As someone who used to work in government contracting, this comment is so freaking true.
The whole thing about contractors is so spot on. The only slight difference I would add is that the contractors will NOT hire the best talent, they will hire whoever they can to fill the position, for the cheapest price, so they can claim to have fulfilled their RFP.
I haven't done much, but anything I ever deal with that involves the government and contractors is the same. The contractor has an astronomical margin and, in addition to not hiring the best talent, they don't care about their employees and have a high churn rate.
These are also the same ones that are super eager to have AI replace their (unappreciated) employees. They don't care about quality at all and as long as they fulfill the contract with something barely working that's all that matters to them.
I predict things are going to worse and worse when systems don't work. Having failures in critical institutions that are life altering for the people that are unlucky enough to be the outliers is going to become the norm IMO.
Yahoo home page is actually very engaging (in a car wreck kind of way), and they haven't updated it much in years. I definitely believe they are doing well.
The only site I know that died from instant user migration is Digg. Lots of sites died a slow death from users moving on to better platforms, but rarely does anything die from boycott that I know of.
Receive a page. Look at the monitor: the AWS service appears down. Check the status page: all green. Double check the logs, check the configs. They seem correct. It's been 20 minutes, refresh the status page. Green. A suspicious shade, too. File a support ticket. Wait. "Request ID, or it didn't happen." Find the relevant code paths. Log the request ID. Redeploy to production. Trigger another instance of the issue. Check the logs. Fish out the now-logged Request ID. Response to support. Wait. Check the status page for giggles: ever green. "Okay, we've escalated this to an engineer." Excellent. "Can you upgrade to the latest version of the service?"
---
To be fair, I find I have to contact AWS support far less often, and honestly, if you do have a request ID in hand … they're far more receptive. But boy if you don't have that ID, it doesn't matter if you're seeing 2+ minute latency from S3 within AWS just to fetch a 1 KiB blob, it isn't happening.
And the status page is lies, but lying on the status page appears to have become industry SOP.
I'd presume they have already been at Google before, but Google wanted them to not be at the Chelsea office in NYC (the walkable one) but instead in Mountain View. So this is more an existing disagreement with the employer.
Yikes, that guy just sitting underneath the moving gantry loaded with tons of sleepers... And then the other fellow crawling in between the wheels of the whole machine _while it is moving_... Do they not have something like OSHA wherever this was filmed??
Also, disappointing they didn't actually show the new railstock being laid, just the ballast and sleepers :/
The wide spectrum of the human experience never cease to amaze me. Reading the stories in this article just made that spectrum a little bit bigger. Just wild. I am too shocked to have any sort of moral opinion about it.
It's really hard to imagine "scale my net worth up to billions" and work out what that practically means - even just your random billionaire can hire people to do things we wouldn't even think of considering, like having multiple houses around the country/world that are identical, and you have staff at each that makes sure they remain identical - if you left the New York Times on your desk in Milan, it will be on your desk in New York when you walk in the room.
Power cuts both ways. Move one or two random items to a location they’ve placed them before but haven’t in awhile, call coworker in Milan with list of things to update, note down reactions and make slight adjustments to tactics until they snap and buy a social media network for $40bn. Never mess with the help.
Your example sounds infuriating. First, I want items where they are supposed to be, not where I left them. But who wants the same thing all the time? If I go out to a large meal and every course tastes the same because it's all covered in the same sauce, it doesn't matter if it is my favorite sauce. I want to have variety. Similarly, when I travel, different spaces please. On the other hand, I would like to arrive at a hotel and be handed a key as I walked in and had the closets already populated with my clothes.
This would be so much fun. I imagine being rich and without meaning or a direction. I'd spend my time messing up my housing, secretly taking photo's of it. then flying around for a few hours in a jet to my identical house and yelling at the staff for not having it match the photos.
Super extravagant, but to blow $150k any random weekend you "only" need to be making ~$10M/year. A massive amount, but I'm guessing even many HN users have businesses making in excess of that (feel free to invite me to your next party).
I don't understand where you got the 10MM/year number from. Blowing 150k/weekend requires 7.8MM/year. Double it for taxes and you get to make 15MM/year just to pay for the talent on your private shows. If you want to live indoors or eat you'll need more money.
Bemmu said a random weekend, so I would expect it to cost about the average of what they spend when no big events were happening . I didn't even add blow out weekends for vacations or major events.
But bemmu also calculated that you need $10 million, as if he were calculating doing this every weekend. I mean, to do it once, you only need $150,000.
Here's an alternate explanation for his calculation. People usually spend around 2-4% of their annual income on vacations. Depends on a lot of factors of course, but that's a reasonable amount. A person earning $10M could afford to blow 2% on one weekend ($200k), 2% on fancy vacations rest of the year and still spend consider themselves fairly responsible.
How much would an ordinary person earning $60,000 be prepared to spend on a big weekend blowout with live music, drinking, partying, clothes etc. Now scale that up to a person earning $10,000,000.
It doesn't scale linearly, more like exponentially. Wealthy people can devote a much, much larger percent of their income towards discretionary spending.
The whole thing about contractors is so spot on. The only slight difference I would add is that the contractors will NOT hire the best talent, they will hire whoever they can to fill the position, for the cheapest price, so they can claim to have fulfilled their RFP.
It's a dead end.