cauterized

Ah. There's an actual educational philosophy behind it. My aunt taught in a Montessori school for years, and everything she described was very different from a typical school.

I don't think there are many Montessori schools that teach beyond primary schooling (6th grade in the US), though.

That is insane!

By keeping their prices below costs in order to undercut the competition.

Sounds like the Montessori method.

Mail.app. I haven't found anything else I like as much for handling inboxes from multiple accounts.

Thanks!

Why not spend some time volunteering for a local charity you believe in?

What does "carry" mean in this context?

The fastest way is immersion. Live for 3 months in a country where English is the primary language spoken. Spend your time among people who do not speak your first language at all.

Failing that, spend at least half an hour every day speaking with someone whose first language is English, even if it has to be over Skype.

Set all your expectations up front and explicitly as possible. That can be more awkward with family than colleagues but it's also more important. Resentment occurs when someone thinks they're doing more or getting less than they bargained for.

AFAIK the price shown in charts and as the current price is basically the price of the last completed trade. And that, yes, is based on how much people trying to sell can get for it, aka how much people trying to buy are willing to pay for it.

For a software team of a handful of people or more, nothing holds a candle to JIRA. It's a little intimidating to new users, and the setup time is ridiculous. I have one or two nitpicks about things like the unavailability of conditional logic in some aspects of workflows. But if you're responsible for _managing_ the project, nothing beats being able to use your issue database as an actual database. And JIRA can be configured to reflect anything from the loosest zero-overhead startuppy kanban process (basically a UI almost exactly like Trello) to the most rigid and calcified enterprise process - and anything in between.

For small backlogs and non-technical users, Trello can be effective, but mature software projects tend to accumulate thousands of open bugs and feature requests and things-we'd-like-to-do-better-someday-if-we-ever-have-the-time. Trello's cards aren't skimmable, and you can't sort and filter them by multiple dimensions the way I'd prefer. There's no way to group a bunch of cards into something like an epic. And I still haven't figured out in Trello how to assign a card to one person but have other people subscribe to updates on it. It's ok to be the engineer assigned work via Trello, but it's awful to be the project manager trying to manage a backlog in Trello.

Asana is good for personal to-dos and tiny projects, but it's awful if you need to track the status of an issue through multiple steps of a process. It's a nearly perfect platform for GTD lists. But GTD is not a system for communication among multiple people.

Finally, both Asana and Trello are missing unique, persistent, human-readable issue IDs that can be used to quickly refer to and pull up a specific item out of hundreds or thousands that may have similar keywords. It seems like a small thing, but is a huge deal dealer for me because it breaks communication.

As for Basecamp, which someone else mentioned, I find it effective for communicating about a project with clients, but not for tracking the internal status of a large number of tasks for some of the same reasons outlined above.

But that's all else being equal. A company with a toxic culture or a toxic reputation is not equal to one with a world-class culture and sterling reputation.

And why is that number so low?

I see one in the article, which is wanting a single doctor to consistently be available through a course of treatment. But I don't see how 24 hours guarantees that any more than 16.

I for one would rather my doctor worked 8 hours, went to bed for 8, and returned for the third (or 4th) 8 hours than that they be on their feet trying to keep their eyes open for 24 hours straight and remember everything that I and 20 other patients have said to them or undergone in the last 24 hours.

Would you rather have your surgeon hand the scalpel off to another doctor, or have them proceed while so fatigued as to be drunk?

And in case you didn't notice, the article also points out the dangers of fatigue, just with the journalistic integrity that suppresses the expression of the outrage that those of us who aren't journalists should all be responding with.

Who thought this was a good idea, and why?

Aren't our medical professionals the people we least want to be dangerously fatigued?

Hasn't anyone read the literature on how sleep deprivation interferes with learning?

Or how being up for 24 hours straight is equivalent to a blood alcohol level that would disqualify a person from driving?

And we want people in this state while they're responsible for the health of people sick enough to be hospitalized?

What the actual fuck?

Now if FF could just avoid pegging the CPU on what should be reasonably performant web apps, we'd be getting somewhere. It's even worse with multiprocess.

How many total hours per week is your team spending on customer support? Is it 20 or more? Hire a dedicated support person or agency, even if they're part time.

Do you still want everyone else to have skin in the support game? Figure out how much time per week it's reasonable for each other member of the team to spend. Have them plan to spend 15 min per day on followup emails. Then schedule dedicated hours for each person to be on call for support so that they don't have to worry about being interrupted all the time but you still have coverage.

Nope. The signal to noise ratio on Reddit makes it a far worse time sink, and I've better things to do with my time.

Wow, I'm in the startup world and haven't heard of half the stuff you mentioned. The other half is my bread and butter.

HN may not be the best place to get a sense of which technologies are worth using because it tends to mix the broadly used stuff with the new shiny that's just a flash in the pan.

I would start by asking how much it is you feel you should know about each of these technologies, and why. Nobody can or does know of every single tool or framework of service that's out there, let alone understand them in depth. But you can probably get "what it is, and what do most people use it to accomplish" in under 5 minutes for each one a client brings up. Then there may be one or two per client that are worth learning in depth.

