davidcalloway

I imagine The Mythical Man Month would have been much more entertaining if written by Mel Brooks ;-)

Many years ago I visited some lava tube caves in Hawaii. I had to call and get directions, write them down and follow them... No address I could out into a navigation device, no coordinates.

It seemed strange and I thought they could surely modernize their operations and get more business.

Nope. The friction was intentional, they told us later. Before visiting the cave you had to prove it was worth it by calling, and that you could follow directions and instructions.

They previously didn't filter customers so well and those people would touch and break sensitive pieces of the cave.

The main thing I find missing with hurl is an rc file.

While I like the article and agree with the sentiment, I do feel it would have been nice to at least mention the GNU project and not leave the impression that we have free software only thanks to Linus Torvalds.

Ah, now that I see this comment, I'm guessing you're one of the ones that flagged the post.

You're surely more knowledgeable than the author about America and Europe, but he's not commenting about the differences of those two things.

He's only remarking that he's observed a general difference in the mindsets in the two cultures.

As pointed out by another comment, it's a fairly broad observation that many have noticed.

This is exactly what I wanted to say... Lacking credentials, but still accurate observations.

I totally agree with this! So much of what we've come to think as American culture emerged from the political success of the car.

It's the main thing I notice that aggravates me when I return to visit the USA: cars, cars everywhere, and few places that allow walking as a reasonable means of transport.

So many assumptions here that it's hard to know where to start. The fact that I prefer a mindset which prioritizes time with friends and family is extrapolated into a caricature of me as a freeloader. It's a bit of a stretch.

On that note, you seem to be saying that immigration is a form of freeloading in general. But the expense of my upbringing all happened in America, and I basically arrived ready to contribute right away in Germany. And I've paid plenty of taxes along the way.

At the end you make wild assumptions about my political support for which you have no evidence. I'm aware that Germany faces serious issues surrounding immigration, but I didn't think rhetoric which paints the current picture as a catastrophe and inevitable decline into chaos is very helpful.

There are so many other points... It's hard to know what set you off by my mere remark that the author is largely correct in his observations and I prefer living in a country that values free time as well as work!

I'm curious how the author has much experience with the American mindset, since he didn't mention living in America when describing his background.

Having said that, as an American living in Germany, I lately agree with his description of the difference. And, frankly, I cannot currently see myself ever returning to my home country other than shorter visits.

This cannot be right.

I've known multiple people in my life whose working shifts do not correspond to the seven-day week.

I know of no illness from which they suffer.

This reminds me of the discover and defend modes from Jonathan Haidt's latest book The Anxious Generation.

On taking a break, I've often found it difficult to stick to the pomodoro technique because the breaks seem too frequent. But those breaks help avoid going down an unfruitful path for too long.

I lived in Hong Kong for nearly a year and our building underwent renovation on the facade at the time.

We could open our windows and go up to the roof on the scaffolding.

Good times.

I'm pretty sure the parent comment is pointing out that the quoted sentence from the main page ought to be present in the rationale page that is linked.

My teacher did the peanut butter and jelly problem with us in the fourth grade, but we were given the time to write the instructions as homework and she picked a few to execute the following day.

The disappointment always stayed with me that my instructions were not chosen, as I really had been far more precise than the fun examples she did choose. I recall even explaining which side of the knife to use when taking peanut butter from the jar.

Of course, she would still have found plenty of bugs in my instructions, which I wish I still had.

Thanks for that, and also the pet rats, Ms. Clouser!

I know this is nitpicking and perhaps a dumb thing to say, but in my view the simple case of drink spilling does not apply.

Have you been around children who spill a drink? The ones who experience high levels of stress bury their heads and treat it as a catastrophe, waiting for someone else to clean it up and soothe them.

Those who treat it as no big deal are more likely to clean it up.

And being more careful only grows slowly with age. Oh, and using heavier glasses btw. It's way better to give kids real glass for drinks and tolerate the occasional breakage than to have constant spilling with light plastic cups.

