I'm not aware of a real "consensus," but a popular view (reflected by my experience) is that they're great for a large org with many teams working asynchronously (though they still introduce headaches), but that for most startups, the payoff is reduced greatly while the pain remains consistent.
I feel this post is addressing something else. Serverless is pretty much simple especially with a framework of the same name or on say netlify. All your code is in one repo and you don’t have to worry about the servers at all.
The blogpost is more about orgs deciding to manage their servers too, going full on kubernetes, docket, etc. That’s what complicated everything because now you need dozens of other systems just to make your container architecture work.
But serverless? You need nothing. Just push to a repo and you’re done because someone else is doing the cat herding of running the containers.
The purpose of a map in the abstract is not merely to answer questions about how to connect two points within a specific transportation system, the subway. Other possibilities include: connecting two locations above ground, understanding the connections and relationship among various places above ground, and even simply enumerating some of those places.
New York City's map shows a variety of out-of-system features which the designer's map doesn't bother with: railroads, avenues, major cross streets, major bus corridors (the original identifies airport link stops but not routes), local commuter rail corridors (LIRR, Metro North), regional rail corridors (Amtrak), ferries, road bridges, tunnels, the Roosevelt Island Aerial Tram, and many more parks.
The MTA map this more effectively answers more-general questions about New York. It can tell you to walk through the park between the Natural History Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This does come at the cost of interfering with several of the more-specific questions you identified.
The question you almost always want to answer about the relationship of the subway to the surroundings is "where is the nearest station entrance" which the system map cannot and should not answer. Any other question about that spatial relationship is essentially trivia, as far as a transit system map is concerned.
And don't try to use the MTA map as a guide to New York City, it is woefully geographically inaccurate. But it still looks like it might be right, so it is in fact quite misleading.
The responsibility of a transit system map is to tell you about the transit system. It should do that above all else.
> The question you almost always want to answer about the relationship of the subway to the surroundings is "where is the nearest station entrance" which the system map cannot and should not answer. Any other question about that spatial relationship is essentially trivia, as far as a transit system map is concerned.
Do you actually live and work in New York? I'll assume not, and your attitude proceeds from ignorance of the situation.
Suppose you work at 1 Pierrepont Plaza (former HQ of Hillary Clinton's campaign, bit of trivia there) and you want to go to Nakamura Ramen on the Lower East Side. You have a subway station right outside the door with the 2345R train, but you'd be a fool to take any of those instead of walking the extra five minutes to Jay St Metrotech for the F.
You are at Broadway - Lafayette St, and you wish to head to the Flatiron Building. The nearest subway to that is the R train. You can take the 6 and transfer at Union Square... but really, you should just walk from the 6 train at 28 St.
You are staying in Fort Greene. The nearest stop is Fulton St (G). The next nearest stop is Lafayette (C). Even if you are headed to Columbus Circle (ABCD1), you might find yourself better served by by walking to DeKalb to catch the B or the Q, which are acceptably close, have more frequent service, and bypass lower Manhattan. (If you are going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you will instead walk to Nevins.)
You work at Union Square and live in Williamsburg. A signal problem -- residual damage from Hurricane Sandy when the tunnel was flooded -- prevents the L train from operating. What are your options for getting home today?
Your proposed universal norm actually makes a lot of sense ... for hybrid commuter rail / metro systems, such as the DC Metro, or BART, where questions like these are only minor and occasional. It is far more ambiguous for NYC.
I do live in New York, thank you very much. My only attitude is that the MTA should never have killed Exit Strategy, that was the one really productive tool for straphangers.
Why do the situations you've proposed have any benefit from the MTA's map? Trying to determine which stations are near your origin or destination based on a system map is a fool's errand, particularly for as large a network as ours. If you're estimating walking times based on distance on the MTA's map, you're going to be very unpleasantly surprised.
The part of those questions that a system map can be useful for is which lines are continuous, which as I mentioned above, is best done when you can see it clearly rather than needing to read it.
The responsibility of the map has many different states based on the situation (long-term resident, tourist, disabled business visitor, non-English speaker, etc.)
I'm not convinced that Berman's map shows weeknight and weekend service massively better than the current one, which includes that info with the key. I find the symbols on Berman's map a bit confusing, and I suspect I would have to reference the key, negating their benefit.
On the other hand, citymapper, google maps, etc. make showing the "outside world" on a subway map less important than in the past, so perhaps it's time to reevaluate.
I think the current map really shines in lower manhattan, where the stops closest to the staring/ending location aren't always the best ones to get on.
I mean, they haven't taken it to court. They probably have a brand management team (understandably, because that impacts use of the subway) and some overzealous employee took an hour to file a complaint with Etsy.
Overzealous is an understatement. My work isn't even remotely related to IP or the MTA and even I've heard of this MTA attorney before. This is the same guy who filed to trademark "if you see something, say something".[1] A safety slogan.
Every few years one of his ridiculous filings or C&D letters seem to pop up on a blog or in the news.
How is that valid? I'm pretty sure it was the CTA's catchphrase well before that was filed...
Edit: Wikipedia says the CTA started using it in response to the 9/11 attacks, but the reference goes to a generic security page (probably changed since it was added). Did find a dated reference from 2004 though, over a year before that trademark was filed: https://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/cta-metra-beef-up-securi...
Let me start with - I agree with you. It is infuriating - to normal people like us.
