth bothering about. The stuff that is worth bothering about ... generally doesn't make the news.
It's hard to miss the larger stories -- they intrude into discussions and conversations. If that story is something I perceive as not useful to know or engage with I'll state as much. This includes most crime and political stories, to the extent those focus on crisis de jour, immediate and personal impacts, horse race, or some orange running its mouth off.
I'm more interested in deeper undercurrents. My guiding question over the past seven or eight years has been "what are the Big Problems". And information that doesn't address this isn't particularly interesting.
Specific major stories are. I've been following hurricane Dorian, for example, though my entry point to that wasn't news, but the https://earth.nullschool.org weather visualiser, which shows interesting phenomena. And Dorian showed up initially as a minor swirl just off the coast of Venezuela, then developed rapidly. Then it started turning up in news mentions.
I occasionally catch On the Media's weekly deep-dive into major stories of the week, or longer. That's about the right frequency for me to catch up on news, and it's no longer every week.
Mostly I'm looking at larger themes and patterns that repeat through history. Models, frames, context. Philosophy, history, systems theory, cybernetics.
Focusing exclusively on the new and now takes away from that.
I mainly used Twitter as my source for news content. I accomplished this by not only following “smart” political people that shared their opinions on things, but also by following most major news organizations as well.
The partisan politics, the faux outrage, the hyped up drama, it’s what drives clicks and ad $ and it’s awful for our mental health.
I mainly only read local news coverage now from my paper of record (LA times), and a couple local magazines with good journalists. I read less of it (as there really is less of it), but what I do read is more impactful and about the area I live in, and the stories are much more likely to have a tangible impact on my life than whatever national gaffe is being talked about currently in every publication and agency at once.
I don't care that I'm out of the loop on a lot of the national soap opera. The loop is pretty dumb usually and not worth wasting much time on. I loooove reading about local transit projects, housing development, and other local matters on the other hand. That stuff I actually use in my life.
I also only use RSS for content, which really saves me time.
I think a lot of people could stand taking a step back from the national drama and studying local issues more closely.
The point is that branding often has little relationship to quality. It does allow brands to charge higher rates for basically identical homogeneous products.
As a teenager I worked in a potato chip factory. We also made chips for competing brands. Often this amounted to changing the bags the chips were put into. These brands would then charge different prices for the identical product.
I once sat in on a lecture by a former CEO of a very successful grocery store chain. He noted that if you buy anything in a can you might as well buy the cheapest good because there were basically identical behind the label.
Choose almost any kind of product. Often times multiple brands are created by the same parent company to provide the illusion of competition. Sometimes there are differences in quality/features but sometimes not.
I've eaten a lot of cans of food in my day, and I can say with certainty that they are not all the same. That's not to say that the expensive brands are the best though.
Maybe it's different in the USA, but there's definitely a huge variation in quality across canned goods in Australia. Most cans under a dollar aren't worth buying in my experience.
They aren't all made in the same factory either, the cheaper cans tend to be made in Indonesia or other developing countries. I try and avoid food manufactured in developing countries, I've seen what their food safety standards are like, not to mention the pollution and heavy metal risk, or if it's even what it says on the can (even Europe isn't immune to this, see the Horse Meat Scandal). I have no particular reason to believe that my can of Tuna from Vietnam actually contains Tuna, or that it's free of mercury or lead.
A 50 cent can of baked beans or spaghetti doesn't taste anything like a proper Heinz can, the beans are usually fine but the sauce is atrocious. But there are brands that are cheaper than Heinz that are just as good (don't taste the same though).
Cheap cans of fruit are almost universally terrible. The fruit in the tins is terrible quality: underripe, overripe; too sweet, sour, or bitter. Bottom shelf tinned pineapple feels like I'm eating timber.
Vegetables tend to be fairly consistent, although the cheapest cans of tomatoes often contain added water or tomato juice.
Coconut milk/cream is worth paying for the premium brands, the budget brands are so watery. Pacific Island sourced coconut milk tends to be better, at least in my opinion.
Fish is a real mixed bag. Not just for taste, but for sustainability, human rights, and pollution. It's worth doing some research into what brands are best. Some of the more expensive brands are actually the worst.
Plain legumes (chickpeas, lentils, kidney beans etc.) are the only canned goods where the cheap brands seem to be the same quality as the premium brands.
Your statement [branding often has little relationship to quality] still stands though. You can get high quality, cheap packaged food, you just need to spend a bit of time looking for the right brands (which may involve trial and error). Going for the most well known or most expensive brand is definitely not the way to ensure you're getting the best quality food at a modest price.
