They have RDS, which is just managed postgres/mysql/maria,
They also have Aurora, which is (I think) compatible with Postgres/mysql/maria, but designed from the ground up to run in the cloud.
A lot of traditional software is designed to run on a traditional server, and has certain design constraints that follow you when you move to the cloud. Designing something to be both compatible but cloud-native has been an important step and both Amazon/Google have created this type of product, if Microsoft/Azure has not already, I'm sure it's just around the corner.
Dynamic movement like one foot jumping requires careful use of lots of force so that you land on the other foot without any extra inertia to tip you over. Jumping above your waistline requires quite a bit of nearly instantaneous power, there's a lot going on here, and a lot of risk of damage if you don't stick the landing exactly right the first time. Versus walking, which if you don't stick the landing, you can stumble in one direction for a couple of steps to recover.
That said, natural terrain has it's own challenges, but I would not discount the ninja jumping. Sure, a 10 year old can do ninja jumps too, but that kind of motor skill control doesn't develop until sometime between 4 and 9 years, which, and I have built a quadruped and tried to make it walk (and failed), is damn hard to do already, that kind of dynamic motion control is impressive.
It wouldn't surprise me if they devised a device with several gyros that used the soft grapple "docking adaptor" they installed on the service mission to replace the gyros. The Dragon is not rated for more than X time in space but it could be uprated filled with gyros, 10 gyros would weigh substantially less than an ISS payload; and then is docked to the rear of the hubble (soft grapple). AFAIK the optics and solar are fine, it is just the gyros that are prone to failure. They could also re-boost the hubble while they're up there. Worst case scenario the new gyros don't work and they disengage and try again. Dragons are less than $200 million to launch these days.
This is why I stopped using evernote. It wants (wanted? haven't checked in 2-3 years) to preserve all the RTF stuff. Text color, background color, weird fonts, etc. No way to revert easily to plain text.
I would be interested in an evernote-type product that just did markdown and embedded images.
Now I just keep a private notes file in a private "notes" github repo in markdown, with folders for personal and work. It is about the same price at $7/mo and I get the revision history and it uses an interface I'm already intimately familiar with. I really liked the markdown editor with embedded images system of the ghost blogging platform (back in the pre 1.0.0 days, haven't used 1 or v2 yet), that always seemed like it was ripe to pull out and build an evernote-markdown style platform.
A sort of variant on the MBPT, Average: These people score high in neuroticism and extraversion, but score low in openness. It is the most typical category, with women being more likely than men to fit into it. This person was BLUE, or a dove, typical emotional female, uses phrases often like, "I feel", are very concerned about the aesthetics of the inside of their home Reserved: This type of person is stable emotionally without being especially open or neurotic. They tend to score lower on extraversion but tend to be somewhat agreeable and conscientious. This person was GREEN, or an owl, i.e. your typical nerd, computer programmer etc, generally very organized
Role Models: These people score high in every trait except neuroticism, and the likelihood that someone fits into this category increases dramatically as they age. "These are people who are dependable and open to new ideas," says Amaral. "These are good people to be in charge of things." Women are more likely than men to be role models.
These people were GOLD, or an eagle, law abiding, rules-based. Like things like their home to be very orderly, neat and tidy. In texas they tend to own guns and favor law enforcement
Self-Centered: These people score very high in extraversion, but score low in openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Most teenage boys would fall into this category, according to Revelle, before (hopefully) maturing out of it. The number of people who fall into this category decreases dramatically with age.
These were ORANGE or parrots, loud, colorful, etc. These people tend to be musicians, artists (artists also fall in to blue to some extent, depending,), or sales people, or bar tenders, especially outgoing.
We took these personality tests back in 10th grade in the 1990s, this is nothing new, they had been giving out the same personality tests for 20 years when we got them.
My girlfriend has the latest iPhone through her work, I have the latest Pixel, whenever we go to use her camera, her comment is "no, use your phone, it takes better photos". We discovered this pretty early on in our relationship, her phone only comes out for photos if mine is across the room or has run out of battery.
