Also sorry I missed this, not only are we in Canada, we just signed our first partner on Vancouver Island – in Victoria, Pacific Heat Pumps: https://www.pacificheatpumps.ca/
We'll have a partner in Nanaimo very soon as well.
Yes this is actually the worst – when open minded people get a heat pump for "the right reasons" and then have buyer's remorse. Completely backfires the transition. Do you have a ducted or ductless heat pump? Sounds like ducted, and if so that might be part of it too. The air cools down in the ductwork and if that's not accounted for - i.e. you reuse ductwork that was meant for a furnace – you run into issues like this. And you also need a cold climate heat pump.
(disclosure/transparency I'm the founder of Quilt, a ductless heat pump manufacturer)
That seems really weird, the only real difference is a reversing valve that costs a couple bucks. A heat pump is an AC, it just can be run backwards to produce heating as well. In cooling it's literally the same thing.
Cool to see a Heat Pump article near the top of HN! I'm the founder/CEO of Quilt (https://www.quilt.com/), which is mentioned in the article, and a decade+ daily reader of this fine site. At Quilt we've run the Nest playbook for ductless heat pumps as our first product. The plan is to do what Tesla did for automotive to the built environment infrastructure category (HVAC, plumbing, etc) and create the first major American manufacturer in a ~century.
The article has bullet #1 in problems to solve as "Contractors who default to what they know." This was one of my founding hypotheses to and it turns out I was wrong, this was the hardest won learning yet at Quilt. We originally were fully vertically integrated and had our own installation force because of this reason – we wanted to solve all the big problems, thought contractors were one of them, and so had to become a contractor. But we quickly saw we were getting in the way of our own mission to accelerate the energy transition (because we had far far more demand than we could scale operations to reach it). So in March we (initially cautiously) switched partnering with existing contractors and I have been delighted by the industry reception. There are so so many existing contractors who want modern tech and see working with us as a breath of fresh air. I definitely sold them short and in retrospect it was naive and even a little elitist.
Yes, it's not about the menstruation, it's about pregnancy. Having a kid, especially the 1st, is the single largest shift in consumer spending in most people's lives (if they have kids). Aside from all the obvious spending on baby stuff, it predicts buying a house and where they might live, and puts that person (new mother, in this case) on a well-modeled path of buying behavior for the next 18 years. Needs and spending as children age through different phases are quite predictable and the spending is huge and touches almost every aspect of the person's life.
This is true in mid and late career, but not early. Lots of mathematically and engineering minded college students consider both CS and mech/aerospace as majors. Of course career prospects are a major influence.
Also fwiw my wife left a 10 year aerospace career, moving from NASA to Google, largely for comp reasons. She was a structural aerospace engineer, now she’s a data scientist.
Nice work! The most surprising part for me was that your websites says you are 20 years old – so I gotta ask, what was the motivation?
I'm 39, born in 1983, so I have serious nostalgia around Windows 95. I was 12 when it came out, my parents bought a Dell when it was new and those years were very formative for me. I assumed that nostalgia would be the only driver to do this... But you weren't born until ~8 years after it was released. I'm genuinely curious (and impressed!)
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The anti-Google frothing here has gotten so extreme it's crossed into comedy. Maybe instead of assuming incompetence and malevolence you should consider how hard it is to do this perfectly.
You don't have to like them, but the fact is the there are many many smart and competent people working on these systems trying to do the best for all users of Gmail and Google Accounts. Every day there are hundreds of very bad people around the world trying to gain access to Gmail accounts to do very bad things using that access. All the worst parts of humanity have found their way to leverage it. Balancing security and user-friendliness is one of the hardest problems in tech and it's impossible to do perfectly.
It seems from this thread that the OP did regain access and it didn't take that long.
Edit: I worked at Google for a few years, including on Gmail, and know that the people there really do care about all these things. But I left in the summer, no longer their employee.
You're at the wrong company. I've worked at a startup, at Twitter, and at Google and each time there was notable "raising of the bar" in the talent I was around. I know there's a lot of Google hate on HN, and it's such a big company it is true not every team is mind blowing, but... I've been there 5 years and I still have serious imposter syndrome and am constantly amazed by my colleagues. I get to work with some crazy smart and productive people. The suggestion isn't "go work for Google" (but maybe you should) but find a group of people that push you and amaze you and make you want to improve. They definitely are out there.
I don't think that's totally right. The idea is to give Canadians a leg up vs. foreign buyers (once the immediate 2 year foreign buyer ban expires, I assume). If your operating model is that foreign bidders are driving up the price and winning the marginal bid, then this is effectively a subsidy to allow Canadians to compete with the foreigners. Yes it will drive prices a bit higher and thus transfer more wealth to sellers. But the mix should be different, with more ownership ending up with Canadian purchasers than foreign ones (vs. today).
My dad is a competitive runner and ultramarathoner (now well into his 60s). One of his favorite sayings is ‘how do you know if you’re a runner? If you don’t think about running while doing it.’ I finally got into it too, and for me/us it’s much more like meditation. Or taking a hot shower. I let my mind wander, come up with most of my best ideas, and generally don’t think much about running while out there.
If you can’t do this you’re probably running too fast for your fitness level. I was for a long time.
"If I worked remotely for Facebook and wanted to move somewhere central where rents are three times higher, would Zuck give me a raise? Somehow I doubt it."
I can't speak for Zuck, but Sundar does. I work for Google. We also have local market indexed compensation (which I support, but not relevant to this point). If you move to a city with higher labor prices, you get paid more. I've seen it multiple times with people in my team. It's a total non issue, just paperwork. Very very standard.
No, you get a thick skin pretty quickly as a Google PM (and come to think of it as a Twitter PM too, my former job). Constructive comments are helpful and even the raw frustration I know is coming from a genuine place. Having your tools disappear sucks. I feel that too.
Just to confirm, the Area 120 labelling is meant to do exactly that. Area 120 projects do not have long-term commitments, explicitly. But the goal is for the successful ones to graduate to be a fully supported Google product and gain those commitments at that time (we have a number of examples of that happening).
[Disclosure I work at Google Area 120 and would be partly responsible for this type of decision]
This is a really helpful comment and I like the nod to transparency. Thank you! Not sure we could get quite so concrete publicly (there are lots of unknowns and wouldn't want to make commitments we can't keep), but aligning goals between the business, team, and users/customers is a great idea and something we can improve on.
We'll have a partner in Nanaimo very soon as well.