> one of the most innovative car manufacturers in the world
Off topic, but I'd like some more specific thoughts regarding what you are aware of for specific automotive technologies that GM has innovated over the past decades, to make this statement.
Intuitively, GM cars do not do well internationally, have been known to have creaky interior build quality, have silly features like turning the reverse lights on when you unlock the car in a parking lot, and are not competitive on a scale of luxury compared to their European and Japanese counterparts.
I agree with you that most American cars are junk. I hate all these same features plus others like the weird headlight controls, parking break on the floor in non-trucks, not to mention the loose feeling brakes and steering.
Traditionally, GM sold other models overseas through brands like Holden or Opel, but these have all been sold off or shut down over the past decade or so except in China. GM now has a much heavier reliance on trucks and SUVs in the North American market. They sell some of those same product overseas still, but in much smaller quantities than before.
I've experience working on a team for one GPS fleet management solution. Our SIMs were usually provided in a bulk PO from a top tier wireless provider and were all locked down to a certain very small (on the order of 5mb/mo) bandwidth plan. This cuts cost and risk.
I have to say I agree fully and it's kind of disappointing how much chaff makes it to the HN front page. This is ostensibly an interesting article, but at second glance doesn't really hold up to any scrutiny as anything really novel... folks buying used cars for decades have been doing detective work on 3rd party aftermarket modifications that have been left in. Instead, show me a door chime that has been converted to Toto's Africa using an arduino or custom fab board with STM chip.
I propose that Walmart needs to use their bulk purchasing power/clout, in combination with the efficiencies that Amazon has put in place, to provide lower prices. If you're going to unseat Amazon, it has to be on price.
I work with a customer who is notorious for not defining requirements. Their culture is that everyone is either too busy or not knowledgeable enough of all the working parts of a system to define requirements. It's a culture problem over there.
The tool I work on generates reports. Rather than defining requirements for reports, the only way to make progress is to understand their general needs through conversation, then provide them a draft report - your best guess. They tell you what to change or what they don't want, then you make changes and provide another draft. When enough tracer bullets are shot, you arrive at the report they actually need.
Aren't at this point you doing the job of two people? I have a coworker who would say this when the requirements are well defined. He would say its our job to build the requirements that are given to us. Our job is not to create / define a product. He would often follow this up by saying our company is worth X Billions of dollars, they can afford to hire a Business Analyst/ Better Product Manager.
Personally I don't agree with this. It goes against my core beliefs to make something that I don't believe is good for the end user. I have a hard time however coming up with arguments on why we should as a developer spend our time creating basically a product plan.
I understand how you feel. You are being hired to solve problems, and figuring out what to solve is a key part of the job. Solving problems is your aim, writing code is only helpful if it solves the problem. I love the days where I get into the office someone ask me streamline something, and all that really is required is a whiteboard, some pens and no code ever. Solving the urgent business issue at a cost of 30 minutes talking and 5 dollars of pens ;)
Hiding developers behind analysts and product managers makes everyones job less fun.
In my first job we had analysts, product managers, user councils making specifications. Specifications that where terrible and the developers in the team would have loved to do this iterative design with the end users, because the software would have been better fit for use. For me that was a soul sucking experience. Much better to be able to understand why the software needs to exist and how to make it good for users and the organisation (not always 1:1 mapping either)
Wanting perfect specs is a good way to limit your career as a developer. Because that way you will never be more than a glorified type writer with a analyst to hold your hand. Solving the whole business problem from start to end is the way to grow professionally.
Also perfect specs are impossible :( so iterating with your users is the fast way to good enough for business applications.
> Aren't at this point you doing the job of two people? ... our company is worth X Billions of dollars, they can afford to hire a Business Analyst/ Better Product Manager.
Yes, definitely. The difference is that in my situation we are a software contractor, not a software development company that owns its products. If we don't work with the customer to discover and build what they want, then it doesn't get built, which means we've lost potential work.
I've worked in environments where everything is specified up front and ones where nothing is specified beyond a vague idea of the end goal. I find the latter far more honest, at least in the context of startups. My experience is that most people don't know how something should work until they see one version of how it could work, from there we can start zeroing in on the actual solution by chopping and changing things.
We tried Platejoy for 6 months. We found it was useful, but found a few caveats:
It was very easy to back ourselves into a corner with food preferences such that you see the same set of 20 or so recipes recycled from week to week. This is probably our fault more than Platejoy's, but we are not especially picky eaters.
Some recipes required ingredients that we just couldn't source. We live in the midwest and the closest major city is 1.5 hours away. Try finding tahini paste at your local midwest walmart or smalltown grocer. In these cases I'd have loved substitution suggestions.
We don't have particular dietary restrictions. We also preferred old fashioned pen and paper tracking of our grocery list/pantry, so that feature wasn't something we used. We didn't really harness Platejoy's unique features. So for our particular situation Platejoy ended up being little more than a recipe suggestion tool.
I'd definitely suggest platejoy for people with dietary restrictions who don't want to think about or go through the hassle of finding recipes.
Hi! Glad you found the service useful. We now have a feature that lets you specify grocery store so that less exotic ingredients are shown if you live somewhere a bit more obscure (grew up in a small town myself, so I get it!) You can also print your shopping lists if you don't want to use the iOS or Android app. We have thousands of recipes in our database and constantly growing, so let me know if you ever want to come back and try it again for a few days.
I order pretty much all of the obscure food/ingredients I use from Amazon - looks like Tahini Paste is widely available there. I'm not sure how much notice PlateJoy gives you to shop before you make the recipe, but it has to be less than Amazon's shipping?
As someone who knows zero haskell, and little markdown, can someone explain how this works?
haskell.org [1] says there is "bird style" and "LaTeX style" ways of marking off code vs documentation, and I see neither in the linked file. Is it the "```haskell" blocks?
Just some additional info, because literate markdown support is not completly frictionless yet:
To so this yourself you need to add the --markdown-unlit flag to ghc and add the package "markdown-unlit" to your dependencies.
Additionally you have to symlink your .md file to .lhs, as ghc does not look at .md files (even with the --markdown-unlit flag, which I find kinda sad)
Off topic, but I'd like some more specific thoughts regarding what you are aware of for specific automotive technologies that GM has innovated over the past decades, to make this statement.
Intuitively, GM cars do not do well internationally, have been known to have creaky interior build quality, have silly features like turning the reverse lights on when you unlock the car in a parking lot, and are not competitive on a scale of luxury compared to their European and Japanese counterparts.