This makes me think of going to chain restaurants. Everything has been focus-grouped and optimized and feels exactly like an overfit proxy for an enjoyable meal. I feel like I'm in a bald-faced machine that is optimized to generate profit from my visit. The fact that it's a restaurant feels almost incidental.
"HI! My name is Tracy! I'm going to be your server this evening!" as she flawlessly writes her name upside down in crayon on the paper tablecloth. Woah. I think this place needs to re-calibrate their flair.
> a collection of half-finished documents that are always out of date
I think of company wikis as a place where information goes to die.
A useful feature, which I'm sure exists somewhere, would be "freshness" checks on pages. A timestamp for the last time someone looked at this and said "yes, this is still valid". For pages that are important, a team could set up recurring tasks for people to do periodic freshness checks.
Surely this is already a common practice, although not any team I've been on. Undoubtedly there is some ISO-9000 process for this...
I worked with a guy who introduced himself by saying "Hi, I'm firstName and I'm the world's best Java programmer." He would say that while shaking your hand and looking you in the eye like an otherwise normal person. I gather he had won some international Java programming competition.
Luckily I didn't work with him very much. He was a technical consultant for a customer of ours. He was brought in to hold us to account so he wasn't going to be fun to work with even without the ego...
> The Starbucks this piece occupies is no longer a community hub – its capacity to function as one has been filtered out by profit-seeking decisions
To be fair, I think the reason that it formerly sought to be a community hub was also motivated by profit-seeking decisions. Maybe when there were a handful of locations the comfy seating was motivated by something other than profit. I imagine by the time they opened store number 20,000 that the design of the store, including the comfy seating, was very careful designed to seek profit.
> Face it, Zuck is an accidental billionaire who had the advantages of Harvard but is now completely out of his depth and lacks a crystalized vision as to where to go from here. It won't be long before Zuck is shown the door after losing large piles of money and failing to make more of it. I give him 1 year or 2 tops.
I'm pretty sure people have been saying exactly that for 15 years now. Maybe someday it will come true...
You can consider porting your landline number to a VOIP service (I use voip.ms) and after that it's nearly free. I bought a basic Linksys modem (SPA2102) so that we can still plug in our cordless phones in an use them normally.
As a bonus you can set up simple filtering so that you don't get many spam calls. For me, all calls that have an anonymous or 800 number in the caller ID get redirected to a voice prompt that asks the caller to press 9 to talk to us; all other calls just ring our phone directly. You could also use whitelists, blacklists, etc.
It's both better and cheaper than a regular landline...
Thank you for putting a brief description of the product at the top of the post. There are often posts on HN for new versions of software that I haven't heard of. I click on them out of curiosity only to find a post that only talks about the new version. I have to go looking to find out what the product/project actually is. (And often the post is on a blog that doesn't have a link back to the main product/project site!)
I think having an extended application process is the point. It selects for people who are good at university, rather than people who were good at high school.
That's the best case scenario. Worst case is that they get nothing back and own nothing. (Based on the quick summary of the deal above; I don't know more than what's here.)
"HI! My name is Tracy! I'm going to be your server this evening!" as she flawlessly writes her name upside down in crayon on the paper tablecloth. Woah. I think this place needs to re-calibrate their flair.