snarf

6 ms·

1.
by snarf 6y ago
From today's Reddit AMA with the NASA team, they use pyrotechnics to set off a guillotine like device to cut the cables. Possibly something like https://psemc.com/products/pyrotechnic-cable-cutter/ Source: h
2.
by snarf 8y ago
Bruce Ames is a renowned scientist, but he also has an anti-aging nutritional supplement company on the side named Juvenon.
3.
by snarf 9y ago
True, one of the X projects like Glass would be a better direct comparison in terms of resources and headcount. Google Scholar was just the first thing that popped into my mind when thinking of a Google product that is a social charity. Whi
4.
by snarf 9y ago
Google has plenty of low revenue, unprofitable products, some of which are social charities like Google Scholar. I don't think Mayer deserves as much credit as a visionary as you are suggesting. It was more about empire building after
5.
by snarf 9y ago
Exactly this. For those who weren't around in the first dot com bubble, he has a certain reputation which he has managed to bury. Benchmark used to be a much bigger firm back then, and due to poor fund performance, they had to scale ba
6.
by snarf 9y ago
I, too, don't get the hype about voice assistants. There are a few uses cases where they may be genuinely useful like if you are driving and don't want to take your hands off the wheel, but for nearly everything else, it is usuall
7.
by snarf 9y ago
It's also a matter of principle. You can always argue that if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear in support of more surveillance. But that's a slippery slope.
8.
by snarf 9y ago
He is naturally a bit puffed up and that was a common critique of him from back in the Google days. I think this personality type is somewhat common among successful seed investors where being a "tech personality" helps with getti
9.
by snarf 9y ago
If Forbes is accurate, then so is Sacca, although I imagine some non-trivial amount of that is in Uber, which is facing downward pressure on its private market valuation.
10.
by snarf 9y ago
Once you have a one big win under your belt, it becomes easier to hit other big wins because you have greater access to capital to diversify your bets as well as much better deal flow. He did have an incredible run, which I would attribute
11.
by snarf 9y ago
So "Hell" was the name of their program for tracking Lyft drivers, and "Heaven" or "God View" was the name of their program for tracking Uber passengers. The allegations of Uber employees abusing the privacy of
12.
by snarf 9y ago
Trilogy Software in the late 90's had the exact same model with cultish hype aimed at graduating students at top universities who mostly didn't know any better and bought into the hype.
13.
by snarf 9y ago
According to the screenwriter, they hedged a bit on the question of free will in the movie compared to the book. He specifically addresses this here: https://youtu.be/xzEPU2PTjT4?t=23m55s
14.
by snarf 10y ago
The funny thing is that the author of this article is a former (longtime) investment banker. I found the line where he describes the lack of liquidity in private shares "falls especially hard on early investors who are not company empl
15.
by snarf 10y ago
Given that key HR people at Uber come from Google, is it possible that Uber senior management actually knew about the issues surrounding their star SVP hire from Google when they hired him and were OK with it until reporters were tipped off
16.
by snarf 10y ago
Right, but it's possible (and I would say likely) that their self-driving program is behind everyone else and their disengagement rate is atrociously high, which is why they would go to great lengths to delay reporting this information
17.
by snarf 10y ago
GV may make decisions and operate completely independently from the rest of Alphabet, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Alphabet does not take into account GV's portfolio position in Uber, which is its largest investment. Way
18.
by snarf 10y ago
I think Alphabet probably views Waymo as their next big thing, and Waymo appears to have a sizable lead over everyone else in the self driving space which they want to protect. Remember, Alphabet is a major investor in Uber through Google V
19.
by snarf 10y ago
I believe the parent means Facebook makes money off of this indirectly. The more salacious fake news on Facebook, the higher the user engagement rate with the news feed, and the more time spent on Facebook reading and sharing this stuff. Th
20.
by snarf 10y ago
Right, in an effort not to appear as though they are editorializing legitimate news stories for one side or the other via what appears in the trending news section, they threw the baby out with the bath water. Fake news is not legitimate ne
21.
by snarf 10y ago
Facebook sat idly by during an election cycle as their platform was used to propagate fake news because blocking this stuff would amount to censorship, and now they suddenly have the moral imperative to police your private messages? I am so
22.
by snarf 10y ago
Intel does actually support ECC memory in some of their low end consumer chips: https://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?s=t&MarketSegment=DT&E...
23.
by snarf 10y ago
I imagine there is a huge difference in the employee pool between their Fremont factory location and their Palo Alto office location. Of course, Tesla is not exactly known to pay even their engineers very well: http://www.autoblo
24.
by snarf 10y ago
A common failure mode for Anova is steam condensation in the electronics because the housing is not completely sealed/waterproof like the Joule, so I'm not sure if I would agree with it being built better and smarter. This is espe
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by snarf 10y ago
Some of these execs keep a high public profile and do a lot of press. It's part of the game at most large tech companies that aren't Apple. I personally find it really amusing that they get all this coverage in the tech press almo
26.
by snarf 10y ago
I was really curious about the timing as well with the year off. It appears from the comments below that at least one other engineering VP from Google (Kevin Thompson) has recently joined Uber but without taking a year off. So is the 1-year
27.
by snarf 10y ago
Not sure Uber is the semi-retire kind of place for this sort of thing. They have a reputation for working people hard.
28.
by snarf 10y ago
Singhal's title at Uber says that he is in charge of marketplaces and maps, not the self-driving stuff. So this would be stuff like pricing, dispatch, supply optimization, and route optimization which rely on traditional algorithms and
29.
by snarf 10y ago
When Google Photos was mistakenly identifying black people as gorillas in 2015, there was a tweet where the Chief Architect for Social was asking the user who reported the issue for permission to examine the data in his account: https:&#x2
30.
by snarf 10y ago
Just FYI, you can store locally as you described with 1Password. You don't have to use their cloud service. Or any cloud service for that matter since 1PW supports syncing over a local wireless network.

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