ep103

Stack Ranking was pioneered by Jack Welch who was operating in an environment where labor was the dominant party in the labor-capital relationship, and he was taking over companies that had had decades of labor growth and power while capital was stagflating nationwide. Introducing stack ranking was a way of trimming excess fat from decades of build up within companies, while reasserting capital in the relationship within the company.

Long term, it has been a disaster in every company. Because eventually you run out of fat, and then what you describe as "far more willing to hire non-standard candidates on gut and hunches, knowing that if it didn't work out, it didn't work out they would be gone" becomes "I need to hire people I don't want to work with, so I have someone to fire in the next stack rank". And that's its own form of fat.

In short, stack ranking makes some sense if you have a fat organization, not unlike restricting calories to lose fat when working out. But once you've lost fat, continuing to restrict your calories results in losing more muscle than fat.

Or solar

I think this is true of all places, people just tend not to recognize it where they live.

One of my favorite ways to travel is by train or motorcycle over long distances, and just watch how architecture, clothing, styles, layouts, etc change or surprisingly don't change in response to geographical changes.

Both are possible, and both tell you a lot about the people there.

We did that post-columbine. One of our friends made the map in something like CS or something. Our little friend group thought it was awesome, but it was also tacitly understood that at no point could we tell anyone outside our tiny little trust circle about it, god forbid they thought we were like the columbine kids, instead of just trying to play a game in like, one of the two buildings we spent half of our lives in thus far. I don't know if he ever even ultimately shared it with us. We also made the school in a starcraft map using the blue resources as hallways IIRC, and were quiet about that one too, for the same reason haha

When I first started playing Go, I realized I thought about it like Risk. I was trying to draw Napoleonic battle lines on the board, and push back the opponent. And it kinda worked for very entry-level games, but mostly didn't make sense? Because then the opponent would just place somewhere behind my "line" and it all fell apart.

Over time, I started imagining each of the spots on the board as being a person in a city. And placing a stone, really, was like bringing the AOE II priest to "wololo" convert the person to my team. So really, the goal wasn't to create battle lines, the goal was to pick and choose who on the board to join my team, so that by the end of the game, I would have the most influence in the city. (I've heard others describe it as planting plants to grow over the majority of a garden, which is similar) At that point, I started choosing spaces around the board in order to make sure I had enough friends in each neighborhood that I would be the most popular person there, even once my opponent started advertising in the region too.

That begs the obvious question, are there different neighborhoods that are more important than others? And the answer is yes. As you learn about eye shapes, you'll realize its easier to be popular and own in a corner than it is a side, and a side than it is the center, so when you start the game, you prioritize being popular in these regions, in that order (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqpqa5NCbMY&t=52s)

And then over time, I've learned how to do that more and more efficiently, and the tradeoffs that come from that.

It also helps to start on smaller boards, then move to bigger ones as you get a feel for what's going on : )

As an outsider, it is rather hilarious that the top two responses to this story right now on HN are:

* Our own local council in the South of England, BCP is in the doghouse too. We have extraordinary inequality of taxation at the root of it. We have some of the wealthiest areas in Europe, like Sandbanks where every house is a mansion with it's own private beach, but we still cant fill the potholes in roads in the poorest areas. So sad that they lack the courage to put basic policies in order.

and

* Guaranteed the only way they’ll think will solve the issue is higher taxes. The uk has run out of ideas and the only option seems to be taking people’s money away.

All of the worldcoin stuff is creepy, and a terrible idea. Potentially profitable though!

I'm far outside of these social circles nowadays, but I stumbled across this youtube video of a phd candidate talking about string theory recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E), and it seemed to imply that the pendulum in those social circles is swinging back again.

This is an understandable sentiment, but I do not think it applies in this case. In the case of Ithaca, most single young people live closer to the colleges, and drive or bus to the chain stores.

The actual town, I think, survives on the individual shop mentality because the physical layout of the town. The Ithaca town square is physically designed to be the physcial, social and cultural center of the town, which allows the shops there an advantage of being a center of the community, completely surrounded on all sides by walkable residential living. This gives them a competitive advantage, that lets them compete with the bigger box stores which require taking a bus or car a few minutes downtown to arrive at.

