Raidion

I think it depends on how you measure top 10% in a video game (especially the MMORPGs Asmongold plays), being a top 10% player by stats is a function of play time and 'grind'.

People actively looking at top 10% players can have more game knowledge and build efficiency than people who just grind bigger numbers.

Being an "effective" software engineer also depends on your definition of effective. Mark Zuckerberg was clearly an effective software engineer, but was he in the top 5% of engineers?

People judging their abilities by adjacent (and loosely correlated) metrics is a road to unhappiness.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure"

I've posted about this before, but this is just the hollowing out of the "middle" of the value curve.

Most people want something that's good enough, and they're not willing to pay for something that's N+1 good at 2N price. Other people want something that's N+5 good and will pay 3N price. As AI pushes down the lower bound of cost for creativity, the "mediocre" content creators/programmers/writers are going to get squeezed. At the same time, this means there is an untapped market for the people who can truly be creative and do great work.

Thinking the difference between the Sports Illustrated AI articles and premium sports journalism (The Athletic), blog spam recipes vs America's Test Kitchen, or CNN/Fox front page vs NYT/WaPo/Politico, etc. You're going to have to vote with your dollar to support the things you care about. If you're not willing to pay for the higher quality, you're going to get AI (or other "budget") content that's making it's money by just being good enough to get you to see the advertisements.

It's a free market out there and you need to be aware that just a few percent of people (probably roughly similar to the lurker/poster ratios) are the ones that enable high quality content to be successful. The HackerNews crowd are significantly more likely to be able to actively support creative pursuits that they find valuable, so I'd suggest you do so! Otherwise, when we don't reward quality, why wouldn't people just be mediocre?

I feel like teaching is mostly a one size fits all endeavor, but people learn and think in different ways, just like a processor is optimized for some operations but not others.

Take simple arithmetic like 12x17. Some people do the long form multiplication (carry the one..), some people say it's 12x10+12x7. Some remember 12x12 from times tables and go 12x12+12x5. Some people make it 24x8+12 => 48x4+12 => 50x4-8+12 etc. Some do it on the abacus in their heads.

All valid, though some are slightly more optimal than others. Good teachers empower alternative solutions and try to help people connect what they already know to what they already understand.

I think it all comes down to priorities. "Adults" are the ones that seem to have the best balance of those (for the location/culture) with the most experience living out those values (aka they learned it from their parents). Having money that's 75%+ percentile helps too.

I've experienced this moving from more rural spots in the south to a NE suburban existence. Lawns and landscaping matters. There is etiquette around how/when to put out your trash cans and leaves. Etiquette for how the kids should play around in the neighborhood. I've had to figure those out on the fly, but the kids learn those rules without even realizing it.

I think the most important thing about being an adult is making sure your kids are happy, healthy, and have opportunities to do well and be proud. You can't let them jump on every culture phenomenon, but you also have to let them be a part of the culture they're in. Unless you're doing the exact same thing as your parents did, it's going to take some figuring out, and that's totally ok. It's adult to figure things out.

Sometimes sites have code that triggers in debug mode and keeps it in a loop. Any tips there, or is the "break and modify source to remove it" the only way?

But phones without user replaceable batteries have advantages like water resistance, size, weight, etc.

If you mandate everything has to have replaceable batteries, you restrict the ability for consumers to choose devices that prioritize other things.

Only logic that I would say could be used is an environmental concern, but you'd need to really show that replaceable batteries would lead to significant improvements in the amount of e-waste we generate. If everything has a replaceable battery, but only a few people take advantage of it and the average lifetime of a phone remains constant-ish, it's really not valuable.

I think the replaceable battery thing is very much a HN bubble issue. It's not like there aren't phones with them. If more people wanted them, more people would sell them, but most people prefer the additional battery life, increased water resistance, and thinness of modern phones.

Poker being one of my favorite hobbies (probably 300k hands played lifetime), it's wild how much variance matters. Like a 4BB/100 winrate (aka you win 4 big blinds every 100 hands) is very much an "I can be a professional" winrate.

