jkingsbery

12 ms·

61.
by jkingsbery 4y ago
I try not to question the intelligence of others that I don't know, but this might be a case where that's merited. Leaving aside whether words can cause harm (which - I don't know, maybe they can), there are a fair number of
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
I'm not sure how a quote by a musical composer about how he imagines conservatives must think is very helpful or convincing. I agree that "the opposite is clearly worthwhile," but most conservatives I've read also agree.
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
This isn't a thing to worry about at this point. In the real world (outside of programming competitions, that is), programmers don't get clear instructions for what we're doing, and what instructions we get deal with messy as
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
For example - sometimes people get confused about what is meant by a "faucet," and so using "faucet" as a variable name could lead to confusion.
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
Among the problems this article ignores is the relatively large fixed cost needed to go from a framework/internal-DSL to a separate "language." Unless you are in a situation where lots of people have that same problem, then i
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
Right... I can't say I'm extremely well read in this (so I'd appreciate correction if someone knows better), but it sounds pretty uncontroversial that (1) batteries take a long time to charge, which is not convenient for many
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
In software engineering, many seem to know about Chesterton's Fence, but hardly anyone seems to know much about Chesterton. I found Orthodoxy, which many consider his best book, to help not simply with one particular topic, but just ab
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
I had a similar reaction. It's pretty rare that you want someone to be surprised by what you have to say in a big meeting like that. Ideally, the goal of a large meeting like that is to say, "I've collected the data, we&#x2
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
You know what else doesn't help? That obnoxious thing where each word in a sentence gets a period after it. I'm pretty sure that doesn't help either. Just write out sentences with the period at the end so you don't sound
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
Lack of execution in your tech roadmap can sink your startup. However, effective execution by your engineering team does not guarantee success. The thing that leads to success is product-market fit and growing revenue. Tech can be a barrier
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
A few thoughts: 1. There's been a big difference between mostly hiring generalists, and only hiring generalists. When you only hire generalists, all those generalists are trying to figure out the tech from scratch, which can be messy
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
TL;DR: Plato's Cave meets The Giver.
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
I'd very much be in favor of having more separation between teachers and those who assess students. Is this teacher intellectually hazing students? I don't know, maybe. Are these students whining that a traditionally hard class is
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
Besides what others have mentioned (the entertainment value in reading), I think there are at least a couple other things at play. 1. When asked about a particular thing from a particular non-fiction book (or lecture, or podcast), one might
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
I only did this for one school, but at the college I went to I was able to sit in on a class or two when I was visiting it before attending. You might need to ask for permission, but I'd imagine most professors/teachers would be h
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
Yeah, the term "Loyalty Check" gives it a weird connotation. There are some executives that just want to hear "Yes" to their initiative, but, (1) the good ones don't, they prefer to hear corrective feedback late rat
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
This seems like good advice. This is pretty close to the "STAR" framework I've seen used(Situation, Task, Action, Result) - explain the context briefly, what you're doing, what you're doing to accomplish the thing y
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
I've gone back and forth on this. I think if you expect you'll only need a small group of people to know the name (the "Shelob" example at a startup), or you expect a large group but only are adding one name to learn (&q
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
What counts as "first line" depends on your situation. On my first team, we managed internal tools. Our customers were other people at Amazon, they submitted tickets to us directly. For some teams at Amazon, there is at least a fi
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
> Much less since you’re posting semi-anonymously in an Internet forum. I mean, I don't make it that hard for people to figure out who I am if that's a thing they care to do. But I think you're right about the larger part
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
Again, this is me speaking just my experience, and not for the company in any official capacity: Capital-P-Policies get followed. But there are a lot of lower-case-p-policies, more what you might call guidelines, that are not. Sometimes, fo
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
> My team spends 4 hours in sprint planning every week That seems excessive, but I don't know what area you work in. Does your team need to spend that long? I have heard of that happening within Amazon, but then people vote with the
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
> if you have to sit there and > rewrite it again and again > don't do it. I've heard of many writers - fiction, non-fiction, poets, all types - who do rewrite things again and again. I don't see why that wouldn&#x27
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
I've worked at Amazon a little over 6 years now. I have not found it toxic. I had the good fortune of joining Amazon working under a director who had been my manager at a previous company, so I knew what he was like going in, and when
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
While I appreciate this distinction and is an interesting way to look at things, I don't think it's inevitable. I've never worked at Facebook, but I work for another large tech company. Every project at our company, particula
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
I would imagine a good chunk of history majors go on to get their law degree or MBA, which would also make this analysis not conclusive.
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
> “When we work with undergraduates on digital humanities projects,” Quinn said, “it's often easier to take a humanities undergrad and teach them just enough coding to do what they need to do rather than taking some of the CS majors
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
I think there are lots of reasons why. One possible reason: no one whose job it is to write Python scripts was ever promoted for making an Excel spreadsheet when that is the simpler and more practical approach. And no manager of people who
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
> 90% precision is actually quite good It is good from the perspective of comparing this to other ML models. It is not good from a real world perspective.
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by jkingsbery 4y ago
Whether or not individuals are excessive, I'd rather live in a world in which people are more aware of when they've made a logical fallacy and work to argue for their point better, rather than the situation now in which people who

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