Ithaca being a college town definitely brings more money into the town. That definitely adds to the vibrancy. But I think my statement still stands independent of that fact :)

Aye, I lived in Ithaca, NY for a while, and they had a local law that the only businesses within the town center could not be franchise stores, and had to be independently owned. Chain stores could open, but had to do so down the highway about ~2 miles away.

It is _incredible_ the difference it makes on town culture, and _how much better it was_

Behold the power of the free market, and the inability of the government to do anything right!

...

Wait a minute

And also, to switch back to Firefox

The more insulated you are from sales / overhead cost reduction pressure, the calmer things will be. Just make sure you're insulated, not so far that you're seen as a cost center as opposed to a revenue generator

You need a truth table.

Good code + Good Business = Success.

Bad code + Bad Business = Failure.

Good code + Bad Business = Failure.

Bad Code + Good Business = Success.

Successful businesses can paper over bad code with money, because ultimately bad code just costs the business money.

A better way of thinking about this, I think, is that code quality expresses itself first and foremost in the product's long-term quality. And code quality, like all product quality, costs money.

But not all companies need good quality. Each business niche has a different quality level : product cost niche. A business will do best if the engineering quality matches the business needs, and vice versa.

A company that has spent money writing beautiful code that costs more to support than that business can generate, is in just as bad a place as a business that is growing massively and burning cash papering over a low-quality engineering department with all their new sales contract money.

Its bizarre to see the "I have nothing to hide, so why should I care" defense on the top of Hacker News.

Post Scriptum:

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. - Cardinal Richelieu

You have to move to feel the chains.

Yup, this is what I'm working on right now.

10 microservices to support a 2 page static html webpage.

We "needed" microservices for "Scalability", but we will never have more than a few hundred users at a time.

We can't have simple logging of our services, because all logs have to go to Loki, and Loki only does full text search. So first, learn how to query with Grafana's querying language in order to do any searches at all, then figure out what you will ever need to search, and turn that into a prometheus metric, but wait, now we have to properly compose our metrics for queryability....

I need to implement retry logic in one of my microservices. Would be easily implementable with an Amazon SQS or RabbitMQ queue. But we can't have queues, because they aren't stateless. We need to use Kafka because it has the ability to scale to billions of events, never mind that we never see more than 10k events in a 24 hour period. So now we'll need to write custom logic for retries and managing state outside of the queue, which means we're back to using database tables, which means there's no point to using kafka to begin with for our application...

Our services build in gitlab to docker images which then are hosted in the cloud and managed by k8s in custom vpcs. Sure, makes sense. But also, can someone show me how the developers on the team are supposed to be able to run the system locally? What? Can't do it? Replicating the production environment for local builds is now too heavy a lift and has been deprioritized by management? So how are they supposed to develop again? Oh, they'll just never learn how the whole system works, and continuously make changes they assume are isolated to their specific microservice without realizing they've introduced an error into the wider system unless the lead/manager catch it? Got it.

I could go on. Architects choosing technologies over listening to their engineers, in order to pad their resumes with technologies that look good to other architects. Committees of middle-managers choosing the 'safe' enterprise technologies instead of what is actually needed.

The enshitification continues

> Elon's big start came from the success of X and Paypal

Funny you mention this as why he was self-made, where by all accounts he was considered an awful coder in this Paypal position, and was only able to be in the country (illegally) at the time, or secure this job, was because of his family's money and connections.

IBM lays off 10% of workforce is literally a yearly headline

As are IBM sued for age discrimination, and IBM closes product line

If the John Deere engineers understand those systems so well, then they could design their products in ways that the farmers could repair the products for common use cases. They are intentionally designing the products to prevent that. That's the whole problem.

But I bet you these people sure can leetcode!

Absolutely.

We're on a forum that is largely composed of engineers, business strategists, and other types of work that encourage and reward thinking deeply about their respective topics.

So I wanted to point out that human cognition is faulty. It is an important skill to be able to think 10 steps ahead in a chess game, but you have to remember that as much as we desire to be rational, we are imperfect rational creatures, and there's a percentage error on every one of those steps, as a result of our being human. To continue the example, its part of why chess is fun: you try to think X moves ahead, and realize that you miscalculated at step 3 when your opponent does something you didn't expect.

