Four short links: 6 December 2016
Cute Lambda, Manufacturing Startups, Walled Wonderland, and Future Shopping
- AWS Lambda to Call You When Servers are Down — it’s not a replacement for Pingdom, but it’s a cute demonstration of the power of lambdas for gluing together services.
- How Not to F Up Your Manufacturing Startup — On the operations front, never leave anything to ambiguity. If a supplier says the item is coming “next week,” ask when exactly next week and get the tracking code.
- Facebook’s Walled Wonderland is Inherently Incompatible with News Media — Here is an important question: how does news fit in Facebook’s walled Wonderland? Short answer: it doesn’t. Unfiltered news doesn’t share well, not at all: it can be emotional, but in the worse sense; no one is willing to spread a gruesome account from Mosul among his/her peers. Most likely, unfiltered news will convey a negative aspect of society. Again, another revelation from The Intercept or ProPublica won’t get many clicks. Unfiltered news can upset users’ views, beliefs, or opinions.
- Amazon Go — store where payments happen automatically, and you just walk off with what you like. Will lead to an interesting social dynamic in the store: instead of checkout agents, there’ll be security staff to stop non-customers from stealing.