If it weren't for the camera, I would just buy any standard $200-class android phone, but since the Pixel takes such fantastic photos, it is worth the extra $400 to have a high quality camera built in to the phone for wherever I go.
To those making the "just take an SLR with you" well great, we own an SLR, it lives in the closet and comes out for weddings and that is just about it. You get 99% of the quality with 500% more compactness. No contest.
Looking forward to the Pixel 3, my display is pretty scratched at this point (only phone where this has ever been a problem since the Nexus S) and the battery is fully worn out.
Only out in the boonies. Texas is rapidly urbanizing and already is 40/40 republican/democrat, with 20% swing votes. In 20 years largely democratic hispanics will outnumber republican leaning whites by a measurable degree.
I would imagine they're in a transitionary stage and/or the project manager in charge of this doesn't trust their implementation enough to switch cold turkey.
Pretty close! The exhaust coming out of a brand new 2001 honda civic is often cleaner than the air it's driving in. Not that you would want to inhale that much carbon monoxide, but in terms of soot/fine matter particulate, passenger vehicles produce almost no smog. It's mostly heavy industry at this point.
LED and CFL lights come with their color temperature written on the box. If you want daylight get a 4500K bulb, if you want yellow get 3000K, if you want candle light get 2000K. If you can't find the color temp you want, buy them online. If you don't like blue, don't buy anything above 4000K on the box.
Agree, I think states rights have been trampled to the point that it's a small miracle that states like California can be allowed to set their own higher vehicle emissions standards than federal ones. When the country was formed, states rights were supposed to be roughly equivalent to federal rule. This worked ok when the country was less than 100 million. If you look at parts of Europe, and a couple of scattered municipalities around the globe like Hong Kong, the sweet spot for self governance seems to be between 7 and 25 million and a diameter of no more than about 750 miles. Beyond that and cultural/regional differences are too great.
I think 3 countries would be too little, probably closer to 30 countries, in loose alliances of 8-20 states similar to the EU model.
I don't think I've owned a car newer than 12 years, typically buy them at the 14 year mark and drive them for three years, which is about as long as you can go without doing any maintenance to them. Usually buy them for $3000. As soon as the first maintenance item comes up that costs more than $500, sign the title, put the keys on the dash and park it on the side of the highway and go buy a different one. No point in putting $500 a year in to a $3000 car that's rapidly wearing out, especially once you factor in the time it takes to go to and from the shop and dealing with those assholes. I figure $1000/yr to own a maintenance-free car is a fair trade.
Stopped owning cars towards the end of 2014/early 2015 when uber became available in my city, started riding my bike to work on days that it did not rain (most of them), took uber on days that it did. Between gas and insurance I was saving enough money each year to take two budget week long international trips. Will probably buy another car when I have kids so I can haul them to daycare and go on camping trips etc.
Private car ownership is here to stay, in the same way cash is; there's too much risk to freedom to ban it ouright, but the market will slowly switch to alternatives due to convenience. E.g. I haven't carried cash in years, except when planning to go to a restaurant in downtown that I knows only takes cash. In most cases I don't even bother choosing restuaunts that are cash only due to the inconvenience of locating and using an ATM. I can see a lot of younger generations growing up with self driving cars and never bothering to save up to buy a car due to the inconvenience of paying to park, maintain and insure it.
My girlfriend has an SLR. The only time in three years it has left the box was for an hour at her brother's wedding.
There's a lot to be said about one touch push to [ social media platform of your choice ]. I want the memory, I want good quality, but I am not going to haul around a camera based on 1930s era philosophy on camera technology.
I used to be big in to cameras, I still have two 35mm SLRs, worked in a darkroom, etc. I just don't have the time or space for a hobby like that. I get no value hauling around a great big nerd box on my neck anymore. It's not practical. I'm glad it works for you, but the photos, selfies, landscapes etc, every single photo I take that I get out of my Pixel are better than 95% of the photos I see on facebook. That's good enough for me.