It is the bane of my existence that in German you cannot just put things in places. The word you would use for "put" depends on the physical relation of the objects involved.

Is it lying down ultimately? Hanging on? Standing upright?

And things don't sit on other things unless they literally have a chair.

Maybe it's not my children but the constant dealing with the German language that perpetually makes me feel exhausted.

Isn't this more of a cultural thing, that Germans seem to agree that it is authoritative and use it as a reference?

I'm not sure what would even make a dictionary prescriptive other than an explicit declaration that it is so or, ridiculously, a law declaring the same.

I get the sentiment but I've never really understood why this saying is so popular. A tax is a specific word with a real meaning. It is not voluntary. By this logic alcohol and cigarettes are themselves a tax on people with poor judgement, as well as many other products.

I myself have never understood the thrill payoff that must exist for lottery ticket buyers, but I cannot call it a tax.

Looks nice but here's some feedback on what is not nice:

- breaks the back button pretty badly - when I filter jobs it says seven results but really there are only two

I cannot help but think of Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven... "Deserve ain't got nothin' to do with it".

I sometimes feel this way even about Google maps. On some level when I make a small contribution I'm aware that everyone doing so profits Google quite nicely.

But then again, I think that I've profited quite a bit from having Google maps as a resource, far more than the contribution I've made.

It feels much better to look at the fact that it's a place that people help share information useful to each other, which happens to profit a large company, than to only focus jealously on the fact that said large company has hit upon a way to monetize the sharing of this information.

Both things are true, and whether you think it's great or horrid really is a matter of perspective.

Same here! I thought when I saw it, "ah, so that's what Jeff Atwood looks like".

I think you value their work too little. I worked as a realtor for a time and admittedly not a good one.

A good realtor has knowledge of current values in the local market, issues to look for throughout the transaction, which services will be needed and who can be trusted to provide those services.

There is often an element of buffering communication between buyer and seller, but it's not just a trust problem. Due to their different interests and perspectives, they will tend to communicate in ways that could offend the other party inadvertantly. A good realtor is skilled in smoothing this over and being more objective.

As an aside, the term realtor is trademarked and is something on top of real estate agent, but for the American public the realtor association has been so successful that almost every agent joins.

At the time I did this work, the requirements for licensing were indeed too lax in my state and therefore a commensurate number of lower quality agents. Which of course feeds the impression that agents are useless, because it was more true.

My understanding is that licensing the has since tightened.

None of that detracts from the fact that a good agent does quite a bit of work to build up knowledge, and to assist through a huge transaction that most people will seldom make and therefore more likely mess up.

Unfortunately this work is also often spent doing things that never lead to a transaction, such as multiple showings to buyers prior to finding a fit, or preparing listings that ultimately fail to sell for whatever reason. These costs need to be accounted for somehow, so we end up thinking only of the services rendered in our dealings.

I realize I have even more to say but I gotta stop sometime...

Yes but it would still feel weird for me to thank my employer for that.

Definitely not California but literally the first part of traffic law in Germany says that caution and consideration are required from all partaking in traffic.

Germans are not known for poor driving.

Thank you I was literally wondering what garbage collection needs to be paid for.

I don't understand why you wouldn't feel good about this job. Ultimately, you are assisting in creating (hopefully accurate) signals that help summarize risk to simplify decision-making. Seems like honorable work to me...

I like Makefiles as well, and although many people have commented on the limitations and the fact that the author's usage of make is fairly simplistic, I think it's great to get started with the basics.

Kudos to the author for writing this up and _not_ feeling the need to learn every last bit of make and do everything "properly" before sharing.

I've worked on a team where GitLab CI pipelines replaced Makefiles, and I was asked not to commit a makefile to the project because it's a customized developer workflow. They were allergic to local testing, but I thought it was a great way to just store and share knowledge about how to build, test, clean, etc. Far easier to read the GitLab CI files (which yes of course were also necessary and served a different porpoise).