> >It all depends on who was elected and who votes.
> If I had to pick one thing I dislike the most about HOAs, it would be this. There is never a guarantee that your quiet HOA will remain that way in the future. Which, to me, seems like a crazy chance to take.
Exactly this. HOA boards have a great tendency to attract the interests of the most busy-body, have to dictate to everyone what they do, Karen's that exist in the area covered by the HOA. Such that, over time, the original HOA that just maintained common areas and only got involved in egregious violations mutates into one that has rules specifying exactly where, by measurement, you are to position your trash container in relation to your garage door when it is not out front for trash pickup day. One of the worst offenders of HOA's near me has exactly that rule (position of trash container in relation to garage door) and the HOA has paid "inspectors" to drive around each trash pickup day after the HOA decreed time that the container should be returned to this location, to look for violations of the position and write folks up.
There was an entire story in the local newspaper about this pettiness on the part of this particular HOA (which is how I learned they had "trash can position relative to garage door" rules and that they had paid "inspectors" to monitor compliance).
And all it takes is for those with "controlling personality disorder" [1] to start running, and getting, elected to the HOA boards for this to happen. And for most HOA areas, the only population group even interested in running for HOA board member are the "controlling personality disorder" types. So no matter who one votes for, the HOA slowly mutates into a "control everyone, everywhere, all the time" one.
[1] I.e., those personality types that want to control everything that someone else is allowed to do.
Keeping it simple. Once you've got the mantissa and exponent out, you can check your number is in range by a simple check that the exponent is within range.
For a 32 bit signed integer the limit is 2E9. This means that the exponent is fine 0-8, or if the exponent is 9, then only if the mantissa is 1 or 2. This only works with a single digit mantissa.
For adding more digits to the mantissa, while a robust range check can be done, it gets more complicated. String-to-Integer functions are very conservatively written pieces of code designed to be quick.
2 and 3 enabled by a homogenous populace that generally agrees with government power and/or sees their government as representing/helping them and/or doesn't see threat from government and/or fears outsiders.
> For example, "My Favorite Air Quality Monitors" rather than "The Best Indoor Air Quality Monitors". The title sets reader expectations for objective evaluation with consistent methodology.
Unfortunately, that ship has sailed. There have now been so many review articles for so very long titled "Best X" when the nature of the review is "... in the subjective opinion of the review author" that it is unlikely anyone views a "best X" article as having any objective evaluation or rigor behind it at all.
Your suggestion would be nice to enforce, but there's no way to get that ship back to port to change its course now.
"is that this review is ... pretty much purely based on the personal preferences of the author."
You've found the core takeaway about nearly all "product reviews" in nearly all publications. They are almost all simply "the personal preferences of the author".
These authors have neither the time, nor the science skills, for anything even beginning to look like a rigorous scientific review, and so the "best" vs. "ok" vs. "not recommended" tags applied result because the author liked the particular shade of pink used on a trim piece on one, or liked that another one looks like the Apple computer they are using, and so forth.
But they are never based upon any objective criteria, and are never (nor ever were intended to be) reproducible in any scientific fashion.
Yet, as you say, they have "great power" to influence buying decisions on the part of folks who read their reviews.
> But they are never based upon any objective criteria, and are never (nor ever were intended to be) reproducible in any scientific fashion.
This is also why review aggregators exist: if I'm just getting into a thing, such as watching movies or buying appliances, I probably need a general sense of how people collectively feel about a thing. But if I'm keenly aware of my preferences, it helps me to find reviewers who align with how I think. People routinely seek out specific reviewers or specific publications for this reason.
For instance, someone reading this review might conclude "I really appreciate that ease of use is a topic that's front of mind with this reviewer." Another reviewer's focus might be customizability, and they might recommend AirGradient. And that reviewer's audience follows that person likely because those concerns are front of mind.
...to be honest, if AirGradient had responded more along those lines ("we prioritized X and Y. We understand if this isn't the best fit for customers looking for Z, but we're working on it"), it would've felt more empathetic and less combative to me.
If that's the reason, then the solution is a license plate on both the front and rear of the vehicle.
But much like the 'little country town' where the speedlimit goes from 55 to 25 instantly on the road into town so the local sheriff can ticket all those "speeders", they won't issue front and rear plates because doing so would cut off a revenue stream.