I get it, there's a law of diminshing returns on camera hardware, and while I'm at the 98th percentil, with that $1500 DSLR I could get to the 99th percentile, but, you know, I've never been to a bar, I've been sailing THREE times in ten years where someone on board had a DSLR, and the photos weren't that much better, with the exception of the telephoto lens. Not worth it.
I've found that there's no appreciable difference between the Moto G5/G6 than the Pixel, with the sole exeption being the screen and camera. The screen, doesn't matter a whole lot, the OLED is a nice bump up, but the camera, you cannot fix or overlook a camera if your phone is your main camera.
I freaking hate paying more than I have to for a phone, I would just carry an old Moto G4 to do facebook and whatsapp, but the camera on it is garbage. The camera on the Pixel however is top notch, every photo comes out absolutely perfect every time. It's magic. If your memories don't matter to you then yeah, get a cheap phone, but if they do, don't skimp the extra $200 for a good camera on your phone.
They probably do work hand in hand with them, and then support it for the life of the equipment. The problem is when the lead engineer who wrote 90% of the software, in a poorly documented and even more poorly maintainable design, left the company, or got hit by a bus or reason X. So sure, do you want to change feature X like increase the max RPM of the motor by 15RPM to get rid of some harmonic vibration? Yeah we can do that. The problem comes when he leaves and you can't do something important without his blessing because once you upgrade the machine, you can't roll it back if the software update isn't compatible with your update, because you lost the original drive image for the machine, or you don't have a way to reinstall the software from scratch because the original software is lost at this point.
Yeah all that sounds crazy but I worked at a finance company where we were running an unapproved version of windows and all the servers were clones of clones of clones because nobody had any idea how to install all 114 packages in the right order (I'm not even exaggerating), and nobody had ever documented what was customized in the registry to get it to be cross-compatible with some other software they had integrated with it. We had a team of 125 testing our custom integrations against the software that was delivered to us, but if we ever lost all the backup copies of the clone images, we would be truly fucked as we had tried to build a new server from scratch several times over the course of a month and were not able to do it.
I'm not sure how complex wafer fab machinery is, but if intel hasn't gone from 14 to 10nm in five years, I am guessing it is at least as complex as what we're doing, and once it's installed, you don't freakin' touch it and pray it never breaks.
I grew up in the surveillance era (late 90s) and had to show ID for many tests at the college level. Most tests were on a scantron or equivalent and the guy giving the test had never met me before so I don't know how else you would keep people from paying others to take the test for them. My ex was a twin and they got away with this stuff all the time, a friend of mine did online tests for others as a side business, it definitely happens and the people giving the tests have a real incentive to take basic steps prevent it.
Free snacks are pretty nice, not gonna lie. Couple bags of chips, beef jerky, cliff bars, etc, one of these in the afternoon does a great job of boosting your blood sugar to keep the sleepies off in the afternoon. I'd say I am 100% more productive after lunch if I have access to something to boost my blood sugar. Given local salaries vs cost of snacks ($100/wk for an office of 20?) seems like a slam dunk no-brainer from a business standpoint. Helps keep the entire department from taking a 1 hour coffee break at 2pm every day.
Stock options aren't worth anything anymore for the majority of startups, that's a pre-2010 concept. Unless you work for google or whatever.
All of these companies have offices in downtown SF. Google is in, or next to the same building (Hill Brothers Coffee building) as the Mozilla Corp on the Embarcadero with a fantabulous view of the bridge. I used to watch them take off drones from the roof of the building periodically. Microsoft is further in to Soma, nearer the caltrain station. I don't know where Apple's SF office is but besides marketing and advertising offices they have their own shuttles that go through the city. Amazon's A9 office is in... redwood city? Or Palo Alto right across from Survey Monkey at the Caltrain station. I'm sure there are others.
