This is one of those situations where it's not what you know, it's who you know. The only thing that matters is if you know someone who can bypass their support and flip a boolean.
Yeah, I think it's most likely that. Seems very plausible Nest wanted to have some voice features but they got cut before launch. The mic's still there because changing hardware is hard, it's not announced because it doesn't do anything.
The hard part is how to make it work politically. I don't know if any place has really done it in an environment that was mostly built out already. Manhattan used to have 700k more residents than it does now, and that was when a lot of the island was still farmland - people spread out with the trains. Once you're out of space it's very difficult to develop transit, because that would probably mean a homeowner doesn't get what they want.
I see this sentiment a lot, but I think it probably does make financial sense to show you ads for a thing you already bought. There are often a few whales out there who are buying one of a thing to sample and then might later buy hundreds or thousands.
If I were buying a sample of something, with a view to buying in bulk, I don't think I'd base that bulk-buying decision on ads that follow me around after the sample purchase. I've already found the product and bought a sample; any decision to buy a thousand of them will be based on my evaluation of that sample. I'm not likely to forget about the whole project until reminded by an ad that stalks me around the web...
Doesn't matter how low is if the payout is high enough. Also, it's not like they've got any better ad to show you, CTR is something like one in a thousand for display.
It's stunning how much energy, ink and tongue movement is wasted trying to justify most decisions, in every aspect of life, when in practice they boil down to vibes.
I’m a hiring manager and I think it’s a complete roll of the dice sometimes.
There’s people who came off really well in the interview who turned out to be terrible hires. And equally there’s been people who seemed woefully inexperienced but I liked their honesty so took a gamble on them and they turned out to be some of my best hires.
Then there is everyone in between.
You have all of these processes in place to help your practical judgement but at the end of the day it’s really just a lot of luck because it’s trivially easy to game interviews and some really good engineers are often really bad at interviewing. So pulling those who interview well but are rubbish from those who don’t interview well but are brilliant is very difficult at times.
Heck in one interview I got nervous and started rambling on about FreeBSD instead of Linux. I was easily qualified enough for that job but that was a terrible interview on my part and I honestly wouldn’t have hired me.
So that's the issue - you're hiring someone and you have no idea which version of them showed up to the meeting, and which one will be coming to work every day.
It's almost like we're trying to solve a taylor series of work efficacy (of an individual on a given team) by capturing a very small number of data points in stressful situations (interviews) and doing a hell of a lot of extrapolation.
Elastic, Mongodb, and Docker all have this business model. I guess the difference is in their case they developed it first and then open sourced - they've got a much more credible claim to superior support.
