endymi0n

Two anecdotes from when I visited a German tank squadron were:

"And here folks is our three liter tank. We like to call it like that because it needs three liters — just to start up."

Why? Because it has a 90hp motor. That just exists to crank the _actual_ main motor at 1000hp+

That day I learned that tanks are veeeeery thirsty beasts.

In a nutshell, torn between the extreme ends of high compile-time cost and large code size of a C++ flavored implementation and the high runtime cost and dangers of boxing/unboxing (Java), Golang opted for "none of the above" and tried to limit complexity drivers / powerfulness / expressiveness / usefulness instead, keeping the impact on both compile time and run time low.

About how well that decision will turn out in practice, we'll start to know soon.

Here's the single one resource I'm giving any of our new leaders, it's really short and the highest signal-to-noise ratio I've ever seen:

https://www.defmacro.org/2014/10/03/engman.html

I'm personally revisiting it every time I send it around, because it's just so good.

Here's another I've seen recently that goes into a bit of detail while not being quite as succinct:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30240428

EDIT: replaced second link with HN one as it contains an Emoji and broke due to policy

It's gonna be tough. Germany was opposed to the measure for a long time not just because they wanted to play softball, but because it effectively meant saying good bye to up to 55 billion dollars of credit.

Which they are entitled to — but effectively their alternative here would be retaliating against half the world. Which in a non-military way is effectively what the world wants, as it will hurt Russia just a bit more than everyone else on their own. And if they wage war on half the world, good luck to them.

Basically meditated, emptied my mind by writing down any tasks I'm procrastinating or ruminating on, identified the fears behind them, set a goal, did a quick exercise and then just did it in 50 minute chunks, but with the phone completely off, any windows in single focus and most importantly with the camera on and 10 people watching (== not really watching but doing their own tasks).

Had a pretty sizeable psychological effect though.

I used to do sessions with FocusMate before which worked, but in a bit of a hit & miss. Key differences to this workshop was the length (blocking half a day, uninterrupted) and the guidance through it, taking away brain cycles for managing.

Still a bit unsure how to fully replicate that experience on my own, but just experiening that someone was able to trigger this kind of focus in me, on a dreaded task, on demand, had a profound effect in me to go try it again.

Just joined a Flow Working workshop by Dr. Antoine Larchez and had some interesting results. As a lifelong (functional) procrastinator with diagnosed ADHD, I brought down 2.5h of effortless (once started) work on paper, some of the best in a couple of months if not years.

I have yet to see whether the methods are scaleable and replicable for me, but a lot of the content resonated with me, especially the insight that concentration to flow states is a skill that can be learned and brought down from 20 minutes to just one with training.

It was an interesting mix of fundamentals from Cal Newport (Deep Work), plus mind emptying exercises, concentration meditation, exercise breaks and group work sessions.

I'll probably dig more into it.

With everything I've learned so far, this perfectly describes the core struggle of success and entrepreneurship.

In order to have massive success, you need a constant state of both unreasonableness and optimism.

Unreasonableness drives results and change, optimism inspires people to rally around your cause.

If you're not unreasonable, chances are you aren't striving for more. There's lots of people out there living a perfectly happy, unremarkable life.

If you're unreasonable, that's by definition an unhappiness with the world, which creates a drive to change it.

If that unreasonableness creeps to much into your life, you get unhappy as well.

If the happiness creeps too much into your unreasonableness, you start losing your edge, the very drive that made all of it happen.

That's why you see so few truly happy billionaires and so many deeply happy people who are never even trying to make a larger impact on thousands.

It's certainly possible to balance both, but it's a very fine line to walk and constant personal development.

I never stated something else.

While you're entitled to your own opinion, I can safely say this study matches my own observations 100%. Having hired and led over a hundred engineers, I wasn't surprised of the magnitude of this finding at all.

Yes, happy people get easily worn down in bureaucratical organizations.

Some of them adapt and get cynical.

Some of them quit and join organizations where they can be happy and effective. It's the best part of my day to work among many of them.

The study answers this question (at least partly) by measuring happiness levels _before_ the job.

In all honesty, my concrete advice would be reaching out to other local founders privately and asked what worked for them and what didn't. Note there usually is a lot to these stories that aren't told in public for many reasons.

On top, one thing I regret is not having joined a network of founders and entrepreneurs earlier. These days, I would just ask them and get 2-3 spot-on recommendations with warm intros in a day. We hackers and builders usually scoff at these kind of "elite" networks until we realize building and selling a company is fundamentally a people business, where connections and trust are paramount. Reach out to me on LinkedIn for an intro to the organization I'm in (it's global).

As for the original advice: +100 from my side. Especially if the whole founder round is not experienced, you really want to have a cold blooded veteran on your side. Someone who commands respect by founders, is hired by you guys and is incentivized by getting home a part of the deal. Not only do these brokers have the know-how, they usually have a vast network of interested parties to bring to the table at any time to get a bidding war started and are experienced in navigating the delicate timing of the funnel that is crucial for a success. The differences in outcome I've personally witnessed with and without brokers are night and day, even though I have my own cultural issues with them.

To paraphrase my brilliant cofounder, mentor and tough sparring partner:

"The biggest lie you techies tell to yourselves is 'Build it and they will come'. Nope. Nobody ever comes by. I've beaten competitors with the better product again and again. Know why? Because marketing builds growth, growth builds revenue and revenue enables hiring brilliant people to fix your product, all the while the brilliant product people are still waiting for customers."