Just because their HQ isn't in the bay area doesn't mean they don't have offices with hundreds of engineers there. What a FAGN company might call a small satellite office, anyone else would call a wildly successful startup. $20 million funding round buys you about 100 engineers + sales/marketing and support staff for 18-24 months plus laptops an office to house them in.
Working as an engineer in the bay area I get unsolicited emails to my (relatively unpublished) personal email account directly by all sorts of companies, not to mention 10+ recruiter contacts a week via linkedin, etc.
I don't hesitate to let them know if a particular republican venture capitalist that financially backed Trump's presidential campaign that has invested in their company, has turned me off from their company (pick one, there's a couple of high profile ones). Or if they're heavily in bed with the defense industry, or tangentially attached to some other cause I'm against (there's a couple of banks that come to mind), I will let them know. Having enough experience in the industry to have options, it's nice to be able to flatly turn down offers. Obviously there is someone who will sell their soul to get their foot in the door, I am not slowing down their hiring process by any measurable degree, but it does mean that they will have to struggle to grow with less talented or less experienced talent. I'm ok with this.
Most of my friend share at least a somewhat similar view. But we've been here long enough to pick and choose our next job. There's a lot of immigrants from other parts of the world that will take the more morally ambiguous jobs in tech just to get here.
We have three offices, two in the US and one in eastern europe. The bay area office uses slack and RHEL, the midwestern office uses email and windows, and the eastern europe office (the largest, their wages are about 20% us wages) uses Skype and some combination of windows and linux.
I know WhatsApp is very popular in south america, most of western europe and chunks of asia, but Skype is still huge in eastern europe for some reason. I don't know why. I think because everyone already has their friends lists setup. Skype has as many users as Twitter (300 million), probably more because Skype users aren't typically bots.
Yeah but this, you can buy, plug it in to the minivan's HDMI in port and hand it to your kids. Now your kids get to play the same games you played growing up. No tinkering required.
Slashdot Mirror
They have RDS, which is just managed postgres/mysql/maria,
They also have Aurora, which is (I think) compatible with Postgres/mysql/maria, but designed from the ground up to run in the cloud.
A lot of traditional software is designed to run on a traditional server, and has certain design constraints that follow you when you move to the cloud. Designing something to be both compatible but cloud-native has been an important step and both Amazon/Google have created this type of product, if Microsoft/Azure has not already, I'm sure it's just around the corner.
Dynamic movement like one foot jumping requires careful use of lots of force so that you land on the other foot without any extra inertia to tip you over. Jumping above your waistline requires quite a bit of nearly instantaneous power, there's a lot going on here, and a lot of risk of damage if you don't stick the landing exactly right the first time. Versus walking, which if you don't stick the landing, you can stumble in one direction for a couple of steps to recover.
That said, natural terrain has it's own challenges, but I would not discount the ninja jumping. Sure, a 10 year old can do ninja jumps too, but that kind of motor skill control doesn't develop until sometime between 4 and 9 years, which, and I have built a quadruped and tried to make it walk (and failed), is damn hard to do already, that kind of dynamic motion control is impressive.
It wouldn't surprise me if they devised a device with several gyros that used the soft grapple "docking adaptor" they installed on the service mission to replace the gyros. The Dragon is not rated for more than X time in space but it could be uprated filled with gyros, 10 gyros would weigh substantially less than an ISS payload; and then is docked to the rear of the hubble (soft grapple). AFAIK the optics and solar are fine, it is just the gyros that are prone to failure. They could also re-boost the hubble while they're up there. Worst case scenario the new gyros don't work and they disengage and try again. Dragons are less than $200 million to launch these days.
This is why I stopped using evernote. It wants (wanted? haven't checked in 2-3 years) to preserve all the RTF stuff. Text color, background color, weird fonts, etc. No way to revert easily to plain text.
I would be interested in an evernote-type product that just did markdown and embedded images.
