drc500free

A good exploration of these metaphors is Gareth Morgan's Images of Organization[1] . To your point, my personal favorite is "Organization as Psychic Prison" - not in the sense of keeping physically curtailed, but in the sense that it is hard for workers to break out of the memes and processes of an administrative organization. A good summary is here[2]:

1. Machine: an organization is a series of connected parts arranged in a logical order in order to produce a repeatable output

2. Organism: an organization is a collective response to its environment and, to survive, must adapt as the environment changes

3. Brain: an organization is a set of functions designed to process information and learn over time

4. Cultural System: an organization is a mini-society, with its own culture and subcultures defined by their values, norms, beliefs, and rituals

5. Political System: an organization is a game of gaining, influencing, and coordinating power

6. Psychic Prison: an organization is a collection of myths and stories that restrict people’s thoughts, ideas, and actions

7. Instrument of Domination: an organization is a means to impose one’s will on others and exploit resources for personal gains

8. Flux and Transformation: an organization is an ever-changing system indivisible from its environment

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/196016

[2] https://academy.nobl.io/gareth-morgan-organizational-metapho...

> So in short, what we have is an uncontested pattern of entering into what both parties knew and accepted to be valid and binding deferred delivery purchase contracts on a number of occasions. It is important to note that each time Kent added to the offered contract “Please confirm terms of durum contract” and Chris did so by succinctly texting “looks good”, “ok” or “yup”. The parties clearly understood these curt words were meant to be confirmation of the contract and not a mere acknowledgement of the receipt of the contract by Chris. There can be no other logical or creditable explanation because the proof is in the pudding. Chris delivered the grain as contracted and got paid. There was no evidence he was merely confirming the receipt of a contract and was left just wondering about a contract.

....

> I find this to be very similar to the durum contracts referred to above including Kent’s use of the phrase “Please confirm flax contract” (the only difference being the use of the word flax instead of the word durum) and this time instead of words like “ok”, “yup” or “looks good” being texted by Chris – a commonly used <thumbs up> emoji was texted by Chris.

This is the key finding in the Judgement[1] for how the judge resolved the ambiguity, including important context missing from TFA. The parties had done business together for ten years, and had executed contracts via text message on three previous occasions. In all three previous cases, the seller responded with something terse and then delivered on the contract.

[1] https://www.canlii.org/en/sk/skkb/doc/2023/2023skkb116/2023s...

It's kind of like going to vegas for a week and coming out with a lot of good stories and 90% of your money.

In terms of investor return, I think it's healthy to have some exits like this. A bunch of the money was only in for 2 years, and probably doubled their investment in that time. The rest of the investors got their money back, with something close to NASDAQ returns on top of it. If this was the baseline for the fund instead of going to zero, you wouldn't need unicorns and the questionable growth tactics that go with them.

If founders had 25%, they got "retirement with reasonable luxuries" or "gunpowder to play investor" money of double digit $millions.

If 20-25 employees split an option pool of 15%, it's close to replacing the FAANG opportunity cost.

So totally agree that it's a bit of a "meh" outcome in comparison to financial alternatives, and the pie splitting matters a lot. But it didn't go to zero, and everyone is within a stone's throw of their stock market / FAANG hurdle rates (and it's not like that FAANG career is guaranteed for people who thrive better at startups). And the stories and experiences are a hell of a lot better.

In sealed auctions, you want to win by bidding the most. But if you win by more than $1, you could have paid less.

In this version, you just bid to win and the seller lets you adjust down to that perfect "just barely winning" bid afterwards.

It turns out the seller makes more by everyone bidding to win than they lose by letting the winner adjust their bid after winning.

That's because the 2nd place bid ends up being higher than the winner's used to be.

I think there are two different kinds of innovation: doing new things, and finding cheaper ways to do existing things. The latter case tends to be about either interesting insights about the actual value that let you find a better point on the cost curve, or entirely new manufacturing technologies that let you bend the cost curve entirely.

Trading away safety for cost isn't usually an innovative trade-off by itself, and making that trade-off without any interest in quantifying it is a red flag.

It would follow a Bathtub Curve, so it would go down first, then up.

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

The website closes with a graph objectively showing how people disagree with each other on these questions. People thinking that interpretation is obvious and that there is no reasonable disagreement is exactly the problem.

I think the most important function of a good Product Management team is to understand what parts of the go-to-market impact tech decisions and spend 80% of their energy into pinning those down as firmly as possible. There is a happy medium between JIT delivery of specs for random features and a hard two-year roadmap that can't react to business changes.

