m104

9 ms·

31.
by m104 14y ago
Awesome! It's nice to read accounts like this from those who have braved the task and successfully completed a ground-up rewrite. Looking ahead, I can see the formation of dedicated development teams who specialize in rewriting working-but-
32.
by m104 14y ago
The sure-fire one-liner Bash way to iterate over files with arbitrary filenames, with any number of files (0 to millions) is this: $ find $CRITERIA -print0 | xargs -0 -r -n $BATCH_SIZE $COMMAND What this does is use 'find' to find
33.
by m104 14y ago
Just a note for those who suffer from RSI-related symptoms of some sort or another (because this article doesn't say a word about it): pay attention to your sleeping positions! I started suffering from pins-and-needles in my fingers a few y
34.
by m104 14y ago
I highly recommend looking for any dissonance between the ground-floor workers and management/leadership. The best scenario you can find (a truly rare gem of an employer), whether startup or established company, is where everyone is on the
35.
by m104 14y ago
I totally agree. There's major street cred to be gained from speaking truth to power. But, as the article points out, there are consequences also. I think the blog article is trying to tell newer/naive employees that, when asked by a soon-t
36.
by m104 14y ago
The crux of this is a simple question: if the company is really interested in honest, constructive, confidential, consequence-free criticism, why only ask the ex-employees? Companies that really do value honest, constructive, confidential,
37.
by m104 14y ago
This is so much better advice than "fight the system", "convince your boss", "use these talking points", etc. If the poster really wants to keep that particular job, but wants to also improve the environment, they need to start following al
38.
by m104 14y ago
Right, I doubt that it scales linearly like that either. My comparison was just as absurd as the article's comparison in the other direction. Really, we don't have a clue how much Apple is making or losing by replacing these batteries. My g
39.
by m104 14y ago
"Admittedly, the battery in the MacBook Pro is more powerful than the Air's: Apple rated the former at 95 watt-hours (Whr), meaning that it can produce one watt of power for 95 hours, or, say, 5 watts of power for 19 hours. The 13-in. MacBo
40.
by m104 14y ago
To put it in perspective, though, most of Apple's customers only started buying their hardware in the last two years and rarely purchased older models.
41.
by m104 14y ago
Ah, I can see why our opinions differ so much: you believe that human error can be mitigated or eliminated with the right systems, training, documentation, procedures, etc. In other words, you can build a system that, while being run and ma
42.
by m104 14y ago
Excellent, I'm glad that's been your experience. Mine hasn't been like that and I've waded through too many everyone's-so-friendly-and-getting-nothing-done-and-always-stressed teams with weak leadership and low standards. I'm hoping that yo
43.
by m104 14y ago
My points are based on the commonalities of the three great teams I've worked for at ten different employers. It's not one company, just a set of observations. And they weren't all IT/software/web companies, either. One was the best IT team
44.
by m104 14y ago
I think this kinda stuff always creates a two-tiered team, so it shouldn't be relied on as a way to hedge anything. You get the A-team/"our people" and the B-team/"their people" and right from the start everyone knows this. Then there's dif
45.
by m104 14y ago
That's a really good point and I think that, for the employees who didn't last more than six months (or were terminated right away), this was a bitter experience. In other words: if you, as an employee or employer, are looking for more of a
46.
by m104 14y ago
It's not one organization, it's the commonality I've noticed from three of the ten that I've worked for that had fantastic teams. The other seven have had wildly different measures and procedures for employees, but each with worse results.
47.
by m104 14y ago
Right, I didn't make that clear: A human mistake comes from the fact that we are fallible humans with crappy memories and fat fingers and a working set of beliefs about the world that may be entirely wrong. Type something in wrong? Why didn
48.
by m104 14y ago
If the goal were to minimize the number of false positives, I would agree. But the managers of these teams had enough experience to know that they'd rather hire one person a month for a year and only keep one gem than to spend days or weeks
49.
by m104 14y ago
The best teams I've ever worked for had this set of common traits: 1) On the offer day, potential employees were told there were high expectations and no fixed rules to govern what that meant. There was leniency in some cases, but manager/s
50.
by m104 14y ago
I doubt remembering everything makes life a lot better, but there actually is someone we can ask: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/17-04/ff_perfec...
51.
by m104 14y ago
No interesting implications, just the reaffirmation that real significance is more important than statistical significance.
52.
by m104 14y ago
Talk about being too smart to solve the problem... The article is comparing apples to concrete blocks. When you're hungry, you want apples. When you're building a retaining wall, you want concrete blocks. One can't substitute for the other.
53.
by m104 14y ago
From the article: "Why is hiring so tough? Because talented people don’t need you anymore. They don’t need the benefits because they know if worse comes to worse, they will find a comfy job. The options are there for them, therefore the ris
54.
by m104 14y ago
Not a serious comment, but that image of Sergey reminds me a lot of the Bill Gates "borg" icon that Slashdot liked to use. How ironic is that?
55.
by m104 14y ago
NTP is great and all, but... When you're timing something that needs accuracy, you use a timer not a clock. If you need to use a clock, you use one clock not all the clocks. Yes, I work in the medical industry. Yes, we generally use timers
56.
by m104 15y ago
Ha, some bots are being written as we speak! Or, someone out there has some killer hand-eye coordination.
57.
by m104 15y ago
If the deadlines are ridiculous and your employer is constantly blowing through them, then your employer's management doesn't take deadlines seriously. What I mean is, the deadlines aren't being realistically created and measured and there'
58.
by m104 15y ago
Ah, look at that, I totally misread where you were going! ;-) In my experience, regulations and crazy laws aren't really a competitive advantage or disadvantage because all of the market players are playing by similar rules. I'm not saying
59.
by m104 15y ago
There are many ways to bring some order back into the world, as you say, but it can be a struggle. In my experience, business leaders will support simpler systems and processes if (and only if!) the benefits clearly outweigh the costs. As
60.
by m104 15y ago
Lovely, now the cycle is complete and we're reading about (and commenting about!) stories that refer to Hacker News comments.

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