Now I just keep a private notes file in a private "notes" github repo in markdown, with folders for personal and work. It is about the same price at $7/mo and I get the revision history and it uses an interface I'm already intimately familiar with. I really liked the markdown editor with embedded images system of the ghost blogging platform (back in the pre 1.0.0 days, haven't used 1 or v2 yet), that always seemed like it was ripe to pull out and build an evernote-markdown style platform.
A sort of variant on the MBPT,
Average: These people score high in neuroticism and extraversion, but score low in openness. It is the most typical category, with women being more likely than men to fit into it.
This person was BLUE, or a dove, typical emotional female, uses phrases often like, "I feel", are very concerned about the aesthetics of the inside of their home
Reserved: This type of person is stable emotionally without being especially open or neurotic. They tend to score lower on extraversion but tend to be somewhat agreeable and conscientious.
This person was GREEN, or an owl, i.e. your typical nerd, computer programmer etc, generally very organized
Role Models: These people score high in every trait except neuroticism, and the likelihood that someone fits into this category increases dramatically as they age. "These are people who are dependable and open to new ideas," says Amaral. "These are good people to be in charge of things." Women are more likely than men to be role models.
These people were GOLD, or an eagle, law abiding, rules-based. Like things like their home to be very orderly, neat and tidy. In texas they tend to own guns and favor law enforcement
Self-Centered: These people score very high in extraversion, but score low in openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Most teenage boys would fall into this category, according to Revelle, before (hopefully) maturing out of it. The number of people who fall into this category decreases dramatically with age.
These were ORANGE or parrots, loud, colorful, etc. These people tend to be musicians, artists (artists also fall in to blue to some extent, depending,), or sales people, or bar tenders, especially outgoing.
We took these personality tests back in 10th grade in the 1990s, this is nothing new, they had been giving out the same personality tests for 20 years when we got them.
My girlfriend has the latest iPhone through her work, I have the latest Pixel, whenever we go to use her camera, her comment is "no, use your phone, it takes better photos". We discovered this pretty early on in our relationship, her phone only comes out for photos if mine is across the room or has run out of battery.
If it weren't for the camera, I would just buy any standard $200-class android phone, but since the Pixel takes such fantastic photos, it is worth the extra $400 to have a high quality camera built in to the phone for wherever I go.
To those making the "just take an SLR with you" well great, we own an SLR, it lives in the closet and comes out for weddings and that is just about it. You get 99% of the quality with 500% more compactness. No contest.
Looking forward to the Pixel 3, my display is pretty scratched at this point (only phone where this has ever been a problem since the Nexus S) and the battery is fully worn out.
Only out in the boonies. Texas is rapidly urbanizing and already is 40/40 republican/democrat, with 20% swing votes. In 20 years largely democratic hispanics will outnumber republican leaning whites by a measurable degree.
I would imagine they're in a transitionary stage and/or the project manager in charge of this doesn't trust their implementation enough to switch cold turkey.
Pretty close! The exhaust coming out of a brand new 2001 honda civic is often cleaner than the air it's driving in. Not that you would want to inhale that much carbon monoxide, but in terms of soot/fine matter particulate, passenger vehicles produce almost no smog. It's mostly heavy industry at this point.
LED and CFL lights come with their color temperature written on the box. If you want daylight get a 4500K bulb, if you want yellow get 3000K, if you want candle light get 2000K. If you can't find the color temp you want, buy them online. If you don't like blue, don't buy anything above 4000K on the box.
Agree, I think states rights have been trampled to the point that it's a small miracle that states like California can be allowed to set their own higher vehicle emissions standards than federal ones. When the country was formed, states rights were supposed to be roughly equivalent to federal rule. This worked ok when the country was less than 100 million. If you look at parts of Europe, and a couple of scattered municipalities around the globe like Hong Kong, the sweet spot for self governance seems to be between 7 and 25 million and a diameter of no more than about 750 miles. Beyond that and cultural/regional differences are too great.
I think 3 countries would be too little, probably closer to 30 countries, in loose alliances of 8-20 states similar to the EU model.
Agreed, the whole system is fully distributed, no reason to ever ever ever upgrade from paper ballots.
