archeantus

Seems like the jury is still out on whether they can reliably generate more energy than it takes to initiate the reaction? It won’t go anywhere if it can’t clear that hurdle.

I did the same thing. Shocked that five years later there still isn’t a great app that really wows. I think the fundamental problem is that the data is broken. Banks don’t get context from the merchants, and the devs only get ugly data from the banks. The only way this situation will improve is if we can somehow get devs better data. I kicked around ideas on how to do that for a year or so before running out of steam.

That’s a fair point. The reality is that they all could have taken the time off individually anyway, this was just a small gesture to show my thanks for a great year!

I feel very fortunate and grateful that I was able to send this Slack message to my team on December 19:

“ @here I want to thank everyone for a great year. We’ve accomplished a ton, and I think we need to stop and recognize it. My ask for everyone is to take the week off next week. We have a few things we need to be on-call for, and heaven knows we could use the time to write more tests, but I think it is important to pause, rest, and reflect.”

Im so glad that this is totally cool in our company and our culture. I wish this was the rule and not the exception.

I’d love to see what the iPhone 10,000 ends up looking like

It seems to me that the millions of events that happened in order to get to where we are now (alive on a rocky, water and oxygen-filled planet, in the Goldilocks zone of a healthy star) were sequential in nature and they took a finite amount of time to occur.

Assuming that there was A Beginning, where everything started at the same time, wouldn’t the steps to get to where we are in this process take about the same time for everyone else? Meaning that if there are other civilizations out there, that they’d more or less be as advanced as we are? Which is pretty sophisticated in certain areas at home, but not yet super capable in the long-distance human space travel department.

Not a scientist, just thinking out loud the thought I had reading the article.

Value is all about impact and companies are incentivized to reward and promote impact. It’s valuable to a company to have a really great IC, it’s even more valuable to have a manager that can grow their team into really great ICs - presumably like the manager was at one point.

If you are an amazing IC, but can’t/won’t help others grow to that level, you are only so valuable to the company - hence the IC ceiling.

Right now the leading candidate on my list is to be a school bus driver. The responsibility is not trivial, but the work doesn’t seem too bad :)

The higher I climb the corporate ladder, the higher my salary goes. This is all well and good, but the expectations and stress climb with it too. I like working and applying my brain to solving problems, but I sometimes pine for a job that pays little and expects little. I can’t afford to make that change now and there is a good chance I wouldn’t actually enjoy bagging groceries at the store again, but it’s nice to dream about every now and then.

Things got a lot better for me when I realized almost nobody gets to the best solution on the first try.

Cobble together an ugly and hacky solution that you can confirm solves the problem, then iterate and iterate until you clean it up well enough to ship it.

It must have been so much harder to be brilliant back then. Now we Just have Google for everything. Imagine what these guys could have accomplished with the computing power/tools of today.

Apple is at an all-time high and Xerox is circling the drain. Pretty amazing to see what Apple has become with the point-in-the-right-direction Steve got from Xerox all those years ago.

I worked as a fully remote software engineer for a very large company for several years and it worked great. Engineering is something that can be done well remotely. It was on me to build and maintain important relationships via Slack or occasional travel, but I made it work very well.

So well that they decided to promote me to manager of my team, which is arguably more risky than working as a remote engineer. They took a bet on me, and I think it has worked out well. I encourage my team to work at home as much as they would like to, and have even started hiring remotely.

I stand by remote work. Work is about more than enslaving code monkeys to do your bidding. It is a partnership that works well when you trust your engineers to get their work done, regardless of where they are located.

RIP, Steve. I have ached since he died not only for the loss of what he was, but also for the loss of what could have been. Whatever your view of Apple now, I feel strongly that it is a fraction of what it would have been if Steve had been able to continue on for another 10 years.

It's fascinating to look at what this technology (not perfect, but definitely Goodenough) has accomplished. And it is also crazy to think that it was almost more of a discovery, than an invention.

Does this mean that the next breakthrough is hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone to put the perfect cocktail of raw materials together? I have no bg in chemistry, but the thought of being part of making a next-level battery sounds very exciting.

If you’ve been inside of a WeWork office, there is a pretty advanced process in place for checking in and alerting different people about you being there. It felt a bit over-engineered when I went there, but I suppose that is the kind of stuff these “tech roles” worked on.

Kind of sickening how he builds up his ego and tells him he loves him. Seems like that kind of treatment could potentially skew the accuracy of the confession.

“Hmm, I like being loved and praised and fed milkshakes here in prison, I’m going to keep talking, even if it isn’t true!”

