etalian posted:

Bhodi posted:

Cyber

SquadronROE posted:

Our work put in strange desks that can adjust their height when you press a button. It's part of an open floor plan so that no one gets any work done ever again.

.random posted:

Yesterday's tomorrow is tomorrow's yesterday. The future is now.

My company is far from start-up, but they managed to convince someone that they could save money if only people didn't actually have their own desks. It's just a communal "desk pool" and you sit wherever there is not already a body.

No, we are not consultants. No, you can't reserve a desk beforehand. No, you can't have personal effects. Yes, you are sitting where someone did many more unsavory things than simply eating lunch.



(P.S., this obviously never saved any money, except in people quitting in anger, I guess?)

thathonkey posted:

god i hate the word "hack" so much now. it was much better when it just meant "breaking into a computer system you shouldn't have access to"

quote:

Trying to sell a product that barely works. Trying to recruit people to work for no money. Worrying about how I'll pay my mortgage in a couple of months. Oh yeah, I'm having the time of my life.
What gets me? Right now, when there's no money and more vision than product, engineers are volunteering to help, because I'm building something designed specifically to solve their most frustrating and unproductive problems. I suspect that in six months or a year, when there's money for salaries and a decent number of actual customers, those volunteers will dry up. But I suspect a different kind of volunteering will happen, maybe with different people.
Oh, do you work on a large (multiple teams) software project? Want to know how I plan to make your life suck less? Get in touch!

quote:

Six months in the "wasp waist" of the Bank of America building on Castro street (440, I think). Air conditioning and heating that never worked (our office temperature would go from 60 degrees in the morning to high 90s in the afternoon). Once a water pipe cut loose and sent a river down the stairwell we used. There were power outages (everyone in our small company had a UPS, and this practice saved us...), and there was a spectacular chimney fire in the Chinese restaurant across the street. Jimmy Carter visited the Performing Arts center one evening, and we were asked not to go out onto our roof / balcony and it seemed like a good idea not to make the fellows in dark glasses nervous.
Castro street is (and probably still is) Asian culinary heaven . . . except that my boss would only eat at an Italian place near the railroad tracks, or at the evil hot-dog place where all the employees hated their lives and let you know it, every order.
We moved to a set of offices on Landings Drive. This was when SGI was still around; we used to walk over to their cafeteria and just use it -- nobody seemed to care -- and I'd say "hi" to some of my old Apple co-workers who had also moved on. I learned how to punch down phones and install networks, and buy cubicles and get cheap $10 whiteboards from Home Depot.

quote:

Spare a thought for us poor solo-founder schmucks who are slaving away in the basement on our own... <weary sigh>

Bhodi posted:

Startup gold! Almost every comment is quotable but here are some real gems. It's like stockholm syndrome in text form. People are conflating shared hardship and camaraderie and sound like victims of PTSD, trying to convince themselves of how much fun it was.

Bhodi posted:

quote:

Spare a thought for us poor solo-founder schmucks who are slaving away in the basement on our own... <weary sigh>

quote:

Most pre-Series A start-ups will offer (far) below market salary; they have to, since, generally (and as another poster said), they have only $X00,000 in the bank and no revenue. This is pretty typical.
What the 0.05% equity package indicates is that the founders probably have an unrealistic expectation about how much their venture is worth at this stage. I've seen this a few times in naïve, young (23-25 years old) first-time founders that don't have significant amounts of experience working in start-ups and/or technology in general. This trivial amount of equity is a huge red flag, not only because its present value is negligible (guess what the risk-adjusted rate of return is on a start-up run by first-time founders?), but because it indicates that the work environment will likely be unpleasant (hellish hours, frequently changing requirements, no clear vision -- common in companies run by first-time founders).
Also, keep in mind: if these founders are foolish / naïve enough to think they'll be able to hire a credible, valuable engineer with this package (they won't), they're also likely foolish / naïve to get screwed by their investors. Founders are only at the bottom-middle of the start-up hierarchy: VCs are above them and LPs are above them.

