virvar (u/virvar) - Readit News

virvar commented on What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017) spreadprivacy.com/duckduc... · Posted by u/asamant

virvar · 6 years ago

This is anecdotal, but I had a positive experience with the lack of privacy recently. I bought a baby stroller, after doing the typical research and finding a used model, I ended up buying a new one from some babyshop. All the pictures had shown the thing with the stroller “hat/head/sunscreen thing” (sorry I don’t know the English word for kalche), anyway, it wasn’t included and that was why the brand new stroller had been priced the same as the used ones.

But it’s bought and it’s nice, so whatever I hit the manufacturer website and find the correct product and google it, and get a flash sale from one of our most prominent baby stores. It was 350 Danish kr including delivery. Without closing the tap I check a few baby shops and a price checker website and see it’s actually 600-700 Danish krs everywhere, including on from the company the flash sale on google is form. So I buy it.

Apparently I hit the right combination of search history, and store advertising/inventory at exactly the right time.

Being curious I called my local baby store to ask why they could flash sale me at half price, and after a bit back and forth they apparently do this thing where they’ll catch you early with a cheap item and then when you come back they to buy it the next day it’ll be priced higher, except by then you’ve made up your mind to buy it and will pay the extra and I was just lucky having already made up my mind when I got it because the other store has been cheeky.

Not really related to DDG, but it’s the first time selling my privacy has paid off.

virvar commented on The use of `class` for things that should be simple free functions quuxplusone.github.io/blo... · Posted by u/ingve

virvar · 6 years ago

I wonder what the author means when he says “ classical polymorphic OOP”. In my experience, subtyping is the absolute worst part of OOP. More so in an enterprise setting, where after two decades, you end up with some really mutated weird ass looking ducks (Animal).

As far as functions vs class go, both are terrible to maintain in the long run. Both lead you on a never ending path of go-to-definition, because the documentation is rotten and the tests aren’t right/even there. The only difference is whether or not you want to search a few large or a metric fuckton of single responsibility files.

Maybe it’s different if your code bases aren’t crap and you’re a better developer than me.

virvar commented on A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression washingtonpost.com/health... · Posted by u/xoxoy

presiozo · 6 years ago

I wonder what's the correlation between this and people being underpaid. I'm fortunate enough to have my own house after graduation so I don't have to pay rent. But I have friends that don't have this luxury and man, they are struggling. Besides eating and rent they can't afford anything else in a month. No question here what's giving them these feelings

virvar · 6 years ago

I live in Denmark, where we lift a lot of the burden of civilisation together, to give everyone access to education, health/elderly/child care as well as a solid security system for those who get unemployed.

And here society is hard enough these days, pressing more and more people beyond their limits. I really wonder how you all do it in America.

virvar commented on I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next gamefromscratch.com/post/... · Posted by u/AlexeyBrin

movedx · 6 years ago

> Instead of actually trying to create the best customer service

I've worked in high volume customer services. It's not easy for the agents doing the work or the companies operating them.

I've worked in multiple call centers dealing with calls and tickets. I've worked in companies in which I dealt with mobile phone bill queries and hardware issues right up to Cisco networking problems and then eventually enterprise grade Linux clusters at Rackspace (UK). I've spanned a pretty large spectrum of industries from a customer services perspective. I've even done customer services in the food industry.

It's HARD. Not just for you as an operator, but as a company trying to offer the service to begin with. of all of the companies I worked for, O2 (a mobile phone provider and network operator) had tens of millions of customers. We had several call centers that spanned close to ten thousand agents doing everything from calls to tickets, emails to Tweets. The call queue for that company never dropped below a constant 200-300 on hold and emails took days to even get to.

Google has approx' one BILLION customers.

What is your suggestion here?

> they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this

Damn straight automation, to a larger degree, is the answer. People don't scale at all. They can do one job at a time, for a limited amount of time, and are subject to all kinds of problems.

> Yeah I know it's terribly expensive to keep a horde of content reviewers

It cost O2 about $5/6 to answer a single call. That's the cost of the agent's time and JUST answering the call, not the cost of listening, understanding, resolving and ending the call. Humans are expensive.

I'm not saying don't use people. I'm saying automation at Google's scale is one of the few solutions available to them when it comes to dealing with the simply insane amounts of complaints they'll receive just via their YouTube platform alone.

EDIT: Apologies for being so crude in my original wording. I'm updating the comment to reflect a more professional, civil tone.

virvar · 6 years ago

I work in the public sector of Europe. One of the primary reasons that we prefer Azure and AWS to google cloud is support.

When things go really wrong on our office365 platform or any part of Azure, Seattle will call us on the the hour with updates until it’s fixed. We have programs within Microsoft support where our developers and sysops can suggest changes, and if the suggestions gather enough popularity and fit within whatever criteria Microsoft have internally they’ll happen.

AWS didn’t always have the great support they do now, but as far as cloud operations (the nerdy bits) go, I think they’re actually better at it than even Microsoft. It build up gradually along with GDPR, but they were the first of the major three to offer things like support for AWS services that’s actually located within the European Union. I’m not updated on Microsoft, but AWS may still be the only company to do that.

Compare that to Google, where we get to talk with an automated system, the same as though we weren’t a 3,3 billion a year budget organisation. I’ve had better personal support for my free google account than I have for our company google cloud account.

