ci5er

Reading two hours gives you 22 hours to "mull"

(Not disagreeing at all, btw)

Yeah - that all makes sense to me.

I'm thinking that maybe small projects: "Hey! Let's build this together" would be more productive. The book club(s) where I have worked have been more cross-functional, which I think is good, but a lot more divisive than group development projects. I'm still trying to get my head around how it is all supposed to work. (I used to be a founder/CTO of a fairly large (in the 90s sense, not the 2010s sense), fintech company and on the board, and you would think I would have figured it all out by now, but the culture, it keeps changing! :-) )

This seems about right. I do not agree with some people, but I want to hear them and do not want to censor them.

It seems that this favor is not returned.

I'm sorry ... I don't!

My father expected me to do so, at the age of 7, so I did. I don't think of it of speed reading - maybe it is. I did lose half my speed when I lived in Japan for a decade (learning to read in Japanese slowed my English input speed,

Yes. I don't know how regular it is, but Austin Ventures used to regularly kill founder CEOs after Series B (maybe (probably?) correctly), but replace them from a bunch of bench-players (we used to call them "the Boys Club". They would generally wreck the company, but AV played enough shell games that they, the LPs and their friends always made out OK.

EDIT: They (AV) have more recently (not super-recently) moved into mostly PE, and the incubator seems to be gone (?), but given the VC penchant to syndicate, and AV's penchant to not be nice to work with, even as the big-fish in a small pond, the number of people at places like Interwest or Sevin Rosen to work with them (Central Texas VC types), maybe they felt constrained? Or maybe they shot enough entrepreneurs in the back? Their 5-year-ago-fund was big enough to qualify for PE activity - maybe their new-new partners (the old ones retired about that time) decided they would prefer to apply their Wharton MBA skills/talents to PE? IDK.

Fred may have this opinion, but I assure you that he is speaking from a position of corporate governance in this article.

The VC, on the board, has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders: directly, his firm; the other shareholders, including the founders (!); and indirectly his LPs.

It is the board's responsibility to hire and fire executive management and as both a significant shareholder and board member, has the leverage to do so IF the other board members agree. It is almost never unilateral. Now - in the early-ish days of a company (say,pre-D series), the board is pretty small and pretty acquainted, so the guy who wants to fire you (the CEO) just places about 4 phone calls, and if everyone is on board, gets the ball rolling. Legally, it is a lot easier than it is with a public company or with someone with one of those weird split-stock-right things like Facebook.

1) I have for a long time. Now with Kindles, I don't have to load 10 paperbacks into my computer bag every time I go on a global jaunt. A lot of time in airplanes and hotels gives you a lot of time for this (on average - which is why I said "per week", not "per day"). But, most under 250 page non-fiction books can be polished off in less than two hours. A lot of people spend two-hours/day watching some Netflix movie - this is the same thing.

2) I guess the ones that are based on subjective interpretation instead of objective fact (whatever that is today). There is a book called "How we know what isn't so" (https://www.amazon.com/How-Know-What-Isnt-Fallibility-dp-002...), and it talks a fair amount about humans can clash by developing different interpretations of reality that they think are really real. I guess this isn't "touchy-feely"; I guess it is just that the reason I got into engineering is that machines are a lot more predictable and understandable than humans (to me). I did not mean to denigrate anyone's choice of book; I just didn't have a better term at hand (I still don't!)

I guess it depends on workplace culture? I have worked and/or consulted at places where I would not have been (in general) afraid to be bold.

Books like "Think" by Simon Blackburn don't bother me to comment on. They are pretty light treatments of the underlying topics, but (as philosophy), they are framed as rational discourses. (Whether they are or not is a different topic).

Topics about things like emotional intelligence (EQ) or persuasion or even nudging or race-relations in the 20th century can trigger a fairly rapid group response (primarily amongst the younger co-workers), and then you get to feeling piled upon (and even cancelled) pretty quickly.

It's a new world, and I'm pretty old, and as a sit-at-my-workstation-and-code engineer, I'm guessing that I may have allowed myself to get behind the curve on normative (allowable?) social opinions.

How does the "Book Club" thing work? By briefly observing it at my pre-Covid work-place, it seemed that (somehow) a book was chosen, people would buy and read it within about 30 days, and then sit around the lunch table and discuss their impressions or feelings or something.