You have a ~10% chance over 100k hands to be <0 dollars earned. Likewise, 10% of time time you'll make twice that. Poker is fascinating in that there are a ton of people who never actually hit the true law of big numbers hands and walk around thinking "I'll never be good enough to play at X level" or "I'm a poker god with big winnings" not knowing how good they really are.

Professional players do actually get in statistically significant sample sizes, but for amateur players, most don't get enough hands to really understand their skill level.

I think Google still deserves a ton of credit. Online shopping is tricky, but information is incredibly easy to access, especially if you do know how to avoid clicking on Quora or WebMD style sites.

Google does a great job of shepherding you towards information and at the very least gives you additional context that you can use to corroborate or tune your search.

Not OP, but fwiw I think there are 2: Having the communications skills and domain knowledge to understand what problem needs to be solved and why, and having the technical skill to do that in the most direct manner that closely matches those constraints.

Sometimes you need to get better technically, sometimes you need to get better at figuring out the problem (solving the wrong problem isn't worth a lot. regardless how "clean" it is). Sometimes you need to get better at figuring out what you need to get better at.

Overengineering is part ego, sure, part new technologies and boredom, sure.

The biggest factor I've found in overengineering is the lack of a long term roadmap. If you need to build a feature X, and you engineer the bare minimum and need to put in the same amount of hours to do X+1, your management is going to be upset that you're taking too long to ship. You already had it 80% (in terms of feature complete) of the way there, why is that extra 20% as hard as the first 80%? So the engineers build up scar tissue. If you have to handle a ton of cases that you don't understand, why not build a CaseHandlerFactory so you can add the next feature faster?

A clear roadmap of "this is what we want in 1 year" will help solve over engineering. Otherwise engineers are incentivized to make their code as configurable, modifiable, and extendable, as possible, regardless of cost or business need. Not to mention all the additional time trying to figure out "canonical" data models that will "future-proof" the applications interfaces. If you have to iterate quickly (which is not as common as agile folks wish), you need to build up a raport with leadership to help them understand that speed comes with trade offs: faster might mean 'more work to change later', while slower to market today might mean faster iteration down the line. These discussions ARE valuable for leadership, as sometimes they need a quick win because of a Q3 earnings hole or contract, and sometimes they are willing to make longer term investments.

You move too quickly, they call your solutions hacky, you move too slowly, they call it overengineered. Everyone needs to be on the same page of what the change is trying to do: win short term, win long term, or somewhere in the middle.

I mean, a ton of people spend time driving, freeing that time would be huge efficiencies. Not to mention that it would mean cars can be shared between people, hugely reducing cost of operation and greenhouse emissions. Parking areas are reduced and put farther away from city centers, freeing land. If cars learn to share the road with us, they can also used optimized lanes and traffic patterns, speeding up commutes and reducing accidents.

Like it's not any one thing, but a self driving car really changes a lot of things about how cities and transport are designed. Interesting thing is that it's harder to have a self driving car now than it would be in 20 years, because as they get closer and closer, the roads are going to adapt to them.

I think that's what's weird about it. You're not paid for your work, you're paid for the value your work is expected create (although of course there are inefficiencies).

Someone with experience in a higher level role can make it look easy, and it is objectively 'easier' than a lot of jobs. 'Easy' discounts the work someone has often had to do to get into those roles, but it also highlights how privileged some of these people are.

Having a family that prioritizes education, the education actually being good, having the ability to focus on studies instead of needing money or to take care of family, the ability to go to college without worrying about finances... All these are huge levers that get people into these director+ roles, and those are things that aren't available to the wide swath of humanity. People do amazing things despite these challenges, but it's clearly harder to do.

I think it's less about the technology than the organizational structure. If you have more than one monolith (aka any company with an acquisition) you either have to have it in code in two places (gross) or as a library. If you have it as a library, then you have N version bumps to do an N pipelines to deploy. Not hard technically, but tons of overhead.

This means that you lose independence and doing A/B testing becomes very difficult when you can't really control what the user is seeing because the version is pinned.

A micro front end allows you to deploy independently, test independently, and truly own your code. Network hops are reasonably cheap for most consumer applications and collaboration on a shared component is very expensive.