Don’t get me wrong, we would probably have a lot of GDPR related reasons to prefer Azure or AWS even if google had better support, but the lack of support means we’ve never gotten beyond that step in our risk assessments.

virvar commented on Software will eat software in a remote-first world themargins.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/sidhanthp

brokencode · 6 years ago

The premise that we are on the verge of some breakthroughs in software development that will significantly reduce the need for engineers is really weak, and is something people have been saying for decades (see the failed fifth generation of programming languages from the 1980s for an example).

In my experience, software engineering is endless, complicated decision making about how something should work and how to make changes without breaking something else rather than the nuts and bolts of programming. It’s all about figuring out what users want and how to give it to them in a way that is feasible.

The idea that we will have some abstraction that will someday (in the foreseeable future) save us from all of this difficult work sounds very far fetched to me, and I can’t imagine how that would work.

Even the example of hosting complexity being replaced by cloud companies seems kind of silly to me. Maybe that’s saving very small companies a sizable fraction of their engineering resources, but I really doubt it for medium or larger companies.

The cloud saves us from some complexity, but it doesn’t just magically design and run a backend for your application. You still need people who understand things like docker, kubernetes, endless different database options, sharding, indexing, failover, backup, message queues, etc. Even if the pieces are now more integrated and easier to put together, the task of figuring out how the pieces will interact and what pieces you even need is still outrageously complicated.

virvar · 6 years ago

I think there has been a steady reduction in the required IT personal needed to do a lot of things. Need a web-page/web-store? You buy a standard product for almost no money, and you don’t really need anyone to run it for you. 25 years ago that was a several month project that involves a dozen of engineers and had a costly fee attached to after launch support.

At the same time we’ve come up with a bunch of new stuff which gave those engineers new jobs.

I do see some reduction in office workers by automation. We still haven’t succeeded with getting non coders to do RPA development for their repetitive tasks, but the tools are getting better and better and our workers are getting more and more tech savvy. In a decade every new hire will have had programming in school, like they have had math today. They may not be experts, but they’ll be able to do a lot of the things we still need developers to do, while primary being there to do whatever business logic they do.

But I’m not too worried, we moved all of our service to virtual a decade ago and are now moving more and more into places like Azure, and it hasn’t reduced the need for sysops engineers. If anything it’s only increased the requirements for them. In the late 90ies you could hire any computer nerdy kid to operate your servers, and you’d probably be alright, today you’ll want someone who really knows what they are doing within whatever complex setup you have.

The same will be true for developers to some extend, but I do think we’ll continue the trend where you’ll need to be actually specialised at something to be really useful. If virtual reality becomes the new smartphone, you’ll have two decades of gold rush there, and that’s not likely to be the last thing that changes our lives with entirely new tech.

virvar commented on SQLite 3.32 sqlite.org/releaselog/3_3... · Posted by u/nikbackm

ha470 · 6 years ago

While I love SQLite as much as the next person (and the performance and reliability is really quite remarkable), I can’t understand all the effusive praise when you can’t do basic things like dropping columns. How do people get around this? Do you just leave columns in forever? Or go through the dance of recreating tables every time you need to drop a column?

virvar · 6 years ago

When do you need to drop a column in a production DB? Maybe my anecdotal bubble is about to burst, but I work in the public sector, and have for a while and on our 200 different production DBs behind around 300 systems we’ve never dropped a column.

virvar commented on Effects of Exercise on Cognitive Performance with ADHD ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti... · Posted by u/nocoder

raverbashing · 6 years ago

Something good to know: the tldr is usually on the article itself, in the Conclusion part of the article (sometimes this is on the abstract as well)

A bit on the ironic side, the Conclusion section of this article is very hard to find (it's on page 36 of 86, depending on your zoom level) and this reading mode on the website doesn't work so well

But here it is

> In line with previous research, we find that exercise benefits executive functions and attentional control in children with ADHD. The beneficial effects are comparable to those reported in PBC with substantial and consistent improvement on test of several cognitive functions following particularly long-term exercise. An important notion is also that no study has reported negative or adverse effects of exercise.

virvar · 6 years ago

I really wish a lot of things started with the conclusion or TLDR. I have ADHD and I have issues reading to the end of an email without skipping and quitting before the end.

I mean, I know there is a certain way to write research articles and that they aren’t exactly meant for people with attention problems, but without people like you I’d never see the conclusion. Hell I might even look for it and then not find it and forget all about it.

I kind of knew exercise was good for me though. I even like doing it. The real issue is to begin to exercising instead of just thinking about starting it for a whole day without actually getting started.

virvar commented on Spotify signs ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ to an exclusive multi-year deal techcrunch.com/2020/05/19... · Posted by u/mmq

aaron695 · 6 years ago

So you ban churchs?

Killed maybe billions over the past 100,000 years.

They also provide comfort and help to billions through their lies. Hard to ever know what their total effect has been. But still lies.

Or is your religion ok and 'normal', but thinking the world is flat not?

virvar · 6 years ago

We don’t censor fiction.

virvar commented on Spotify signs ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ to an exclusive multi-year deal techcrunch.com/2020/05/19... · Posted by u/mmq

MadSudaca · 6 years ago

What if your country's government becomes corrupt and starts using its power to enforce "truth" against its citizen's own interests?

virvar · 6 years ago

Well, what would stop them from doing that anyway? Look at Poland or Turkey, it’s not like a constitution is going to save a democracy.