I read about 5 fiction and 2 non-fiction books per week, so the reading is not the challenge for me. The challenge for me is that I feel that I will be judged if I have a non-consensus opinion about (for example) what everyone else thinks. On tech-stuff, I hold my own (Because I'm always right! Ha!), but with some of these more touchy-feely books, I'm not sure I won't be excoriated (and I don't enjoy that, and don't feel like fighting battles I don't care much about), I just don't share. And I'm not the only one in the group that does exactly what I just said. We want to have a convivial group and grow, but, isn't a Happy Hour slightly more inclusive (esp. with Hors d'oeuvres and Ginger-ale or whatever?)

That's a great point, and after re-reading your blog-piece, I'm not sure that point came through so clearly as you just declared it here.

A LONG time ago, I used to use it (tcl/tk) to do quick-and-dirty apps on X-windowed Unix boxes and port them to Windows without really knowing much about Windows. (That was handy!)

And Expect blew me away back in the day of distributed systems management (I'm more of a programmer than a sys-admin, so I guess it would even be more important to those folks?).

The whole "There is no math, only strings" thing, still irritates me to this day, but I suspect you are right - this might be tied to the simplicity and strengths.

IDK. Food for though. Interesting piece. I think that I'm the only person I know that still dabbles in TCL after about 15~20 years ago (maybe I need to get out more), but it certainly rocks where it rocks! It is always surprising and pleasant to see a modern piece on it.

I don't know. The science and engineering has quietly moved quite a bit over the last 40 years.

These [0] SMRs can, for example - there are several other approaches - can be assembled on a standard assembly line, shipped in a couple of C-Containers, and stood up on a concrete pad (well, not exactly, but close enough that I don't feel like complicating the point.

[0]: https://www.nuscalepower.com/

This is a fair beef.

But, at the same time, sometimes when dev-teams build a system/product named after a single short common word (Looking at you, go!), or a single letter, it gets to be hard to search for and find relevant results. (The "go-lang" convention didn't get widely adopted/used until go had been out there for a while).

Thanks! I love to read this kind of stuff!

That seems more-or-less intuitively plausible, but I often find missing from these discussions, is the aggregate employers' contribution to health insurance plans. If, for example, my employer's contribution to my health insurance premiums go up $500/month - I am going home with $6000 less that year. Now, they probably don't cut my wages, but it's pretty easy to see how they might be frozen for a few years.

Well, we do replicate. Maybe not as much as rabbits.

And, recently, we die less in childbirth and infant-hood. So - even with falling childbirth rates, we still tend to multiply a bit.

But given that absolute and relative global poverty rates and starvation rates and disease mortality rates have plummeted and population grows dramatically - it becomes a resource allocation problem.

Germany (for example) needs more laborers because of plummeting domestic birth rates. The retired community's social net requires young tax-payers to pick up the burden. Demographics are screwing with this math. Somalia or Syria (for example) have a lot of folks that need to escape. Problem: Once Turks or Arabs or Persians or Somalians or Syrians or Northern Africans get to Germany - they may or may not want to learn the language - but as refugees, they get full public benefit. And are not willing to learn or work to support retired Germans (this is an isolated example).

Maybe we have an exploding population in all the wrong places? (I am not recommending genocide - just: It is a wicked problem)

The nature of government is reactive, not pro-active. Except when they are stepping forward to propose a solution that won't work for a problem that doesn't exist for virtue/positioning points.

Star Trek is a great fantasy, but we are a long ways away from that. (Culturally, politically, legally, technologically and economically)

> Every paying software job I've ever had was in some way involved getting people to click on ads.

That's an amazing fact.

May I ask how old you are?

I've been designing SOCs, DSPs, Control Systems and a lot of software for various systems since 1985, and I can only recall one that might have been close to "clicking on ads" (it was a personalized "on hold" system for dial-in to major retailers (like JCP), to replace Muzak with offers and information and stuff). I was the VOIP-to-Enterprise-Telecom integration guy, so not directly tied to the ad-part, but the company pushed couponing to their clients pretty hard.

Wow. A man after my own heart. I finally gave up (partly because FF can be quite the memory hog when left open for a long time) and utilize OneTab a bit and have multiple tabs in each of multiple windows and use TabSession Manager to let me kill those windows and yet re-instantiate them at will. I guess it just comes down to organization - a straight-list wouldn't help me get my head around it all (which is my problem with Sublime Text, where I have ~1000 unsaved WIP files. That's also a problem for me)

Google domains sometimes dumps you onto GoDaddy. Which is/was unexpected and unwelcome. Sometimes you have to buy a domain and that's the way through.

