- I've been on Zoho for my (and my partner's) email for 4+ years and it has been great. Chose them because there is no per-domain charge, so I have like 12 domains on it.
The configurability is extensive in both web app and ios email app. Service has been fast and stable. They rarely change anything in the UI (no random tinkering is what I mean) so it is predictable and easy to use.
- It definitely affected hiring. I work at a startup that is self-funded, profitable, and at about 24 people. The tax change increased our tax bill by around $125k, so that's an engineer we couldn't hire.
Made me glad our founders are so fiscally conservative, as other startups around had to lay off some people to have cash on hand to pay the increased taxes.
- Thank you for sharing that. It's a beautiful set of ideas. I read it aloud to my wife and we're talking about it now the implications for all knowledge levels. Fascinating thing to share.
- Indeed. At a former employer, when they announced removing free soda, I assumed they were about to stagnate very hard. Compared to the costs and profits of flying hundreds of sales engineers around weekly and any executive-level expenses the cost rounded to zero. It was routine to hear about the $200/person dinners for big groups of leaders when courting visiting customers. So when they start cutting something as cheap as soda maintenance, they're definitely desperate and going to cut all the wrong expenses.
Coincidence or not, their stock has slowly fallen and they've lost their shine since then.
I think "broadly cutting tiny costs" means the company is done believing in itself.
- This is incredible software. Thank you for linking to it. It has features I've long wished for in a laptop!
- And in those more complex interactions there is not enough adjustment capability. I often want Alexa to speak faster or just shorter (reduce filler words and pauses). There's no way (I am aware of) to make it more efficient for the determined user.
- In 8th grade I read a book on Zinc and it projected the world's supply would run out by ~1985. The book was published in like 1970 and I was reading it in 1994. Since then I've had a big of skepticism of "it's running out" when it comes to raw industrial materials.
- There's an older short story "Thirteen to Centaurus" by JG Ballard with an interesting take on this.
- I have a strong memory of using an IDE that behaved like this - using size and font to communicate structure - at a job around 2005. I can't currently remember the name but think it it started with 'source'?
If someone else remembers this and the name I'd appreciate it. I could be remembering wrong too about how far it went with such decoration.
- Thanks for explaining that. I feel like I heard about the "Tweel" in the 90s in Popular Mechanics, and occasionally since then.
- Indeed. I installed half a dozen apps on my Ipad to figure out which one actually was the correct one.
- Don't forget healthcare! Excel and CSV for tons of data exchange.
- A new novel by Derek Kunsken called "House of Styx" explores in detail human habitation of Venus. In floating cities and airships and realistically dealing with pressures, temps, and the acidity of the atmosphere.
- Same in healthcare. I work in one of the EMR companies, usually onsite at clients, and the whole operation is appalling in wasted human time and just cash wasted on stupid things.
- This argument against checklists would apply anywhere for checklists: healthcare, airplane pre-flights, auto mechanics. Checklists enforce a minimum set of thought processes.
Suggesting checklists be discarded because some people don't do more than the minimum is a ridiculous misunderstanding of their value and human behavior.
This post argues for a detailed thought process of "Vulnerability Taxonomy" which could lead to new ideas, but also fails to enforce any minimum. Moreover, by encouraging exploration of various security areas (which is good) it still leaves you to your own knowledge which will be faulty and insufficient in some areas.
End result of this sounds like you'll have your own homegrown checklist, but it won't be called a checklist and it still won't adapt automatically and thinking will be required.
- If you are talking about being overburdened by too much work, here's my thoughts:
I prioritize. I get as much as I can done in my usual 40 hours, maybe 50. Anything left undone apparently wasn't high enough priority, so gets dropped. I either delegate it or ignore it.
I used to put in long hours and scramble to do lots of extra work. My company pays me for 40 hours a week, so they get the highest value work I can do for those 40 hours.
If you're not using discretion and simply ignoring some things, you're not working effectively, you're being an automaton with no judgement. There's a lot of low-value things people request you to do or be involved in at work. You have to blow some of it off or you're wasting your own potential and time.
-- Don't anybody read into this I'm some kind of time-guarding jerk at work. This is my general mindset, but being practical and adaptable is important, as is being sure your manager agrees with your assessment of priorities.
- Also a group chat site call Convore. It didn't last very long from what I remember but was pretty interesting. https://techcrunch.com/2011/02/09/convore-wants-to-be-the-ea...
- That's how the Kansas City Airport (MCI) was designed. Before 9/11, you could park, go through security, and walk onto a plane in 15 minutes. Very minimal space is given to restaurants, shops, or even bathrooms inside gates.
The layour is 3 separate terminals which are each a semicircle ring: http://www.metafares.com/images/airports/MCI_Airport%20Layou...
