Why as an engineer, would you log the entirety of a user’s info on mixpanel? I mean come on, how hard is it to have an obfuscated unique id for your users that can’t be traced back to them when logging info in third party apps? What benefit can you possibly get from logging email ids in mixpanel?
It depends on the company and the people around you. At one company, my quarterly feedback was that I don’t ask too many questions in meetings, which was mostly due to the fact that the project was pretty straightforward and requirements were hammered down on a document. In another company, asking questions got me the feedback that I was maybe not experienced enough to manage the project by myself, which I was completely capable of. It’s a double edged sword.
But yes on a personal level, being senior enough in my career, I’d rather be thought of as less skilled by asking questions before the s hits the fan, than execute and mismanage a project that I didn’t ask enough questions on. The latter has more consequences tbh.
There’s power dynamics that come into play when you’re a C level executive. You’re allowed to ask questions. For entry level employees, asking questions almost always comes with a judgement of lower skills/experience. This is often what senior and experienced folk forget, there’s a certain amount of assumed competence when you asked questions, that doesn’t get assigned to newer people.
I am yet to be convinced that 4000 data points are sufficient to extrapolate how happy 2.8B people are in the world. (India and China) Especially when it deals with a complex topic as happiness without taking any cultural differences into account.
People on HN tend to argue it’s sufficient data to be statistically significant, but I don’t see how.
That’s not true. Theoretical maximum shareholder value would be achieved by firing all employees and selling the company for scraps, yet we don’t see that happening. Fiduciary duty doesn’t mean you are required to squeeze profits above all else.
> I haven't talked to a cashier at a grocery store in years. It's all self-checkout
That’s at least one trend I’ve seen reversed. All the self checkouts around where I am have been removed because the stores realized that the self checkouts and honesty system only works when the times are good.
The reversal of self checkouts has been one I've seen spottily, but I do totally agree. I've seen some Walmarts close their self checkout while others keep them open. I guess each store may do their out loss calculations and take action based on that.
I personally like self-checkout a lot. At the grocery store I used to go to, I swear I could get my stuff scanned and bagged in half the time as the cashier, and that's not counting the time waiting in limited lines (since there are usually way more self checkouts so the time-to-first-scan is also lower). Very slow and they seemed to hate small talk (also a let down, because the only redeeming part of a manned line to me is casual conversation with the cashier and those in line).
The whole point of Duopoly is to have a “competitor” so that you can continue to act as a monopoly behind the scenes while avoiding the appearance of a monopoly. You get to point finger at the other guy when there’s scrutiny and argue there’s no monopoly, but also increase your own prices when your competitor does it.
The biggest driver for push vs pull in my experience is “who does the work”. If I need data and I have to ask 7 different teams to “push”, it ain’t happening.
Rivian has a huge interest in being the outsourcer for legacy automakers. They’re not able to sell $100k cars enough and even with the promised R2, they probably will only be a small-ish player in the EV market. Their CEO recognizes how crazy good Chinese EVs are and currently they’re not even a competitor for Tesla.
But, VW is willing to pay $5B for their software platform. I think they want to extend that to being able to sell custom chips and “AI” capabilities, whatever that means.
Which honestly is crazy to me. I have a Rivian, and to say the software is disappointing would be an understatement. There are heisenbugs galore; some examples:
* Doors refuse to open
* Lose the ability to control media playback using any controls
* Any button in the UI just opens and closes the windows
Granted, I'm a server side/backend engineer mostly, and I don't know much about writing software/firmware for a very hostile emf environment. But if any project I worked on had bugs like this, fixed at the rate they're fixed on Rivian, I would assume a badly flawed architecture or non existent technical leadership
Yet VW paid billions for this very software. I can't imagine how bad it must've been on their own stack that they gave up and bought this other seemingly broken stack
Service can’t do anything about the state machine being wrong.
The Rivian app does not permit you to send a command to the car while the app thinks the car is processing a command. Trunk opening? You can’t unlock the door. On top of this, if you try to open the trunk while outside Bluetooth range and then Bluetooth connects, you are still stuck waiting for the pending command to complete.
Oh, and the ridiculous “hey let’s always remind you that you own a Rivian” Live Activity seems to synchronize on a schedule that involves being hours and hours out of date.
I agree that the app leaves something to be desired - my personal pet peeve is that it shows stale or cached data while waiting to do some async update, leading to just outright fabricated charge or lock state. Never had those kinds of problems with the truck's software proper though
I have seen issues like that. Rebooting has always fixed it, but it is notable.
I really wish they would hire a strong frontend team. I can almost always figure out what happened just from the signal, and it's usually a state machine getting stuck. Which I have some sympathy for, but also you just can't have that happen in something that is going to feel polished and responsive.
Presumably, but you don't really known until you pay to take it in for service and they tell you there is nothing wrong but they don't have a fix (gee, great experience). On the "know it's software" side e.g. I had what appeared to be random issues with audio crackling on my PC I assumed was software/driver related, it turned out there was a faulty USB hub causing an issues for the whole bus but it was just most apparent in the audio device.
Stuff like "Doors refuse to open" is vague enough it could be a similar kind of issue which needs physical service/replacement rather than just a software update, especially if other buttons are triggering completely separate actions with the windows. Or it could very well be 100% software issues, which could be more apparent with additional details like "only does it after transitioning from this screen or pressing things in this order" type problems.
As a car guy you should know that there's tech in cars these days. Or do you calibrate everything from tpms monitors to re pointing/tunes in your garage?
If something's wrong with your car's head unit firmware or android auto connection or whatever, of course you'd have a technician look at it?
> Or do you calibrate everything from tpms monitors to re pointing/tunes in your garage?
Pretty much, yeah. I race SCCA and build race cars. Exactly why I want nothing to do with these, you don’t own it. You’re leasing the hardware that’s hogtied to the software.
Oh man, you're in for a bad time then, as pretty much everything - yes even amateur racing cars - has software in it now, and you don't own any of it.
As a car guy, it surprises me you weren't aware of this trend yet but I guess we all find out sooner or later. But hey - maybe that '89 Carrera will keep on trucking for a few more decades though - good luck!
one funny one is that periodically you can trigger the "more cowbell" rainbow road easter egg. You can cancel the road animation, but you can't cancel the easter egg music or control the volume.
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