I don't think I've owned a car newer than 12 years, typically buy them at the 14 year mark and drive them for three years, which is about as long as you can go without doing any maintenance to them. Usually buy them for $3000. As soon as the first maintenance item comes up that costs more than $500, sign the title, put the keys on the dash and park it on the side of the highway and go buy a different one. No point in putting $500 a year in to a $3000 car that's rapidly wearing out, especially once you factor in the time it takes to go to and from the shop and dealing with those assholes. I figure $1000/yr to own a maintenance-free car is a fair trade.
Stopped owning cars towards the end of 2014/early 2015 when uber became available in my city, started riding my bike to work on days that it did not rain (most of them), took uber on days that it did. Between gas and insurance I was saving enough money each year to take two budget week long international trips. Will probably buy another car when I have kids so I can haul them to daycare and go on camping trips etc.
Private car ownership is here to stay, in the same way cash is; there's too much risk to freedom to ban it ouright, but the market will slowly switch to alternatives due to convenience. E.g. I haven't carried cash in years, except when planning to go to a restaurant in downtown that I knows only takes cash. In most cases I don't even bother choosing restuaunts that are cash only due to the inconvenience of locating and using an ATM. I can see a lot of younger generations growing up with self driving cars and never bothering to save up to buy a car due to the inconvenience of paying to park, maintain and insure it.
I'm trying to remember the last time someone I know talked about a smartwatch, let alone admitting out loud that they wanted one.
My girlfriend has an SLR. The only time in three years it has left the box was for an hour at her brother's wedding.
There's a lot to be said about one touch push to [ social media platform of your choice ]. I want the memory, I want good quality, but I am not going to haul around a camera based on 1930s era philosophy on camera technology.
I used to be big in to cameras, I still have two 35mm SLRs, worked in a darkroom, etc. I just don't have the time or space for a hobby like that. I get no value hauling around a great big nerd box on my neck anymore. It's not practical. I'm glad it works for you, but the photos, selfies, landscapes etc, every single photo I take that I get out of my Pixel are better than 95% of the photos I see on facebook. That's good enough for me.
I get it, there's a law of diminshing returns on camera hardware, and while I'm at the 98th percentil, with that $1500 DSLR I could get to the 99th percentile, but, you know, I've never been to a bar, I've been sailing THREE times in ten years where someone on board had a DSLR, and the photos weren't that much better, with the exception of the telephoto lens. Not worth it.
I've had zero issues with Project Fi, nor has anyone I work with or met who has Fi (200+ people). Sorry you had such a bad experience.
I've found that there's no appreciable difference between the Moto G5/G6 than the Pixel, with the sole exeption being the screen and camera. The screen, doesn't matter a whole lot, the OLED is a nice bump up, but the camera, you cannot fix or overlook a camera if your phone is your main camera.
I freaking hate paying more than I have to for a phone, I would just carry an old Moto G4 to do facebook and whatsapp, but the camera on it is garbage. The camera on the Pixel however is top notch, every photo comes out absolutely perfect every time. It's magic. If your memories don't matter to you then yeah, get a cheap phone, but if they do, don't skimp the extra $200 for a good camera on your phone.
They probably do work hand in hand with them, and then support it for the life of the equipment. The problem is when the lead engineer who wrote 90% of the software, in a poorly documented and even more poorly maintainable design, left the company, or got hit by a bus or reason X. So sure, do you want to change feature X like increase the max RPM of the motor by 15RPM to get rid of some harmonic vibration? Yeah we can do that. The problem comes when he leaves and you can't do something important without his blessing because once you upgrade the machine, you can't roll it back if the software update isn't compatible with your update, because you lost the original drive image for the machine, or you don't have a way to reinstall the software from scratch because the original software is lost at this point.
