commonturtle

Man, I'd love to be able to get a really high resolution print of this framed so I can hang it in my living room.

Hasn't software been (almost) everybody's job for the past decade? Many millions of people use Excel on a daily / weekly basis.

We might be weeks / months away from finding aliens, even if they are only microbes :) Exciting times.

This is a very important point, often overlooked. It's worth building and maintaining essential capabilities, even if you're not the most efficient at them. E.g., a large nation (> 50m people) should be able to feed itself (fine import oranges from somewhere else if you have to, but grow your own wheat and potatoes).

45 kmph (28 mph) is still pretty fast for Parisian streets. I'd feel nervous about letting 14-year olds without a license drive these cars.

Every language at FB ends up getting static typing: - PHP => Hack - JS => Flow - Erlang => this new thing

It might just be FB's greatest contribution to the developer community.

It's unclear if a significant number of the employees are going to move from PA to Denver or if Denver will simply be HQ in name.

It's behind a paywall so I can't read it. But has the Senate ever really been great?

Robert Caro's Master of the Senate discussed the history of the institution in some detail. My takeaway from the book: The Senate basically never really worked as it was intended. The Senate was designed to be more deliberative than the House, and to slow down the pace of political change, primarily by having longer and staggered terms for Sentators and giving them a lot of negative power: the ability to vote down legislation even if the house wanted to pass it. But throughout American history it seems to have slowed down things far too much. The only time it worked was when LBJ was majority leader. Once he left the Senate it reverted to being the bottleneck for political change yet again.

Wow. The intense orange colour in the sky almost seems photoshopped.

Amazing. Thank you. Quora's login-wall is unbearable.

Experience as another commenter suggested. There are probably a few good formal sources as well, but really, a lot of this knowledge is tactile and remains uncodified.

I worked more on the infrastructure / backend side, and I've found the book Designing Data Intensive Applications really useful. Amazing mix of practice and theory, super applicable to people working on distributed systems. Not sure if there is any equivalent for frontend / product engineering.

I read this a few years ago. It such an important topic. Billions of dollars have been spent doing research in fields like nutrition and psychology with very little ROI.

Hmm.. for distinguishing senior engineers from juniors I would look beyond just knowledge on technical topics. Two important areas to cover IMO for senior candidates, beyond coding skills:

1. Design / architecture / product skills. Here I mean 'design' in the software sense: can you design a good API, can you structure a large project well? Do you have good enough product intuition to work well with a product manager and a designer?

2. Past experience. What have they shipped in the past? How did they deal with difficulties like conflict between teams, deadline misses, uncooperative team members, etc.

I’ve become a big player of board games online, mostly terraforming Mars. Given how fast this is spreading I wouldn’t be surprised if we found that gaming overtakes every entertainment option around.

I think at least in London used bookstores are doing better than normal ones. The books are cheaper and the selection is more unique — Waterstones etc., have a harder time beating Kindles selection.

Very well put. I suspect this is one of those xkcd's that will become a timeless classic, just like the one on standards: https://xkcd.com/927/.

I try to do some activity to signal the end of the work day. Recently I've been attacking a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle while listening to a podcast. Amazing how quickly I can forget about work this way.

Wow, this is the most amazing story I've read in a while. Are dowsing rods really believed to be a successful method of finding water by a decent number of people?

Interesting, thanks. Do you think the information in it is trustworthy? Not sure if I can trust Putin to tell his own story truthfully.

I enjoyed reading this. Does anyone have a recommendation for a biography of Putin?

Depends. If there isn't a strong enough selection pressure (there is plenty of wild prey, they only rarely attack cattle) then they wouldn't learn to ignore the eyespots for many generations.

Any suggestions for how to actually apply (or remember to apply) this stuff? I've read tons of lists of mental models (and have even written my own), but I just never remember to use them for any decisions, and when I do remember I can't really find one appropriate to the situation at hand.

I'm not a CTO (yet?) but I've begin to grok some of the stuff involved in managing teams of engineers. 'The Manager's Path' by Camille Fournier was really helpful. Lots of very practical advice for all sorts of technical leaders: senior ICs, front-line managers, managers-of-managers, CTOs.

A really good cup of tea after a heavy workout. The perfect way to start a day IMO.

Only slightly surprised; domains where failure is really expensive aren't likely to experiment with technologies. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I read something similar about the computers that control the US nuclear arsenal: They're extremely primitive and can only be updated by floppy disks.

The guano (seabird poop) trade was a really big deal in the 19th century, Spain even tried to steal some islands from Peru because they had significant guano deposits (http://www.environmentandsociety.org/tools/keywords/guano-wa...).

Eventually guano became less valuable since artificial fertiliser was cheaper. I don't think there's any significant guano trade now, and definitely not in the range of $1B / year. The article seems to be suggesting that the indirect benefits of guano (birds dropping it over fields) is worth $1B / year. Somewhat misleading title IMO.

> - automated one-page summaries of individual companies financials and what they do — see up to 20 yrs of historical data and all 3 financial statements on 1 page, to make it easier to "skim" an investment before committing to further research.

I'd love something like this for small/micro-caps (< $100M) in the US and Europe. I think that's probably where the individual investor can find the best opportunities to add alpha as the big players are less relevant there.

I picked up a 1000 piece Jigsaw puzzle during the lockdowns. Now I'm on my third one. It's a great way to decompress after a long day.

Does anyone know why the scale isn't more granular? Type I's apparently consume 10^16W, Type II's 10^26W, Type III's 10^36W. That's 10B multiplier between each level.

Nice, I've wanted something like this for a while. HN often has substantive comments on writing in the internet, so I often find myself checking if something interesting I read has been submitted to HN before.