ellius

9 ms·

31.
by ellius 7y ago
I think we all just want something simple to clean up the giant, overwhelming mess of modern life, so we're primed to approve of anything that looks like a silver bullet.
32.
by ellius 7y ago
Taleb makes the argument this should actually be obvious. Old ideas have survived over time, which suggests they are good enough to be passed down from generation to generation. New ideas are a complete crapshoot, and you have to do a lot m
33.
by ellius 7y ago
One thing not highlighted in this article is that Seneca considered "leisure" the highest virtue. He talks about Augustus, for example, and other prominent Romans who "won" the rat race, and says they basically wasted th
34.
by ellius 7y ago
The second option is possible if you declare an abstract dependency (preferably just a contract like an interface) and make your persistence layer implement it. I highly recommend "Clean Architecture" if you'd like to learn m
35.
by ellius 7y ago
Small quibble, I really like inverting the (business logic) –> (persistence) dependency. That way your business logic drives everything, which aligns with your point about the app being "logic with an HTTP interface." Agree who
36.
by ellius 7y ago
A lot of people here are defending ADHD/procrastination, and while I agree with a lot of the points (especially the one about industrialization being maladaptive), it's worth considering the personal cost of not mitigating these b
37.
by ellius 7y ago
Or QE was essentially money printing that rippled through the shadow banking system in such a way that the price of certain assets (companies/stocks, real estate) are inflating indefinitely.
38.
by ellius 7y ago
John Cleese videos, esp. "Creativity in Management" on YouTube "The Creative Habit" "Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention" If you really take it to heart, though, the Cleese video is a
39.
by ellius 7y ago
There are probably use cases where core language features like "highly concurrent/distributed by default" or "highly safe low-level operations" are worth the risk, but in general this is my answer too. I just finish
40.
by ellius 7y ago
I'm not sure this is a counterargument, but if a company did this in an open way I could trust, I would buy EVERYTHING from them. Fridge, washer, dryer, dishwasher, televisions, small electronics, cars, whatever. You name it I'd b
41.
by ellius 7y ago
I attended a private high school that gave us a remarkable degree of freedom at a young age. We were allowed to drive off campus as upper classmen, choose a wide range of electives, and generally were treated as the near-adults we were. Rec
42.
by ellius 7y ago
• The Revolt of the Public: No book has done a better job of describing the current moment in history • Masters of Doom: Reminded me what it means to care about work and have fun doing it • Team of Rivals: A remarkable work of history and p
43.
by ellius 7y ago
If anything, the amount of shadow work foisted on customers has increased. Somehow it's a norm to have to go through a bunch of bullshit to have errors corrected and often just to get halfway decent service. It's obviously worse i
44.
by ellius 7y ago
This is the same impulse behind many disasters of history. It's a classic "who watches the watchmen?" problem. You can't perfect human society, and attempting to do so through the blunt centralization of power into the h
45.
by ellius 7y ago
You need strong engineering management to communicate the business advantages of well-made software. The benefits of good software are exceedingly hard to measure and understand as a businessperson, because design is a lot like risk managem
46.
by ellius 7y ago
I think people fail to deeply reflect on what they want from life. I'll share my list, because maybe it will help someone else to figure out theirs: • Maintain my body • Maintain a sense of mental tranquility • Work on projects and lea
47.
by ellius 7y ago
My team (Spring Boot / Angular greenfield app in an enterprise) has a guy that transitioned over from .NET and is totally new to the Java ecosystem. He has 30+ years experience with SQL and can't stand entity frameworks or make th
48.
by ellius 7y ago
I've found the opposite. When I start to write a test, I often realize I don't know exactly what I need to do because the requirements are unclear or somehow conflict with some other assumption of the system. That realization prom
49.
by ellius 7y ago
Funny enough, one of my favorite talks argues the opposite. "Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain." I won't attempt to summarize but it's well worth a watch.
50.
by ellius 7y ago
Not to nitpick too hard, but I'm pretty confident we know that was Pascal. The rest are misattributions.
51.
by ellius 7y ago
Simple is easier than complex the same way that exercise is easier than chronic obesity. If you have the discipline to do the obvious that's great, but it takes willpower to create or do the simple thing. Oftentimes it's easier or
52.
by ellius 7y ago
Lack of perfect information is a well-known failure mode of standard economic models. It may be true that people value their inherently scarce time more than they value the improved light bulb buying decision they could make by obtaining mo
53.
by ellius 7y ago
I agree. I had Bloomberg on that list but it's gotten steadily worse over the last few years. Some parts of WSJ and NYT are still pretty good, but they're flooded by drivel and hard to find.
54.
by ellius 7y ago
The problem is you don't get to pick and choose who your culture affects. If you hire people with those opinions and then tell them they need to watch what they say, other employees get the same message. You may have people who aren&#x
55.
by ellius 7y ago
My take on tests is that they serve two purposes: 1. As a security system for your code 2. As a tool for thought, prompting the application of inverse problem solving Both of these have costs and benefits. If you consider the metaphor of th
56.
by ellius 7y ago
Valid point, but the article does mention that ants are at least somewhat constrained to the narrow paths laid out by their colony's pheromones.
57.
by ellius 7y ago
It's a really hard argument to refute, because once you bring "power" and the "subconscious" into arguments almost nothing is falsifiable. Nevertheless some possible contradictory evidence: 1. Look at all of the peo
58.
by ellius 7y ago
That "directly" is carrying a lot of weight, though. The salesmen have nothing to sell without all of the work of the other employees. I prefer the conception of profit and cost in "The Goal": you have throughput (money
59.
by ellius 7y ago
I was hit hard by melancholy a few days ago. Thanks for the well wishes, sympathies from Ohio and I hope your pain mellows.
60.
by ellius 7y ago
You can get value from making your own. I have a small list for coding that says "commit, test, story" that reminds me to be always saving my work, coding against a test, and testing against a story. As long as you remember that y

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