asplake

> You don’t obsess over one thing. You move lots of little things forward. No grand initiatives. No reorg. Just constant, low-key, under-the-radar nudging in the right direction.

It's not terrible advice, but it scales less well than the writer thinks. To really scale, you:

1. Engage with the right challenges (large or small)

2. Invite others into the process, celebrate their successes etc

3. Coach others to start from #1

Perhaps its organisational scope isn't much bigger than the team, but to my mind, the article doesn't go far enough beyond #2.

Do it, and you're the best kind of leader, one that makes other leaders. That's what scales.

“… well enough to reproduce 50-token excerpts at least half the time”

That’s the closest so far, thanks!

Nice!

> The traitorous eight was a group of eight employees who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

Yes I’ve played with Gleam. A nice small language but bigger than I had in mind. That’s mainly to look under the covers, which in Gleam’s case involves other language platforms, so less interesting in this context.

That’s great, thanks! I see there is a mini Haskell there too. But yes, a smallest possible ML is what I had in mind.

Something I was looking for recently: is there a tiny, "just for fun" language in the ML line, or something similarly based on typed lambda calculus? Or something smaller, something more Lisp-like but curried?

More niche than mainstream I guess, but I do have what could be called a community, a large following on LinkedIn, a mailing list in the low thousands, paid subscribers, and a partner programme. Not enough to generate the kind of sales that anyone could live on, but not nothing either. Much of my blogging since publication has been in support of the book.

Two of my five did have publishers. I’m grateful for that experience. Learned a lot!

That’s my experience too. My most recent book (my fifth) was closer to one publisher’s stated mission than 95% of its catalog, but they all but admitted that they had given up on it. After that rejection I didn’t have the energy to approach anyone else and did it myself instead. LeanPub first, then Amazon (print and kindle), Apple, Kobo, and Google.

Nice! Any plans for epub?

Could have been titled "When a team lacks sufficient reason for colleagues to care what others are up to"

It’s not either/or. No formal process or knowledge management system is so efficient that people won’t from time to time lack the context they need to make good decisions. Informal conversations made possible by seniors making themselves available and present makes up at least part of the shortfall. Moreover, informal conversations can benefit both parties. How many bad strategic decisions are made for want of on-the-ground context?

It’s a well-studied problem. See my recent book “Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation”. Or if you prefer original sources to modern takes, note that Stafford Beer followed up Brain of the Firm with Heart of Enterprise. Between the two books, the most significant change in his Viable System Model was to address this issue.

Erlang → scalable real-time systems, eg telecoms

The product vs engineering framing here didn’t sit well with me. For a deep dive I would recommend Don Reinertsen’s Principles of Product Development Flow (2009).

I started the SolidJS tutorial on my iPhone this morning. Was impressed that it worked at all, but I couldn’t find a way to copy & paste, and switched to my MacBook. Better than giving up I guess…

The secant is the reciprocal of a cosine – the hypotenuse over the adjacent

Better still, pass the parsed config. Let the app decide how it is configured, and let it deal with any problems.

Demographics is a problem for the US also, but the easiest solution, immigration, is no longer acceptable (if ever it was) to an increasingly vocal minority. To be fair to the US, that situation is shared by many other countries in the West, and I'm not sure that China is ready for that solution either.

Seems ok for me now

Ovens in the UK are usually wired in. Plugs go up to 13A, suitable only for small (e.g. tabletop) ovens.

Potentially a testable hypothesis for string theory? I.e. that it might predict something observable that isn’t accounted for otherwise?

Oh wow, thanks!

Do they have SPLIT and JOIN also? I have long wished for those in Excel

I think of that as “British” style (as opposed to American). I think it’s more common here and I certainly prefer it

Recently updated: [Simon Tatham, initial version 2023-09-01, last updated 2025-03-25]

The illustrated example isn’t multivariate and can be drawn in 2 dimensions. The harder examples are also harder to visualise.

Implying an memoryless distribution (eg exponential) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorylessness

In the absence of other information it might be as good a basis as any?

I wouldn’t call it disingenuous. It’s the published title (i.e. not editorialised for HN) and accurate enough for its intended audience.

What’s good for Tesla is good for America. Charles E. Wilson.

https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2016/04/when-a-quote-is-n...