johan_larson

11 ms·

61.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Armies typically have minimum (and sometimes maximum) heights, to ensure soldiers will fit into uniforms and standardized gear. The US Army, for instance, has had a minimum height for men of 5' 0" for a long time. If those who are
62.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Ending the Selective Service System is certainly an option. It's unlikely the US will need a mass draft any time soon, and if it did need to draft young people (or just men) in large numbers, it wouldn't be all that difficult to a
63.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I'd say the obvious comparison is to Brazil. The upper end of Brazilian society lives in first-world conditions. Some of them a really rich. But the bottom end lives in the third world, in gang-run unregulated slums that have dodgy wat
64.
by johan_larson 8y ago
It doesn't matter. Are the Indians and Chinese going to stop pounding on the doors because the American government makes the rules marginally more strict? No, probably not.
65.
by johan_larson 8y ago
"Senior" in this industry typically means "not a beginner". You should not be right out of school if you are applying for these positions. And "experience required" is certainly a useful concept. But "seni
66.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Shrug. Seems ok to me. Maybe I'm a robot.
67.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Mandatory nudity from ankles to eyebrows, sunrise to sunset.
68.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Maybe it's time to contract out the entire operation of the California state government to some more trustworthy entity. Someone who can actually build public infrastructure. Someone like France. Or possibly Singapore.
69.
by johan_larson 8y ago
A phenomenon like Burning Man needs to be somewhat inaccessible to actually work. If it's too easy, it fills up with people who aren't committed enough. In the beginning, that inaccessibility was provided by the sheer obscurity an
70.
by johan_larson 8y ago
QZ: Oregon has more legal cannabis than they can consume in six years. OREGON: Challenge accepted.
71.
by johan_larson 8y ago
My impression is that stack ranking with forced attrition can, if applied for a short period, shake a sleepy low-performing organization out of its lethargy. But if you try to run things that way long-term you get problems. People stop thin
72.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Forced attrition messed up Microsoft pretty hard before they stopped the practice. Getting rid of mediocrities is a good thing, but if you mandate getting rid of X% per year, people stop cooperating with their coworkers, because those cowor
73.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Yes, if someone set up a honeypot to catch egomaniacs it would look just like that page.
74.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Is this term sheet descriptive or prescriptive? Are you telling us what standard straight-forward terms are right now, or what they should be right now (and would be, in a slightly better world)?
75.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Bloomberg covered this phenomenon back in 2018. The article generated 446 comments on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17566164
76.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I have to wonder who the target audience for this article is. The advice just doesn't seem particularly actionable. A statement like, "I think the biggest competitive advantage in business—either for a company or for an individual
77.
by johan_larson 8y ago
"I'm reading an article on HN about Japanese rail workers pointing at things." "Done." "I'm composing a snarky comment about Japanese rail workers pointing at things." "Done." "I'm
78.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I have to believe scholars who study pop music did this research decades ago, though probably by hand.
79.
by johan_larson 8y ago
It is useful to consider the audience the book was written for: first-year students at MIT in the 1980s. That was a formidably bright and meticulously prepared group. Many of them already had some programming experience from high school. It
80.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I thought "Big Swinging Dicks" was a purely figurative term.
81.
by johan_larson 8y ago
It's amazing how much time and effort some people are willing to spend on make-believe. At least in pro sports and entertainment there's big money on the line. (Don't get me wrong. I admire cleverness, devotion, and capacity
82.
by johan_larson 8y ago
"If you keep getting in fights with your white buddies, you won't have the energy to push around brown people." Now there's a message for our time.
83.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I don't remember being offered a package or template or anything like that. This was in 1995; I expect things have improved.
84.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I wrote one thesis in LaTeX and one in Word. There were some challenges each way, but all in all, doing it in Word was easier. WYSIWYG helped a lot, Word had good documentation, and LaTeX was hard to customize to meet the university's
85.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I've been coding for 37 years now, counting what I did in childhood. I can remember getting a real charge out of doing it. It was a real thrill to be able to tell the machine what to do and see things happen on the screen. But I don&#x
86.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Facebook was started in 2004, so it's a good 15 years old now. It also has 30,000 employees. That's way to big and way too old to be a startup in any meaningful sense. It's a big and powerful, but young, company.
87.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Science isn't short of brains. It's short of money. There's an overabundance of clever and highly trained people chasing too little funding, which is why you find so many young scientists in their thirties grinding through se
88.
by johan_larson 8y ago
The world is not short of people who want to work in healthcare. Because of high barriers to entry, professionals in the field are very well paid and young people are desperate to enter it. Given this vast army of the aspiring, you can be c
89.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Probably the sheer amount of time and effort legal campaign has consumed. No government agency has infinite money and staff.
90.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I wonder why the government fought this tooth and nail. Do they just really hate to lose, so they double down time and again? Or are they worried that losing once will open the floodgates to a torrent of litigation?

More ›