Yeah all that sounds crazy but I worked at a finance company where we were running an unapproved version of windows and all the servers were clones of clones of clones because nobody had any idea how to install all 114 packages in the right order (I'm not even exaggerating), and nobody had ever documented what was customized in the registry to get it to be cross-compatible with some other software they had integrated with it. We had a team of 125 testing our custom integrations against the software that was delivered to us, but if we ever lost all the backup copies of the clone images, we would be truly fucked as we had tried to build a new server from scratch several times over the course of a month and were not able to do it.
I'm not sure how complex wafer fab machinery is, but if intel hasn't gone from 14 to 10nm in five years, I am guessing it is at least as complex as what we're doing, and once it's installed, you don't freakin' touch it and pray it never breaks.
I grew up in the surveillance era (late 90s) and had to show ID for many tests at the college level. Most tests were on a scantron or equivalent and the guy giving the test had never met me before so I don't know how else you would keep people from paying others to take the test for them. My ex was a twin and they got away with this stuff all the time, a friend of mine did online tests for others as a side business, it definitely happens and the people giving the tests have a real incentive to take basic steps prevent it.
Free snacks are pretty nice, not gonna lie. Couple bags of chips, beef jerky, cliff bars, etc, one of these in the afternoon does a great job of boosting your blood sugar to keep the sleepies off in the afternoon. I'd say I am 100% more productive after lunch if I have access to something to boost my blood sugar. Given local salaries vs cost of snacks ($100/wk for an office of 20?) seems like a slam dunk no-brainer from a business standpoint. Helps keep the entire department from taking a 1 hour coffee break at 2pm every day.
Stock options aren't worth anything anymore for the majority of startups, that's a pre-2010 concept. Unless you work for google or whatever.
All of these companies have offices in downtown SF. Google is in, or next to the same building (Hill Brothers Coffee building) as the Mozilla Corp on the Embarcadero with a fantabulous view of the bridge. I used to watch them take off drones from the roof of the building periodically. Microsoft is further in to Soma, nearer the caltrain station. I don't know where Apple's SF office is but besides marketing and advertising offices they have their own shuttles that go through the city. Amazon's A9 office is in... redwood city? Or Palo Alto right across from Survey Monkey at the Caltrain station. I'm sure there are others.
Just because their HQ isn't in the bay area doesn't mean they don't have offices with hundreds of engineers there. What a FAGN company might call a small satellite office, anyone else would call a wildly successful startup. $20 million funding round buys you about 100 engineers + sales/marketing and support staff for 18-24 months plus laptops an office to house them in.
Working as an engineer in the bay area I get unsolicited emails to my (relatively unpublished) personal email account directly by all sorts of companies, not to mention 10+ recruiter contacts a week via linkedin, etc.
I don't hesitate to let them know if a particular republican venture capitalist that financially backed Trump's presidential campaign that has invested in their company, has turned me off from their company (pick one, there's a couple of high profile ones). Or if they're heavily in bed with the defense industry, or tangentially attached to some other cause I'm against (there's a couple of banks that come to mind), I will let them know. Having enough experience in the industry to have options, it's nice to be able to flatly turn down offers. Obviously there is someone who will sell their soul to get their foot in the door, I am not slowing down their hiring process by any measurable degree, but it does mean that they will have to struggle to grow with less talented or less experienced talent. I'm ok with this.
Most of my friend share at least a somewhat similar view. But we've been here long enough to pick and choose our next job. There's a lot of immigrants from other parts of the world that will take the more morally ambiguous jobs in tech just to get here.
We have three offices, two in the US and one in eastern europe. The bay area office uses slack and RHEL, the midwestern office uses email and windows, and the eastern europe office (the largest, their wages are about 20% us wages) uses Skype and some combination of windows and linux.
I know WhatsApp is very popular in south america, most of western europe and chunks of asia, but Skype is still huge in eastern europe for some reason. I don't know why. I think because everyone already has their friends lists setup. Skype has as many users as Twitter (300 million), probably more because Skype users aren't typically bots.
Yeah but this, you can buy, plug it in to the minivan's HDMI in port and hand it to your kids. Now your kids get to play the same games you played growing up. No tinkering required.