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dieterramson A Stroke of Genius: Striving for Greatness in All You Do (1993)

> Finally, I must at least address the question of whether greatness is worth the large effort it requires. Those who have done really great things generally report, privately, that it is better than wine, the opposite sex, and song put together. The realization that you have done it is overwhelming.

Is this just a momentary high, or does it result in a lasting effect on one's mood/disposition?

Reflecting on my personal (not "great") achievements, I'll feel a momentary sense of pride, which is a good thing to be able to feel from time to time, but largely inconsequential to my day-to-day.

dieterramson 72% of Consumers Don't Know What Net Neutrality Is

Depends. Equality of opportunity, equality of the vote, equal in the eyes of the law, those are largely uncontested. Income/outcome equality is certainly a hot button issue.

dieterramson 72% of Consumers Don't Know What Net Neutrality Is

Survey methodology and all that, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if most of the affected population didn't know.

Net Equality would have likely perked up more interest.

dieterramson Facebook – You are the Product

> If it does not fundamentally provide some value that you care about, you will stop using it

This isn't quite true, where addiction / compulsive usage can be implicated. Still, it's true that FB isn't completely in the pocket of advertisers and such. To the extent that they do make transgressions against their users, they will tend to not be overt.

FB doesn't have to make its users happy (whatever that means) so much as not piss them off.

dieterramson Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

It's not postmodernism. It's hot cognition, and this sort of behavior isn't limited to the left.

dieterramson If I Made Another Monkey Island (2013)

To elaborate, MI 1 and 2 can very much be seen as the glorified daydream of a child imagining himself to be a pirate. (There are certainly some books that play with this sort of thing, but I'm not remembering them at the moment. Pan's Labyrinth and Sucker Punch are movies in this vein.) Hence the zaniness of the world, and Guybrush having little personality of his own beyond a naive aspiration and a certain wit--he's a sort of surrogate for the player. The ending of MI2 suggests this is very much the case, but leaves it ambiguous. An MI3 by Gilbert would undoubtedly have continued along these lines.

CMI pretty much eschews the MI-as-daydream idea altogether in favor of MI as a sort of off-Disney world/production, meant to be taken at face value, with Guybrush becoming more of a character in his own right rather than a player surrogate.

dieterramson If I Made Another Monkey Island (2013)

MI3 is a good adventure game in its own right, but it's a very different flavor of MI than the first two, which are decidedly more literary/surreal/sardonic.

dieterramson Software Engineering ≠ Computer Science (2009)

We haven't been arguing that programming can't benefit from math.

> ignoring math as a programmer, feels like ignoring music theory as a musician or linear algebra as a structural engineer.

We're not ignoring math.

dieterramson Software Engineering ≠ Computer Science (2009)

Curry-Howard isomorphism does not mean the same practices that are performed in mathematics research must be applied to writing software.

Some aspects of language design are reinventing wheels invented by the math community. This is far from constituting the set of "writing software" or "software engineering".

dieterramson On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

> I haven't seen a single criticism of the paper that even recognizes the author is referencing large-scale incontrovertible research involving the Big-5 personality model (the giveaway is the use of terms "agreeability", "conscienciousness", "neuroticism").

I've seen that research. What conclusions do you think you can draw from it?

dieterramson Software Engineering ≠ Computer Science (2009)

>>Writing software is not math.

> You're wrong, and I've explained this upthread.

I suspect there is a difference in semantics, here. Software is inherently mathematical, yes. But the practice of writing software is not the practice of doing math.

The output of doing math is proofs. The output of writing software is...something that does something when run on a computer, hopefully interesting, meaningful, useful, or entertaining. In the vast majority of cases, we have not and will not need formal proofs of correctness for software to achieve these things.

If I want a blur effect on some portion of a UI, and choose to implement that with a Gaussian blur, what value is there in formally proving that a specifically Gaussian blur has been applied? All of this is inherently mathematical, but that doesn't imply a need for mathematical proof.

dieterramson Software Engineering ≠ Computer Science (2009)

Software engineering isn't math research. While I'm not against making it easier to formally prove correctness, at the same time I'm not sure why you think it's so important. We've been doing pretty well without it. How do you justify your certainty that we need it?

dieterramson Squaring Venture Capital Valuations with Reality

A $100k company could only be a 10x return for a $10k investment if that investment was for 100% of the company.

dieterramson Lack of cohesion in Uber's search for a new CEO

That isn't being implied.

