Hacker News Reader

rondon2on To Raise Productivity, Let More Employees Work from Home (2014)

So was the guy your boss or not? What kind of organization lets someone promote themselves to project manager or the boss of other engineers?

rondon2on Why Children Need Chores

My 12 year old loves it. The 15 year old... Not so much

rondon2on Redis Conference 2015 Recap

One thing I took from mythical man month was that having an architect with a clear vision is necessary for success. The architect isn't perfect. He will make mistakes and he will reject good ideas from time to time. But design by committee has the risk of doing development without a clear vision.

rondon2on [dead]

"Linus uses CVS at home". That was the best line.

In all seriousness, I don't tell new members of my team about the CLI. We use Visual Studio and the VS UI plugin only supports add,commit,push,pull,undo.

rondon2on Understand contracts before you sign them

I was given a non employee poaching contract to sign when I gave my notice at BIGCORP. It had some vague language like "I will not attempt to contact any BIGCORP employees with information about other positions". I gave it back to the manager at the exit interview unsigned and said nice try. I guess they are just hoping someone doesn't read it.

rondon2on Who Cares about GET vs. POST? NoREST

Thank you! I was wondering why I couldn't just use post for a function I'm writing right now. It helps to have someone else say out loud what I was thinking.

rondon2on Embracing SQL in Postgres

I'm in the process of moving some of my data storage from oracle to redis. Having already used Linq has made this easier. I had a pretty small data-model though. I think that in a large project switching databases is a large effort with or without ORM.

rondon2on Embracing SQL in Postgres

I'm sure anyone can come up with specific situations where writing SQL is much better than using ORM. If I had infinite time and dev resources I would never use an ORM. In reality Entity Framework makes abstracting my data-layer very easy and increases my productivity. It also makes me feel much more comfortable about switching databases if necessary. Even if I'm taking a 5% performance hit it is totally worth it to me.

rondon2on How Chris McCandless Died: An Update

I read everything he writes. The only time I have had a problem with anything he said was in "Under the Banner of Heaven" he partially blamed the Mormon church for the kidnap and rape of Elizabeth Smart. I suspect that the guy that kidnapped her would have been a piece of shit no matter what religion he was born into.

rondon2on Next Week's Bloodbath At IBM Won't Fix The Real Problem

I left IBM in 2012 because I saw that the division I was working for was never going to be competitive. It is surprising that it took almost 3 years for what was obvious at the bottom to reach the top and be implemented.

rondon2on Why Falling Prices Are Actually a Really Bad Thing

That is only a temporary problem. Eventually employees will quit or die. And when that happens you will hire a replacement at current market rates.

rondon2on Why Falling Prices Are Actually a Really Bad Thing

The renter will get a break actually because newly constructed apartments are cheaper than the older apartments so he can move to a newer/nicer/cheaper place.

Deflation is a big problem for highly leveraged businesses and individuals. But for savers deflation is not a disaster at all.

rondon2on Why Falling Prices Are Actually a Really Bad Thing

"So you get broad based increases in unemployment." I know it sucks to go from making 70k to making 60k but in a world where prices are going lower someone will still be able to have a similar quality of live at 60k. What kind of economic "Theory" would assume that people would rather starve to death than take a salary cut at another job?

rondon2on Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

That is because Google has technicians 24/7/365 at their data centers.

rondon2on Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work

It is just so expensive to provide 99% uptime on your own servers. Who is going to go into the office at 2:00AM when an executive can't access his power point presentation?

rondon2on What 2,000 Calories Looks Like

http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/nutritionfacts.p...

A Big Mac is 530 and a Large Fry is 530. Your example is off by about 50%.

rondon2on Coca-Cola Disconnects Voice Mail at Headquarters

When you to try and make someone look bad it does matter. "I didn't see bob on instant messenger, and I called him several times and I left him a voice mail. I'm not able to get my task done because I still have not heard back from Bob."

rondon2on What 2,000 Calories Looks Like

The person who eats 2,000 calories in one sitting at burger king is much more likely to make a Frozen Pizza at home than a Arugula salad and Grilled fish.

rondon2on How Magic Leap Is Creating an Alternate Reality

Two things.