The translation from marketing speak to real world is likely something like this:
We need until the fall to get new US relevant artwork/mandatory contents disclosures designed for the packaging, to get the new packaging sourced from our suppliers, and to start distributing the resulting bottles/cans to our distributors.
Totally valid response :-) And I think that's another great angle as well that you can bring to a conundrum like Gmail or Google Search, like Time to Value or Engagement, etc.
As an extension, what we're seeing with OpenAi et al. is that they are capturing that attention and taking search with them. And so (as I referred to a couple comments down) OpenAI and the others are in the Google pre-2006 moment where the products are highly successfully engaging and grabbing our attention, but they haven't quite found the business model that prints money in the way Google Ads do.
This has got to be one of the most loaded question I have ever seen on here. Could you perhaps be clearer with what you want to ask? It sounds like you are insinuating that the guy is a bad person in some vague, nondescript way.
Agreed. And I added an update to give a more thoughtful response. I've been on the receiving side of trick questions, so I do understand. How you ask the question, which I didn't phrase here, is important. Google Search or Gmail are great case study style questions. Here's an oldie but a goodie about it from 2006:
To answer your question: I am insinuating nothing. There is a certain vibe to his comments which struck me from having noticed it in certain people, and the effects it has on their relationships with others. From his answer, I gather that he doesn't care. So, that's it for the free remote psychoanalysis by HN comments.
Yup, but my earlier comment was a bit flippant, so here’s a more in-depth response.
It was an answer to the OP’s question about why Gmail search feels broken, and a nod to the previous comment pointing out Google’s core business is selling ads. In that context, Gmail isn’t optimized for superior search. It’s part of a data funnel that enables keyword targeting, ad placement, and behavioral profiling.
For me, there’s a deeper product lesson here, but also a signal about how someone thinks. Whether a candidate answers “ads” or “search” or “email” isn’t what really matters. It’s the why behind the answer that matters most.
At the end of the day, business models directly shape product decisions. That tension is something every product manager has to navigate because they sit between the business and technical sides of a company. Being able to see and articulate that tradeoff, especially when user needs diverge from monetization incentives, is key to both building effectively and being a successful product manager.
More often the business model, like subscriptions, is more tightly connected to the product. User has X problem that product Y solves and the company receives Z dollars in exchange for access. However, there are many examples where the pricing or monetization strategy is not so clearly connected to the feature set, of which google search is a great example.
For the record, I don't ask this question to junior PMs.
You are doing your job well, and for that I salute you.
However, you highlight the real problem with ad-supported tech. It creates perverse incentives that makes the world an objectively worse place for most just to sell another ad. It justifies actions and data collection that would be illegal if it were anything other than a large corporation peforming that activity. At some point in history the words, "just trying to make my quarterly numbers", will be looked at with the same level of horror and shame as a similar phrase was over 75 years ago.
I'm assuming whatever they're currently doing involves machine learning so uses more compute than the simple correct solution that a CS freshman could code up.
I think it is a hard problem that requires a lot of work to get right. The ancient “Google Desktop Search” from 20 years ago was probably the best email search I’ve seen. Products like that require alot of man-hours and are expensive.
> If I had to pick one thing I dislike the most about HOAs, it would be this. There is never a guarantee that your quiet HOA will remain that way in the future. Which, to me, seems like a crazy chance to take.
Exactly this. HOA boards have a great tendency to attract the interests of the most busy-body, have to dictate to everyone what they do, Karen's that exist in the area covered by the HOA. Such that, over time, the original HOA that just maintained common areas and only got involved in egregious violations mutates into one that has rules specifying exactly where, by measurement, you are to position your trash container in relation to your garage door when it is not out front for trash pickup day. One of the worst offenders of HOA's near me has exactly that rule (position of trash container in relation to garage door) and the HOA has paid "inspectors" to drive around each trash pickup day after the HOA decreed time that the container should be returned to this location, to look for violations of the position and write folks up.
There was an entire story in the local newspaper about this pettiness on the part of this particular HOA (which is how I learned they had "trash can position relative to garage door" rules and that they had paid "inspectors" to monitor compliance).
And all it takes is for those with "controlling personality disorder" [1] to start running, and getting, elected to the HOA boards for this to happen. And for most HOA areas, the only population group even interested in running for HOA board member are the "controlling personality disorder" types. So no matter who one votes for, the HOA slowly mutates into a "control everyone, everywhere, all the time" one.
[1] I.e., those personality types that want to control everything that someone else is allowed to do.
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