The same thing applies to life in general. We build up ways of thinking about things over lifetimes of thinking deeply on subjects. But each layer of learning is built on a previous layer, and each layer has a percentage error.

So it is important, from time to time, to stop and reassess. Is your current view of the world faulty? How might I be wrong? What if I am wrong? What would be the repercussions? Is my current way of thinking leading me to live the type of life I want to live? Is my way of viewing the world a positive or negative, for myself and for the people around me?

If the answer to any of those answers is no, that's a good indicator that the compounded errors in your way of thinking have lead you down a bad path, and you should stop and reassess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU

And the thing is, that's not something that you can notice, unless you really take the effort to take a step back and re-assess, in part by asking such questions. We get so used to our current mode of thinking, whatever it is, that even if it has led us down dark and dangerous and self-destructive paths, it will feel normal at the time, unless one makes a conscious effort to re-asses from time to time, and really, genuinely, consider that our world outlook might really be deleterious or even outright wrong. Its what David Foster Wallace was talking about when he talked about his 'default human viewpoint', or 'this is water'.

And one last thing, if you do do these re-assessments, then you have two options. You can stop and reassess your way of thinking, and look for the mistakes in your thinking and evolve (which is always a good thing to do, always, regardless of whether or not you are wrong to begin with, this is how we grow as people).

Or you can choose to radically change your life outlook and philosophy, _even if you still believe your initial one was correct_, just because you think a different viewpoint might be beneficial. Because there are a wealth of different life philosophies that have been developed over the years, many of which have been deeply developed by myriads of intelligent people and refined throughout the ages. It turns out life is complicated, and the human brain isn't really capable of 100% understanding all of it, the best we can do is choose which lens we want to view it through. Learning how to view life through a different lens, if carefully chosen, is never a bad thing.

So I don't know much about the self-sacrificing monks in the original post. Maybe such self-sacrifice was the right thing for them to do. And I am not trying to come out against suicide, there are plenty of times in life where such self-sacrifice is warranted or a downright honorable thing to do. But I sure hope that each of those monks, before they did it, took some time to really consider that even if this was the right move for them to take, they could still choose not to do so. My suspicion of the average person, is that once they get in that deep, they tend not to do so, even when they are facing their own death, or the taking of another's life. And I think that's a tragic flaw in humanity.

The most important philosophical lesson I've learned in life, is that it is important to take a step back once in a while (regularly!) and assess whether what you are doing in life genuinely appears to be good or bad at a very surface, kindergarten level, as a reality check.

There are just too many times you read through people doing horrific things throughout history, and if you read enough you can understand the viewpoints and the cultures that drove those people do to those things, but at the end of the day, I can't help but feel like: "why can't people just, from time to time, take a step back and think: really though, do I think this is right?" and then truly be willing to make the changes necessary to their life's choices if the answer is: "No".

It doesn't matter if it is something as obvious as being a member of the einsatzgruppen, or just realizing that you're spending too much time at work when you need to be home with your family (or vice versa).

People don't seem to do this nearly enough, and I've found that generally, its a more important moral signifier than the deep and complicated ideologies we mentally build for ourselves that gets us into these situations.

So no. Even if the moral ideology of these monks is crystal clear, perfectly logical, and rationally perfect, at the end of the day, they've chosen suicide over finding a way to enjoy life. They've failed the kindergarten morality test.

React is still easier to work with than angular, depending on your application, even with these issues. But these are still issues : )

Joel on Software - The Pit of Success applies here, yet again

You are correct, and this Supreme Court in particular has made large changes to the concept, furthering the degree to which qualified immunity can be applied, and have done so in a time when there is a large, popular pushback to the concept. :)

The thing that blew my mind was that they always report this in degrees Celsius.

I'm in America, even despite an engineering degree, I think in Fahrenheit.

1.5C sounds like a small number, until you remember that Fahrenheit is ~2x 1C.

So 1.5 degrees C is ~3 degrees F. Which, to me, just emotionally feels like a bigger number despite being the same empiraclly.

Similarly, it means when the IPCC is saying there might be a 7C change in 100 years, they mean a 15F change. 15F is emotionally terrifying to me. Its the difference between 85 degrees and 100. 7C is an abstract concept to me.