ellius

15 ms·

91.
by ellius 7y ago
Can't speak for OP, but my appetite and then weight have steadily decreased for six years since beginning CPAP. As a person with apnea I had no idea that my constant fatigue was causing me to eat so much, or making sustained exercise s
92.
by ellius 7y ago
Having worked in the financial industry for a few years, this is definitely necessary. Financial companies over the last few decades have shifted from a culture of responsibility to a culture of sales. There is constant pressure to "st
93.
by ellius 7y ago
What's great about this is you're hedging your bets (prudent) while acknowledging the worker's needs as well. The problem without some kind of middle ground like this is that it reeeeeally feels like getting screwed when you&
94.
by ellius 7y ago
That may very well happen over time. Non-Bay workers may bid down the price of coding labor, and remote workers from disparate markets will bid against each other, and eventually some "global market clearing price" may be establis
95.
by ellius 7y ago
But prices aren't based on fairness, they are based on demand and supply. If there is a supply of workers willing to work at a lower price in areas outside of San Francisco, then it makes sense for a company to purchase their cheaper l
96.
by ellius 7y ago
I'm someone who chose the predictable suburban values, and I still say amen to your analysis (especially the final sentence). It's like people have no sense of what real character (in a person or place) is actually comprised of. A
97.
by ellius 7y ago
That's exactly why you should read it, and other great works. "Those who don't learn from history" and all that. I just recently read "On the Shortness of Life" by Seneca and I'll be damned if it couldn&#x
98.
by ellius 7y ago
I'm glad the NYT has with a single op-ed answered the fundamental question of the American Experiment. Snark aside, there are entire great works of Western thought on the question of whether men are capable of governing themselves. It
99.
by ellius 7y ago
The biggest thing for me is experiencing my own emotions almost like coming upon landmarks while driving. They stop being "you" and start to be just part of the scenery as you drive along through your life.
100.
by ellius 7y ago
Aircraft, hospitals, hotels — a million complex bespoke things are built every day. Cost and time projections are inevitable.
101.
by ellius 7y ago
One counterintuitive trick that has worked for me is to fire up my "manager brain" in daily life. When you do most white collar work, especially as a manager, your job consists largely of filtering a huge number of potential input
102.
by ellius 7y ago
Life is essentially a big collection of systems or games, and choosing to play the wrong ones is worse than playing the right ones badly. You can learn tricks to get promoted at some place that has a shitty culture, shitty bosses, etc., but
103.
by ellius 7y ago
I think programming as a profession provides three main services: 1. Implementing user/client features (meeting demand) 2. Designing and maintaining an architecture flexible enough to continue adding features at a reasonable pace 3. Re
104.
by ellius 7y ago
People not being on the same page is a massive problem. It especially constrains the leader herself, because she can't make any strong, clear decisions without second-guessing whether she has the authority to do so.
105.
by ellius 7y ago
Yes and no. You could summarize 'The Wealth of Nations' the same way and it would also sound pretty basic and not worth the 800+ page read. I agree in general that 'Thinking in Bets' is conceptually thin, in the sense th
106.
by ellius 7y ago
Could be wrong but I believe it depends on the state.
107.
by ellius 7y ago
As in all things, we humans are predisposed to think in all-or-nothing terms. Agile works or it doesn't. Lean is effective or it's not. People just don't want to do the hard and nuanced work of realizing that these are just m
108.
by ellius 7y ago
Purely anecdotal, but I was a tutor for two years out of college and planned to be a teacher (originally college, then high school). I went into a different field for 3 reasons: 1. Pay 2. Professionalism - all of the teachers I saw and talk
109.
by ellius 7y ago
I'm not an expert, but anecdotally my uncle is a chemist at a company that makes plastics and they make all of theirs from natural gas. They do not drill, refine, or otherwise use oil.
110.
by ellius 7y ago
I disagree with the other responses. I think it's both. You can get very quick results and feedback for experiments related to implementation. Code compiles or doesn't, tests pass or they fail. But whether you actually built the c
111.
by ellius 7y ago
In other words, marketing is very important. I think as technical people we like to "evaluate things on merit," but the reality is that the technological complexity of our society has become such that it is virtually impossible fo
112.
by ellius 7y ago
This is a really interesting point. It reminds me of the story of the American soldier meeting a former Vietcong many years after the Vietnam war. The American said, "Every time we met you guys in the field we beat you. You never won a
113.
by ellius 7y ago
I tried to think of a counterargument to this and drew an almost total blank. There have been some great works of art over say the last 20 years or so—"Breaking Bad," "The Sopranos," and the like—but it's almost com
114.
by ellius 7y ago
This is actually discussed very intelligently in "The Mythical Man-Month." The author explains that large software projects have an inherent tension between coherence and efficiency. A small team maintains coherence, but cannot ge
115.
by ellius 7y ago
I think the point is that "data" is useless until it becomes "knowledge," and that turning data into knowledge is a complicated and philosophical act. Business being business, most of the people running the show were nev
116.
by ellius 7y ago
Architectural coherence is such an important part of software design. I agree with your point completely—you need specialists for deep, specific problems, but you also need people with a view of the entire system.
117.
by ellius 7y ago
Loose interpretation of "tools" but I pair program. It does wonders for clarity and focus most of the time, but can be exhausting and sometimes counterproductive for deep thought and analysis.
118.
by ellius 7y ago
I disagree with this completely. Development is not line work, and doing it like line work creates unmaintainable, expensive crap. "The Mythical Man-Month" explains this well. Conceptual coherence is of the utmost importance in ef
119.
by ellius 7y ago
Excellent
120.
by ellius 7y ago
After fixing a recent bug, I asked my client company what if any postmortem process they had. I informally noted about 8 factors that had driven the resolution time to ~8 hours from what probably could have been 1 or 2. Some of them were th

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