I typically don't use them by choice (I actually like the AWS admin for DNS, but they aren't cheap - I probably need to check out other services like NameCheap).

But I don't think it is fair to label them technically incompetent, when it is not uncommon to get shanghai'd by accident (maybe that's what you mean by technically incompetent - but frankly if it burns more than 1 hour of my time to fix - I leave it alone because I have other priorities. I also only change about 10~20 vim defaults on a new VM. Fight me.)

Are you the guy (person) to talk to about feature/functions/satisfaction?

I've recommended or installed DropBox on over 200 SMBs over the last (close to a decade - I don't know how long specifically).

There are things you do great. There are some things you used to do great (or OK) but stopped. There are some not-great things. Compared to Google Drive (Which I have to use for some clients) and Microsoft One Drive (Which I have to use for some clients) and Box.com (which I have to use for some clients), I would prefer it if DropBox would simply solve for my technical and business needs (and I don't think, as an engineer, that they are that hard - I mean some of them you already did and removed).

I would love to talk. Please let me know if/how/when that could happen. If you are not interested, that is fine too. I am on the road for the next week-or-so, but just give me the sign, and I'd love to talk to you about your excellent core product.

EDIT: Oh! Ha - My email address is in my profile.

Well, yes.

As since obesity is (a bit) skewed by race, depending on the age group, you'd be looking at disparate impact lawsuits.

Whereas PPE is purely individual choice. I would expect a fair amount of judicial respect for the former, but maybe not the latter.

The peers are of the same age group (largely), so as a comparative tool within a cohort, would it still not be relevant?

I constantly give estimates that are about 1/2 ~ 1/5 of the actual because I am overly optimistic (and the thing about unknown unknowns). I have done this for 20 years, so you'd think that I would get over it, but apparently I am a dumb-ass.

But apparently, this is in the opposite direction of what you are talking about. That said! If I were to pad my guesstimates, then it could legitimately look like sand-bagging. I don't know that there are any easy answers. I am trying to become more accurate (if for no other reason than not having to work over Christmas holidays to keep up with my promises), but estimation is hard!

IMHO - you would be wrong. It is a perfectly good word.

This horse-shit has to stop.

Well played. Still - sometimes I would like to rank answers somehow, like: 1) I was there, 2) My best friend was there, 3) I have a PhD in that theory, 4) I built something from theoretical blocks, 5) My friends and I got high in college, and thought about building something, 6) ....

Maybe!

I always found Shimizu delightful, but worked in Tokyo for about 12~15 years (depending on how you count gaps), so I certainly can't criticize anyone for choosing that path!

If I had it all over to do again, I would probably choose a blend of Tokyo and Shimizu and Nagoya (maybe 3~4 years each?), but I really hate to move, so I probably end up with one and just stay there and hang out with yakuza in akachochin, because I fall into ruts of behavior.

EDIT: I have kind of a life-time pass, a marriage pass and a couple of kids that ended being able to be citizens, so it is surely a lot easier for me to come-and-go than it is for you - and I don't intend to be glib to the fact that you are probably trying to get a work visa (I started there!)

May I ask why you find that unusual?

EDIT: I don't know what country you are in.

May I ask? In English: "I presume" means that "I have no data and am speculating". I that correct?

If that is correct, why would you give an answer?

My query should not imply any criticism - just that I don't understand. Could you explain to an (Sincerely, From: obvious problematic person, who does want to learn)

Yup. It is soul-crushing.

My company failed in the back-wash of the "dot-bomb" (we were not strictly a dot-com play - but close enough that we got caught in the back-wash), and while I would have preferred IPOing (not really possible in early 2000) or M&A (actually, similar reasons), I got really DEPRESSED!. Now, I was just the founder, not the CEO, but the journey from garage to supremacy (if you even make it) is a ride, maaan!

I always found the garage loneliness that you find people lamenting on HackerNews to be a lot more bearable than 10 shareholders and 250 employees and (in our case) 20 global enterprise customers. I am certainly not sure that I have it in me to attempt again. Psychologically, I mean.