And an "unquestionable" symbolism is not the same as "the only possible" symbolism.

dieterramson Higher-paid, faster-growing tech jobs are concentrating in 8 US hubs

You and the people you know are definitely outliers.

dieterramson Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

Combo of poor performance and battery usage.

I'm sure the unstated reasons included that it generally made for poor UX across the web.

dieterramson How to Interview Engineers

Generally I told people that I had done a tiny bit of contract work (true) and had been working on my own project (somewhat true, although it never got past the conceptual stage). There were a couple other things, which I won't elaborate on for anonymity's sake, but they were not programming related at all. Even on the projects, interviewers never really dug deep into them.

I suppose sleep and videogames aren't great answers. Taking time off to travel or explore some other interest is almost certainly fine in SV.

Ultimately, I think most places are so hard up to find qualified candidates that as long as you pass the interview and don't come off as a total slacker, you're probably fine. But if you're career-minded and applying to a place that has their career tracks worked out (read, not most startups), you probably want to give that impression to your future engineering manager.

dieterramson How to Interview Engineers

I spent a year not working and had no trouble lining up dozens of interviews when I started looking. However, it did take several months before (a) my interview game was up to par, and (b) I found a company I actually wanted to work for.

dieterramson Airbnb Employees Speak Out About Bullying and ‘Toxic’ Work Environment

On what grounds do you consider a claim "remarkable"?

This also isn't a standard of admittance that would work terribly well for minorities.

dieterramson Airbnb Employees Speak Out About Bullying and ‘Toxic’ Work Environment

> It's almost certainly a mistake to judge them negatively based on this story.

Logically speaking, it would also be a mistake to dismiss every report of poor employee treatment where those selection biases apply.

dieterramson Ask HN: What are the Madrid and Barcelona tech scenes like?

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Amazon-Spain-Salaries-EI_IE...

Doing a Numbeo cost of living conversion suggests at least the base salary is roughly comparable to what you'd be making in the US. The total comp numbers seem low to me, however.

dieterramson Do Developers Need College Degrees?

Just to share my experience:

Like you, I also didn't have a CS degree (I did take foundational CS coursework in undergrad, and also had an MS in something akin to HCI). I was hired for my first software engineering job in SF by a couple not-very-technical founders--both of whom were rather taken with a game I had designed/developed--after completing a week-long contract job for them. No CS fundamentals interview process.

After that first job, it was very easy to get interviews, although I had to prep a bit for those CS questions. I'm now interviewing for my third job, and feel like I've taken on too many interviews, many at big name startups and big corps. Among 18ish cold applications, I've only been turned down without so much as a recruiter call twice, likely because I was missing some keyword on my resume or something.

dieterramson Welcome, ACLU

I'm completely sympathetic to your point. Part of the problem is that the examples you give were, sadly, not enough of a deviation from the status quo to shock people into large scale action/donation. Trump's actions are, and he/Bannon/et al. also built up an ever increasing antagonism during the election cycle that wants an outlet.

dieterramson Material Components Preview

They do to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's a bit puffed up in the obtuse humanities style, but I do get its meaning.

dieterramson The Busy Person’s Lies

I think the problem is when such administrative work interrupts the intellectually productive work.

dieterramson Ask HN: Interview tomorrow – How to learn whether an org is “healthy”?

Agree. That is far too strong a conclusion from the information provided, though a good potential scenario to be on watch for.

dieterramson I’ve Seen the Greatest A.I. Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Twitter

It would surprise me if there wasn't already an AI that could handle that class of question. Or, at least, I'd imagine it being relatively straightforward (non-trivial, but straightforward) to develop an AI that could handle it.

dieterramson Never consider a travel planning startup

You have to make this sort of thing effortless (symbolic rewards lose their appeal over time). E.g, use background location or iBeacon so users are checked in without having to pull out their phone. The first time they enter a club, they get prompted for permission to check them in now and any future time they're at the club. Specifying male/female should only need to happen the first time they use the app.

dieterramson Australian women are having fewer children, later in life

This is actually a pointless distinction to make, as evidenced by the fact that (1) nobody is actually confused by one's meaning if they use 'less' where they were supposed to use 'fewer', and (2) there is no equivalent for 'more'.

Probably one of the best examples of a rule that should be dropped from the English language, imo.

dieterramson Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

Ah. I don't believe mrshoe was talking about Bill Gates remaining CEO of MS. He was suggesting that Gates should have managed more like Jobs back when he was CEO.