But when faced with circumstances such as this - where one is inclined to say "why don't they spend that money on X instead?" - I find it useful to reflect on how organisations, and especially government organisations, work. Feel free to ignore this if you already understand and are just "venting" (quite rightfully I'd add), but what follows would be my "explain like I'm five" for why this sort of thing not only happens, but is almost guaranteed to happen.
See, the thing is, they aren't "spending money on this" in the sense that you or I would, say, spend money on lunch - ie. we have a pot of money, and we choose to take $10 out and buy lunch with it, leaving $10 less to spend on everything else.
The reality is that they have multiple pots of money, and each pot of money is only allowed to be spent on some category of expenditure. It'd be like if we had a bank account each for food, rent, transportation, clothing, utilities, etc, and you were only allowed to spend from each separate account accordingly. Now, when you got paid you put a proportion of your salary into each account - in proportions that you get to set annually. You can't move money between accounts - at best at the end of the year you can take everything that's left over and re-allocate it as a lump sum according to the rules.
Now let's stretch the analogy further - instead of you managing everything yourself, imagine if you were merely one person managing one account, and other people (say, the rest of your family) individually managed each account. Imagine the annual negotiation for doing the apportionment of the monthly income.
Now imagine that you get a personal "allowance" for managing that account, and the size of the allowance is related to the proportion of the total budget that the account encompasses - only fair, given that more money equals more responsibility, right? How do you think that would change the tone of the annual budgeting process?
What we have here in the above tortured analogy is probably a reasonable best case example of budget and monetary management in a big organisation. You can easily make it worse - say, money left over at the end of the year? Your "automatic" starting point for budgetary negotiation next year drops by that amount, for example.
Anyway, back to the point. They aren't "spending the money" as such. It's not like someone had the budget of the entire MTA sitting there and asked themselves "What should I do with this money - should I pay a lawyer to send a copyright letter to this artist, or should I pay someone to clean up some graffiti?"
What they have is a legal department staffed with X people, many of whom are mandatory to have available on staff for when something comes up. But they also have to do something with their days. They are paid regardless of what they do - be it write threatening letters, go to court, negotiate contracts, or browse hacker news. But their boss will definitely notice if they aren't doing something. And the boss' boss will notice too, eventually.
So maybe this kind of nonsense is a warning signal that the legal department is over-staffed and some over-zealous member got bored and decided that this was a better use of their time than writing long-winded HN posts. And maybe this will get the attention of the higher-ups, who might ask the right questions, such as "Are we over-staffed in Legal?" And maybe the legal department budget gets cut by one FTE and that allocation can be spread elsewhere. So maybe the year after next when the maintenance division asks for another graffiti crew, they'll get it.
A bunch of IDEs/editors have remote pair programming add-ons now. Atom has Teletype and VS has Visual Studio Live Share.
Also, I'd recommend Glitch as a platform for letting your students host projects. It has a nice collaborative feel and lets them share their work in a "real" environment.
Nothing, in my opinion, but I do have a sort of funny story about IoT thermostats.
My SO's dad is a gadgets guy, and he travels constantly for work. He is also incredibly vigilant about bills. They're the kind of family that can't touch the thermostat until a certain time of year, weighs insurance costs into every decision they make, etc.
Anyways, when he was traveling—even in cold months—he would see the thermostat going up on his phone and panic, turning it down. His kids, who were freezing in the house, would turn it up again because winter, and several hours later the cycle would repeat. They were basically locked in a constant battle to warm their house against their miserly dad and the cloud.
Classic story I heard was of a landlord who locked the thermostat in a plastic air-flow case. The college roommates who lived at the residence learned to strap an ice pack to it. Hilarity ensued when the landlord would come by to check on the heating system.
(He’s the “PC guy” from the Apple commercials, among many other performances, and he has a podcast where he acts as a more cerebral and empathetic Judge Wapner, hearing “cases” and making rulings. The show has quite the internal lore, complete with local court rules, standing, and binding precedent.)
One thing that always annoys me about these sorts of posts is how much they oversell the competence of publishers.
I've worked in book publishing most of my career, both with publishers and with independent authors. Trust me, the publisher's marketing strategy is nothing special.
The difference between a successful book and a middling book, barring the impossibly rare "so good it organically becomes a world beater," is the size of the author's platform. Publishers have a rigid PR/marketing process they run for every book, involving sending galleys (press copies) to the same press contacts, and sometimes those efforts net press coverage, and sometimes that coverage will result in some sales. If a press is very forward-thinking, by industry standards, they may invest in building the author a website or helping manage social.
However, books that hit bestseller lists are typically written by authors who have a large, engaged audience they've built on their own. The impact of a publisher's marketing budget is typically small, and definitely not worth giving up 80%-plus of your sales due to royalties.
> [...] the publisher's marketing strategy is nothing special.
So true! I'm self publishing for this reason—the 10% of profits as royalty just doesn't make sense... I mean I get it that developmental editing, copy editing, cover design, typesetting and other pre-publication services are useful add ons, but still not worth the publisher's 80% cut.
In one thing mainstream publisher have going for them is the reputation, especially in the academic space (textbooks). Seeing that a book was "vetted" by a serious publisher gets you some immediate respect from the reader—something self-published authors have to earn on their own.
Like you say though, the author's "platform" is the key thing, and who better than the author themselves to build that?
You've probably around seen this, but DHH has a good piece on this in Signal v. Noise: https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-majestic-monolith/