I'm speaking from the perspective of a checkout flow, which my company is actively ripping out from the monolith in order to ensure people outside the monolith can use it AND to ensure we're able to do the price testing/conversion rate testing at a level that doesn't need a separate suite of tools for each business unit. This also has the benefit of reducing integration points with the billing system leading to better standardization and consolidated data in one billing system.

Did they really not fire anyone or close any buildings (reducing wear and tear)? It seems like their fixed costs do decrease significantly. Facilities upkeep is incredibly expensive and needs a lot of staff to make happen.

I'm a manager for two dev teams (~10 people) my breakdown per week is:

* 2.5h for 30 minute 1:1s for people that want them once a week

* 1.25h for 30 minutes 1:1s for people that want them every other week

* 2.5h for team standup (15 mins/day * 2 teams)

* 4h for project meetings (status or technical discussions) (4 projects at 1h a day, but might be two 30m)

* 2h ceremonies a week (could be refinement/planning/retro)

* 1h compliance meeting (internal or external as my department is heavily regulated)

* 1h manager sync with my peer managers + director

* 30m 1:1 with my boss (director)

* 30m 1:1 with product

* 30m 1:1 with project manager

* 2h "what's next" meetings with product + staff engineers + mgmt for our rough sizing and product pipeline (not every week, but if we're in the midst of a BIG project, swap this with syncs with other parts of the org working on the same thing)

That's 18h of meetings a week. Add on some recruiting/hiring meetings, ad hoc "let's get in a room and talk about it" risk discussions, random all hands, and some bursty higher level stuff (OKRs/goal setting/etc).

That's >20h a week, and I do feel like people need all of those to be productive. If I cut the 1:1s, attrition rises. If I cut the status meetings, stuff gets off track and fingers start being pointed. I'm pretty aggressive when it comes to cancelling 1:1 or status meetings. We'll do a lot of "we don't need this cross team sync meeting unless someone has something they want to talk about or ask questions on". Any time I spend on people or making sure we know what we're trying to accomplish has huge ROI, IMO.

FWIW: Was a former lead developer with decade plus experience hands on coding, so I believe I can bring at least some developer perspective. I have a CS degree, not a management one.

1 minute a month (upper bound) is hardly a deal breaker. If you were adjusting the watch regularly without hacking (as a pilot) you'd have an error rate that's probably close to 10x higher. 10+ minutes a month WOULD make a difference.

You already see this. Google "NFL oxygen masks". I'm sort of surprised I haven't heard about it in the context of shorter physical sports: I'd wonder what effect it would have on an 100m/200m/400m time or shotput distance to oxygen saturate like free divers do.

Yea, I feel like these people never got a chron daily data dump (times N customers). Scaling is dead simple, and there isn't a need (or ability) to instantaneously handle large bursty workloads in like 99% of cases.

Longer SLAs mean it's also easier to hit those SLAs. Giving the clients realistic SLAs is super important.

Amateur guitar player here, I feel like sometimes I don't know if my fingers have gotten the concept or if I've just learned a difficult passage by rote.

I'd love to have something that generates the same right hand picking pattern with a different left hand.

Also, I think there are licks that you have to be very precise with fingering or picking pattern. It would be cool to generate those.

My take on remote work as a manager for a company with significant name recognition:

I think it's clear some people prefer working remotely (and the online hacker news crowd leans heavily that way). It's also clear that some people feel real benefits from being in the office.

I think it's inevitable that the culture of a company mirrors the values of it's leaders.

Companies with leaders that value in person communication, place a high premium on random collaboration will prefer their teams to be in office, and hire people based on this. This could involve companies with large amounts of more junior people that need training or experience (and whose leaders feel that training is easier done in person).

Companies with leaders that feel like collaboration is less important, are more willing to set metrics and not be as directly as involved, and hire experienced employees with less oversight, lean towards remote work.

This means you'll see a decline in hybrid teams. Teams want to be made up of people who share values, and this is something that will polarize teams. Companies that prioritize growing talent will prefer to be in person, companies that prefer to hire for specific roles with clear expectations will be OK being remote.

This polarization will be painful and shouldn't happen quickly. I see many companies putting their finger on the scale when hiring, preferring in office roles (and selecting people that want or can't get remote roles). Over time, natural attrition will mean less and less remote workers, and that eventual makes it easier to push others out.