1. An elephant on a flower isn't going to get someone to pay $500-$1000 for this hardware. You need very high quality content to get lots of consumers on board.

2. Moving from current cinema production to VR production is going to be a huge learning curve for a lot of artists. You need to create best practices and examples of how it is done by artists.

rondon2on On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

His point is that there is no way to provide statistics on the number of bullshit jobs.

For example, I worked at a company where we made networking software for some military radios. We had a "Hardware Engineer" that fixed or returned radios that had stopped working. From all economist metrics this was not a bullshit job. He was using his engineering degree to do engineering work.

But in reality he added nothing to the productivity of the company. He actually reduced the productivity of the company by taking 3 days to do 5 minutes of work. I stopped using him and did it myself when he was at lunch. It is impossible to get metrics on bullshit level because it includes lots of nuances. For example, i'm sure this guy and his manager would say that only he was capable of doing the hardware work because he took a 1 hour course on electrostatic discharge.

It would take a lot of evidence gathering for me to prove that this was a bullshit job and once I did prove it his manager would have immediately assigned him some new responsibilities making my previous data worthless. This is a big problem with macro-economics. Economic Job data is limited to Salary,Title,Hour worked. It doesn't tell you much more than that.

rondon2on Richmond Italian restaurant waging war on Yelp

I understand it does suck to have one or two idiot customers that will flip out about something stupid and write a terrible review of your great restaurant. But I think it would be better just to have no reviews at all on Yelp. Is there anyway to ask yelp to remove your business. Can you not tell yelp that the phone number and address they have listed are personal and no longer a business and that yelp should remove them?

rondon2on Inside the Dark, Lucrative World of Consumer Debt Collection

There is a small difference in interest rates that you get based on your credit score.

When I bought a car from the dealer I told the loan guy that I had a 0.9% rate at my Credit Union so I didn't need financing. He was able to match the rate based on my credit score and take 300.00 off the car. I doubt he would have believed that I qualified for %0.9 if I had bad credit. So for me we are talking about a difference of at least $300 a year for having a good Rating.

rondon2on Inside the Dark, Lucrative World of Consumer Debt Collection

Yes, and you can tell them to never contact you again in any way. Tell them that you refute all of the debt and will sue them if they file inaccurate information with a credit agency. I did that two years ago when a debt was incorrectly reported against me and I never heard from anyone again and it never showed up on my credit report. I'm not sure what would happen if they could prove the debt was accurate.

rondon2on Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

Assuming their spouses' incomes wouldn't support their family, I would think so

rondon2on Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

People can become illogical when faced with emotional scenarios. "If I loose my job my family/friends will think that I'm a failure". I was at IBM during a similar situations and it was people that were in the top 40%-20% that were the most worried.

rondon2on Google, Detroit diverge on road map for self-driving cars

It is much better to develop self driving technology in-house rather than risk being stuck licencing technology from Google in perpetuity. The software is the easy part. The regulatory and societal hurdles are the hard part and Google is already working on that for free.

rondon2on Everything Is Bullshit: A Book by Priceonomics

Thanks for explaining that you get $6 either way (Hardcopy or Kindle) I would have assumed you get more with the hard copy.

rondon2on Real-time lightning map, worldwide

It seems to me that these strikes are happening in clusters at the same time 1000s of miles away. Is this related to radiation from the sun providing the tipping point?

rondon2on My Open Wireless Network (2008)

If you own a coffee shop, they would want you to buy a business plan that costs more than a home plan. They would detect it by calling your business to ask if you want a business plan and when you said you were using the internet from your apartment they may send you a letter.

rondon2on Michael Lewis: The Wolf Hunters of Wall Street

You ban trades that are made in an attempt to purchase shares that you believe someone else is also attempting to purchase based on knowledge that you have received because of your proximity to an exchange.

This would be very similar to insider trading in that there is going to be a grey area where it would be hard to prove that the intent was to undercut someone else but having the regulation there would at least curtail this practice somewhat.