It is great to fly in and out of. It feel optimized for people to get on and off planes quickly, and get out of the airport fast.
It is awful to have layovers in or have to change terminals in for a flight: you have to leave security for everything for one. And the waiting spaces are cramped and unfriendly.
After 9/11 it's still extremely fast to get in and out of, but the long waiting before flights is unpleasant. - Personally I would love to see airport design focus on passengers and less on retail space. All the proposals to replace KC Airport brag about all the shopping and restaurants... when all most people care about is spending as little time there as possible.
- http://amasci.com/ - Science Hobbyist, the homepage of Bill Beaty. I've been perusing it off and on for 15 years and keep discovering neat things. First found it via "Evil Genius Hoaxes" http://amasci.com/hoax.html
- We use them extensively in our API client code to pass back immutable, well-defined data structures. Dictionaries and classes are mutable and then each layer of code tends to sloppily change them however is convenient, meaning the underlying data can end up being represented differently in different code flows.
Namedtuples are a way to preserve the data unless the consuming code _really_ wants to change it, which is sometimes legitimate.
I'm not totally sold, as in some cases dictionaries or classes would add nice value. But namedtuples have a rigidity that makes you think twice before tampering with retrieved data.
- Nativescript has been a godsend to me of turning working web apps into mobile apps.
- It's always pleasant to find names for things. I haven't seen that term Cornell Notes before, but it's close to my method. I tend to use the full width of a page within a lab notebook, but use annotations in the left margin to mark them as Question, Person (recording contact info), Todo, etc. Everything else is general notes.
I use Bullet Journal methods for todo lists interspersed with that.
- Neat, I'm setting a reminder to check back. I'm not opposed to paying. I just have to calibrate it against other things I am used to paying for. Cheers
- This is pretty awesome-looking. I was thinking today about how to create a dashboard to which I could send data and easily add new widgets on it: graphs or lists or urgent notices.
The examples for sending from django, python, rails, etc are really neat! I wouldn't have thought of directly sending querysets, but the simple example made it seem obvious.
I hope you find the right paying niche for it. I personally wouldn't pay $20/month for it unless I had an active startup project. For me, a couple dollars a month maybe since my use would be pretty limited and occasional.
- Thanks for the tip. I didn't know that one had any kind of movie adaptation.
- I agree. Integration is exceedingly complex. Data is stored and interpreted differently in every system, even if they share the same EMR, due to configuration differences in workflow, data setup, software versions, etc.
You can't exchange data without thoroughly understanding the clinic workflows that generated it or will be using it. It's all time-consuming and hard.
I work on a patient portal consuming data from the EMR, and even that is tremendously complicated to present medical data safely and correctly to a person.
--
Sibling comment mentioned wanting to work in Health IT. The big market problem in healthcare is small companies doing good innovation (usable patient-side workflows, modern clinical tools, shiny things) running into the consolidated, massive EMR systems. The first question when they approach a healthcare system will be "Are you integrated with Epic/Cerner/whatever?" and if not, they will be sent away. Or be ready to embark on a very long, slow process and integrate deeply into workflows, data APIs, etc.
When a system consolidates their EMR (driven by real needs but also Meaningful Use incentives), it forces standardization and special one-offs become much harder. Getting a doctor interested in using a new device or software means working within the whole EMR - the staff doesn't have the time or leeway to go use tools that don't integrate, just because a doctor really wants it. That doctor needs to align large groups, get agreement, and it's going to take a lot of time and money.
It all comes down to interoperability/integration. Building cool stuff in healthcare is really easy since most of the tech in use is outdated and slow moving. But interoperability - required to sell into healthcare systems - is really, really tough.
- That's great news! I didn't know it was still actively developed. I played with it... criminy how many years ago did it first start? I liked it then but it was brittle and slow.
It looks great now, functionally and speed-wise. Obviously computers themselves changed a lot in that time to give the speed improvement.
Looking forward to playing with it again now.
- Indeed. Debugging them is painful at the moment. I'm using Apex to deploy a few and running "apex logs" gets me all recent logs, but that's pretty far from being actually debugging.
- I had a personal trainer for a month a few years back and he pointed this out. I was running with a heart rate monitor (belt around chest type). He pointed out that my heart rate fell 10 bpm when I switched from watching readouts on the treadmill to watching whatever was on the many TVs. Same speed and incline, but if I focused on something other than those numbers, I relaxed and it became easier.
It's interesting to see a real test of this. The clever bit in here was asking the cyclists to count red circles on the screen occasionally, ensuring the TV had a large share of their conscious attention.
Interesting! I had never caught that key idea and need to read more about that. thanks