YNGNA is generally true, but Product's should have a very clear vision of what kinds of entities the system is going to handle over then next 36 months before they start asking for specific functionality. I've seen extra shit get built, but I've also seen e.g. a travel booking system that was built without a "flight" being a first class entity. Flights were deduced on the front end from attributes attached to seats... which worked well until a PM asked for the UI to show fully-booked flights, which HAVE no available seats that make it to the front end. Same product couldn't handle the booker and traveler being different people, when they knew from day 1 that it would be a necessary feature. It would have been little extra work to incorporate into the data model from the beginning, even if the two values were always the same for a while.

I think the majority of the technical debt I've seen that isn't ci/cd related is disconnect between the domain model the product team is working in and the data model the engineering team is working with. Formalizing that domain model is now one of the first things I do when joining a team, so everyone agrees on precisely what the major nouns and verbs are and how they interact. Not just for the current system, for where we think we will be in 2-3 years. With everyone doing agile, it's amazing how many incompatible, un-written assumptions you discover that hadn't been ironed out.

Confusing title, but quick read and worth it. Data collector only had to swap 3 data points with 3 others to get the fake effect in their study, and the other authors seemingly had no idea.

The standard chemistry curriculum was strange to me. It seemed like we had to learn every incorrect model that civilization ever had about atoms, molecules, and electrons.

It seemed like the kids who were into chemistry were frustrated by the distraction, and the kids who weren't were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of concepts. They didn't seem like useful stepping stones to how things actually worked, just wasted time on things that then had to be un-learned for the next module.

I didn't need much of a "why" to crunch through stoichiometry as a kid who was into physics and algebra who liked puzzles, but I also stopped doing chem after my freshman undergrad requirement. I didn't really understand organic chem and the tie between carbon backbones and interesting organic molecules that can actually do things. I think I would have taken it farther if we hadn't exclusively focused on simple ions in solution for like 2 years, implying to a high schooler that the only career available was more efficient ways of manufacturing ammonia.

The border trilogy (All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain) is understated compared to many of his other books, but gets to something about young men becoming who they are that I haven't found elsewhere.

Please replace the editorialized headline with the actual one (Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration)

From the abstract:

> our findings show that tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring). For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning.

i.e. out of six domains, three were neutral, one favored women, and two favored men. Guess which one was cherrypicked for the HN submission?

Is there a term for this "winning the lottery jackpot is unbelievably unlikely, but every week we hear about someone winning it" effect? People get it when the media reports on the lottery, but somehow miss the amplifying effect on pretty much any other topic.

Totally agreed, in the last 5 years or so it feels like mediocre drivers have switched from white entry-level BMW drivers to white Teslas. It's definitely hit the mass market of somewhat-well-off people rather than just tech bros who like the technology.

The bigger annoyance is the "new trendy thing + old solved problem" patents that will be handed out, requiring corporations to race patent trolls to see who can make the first documented claim that obvious things are possible.

If anything that data point proves that this isn't a trend. I searched "funny elbow" and saw more than 188k views. In other words "fake british accent" is less of a trend than "funny elbow," which is two random words I put together.

It's interesting how much reporting about TikTok depends completely on the audience having zero exposure to TikTok.

Same deal with those warning words - mine are "enable" and "leverage." Smells that I'm handwaving away something I should be specific about, which means I don't understand it as well as I should.

Different contexts require different paradigms. For example, you can't operate in a war if you require your soldiers to arrest everyone who is shooting at them and collect evidence for an eventual trial. You also can't operate as even a regional power (let alone a global superpower) without keeping tabs on your adversaries.

The difficulty is in structuring agencies that have to follow different paradigms and determining how they should interact. One key bifurcation is supposed to be that intelligence services face outward, dealing with people who don't have constitutional protection because they are not residents or citizens. That outward focus has gotten muddied by the focus on preventing domestic terror attacks, the reality that much of the internet's physical infrastructure exists within our borders, and the difficulty in automatically determining the nationality of online personas.

One is a law enforcement agency that primarily focuses on domestic cases. It is set up to follow requirements that protect constitutional rights, with the ultimate goal being a prosecution through the justice system.

The other is an intelligence agency that focuses on foreign collection, analysis and action. Its activities are definitionally illegal in the places where it operates, with the ultimate goal being to inform and enforce American foreign policy using means other than the US justice system.

The CIA sharing information with the FBI generally means that the 4th amendment has been violated, because the CIA operates with an "ends justify the means" framework that the FBI isn't supposed to use.