My wife and I were on a 10 hour flight to Tokyo earlier this year and we happened to sit next to a lady with unbelievable resolve to keep the window open.

It was a very big plane and in our portion of the plane, every other window was closed (several dozen). We debated asking her to shut it, but decided she must have her reasons.

For a flight that was supposed to have a sleep segment, we were quite grumpy to realize this wasn’t going to be possible.

Going to that link I was punched in the face by about 20 ads and saw one sentence of content that basically just restated what was in the title... did I miss something?

I dropped out of college about seven years ago, about 24 credit hours shy of getting my IS degree. The classes left were a mix of business classes I don't care for (Accounting) and generals I don't care for (Biology 100? PASS). I haven't had any problems finding great jobs as a software engineer throughout my career, including working at Apple in Cupertino straight out of college.

Recently, a guy in my neighborhood who works at the school I went to tried to talk me into going back and finishing up. He talked to the dean and said they could waive four of the eight classes I had left to do! So now I only have four classes left, all doable online, most of them easy generals like arts and letters...

That sounds pretty tempting and everything, but part of me has also enjoyed achieving success outside of the path that our society more or less mandates as a requirement. I almost want to skip the degree to continue showing that it isn't the paper that matters, but the line of work that you pursue and the effort you put into it.

Am I crazy? Should I just go get the silly degree?

I mainly used Twitter as my source for news content. I accomplished this by not only following “smart” political people that shared their opinions on things, but also by following most major news organizations as well.

The partisan politics, the faux outrage, the hyped up drama, it’s what drives clicks and ad $ and it’s awful for our mental health.

This is the right answer. Smartphones aren’t inherently bad, but they enable things that are toxic without us understanding - chief among them the news.

Back in college I thought it was the grown up thing to do to read the news everyday. Fast forward ten years and I’ve finally realized how much frustration and misery the news (Twitter) was bringing into my life.

As of a week and a half ago, I’m now completely off of the news. I deleted the news app, blocked Twitter and FB from Safari, and avoid other news sites. The outcome has been remarkable! My wife continues to remark how much less irritable I’ve become and how much less stressed I seem. I use HN to stay current on industry news, but I can honestly say I don’t miss that other stuff.

To anyone reading this that is hooked on news consumption - try cutting it from your life! It is a life-changing experience.

I think Jony was shown the door over this debacle, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Phil is next. When is the last time you’ve seen Phil on stage at an event?

He’s the one who introduced these keyboards and praised them up and down, he’s probably going to take the fall for them as well.

I have money burning a hole in my pocket right now to buy a MBP but I can’t do it. It is literally a defective product. Shame on Apple for selling a productive they know is not going to work well for their customers.

Good points. I guess I didn’t mean that the language wasn’t valid or supported, but rather, that it wasn’t the main first-class language of the platform.

Interesting post. I wonder if the major pain point was the fact that they were doing dev with a language that had nothing to do with either platform.

We’re currently investigating Kotlin/native and it looks really promising. We don’t have to write stuff in a foreign language, but can repurpose our existing Kotlin code and share with iOS. This model seems promising.

Does anyone have any experience with Kotlin/native?

This jives with another phenomenon I have noticed over the years: the smartest or best devs in the company aren't necessarily making the most money.

Imagine you have a very talented engineer that joins Company A out of college. They pick up new skills quickly and do an excellent job with everything they get thrown their way. The reality is that the company isn't likely to give them a 50% bonus overnight just because they deserve it.

Whereas you can get another person that comes in from another company (and many more before that) and due to the nature of jumping around has the title and the base salary going for them. They very well aren't as good as this other person, but just because they have what they have, they keep getting it.

To be really successful as an engineer, you need to know your stuff, and also know what you are worth. I've seen so many talented engineers stick with companies that are paying them way under market value just because they don't feel like applying anywhere else and they don't know how much more they could be making elsewhere.

If we want to teach people how to think, I propose that math isn't the best way to do it. I can't tell you how many times I complained about how senseless math was. The real-world application is very limited, for the most part.

Contrast that to if I had learned programming instead. Programming definitely teaches you how to think, but it also has immense value and definite real-world application.

Looks great. But how about that mural?? The main takeaway I had from that video is I need to pick up sponge painting in my kid's rooms.

This looks amazing. I actually spent several months making an awesome Mint killer. The only problem was getting access to bank data that wasn't crazy expensive.

If this pans out, I've got a beautiful app ready to roll! Anyone want to help out?

I wouldn't mind paying less in taxes.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DEFICIT???

The deficit hasn't mattered to anyone before now, esp not in the last 8 years. Can't get any worse than it has been already for years now.