Here in Brussels a few years ago, it was found that 1 in 3 kinds of fish that was served in restaurants did not match the type of fish on the menu.
150 restaurants were visited, 5 types of fish were ordered and 36 different types were served (lots of Pangasius). In 95% of cases, "red tuna" was actually white or some other kind of tuna.
I used to work at Sysco foods and while I never attended one, the sales guys used to talk about "can cuttings" as a big sales tool.
Basically, they would cut open cans of other providers and cans of Sysco products to show how much more product vs liquid they provided, or maybe the quality... Not really sure.
You can debate endlessly the merits of different products in theory or in actual cases, but not that there are differences in quality. If multiple things are made on the same assembly line, don't you think they have dials they can adjust for different clients?
I remember buying a generic roll of aluminum foil once, because what could possibly go wrong with something that simple? Why should I pay the premium for a brand name? Well, it was not wrapped around the spool quite right. It wasn't completely worthless, but it reminded me that there is a huge amount of detail that needs to be gotten right even for products that occupy little if any space in your mental world when you don't work in the industry. And a factory can turn dials to make infinite variations for different clients, including quality control. I remember trying some generic cereal, and it was very similar to the branded equivalent, but there was something odd and gritty in it.
However, I think what leads to people being receptive to claims that it's all the same is the degradation of brand name quality - as soon as someone recognizes that brand equity exists, they can exploit it by cutting costs until people notice it. There's always going to be a lag that is profitable in the short term and information technology is making this more efficient, measurable, and tempting. My suspicion is that this is why white label goods are becoming more popular - it's not that brands are less useful in principle than they ever were, but everyone who owns a brand is succumbing to the temptation to strip mine it and this is making consumers become more cynical and devalue brands in general.
I think talking about averages is somewhat misleading. There has been a steep upward trend in the US and Europe. In the 1960s we'd be talking about less than 5% for the US and Europe so that is a big change. It's fair to say that there have been major policy changes over the past 50 years but it's misleading -- I'm not accusing you, just pointing out -- to say it's an average because that implies a steady state.
I don't think USA/EU is at 15% yet. Europe trends just a little less than the USA (at least from 2016). I was just skimming this article today (below). I may have misinterpreted it so feel free to set the record straight. See Fig 1.
Peri, G. 2016. Immigrants, Productivity, and Labor Markets. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30(4): 3–30.
Canada and Australia have had very high rates for a long time. Australia's is higher though. I'm not sure why Peri chose to combine the series because they are quite different but higher than the US.
The AU/NZ (and Canada too I suppose) cases are interesting because they all have very overheated housing markets and prices are historically high relative to average wages. The USA went through a market correction and let the housing bubble burst but these markets did not. I've heard it argued that increased immigration to major housing markets is considered to be one way to keep the construction industry and house/rent prices sustainable. I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts or insight into this.
Maybe "average" was the wrong word, perhaps "unremarkable" is a better one.
Before Trump the US was proud to describe itself as a nation of immigrants (I was one for 20 years) but Americans have this myth that they take in far more immigrants than anywhere else, it's just not true
Well it does a pretty remarkable job. Recall too that the stats are foreign born as a percentage of the population (Peri, 2016 that I mentioned above).
The USA is larger than all Canada, Australia, UK and NZ combined. So, let's not pretend that the US is not taking new comers at all. We're still in the ballpark of close to 50 million people. This compares to about 7 million in Canada.
I think that percentage gives a reasonable job of looking at the impact that immigrants have on the existing system - NZ takes in far fewer immigrants than the US, but compared with their population they're taking more and would be expected to have a larger impact on society (NZ has lower taxes that the US)
Some people really do learn from classes. I'm not being facetious. Sometimes teaching you can actually see that students have never considered certain things and for them it is a revelation of sorts.
To understand this you have to also take on board that ethics is difficult. The media often gives us simplified versions of situations after the fact and we can't help but feel the "right" choice was always obvious. But in reality, as an ethical conflict develops those involved often feel helpless as the problem continues to grow. No one risks stopping it precisely because they don't have the intellectual framework to deal with or understand the developing complex ethical dilemma until it is too large for a single individual to take on.
I get where you are coming from though. I'm just saying that some people aren't lucky enough to have come from that place. Education does often make the difference for well meaning people not otherwise exposed to a good moral foundation.
My journalism ethics class did open my eyes to some things. However, when the industry itself ignores the ethics taught in the classroom and demands its cogs do the same, then no matter how good the class may have been, it's not going to win over a boss deciding to behave unethically.