I don't think this is a good or bad thing, but it does mean that if you want to be fully remote, you need to remain very competitive in terms of skills. You're competing against a wider talent pool. I do expect 3 days a week (Tues/Wed/Thurs) to become standard for many companies, and that broadens the "recruiting" radius for in office companies. 1 hour commute 5 days a week is the same time commitment as 1.5 hours commute 3 days a week.

I think any system that wants to store assets would expect to store >$50 eventually and the incentives grow correspondingly.

What's the next play for Reddit leadership? I feel like it's just a "wait and hope it all blows over?". If they don't change, are all of these subreddits going to stay dark? If the subreddits do stay dark, how long will it take before someone creates a replacement that gains enough traction?

I'm participating in the Reddit blackout (as a 15y user), and I love to see the collective action, but not sure if it's really going to bring about long term change. Egos are clearly involved here, so I think Reddit's future hinges on spez's personal ability for change and growth. I'm not optimistic.

It's really quick fuel that leads to an insulin spike that triggers more fat storage and eventually leads to insulin resistance.

It does kill it because the soap breaks up fats in the virus.

I used to be a diehard scrum advocate (though I've always been focused on results and not just process as magic). I've felt in my latest role, scrum doesn't cut it.

Problems: - Larger team: I can't swarm developers on a single project. It's impractical for every team member to be instantly able to help out with the domain specific work. - We're a platform team and so are in the way of $FEATURE a lot. Our long term roadmap is primarily driven by other teams urgency and we have to roll with it. - Estimates are a boolean, not a date. Our estimates don't matter because unless it's a 6m+ project, it needs to be done because of $FEATURE

Because of this, sprint planning is never stable long term. Every work comes with tradeoffs being made at the top level. Estimation means time away from doing work we know we're going to do unless it's a huge SWAG.

I like the ownership scrum has, but the work is gonna take what the work takes. Why should we spend tons of time estimating and planning when we just need to get the work done before next product launch 6m out? Feels like Kanban might work better. I need to read up on the Basecamp model.

I think I agree with you on principle, but temps higher than 100 are totally fine in a lot of cases. Hot tubs are at 102-106. 120°F takes you like 10 minutes to suffer serious burns. But 140° will cause burns in seconds. I've seen cooks handle stuff waaay hotter than 140 for a half secondish (grab a noodle from a pot of boiling water, poke a 160+° burger on a grill, etc). Obviously makes a big difference if you splash yourself a bit vs get a whole cup on you too.

Useless? No. Possibly open to being faked? Yes.

Lots of ways to sign photos and videos today that should make them fully verifiable in the future (assuming public/private key cryptography remains secure). For stuff that isn't signed, it's not like good old detective work can't verify in a lot of cases. Phone records, eye witnesses, additional unpublished recordings, etc.

Also being verified really only matters when it comes to "truth" as defined by law. It's not like your family won't enjoy your videos of Christmas '23.

But it wouldn't be validated with the original key, so people could know it could have been tampered with.

Pretty anecdotally but I have a friend on an H1B1, and he's actively going though the green card process now.

If I have a CD, that CD is often not time locked, it just has a penalty for early withdrawal (X months of interest or whatever).

If I don't trust that the bank can give me the money, it doesn't matter if it's in a CD or checking account, I'm going to pull it out (screw the gains) and the liquidity problem still exists. The extra months/year of interest don't stop a bank run.

This is why I think this can really only be solved by government and regulation. Government regulation on the quality of investments to make sure that they're really worth X% long term. If there is a bank run, government needs to step in with the government liquidity, and say "customer gets their money, we get your assets". Of course, brokering an auction for these amongst other banks is the preferred approach.

There should be a fairly free market around what leverage banks are willing to take on as long as the investments that back it are regulated and solid. If a company wants to expose their shareholders to risk by keeping high levels of leverage, that's their problem, but you can't punish depositors for the mistakes of the bank. Not saying we shouldn't have any regulations in this space, but as long as mistakes impact shareholders and not depositors or taxpayers, I think everyone is happy.