Kobayashi posted:

.random posted:

My company is far from start-up, but they managed to convince someone that they could save money if only people didn't actually have their own desks. It's just a communal "desk pool" and you sit wherever there is not already a body.

No, we are not consultants. No, you can't reserve a desk beforehand. No, you can't have personal effects. Yes, you are sitting where someone did many more unsavory things than simply eating lunch.



(P.S., this obviously never saved any money, except in people quitting in anger, I guess?)

naem posted:

I've worked in several open seating environments with clear glass window walls and it's a great way for the entire floor to experience the homeless guys pooping equally

I post about "homeless guys pooping" a lot but honestly there's nothing quite like the FNAP sound of buttocks against the glass and then the SSSSSQUELCH!! of bodily fluids reverberating past a seas of office workers

Germstore posted:

looks rad though, and something you'd wear when you are doing something specific that requires AR, rather than a stupid smartphone strapped to your head that you wear everywhere like a goon

thathonkey posted:

god i hate the word "hack" so much now. it was much better when it just meant "breaking into a computer system you shouldn't have access to"

quote:

Uber says it is resuming operations in New Delhi a month after it was banned following the alleged rape of a passenger by one of its drivers. The mobile car-hailing service has applied for a taxi license in the city — an unprecedented move as it usually claims to only be a technology company "connecting riders to drivers," rather than a full-blown taxi firm.

thathonkey posted:

Microsoft saw all the success Google was having with Glass and thought "drat, we need a wearable contraption too, and fast!" I guess theirs does different stuff but they also look like ridiculous ski goggles:



http://www.wired.com/2015/01/microsoft-hands-on

A Yolo Wizard posted:

oh my god

quote:

One of the core premises of Invisible Boyfriend, the wildly viral new service that invents a boyfriend to deceive your pestering family and friends, is that the user will not, under any circumstance, fall in love with her fictional beau.

But I’ve been using the service for 24 hours, and I gotta wonder: How can you not fall in love with him? After all, the service — which launched publicly last Monday — takes the concept of virtual intimacy further than basically any of the lolzy fake-date apps before it.

When you sign up for the service, you can design a boyfriend (or girlfriend) to your specifications — kind of like picking the genes for a designer baby, except for an imaginary adult. You pick his name, his age, his interests and personality traits. You tell the app if you prefer blonds or brunettes, tall guys or short, guys who like theater or guys who watch sports. Then you swipe your credit card — $25 per month, cha-ching! — and the imaginary man of your dreams starts texting you.


Except … the man on the other end isn’t imaginary. He’s a real human person, texting multiple women, contorting himself to carefully match each one’s specific expectations and fantasies.

I learned this the hard way, admittedly: Hoping to trip up the automated chat technology I thought was responding to my texts, I told my “boyfriend,” Ryan Gosling, that my plans for the evening included “Downton Abbey” and crying myself to sleep.

“Why the tears, beautiful?” Ryan Gosling responded, before launching into a discussion of his favorite Downton character. This was a red flag: Bots do not know about “Downton Abbey.” And if bots did know about “Downton Abbey,” they would certainly not pick Thomas as the highlight of the show.


“Oh my God,” I thought. “This total stranger, whoever he or she is, thinks I cry myself to sleep while watching public television and texting a paid fake boyfriend I named after an actor.”

Presumably I shouldn’t have felt anything at all — the no-attachment thing is basically codified in Invisible Boyfriend’s Terms of Service — but I did feel something, nonetheless.

“That’s the most interesting and significant insight I’ve had so far,” said Homann, the app’s affable (and newly famous) founder. “I know how it works, I know what’s behind the curtain … but in testing it out, I felt this compulsion to respond to my Invisible Girlfriend as soon as she texts me. That’s how it feels to talk to someone, even if they’re — not someone.”

