mdkess

15 ms·

61.
by mdkess 14y ago
To quote Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: "Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are 'It might have been.'" And Tennyson/M: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" And Bruce Lee: "If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or
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by mdkess 14y ago
Therein lies the challenge. And I agree with you that it comes down to dedication. Heck, the stuff I'm most interested in today I didn't even know existed five years ago. The article said: | "Passion is something that will follow you as you
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by mdkess 14y ago
And this has nothing to do with cultural biases against divorce, and subjugation of women, right? There was a far lower attrition with slave labor as well.
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by mdkess 14y ago
Passion leads to hours of practice, and hours of practice leads to success. While you can't force yourself to be passionate about your current job, if you follow your passions - sincerely - I think that more often than not, it'll lead to a
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by mdkess 14y ago
There will always be illegal immigrants. Do you know what happens when you exclude a group of people from using the legal system? They create their own. If illegal immigrants can't get car insurance, they drive without car insurance. If the
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by mdkess 14y ago
Which is why I think that having a guideline is important - if only to set the expectation when you join the company. If a company had a "no vacation policy", and when pressed about it, they said "just get your work done - we don't track va
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by mdkess 14y ago
For 20 people, you don't need policies at all. But probably you're not planning on being a 20 person company forever, and the more people, the harder it is to change things. As for vacation, why not - you get 2 weeks vacation as a signing b
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by mdkess 14y ago
I disagree with some of this list. Having never started a company but worked at a few, here's my opinionated and uninformed rant. Picking your own email address and hostname sounds fine in theory, but as the company grows, having a naming s
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by mdkess 14y ago
The way the industry views raises is bizarre. In my mind, there should be an automatic say 3% raise to everyone's salary every year, performance review aside. If someone's not worth 3% more to you after a year, they should be fired. After t
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by mdkess 14y ago
That sounds nice, but I don't think it's true, especially not in the near future. We're already in a state where society could go on with say 30% of the population working to produce food, but we keep growing, because as a society we want m
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by mdkess 14y ago
Find some places that pay minimum wage and will also pay for education in some form. And do you really think that the unemployment problem in unskilled or low skill labor is simply because there aren't enough people who can show up and foll
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by mdkess 14y ago
Of course, there are always counter examples. A stuck clock is right twice a day. And someone always wins the lottery. Stats don't lie though, parents income and education is highly correlated with their childrens' success (and apparently e
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by mdkess 14y ago
Do you really think that there are that many zero marginal product people? Or do you think that it's mostly people who are unwilling or don't have the education background to do work with utility? I feel like a lot of minimum wage is a big
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by mdkess 14y ago
We've had low margin businesses forever, that's not going to change. I agree with what you said, single party billing is great, except Apple also sells software on their platform, and is exempt from the cut. So that means that Apple is the
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by mdkess 14y ago
I think that a useful skill for anyone is to be able to listen to someone's opinion on something and gain information or knowledge from it, without agreeing with what the person is saying or even taking a position on it at all. This skill t
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by mdkess 14y ago
Is this true (by the definition on the site)? I mean, certainly O(log(n!)) <= O(n log n) since we can just say that log(n!) = log(n) + log(n-1) + ... + log(1) <= log(n) + log(n) + ... + log(n) = n * log(n), but is the bound tight? I
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by mdkess 14y ago
I think that when you're designing a logo, you need to have a clear silhouette. Right now it looks like a fancy header for a header of a section of a website, not a logo. Look at Pepsi, Coke, Apple, Toyota, YCombinator - - all of them have
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by mdkess 14y ago
These nagging bugs pay back dividends in the long term if you are on the right side of them though, which was my point. Let's say that I get a 6% raise every year because I ask for it (either directly, or through promotion), while people wh
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by mdkess 14y ago
Sexism that I've noticed has been very subtle. I work with some very intelligent people, so I can't imagine anyone is overtly sexist (ie. thinking that women can't do this job, would not hire a person simply based on gender etc.), but still
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by mdkess 14y ago
I found this http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/cpumemory.pdf to be a very good starting point for getting into serious low level development. It's a difficult read, so go through it slowly and with a pad of paper for notes, but very informat
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by mdkess 14y ago
I have a ThinkPad (T420) too, I love it. I agree with everything that you said - nobody else comes close. Plus, their keyboards are by far the nicest laptop keyboards out there. The X220 is in my mind the perfect portable laptop... except,
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by mdkess 14y ago
I totally agree with you on this, but I think that is a separate issue at least in that it doesn't address immigration, but I do think that it touches at the heart of the problem. Companies like Microsoft are willing to give kids out of sch
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by mdkess 14y ago
As a Canadian, one thing that I don't understand is why companies don't move to Canada. I feel like working in the states, I've priced myself out of the Canadian market (since salaries in Canada for engineers seem to be about 60-70% of what
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by mdkess 14y ago
The nail that sticks out gets the hammer. Brilliant management strategy.
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by mdkess 14y ago
That's an excuse if I've ever heard one. You would be so lucky to get sued. "I'd be a famous musician, but I'm worried about the publicity."
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by mdkess 14y ago
This is a beautiful post. Here's the deal. As you get older, more and more people fall into mediocrity. Age is a number - it's also a responsibility. You will meet 40 year olds who you'll think - what the fuck did you do with your life? And
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by mdkess 14y ago
I really don't like free to play games, as they're implemented now. The current strategy is simply "pay to progress" rather than to unlock more functionality. I was playing this game called Tiny Tower, and in it, you could pay to finish bui
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by mdkess 14y ago
How do visas work in this situation? Are you allowed to work on tourist visas?
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by mdkess 14y ago
This looks really awesome. For a long time, I've thought that multi-touch has been very under used, it's nice to see people thinking outside of the desktop OS paradigm. I would imagine this would be quite useful with a Wacom tablet as well
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by mdkess 14y ago
Not really profound, but a good, quick way to think about clock cycles: A 1 MHz machine executes 1 clock cycle in 1 microsecond (ie. 1 MHz is 1,000,000 Hz, and there are 1 million microseconds per second). So a reasonable machine, say 2 GHz

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