Edit: I worked with defense/intel forensics as Iraq was transitioning from wartime (intelligence based) to peacetime (justice based) frameworks for dealing with terrorists. There is a massive difference between intelligence briefings needed in a wartime environment to prevent IEDs through "kinetic action" and the evidence packet needed to prosecute terrorists in court as civil society reasserts itself.

Definitely been a trend that professional content creation outperforms once the pros figure out how to game the algorithm. TikTok seems pretty resistant, both culturally and technologically. The shelf life of any one piece of content is so short that it might not be economical to invest too much in it. Instead you get a lot of fake amateur content, which is at least amusing.

I tried TikTok for a few hours.

It became clear really quickly that they have completely disrupted instagram and snap. The UX is much more communal and interactive than either of those, the algorithm lands you on your interests faster, and they have massively reduced the friction around becoming a content creator rather than just a consumer - so there's simply more STUFF there. The videos are more ephemeral and imperfect than what you usually see on IG, and there's a lot more joy in what's being captured. It really is a step change in the ability to build communities around shared interests.

Behind the scenes, it's a privacy nightmare and I understand the national security concerns that go with PRC tapping directly into the id of our electorate. I think PRC is much more skilled and subtle about online manipulation than Russia is. (I was working on media monitoring when social media became strangely fixated on trade deals for just long enough to get US involvement in TPP killed - a framework that was only significantly different from other trade deals in that it would sideline PRC. Once both candidates came out against it, popular concern over trade deal nuances disappeared and never returned)

But the hysteria is driven just as much by SV tech knowing that they've been lapped and finding common ground with congress for purely anti-competitive reasons, as it is by the government trying to thread the needle between free speech and ceding ground to adversary information ops.

It deals with that through having multiple "spaces" - horizontal scroll on the tabs to get to another one that can have completely different tabs for a different context.

But they haven't smoothed out the UX with multiple windows, which has all the annoyances that you point out. I think they need to figure out how to nudge users towards going to a different space instead of a new window, or automatically launch each new window with a new space.

Having worked in the travel industry, I recommend booking direct and organizing everything together with TripIt.

It's fascinating how creepy and manipulative the innards of these products look when you have to implement them with natural language instead of code.

"Radical Candor" is a great book that is 80% summarized by the following 2x2:

              Care
            Personally
               ^
    Ruinous    |   Radical
    Empathy    |   Candor
  --------------------------> Challenge Directly
  Manipulative |  Obnoxious
  Insincerity  |  Agression

Managers don't want to end up in the bottom right, because no one wants to be an asshole. Everyone remembers the negative impact of assholes, and it's very hard to challenge directly without being a dick. A common management failure (and definitely a personal challenge for me) is avoiding directness instead of building empathy. But I've seen a lot more aggregate damage done by large numbers of managers being stuck in the two left quadrants (ESPECIALLY ruinous empathy) and causing a lack of progress from excess entropy.

Writing emails that I had been putting off for weeks.

That's great! I didn't really grok accrual accounting until I realized that non cash "accounts" are explanations for why there is extra cash or missing cash.

When I stopped thinking about an asset as "a truck" and started thinking of it as "an explanation that cash is missing because we bought a truck" it all clicked. The "asset account" is the negative space around the asset, so that it can be matched up later with the cash that is generated by using up the asset.

Before that I thought of assets and revenues as good, and liabilities and expenses as bad. I couldn't make sense of why an asset turns into a liability instead of into a revenue. It's similar to learning intro physics and trying to understand how anything moves if every force generates an opposite force.

It's strange that commenters here think a 30-year-old entrepreneur worth $500M wouldn't know that there have been SEC questions around crypto offerings being unregistered securities for years.

It's not some obscure detail, it's one of the key risks of being involved in a new crypto offering as an investor, and I think most people posting here have read years of HN discussions about the relevant SEC positions. Ultra high net worth individuals - especially ones that have launched multiple business lines - are fairly likely to have heard about it. At least enough to play word association and ask someone to look into it for them.

The key distinction for reporters is that conspiring with someone before the fact to remove classified material is a crime. This includes giving advice to someone considering leaking on how to circumvent access controls.

Reporting on it after the fact when you had nothing to do with the removal of classified material in the first place is not.

The profession came first. And then licensure was added to make sure that bridges and buildings didn't fail all the time and kill people.

But it never quite reached the level of "Attorney" or "Physician" so we have this ambiguity depending on the field of practice, especially since the explosion of Software Engineer jobs.