For instance, github is just version control hosting for git. If you work with client code, it's probably worth your while to be able to accomplish basic operations in git, even if you don't master it yet. But knowing github beyond a basic understanding of browsing websites is probably not worth your time.

Similarly, if you're deploying software for a client that uses puppet and nginx, you'll need a working knowledge of both (skimming the docs lightly is a good place to start for a new technology - you don't have to memorize every detail but get a sense of what it's capable of and what the terminology is that is uses so that when you're troubleshooting you know how to ask questions and which parts of the docs to return to).

But if you're just writing a new feature for the client's application, or troubleshooting their database indexes, probably all you need to know to be productive is that nginx is a web server and puppet is a tool for automating server management.

I think a bit less about "can you fit into our society?" and more about "can you produce effectively given certain constraints and reward structures?"

I recently learned that the concept of cultural fit was originally about being a fit for the process and work culture, not about being best friends with one's teammates.

What does that actually mean?

Well, for instance, someone who wants or needs to be told exactly what they're expected to do and how to do it is not a good cultural fit for us - we need people who can show initiative and direct their own work.

Someone who wants to work 6pm-2am is also not a good cultural fit. While we offer some flexibility in work hours, we rely too much on reasonably-synchronous communication (aka slack) for collaboration.

And we can't hire selfish or self-important assholes, because they're toxic and will ruin morale.

All the rest (beer or wine or non-drinker? Loves basketball? Plays an instrument?) is beside the point and usually just an excuse for various types of otherwise illegal discrimination. Hire someone who's capable of acting like a professional when in the office. Someone who can be courteous and communicates well. Once your company is past the size where you can all fit in a sedan at one time, you don't need to all be best friends.

If you take a few months off to live on that money and learn something new, would it be enough to increase your earnings by $100k total over the next 5-10 years? That's also an investment, and one that's got a decent chance of doubling your money in a reasonable timeframe.

I agree with the rest of the advice, but buying a home is not a good investment in all parts of the country/world, nor at all times. A home you own decreases your mobility and thus your employment options, especially if the labor or housing market in your area plummets in the future.

In other markets, home ownership and all its associated costs (including property taxes and maintenance) is more expensive in both the long and short term than renting.

For instance, for what I pay in rent in NYC (PLUS a down payment), I would have to commute at least 3 times as long to afford to buy an equivalent home. And also have to add the responsibility (in time and expense) for maintenance - from upgrading the plumbing to shoveling snow from the sidewalk.) Further, it'd be much more difficult to see friends, whom I'd no longer live near. That's all time that could instead be spent with friends and family, being healthier, or even making money on a side project or freelancing.

And if you get poor terms on your mortgage (think variable rate loans), you're just setting yourself up for pain.

Ugh. No.

Or rather, I don't feel obligated to attend all or even most of them. I do try to attend once a quarter or so as a way of expressing that I'm not above socializing with my teammates, just busy.

A cold boiled egg, sometimes two (I make a batch every weekend, and they keep well for a week or so). Occasionally also Greek yogurt. Sometimes berries (fresh or frozen, depending on availability and the weather) in the yogurt. Minimal effort (sleep an extra 10 min, woot!), lots of protein for energy and satiety.

I have a few simple (Wordpress or simpler) PHP/MySQL sites that get a couple thousand pageviews/mo apiece. They don't need more than ~99.98% uptime. I spend $5/mo apiece to host them on a shared host (asmallorange.com, if you care). I could probably find similar featured hosting for half that, but my experience is that the extra $30/yr buys you good customer service.

At work, our site serves 8 figures per month in page views and targets 99.999% uptime. We're on a Python/Django/MySQL stack with Celery, Varnish, Elasticsearch, and a few other things thrown in for fun. Between staging and production environments, and redundancy in production, I'd estimate we spend around $7k/mo on AWS for hosting, plus about $3k/mo for a couple Redshift instances for internal use. This year we might reserve some of our instances to save money.

Doing new things with guidance and a safety net. Working solo you can push yourself to do new things but it's hard to tell how you might do them better. And some things I'll pay someone to do for me rather than try to do myself because I'm afraid of the consequences of failing (for instance, hardening a server).

But doing something new under the instruction of someone who knows it well, you can ask WHY they do things a certain way, or what would happen if you did X differently, or even just "help, it's not working at all!" and learn a ton from the answers.

What if that event cost your company less than the additional redundancy required to avoid downtime from any such outage?

What if the lost revenue from that event multiplied by its annual likelihood is less than the cost of avoiding it?

I wouldn't WANT the email, but wouldn't be surprised by it. Its actually less offensive to email sooner. If you email me 6 months after I signed up just to check something out, I probably won't remember what the service was and will be annoyed. If you email a week after I signed up, I'll either read or delete and move on.

I for one will tolerate about one marketing or feature update email per month from a service I actively use. More than that and it gets irritating. Less than once every 3 months for a service I DON'T actively use, and I'll forget who you are.

And for me at least, feature update emails are the most likely to get at least skimmed. I'm generally not interested in your latest generic blog post about how to be better at X (hint: use our product!) Maybe some people are. But if your product now does something I was previously hoping it would (or that I hadn't even thought about but now realize would be super useful), I'll be GLAD to have received the email.

And yes, always offer and honor an unsubscribe. In many markets it's the law; and it others it's common courtesy.