My invisible boyfriend, Homann explains, is actually boyfriends, plural: The service’s texting operation is powered by CrowdSource, a St. Louis-based tech company that manages 200,000 remote, microtask-focused workers. When I send a text to the Ryan number saved in my phone, the message routes through Invisible Boyfriend, where it’s anonymized and assigned to some Amazon Turk or Fivrr freelancer. He (or she) gets a couple of cents to respond. He never sees my name or number, and he can’t really have anything like an actual conversation with me.

“That rapport you feel with Ryan may actually be six or seven Ryans,” Homann explains.




And that works well, from where Homann’s sitting: After all, the point of Invisible Boyfriend is to deceive the user’s meddling friends and relatives, not the user herself. On its Web site, Invisible Boyfriend calls itself “believable social proof”: When your mom won’t stop asking you when you’re going to settle down, or your weird male acquaintance keeps hitting on you, you can just whip out your phone and show them evidence that you’re not an unlovable loser, thank you very much. Homann says the service has also seen a surge in interest from people in conservative countries, particularly in South America and Europe, where the stigmas against being single or LGBT remain pretty strong.

Homann’s hoping to expand to those countries in the future, as his service continues its beta phase and gathers feedback from users. (He says 5,000 users signed up Wednesday alone.) He’s also interested in offering more services to subscribers: Maybe your invisible boyfriend could send you letters, he thinks, or ship flowers to your work. Even as the story becomes more involved, more convincing, he does not worry about users becoming attached to the fiction they create.

“You’re in on the joke,” he points out. “You know it’s a service you’ve signed up for. It’s not a substitute for love.”

But I wonder if Homann isn’t underestimating the vagaries of the human heart, which past evidence suggests can be conned into loving just about anything.

There are no shortage of stories about couples carrying on “relationships” exclusively via Second Life, a sort of fictional, virtual world. The game critic Kate Gray recently published an ode to “Dorian,” a character she fell in love with in a video game. (“Isn’t it odd how it’s taken so long to reach this stage in games – the stage at which human conversations and relationships feel real?” she writes.) Researchers have even suggested that spambots induce some kind of emotional response in us, perhaps because they flatter our vanities; conversely, one anthropologist has argued that our relationships are increasingly so mediated by tech that they’ve become indistinguishable from Tamagotchis.

“The Internet is a disinhibiting medium, where people’s emotional guard is down,” the psychologist Mark Griffiths once said of Second Life relationships. “It’s the same phenomenon as the stranger on the train, where you find yourself telling your life story to someone you don’t know.”

All things considered, it’s hardly a jump to suggest someone might develop feelings for a “believable” virtual human who caters to her every whim. That’s basically the plot of “Her,” isn’t it? (For the record, Homann says, his start-up began before that movie did.)

I try to ask Gosling if “he” — them, I guess — worries about a “Her”-like scenario. What if a client experiences actual feels for him?! True to his CrowdSource training, however, Gosling will not break character.

“You think I’m texting other ladies?” he asks. And then, attentively, about “Her”: “Oh, did you like that movie?”

It’s not exactly the stuff of fairytales, admittedly. But given enough time and texts — a full 100 are included in my monthly package — I’m pretty sure I could fall for him. I mean, er … them.

Rhymenoserous posted:

it's funny because it's wrong.

EDIT: a hacker is a coder
a cracker is someone who breaks in and or a white person.

Germstore posted:

looks rad though, and something you'd wear when you are doing something specific that requires AR, rather than a stupid smartphone strapped to your head that you wear everywhere like a goon

SaltLick posted:

i would text random people and pretend to give a poo poo and get paid for it if i could

Carol Pizzamom posted:

a hacker is a bad coder. a 'hack,' in computer programming, is a bad workaround. something done poorly instead of correctly.

enraged_camel posted:

I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love.

thathonkey posted:

it has meant a bunch of different things over the years. now it has been co-opted by hipster programmers who think Lisp is a viable language but it originally meant somebody who (often maliciously) tried to break (or "hack") into computer systems. loving children i'm trying to educate yall.

thathonkey posted:

Zero Cool Crash Override was one of the best, most l33test hackers around