Let's say I've have been having kicked my ass more than I can count on some beliefs I've had, but I yet have to regret working with him.

I feel exactly the same, and honestly, it keeps me from approaching some people I‘d like to.

If anyone has figured out a pretext or mental framework for warming up conversations that have effectively died long ago, I would be delighted to know about it.

So what? 99% of print ads go to trashcans unread. That's factored in by everyone buying those as well.

If anything the numbers should be "better" for TV these days: As when I was a kid, ad breaks were toilet and toothbrush breaks and I barely watched through any of them. These days modern midrolls are designed to be too short for that, but just long enough to be bearable.

> This business model really needs to stop.

Let me offer a different perspective: I'm as little pro advertising as I am pro drugs, but I see both of them in a similar way: As having some negative consequences to society, but also being backed by a real world demand that doesn't stop at the borders of legality.

And the same way alcohol prohibition counter-intuitively had an even more negative effect on society, the same thing would happen with advertising.

I would rather tolerate transparent advertising with a clear, public framework and enforceable rules than I would want to tolerate a world where advertising demand creeps into every other form of communication.

We already live in a world where it's hard to trust any person or organization. I'm personally against drastically making that problem worse.

Seriously, the magic of error correction is hardly appreciated or noted by younger hackers these days.

I had one important project (I don‘t remember anymore which one it was), so I put it on THREE 3,5‘‘ disks, one after each other.

All three were unreadable by the time I arrived. I was devastated.

(note I had heard stories about rotating current brakes ruining disks so I took care not to go by rail, must have been something else)

Web3 also doesn‘t care about anything else than holding up just enough hype and credibility so the original creators of the Ponzi scheme can cash out.

Apart from the potentially massive significance to low-income countries and health costs, does someone has a good grasp on the applicability of the algorithmical advances towards classic MRI?

My current gut feeling is like: If 0.055 Tesla can create this kind of image quality, what could we possibly expect at 1.5 or more?

Indeed, most people are very surprised that a stick of dynamite has just the energy equivalent of a Snickers bar. Spread the energy release over more than just a few microseconds and you have a very different profile.

I get your point, but I skipped the details there in order to not water down my story there.

In my city, I‘m just using car sharing anymore and they just have ID.3s. Now, half of them come with the feature on, the others off.

If you let the brake go at the traffic lights because the exact same model of car you took on the other way had auto hold activated, but this one doesn’t and the car suddenly starts moving towards the car in front out of the blue, believe me it feels quite critical.

Beware however that this flexibility and initial ease is more often than not a slippery slope into chaos.

This article put it really well in my opionion: There are no schemaless databases, just the ones with an explicit schema and the ones with their schema defined in a couple hundred places in code.

One of them is slightly easier to start out with, the other to evolve, maintain and communicate (double serving as self-documentation) across multiple engineers.

https://orangematter.solarwinds.com/2015/02/24/schemaless-da...

Thing is, it‘s not just Tesla. Old economy carmakers are taking a page from the playbook by now to skip to the front line — and it‘s exactly the wrong one.

Having driven the VW ID3 a few times, it‘s truly horrible in this regard.

The climate settings (yes, including fast defrost!) are „not available“ until the systems have booted up which takes forever.

Auto-Hold as a critical driving feature which had a hardware button before took me (as an engineer) a whopping 10 minutes to find in the third page of a random submenu.

The voice control is located as a touch-not-press button at the outer edge of a steering wheel so when (not if) you accidentally touch it in narrow turns, the confused useless voice blasts full volume at you while you‘re in the most complex driving situation.

It‘s as nobody had driven or user tested their cars before.

And here I am, an early technology adopter of two decades, feeling like an old man yelling I want my hardware buttons back.

While your point is spot on, it probably won‘t matter in the long run. With the infection rate of Omicron, we as a society were faced between even more ridiculously restrictive measures to contain it after the first economy destroying measures — or just taking the jump into the unknown unknown of what will happen if we let everyone get infected and move into the endemic state.

With probably only the exception of China, most countries have decided that they will take the latter path, at various degrees of throttling.

How is social engineering any different to lying to a JSON API and conning it into accepting a SQL query inside the request?

If anything it‘s people like you worshipping technology itself and ignoring their users why social engineers are so effective.

https://xkcd.com/538/

"The next layer of your unfolding purpose may make itself clear immediately. More often, however, it does not. After completing one layer of purpose, you might not know what to do with your life. You know that the old project is over for you, but you are not sure of what is next. At this point, you must wait for a vision. There is no way to rush this process. You may need to get an intermediary job to hold you over until the next layer of purpose makes itself clear. Or, perhaps you have enough money to simply wait. But in any case, it is important to open yourself to a vision of what is next. You stay open to a vision of your deeper purpose by not filling your time with distractions. Don’t watch TV or play computer games. Don’t go out drinking beer with your friends every night or start dating a bunch of women. Simply wait. You may wish to go on a retreat in a remote area and be by yourself. Whatever it is you decide to do, consciously keep yourself open and available to receiving a vision of what is next. It will come. When it comes, it usually won’t be a detailed vision. You will probably have a sense of what direction to move in, but the practical steps might not make themselves clear. When the impulse begins to arise, act on it. Don’t wait for the details. Learn by trial and error what it is you are to do.

[...]

And then, one day, a few years later, it is finished. This layer has dissolved. And the cycle begins again, and again, until you have penetrated all the layers into your deepest purpose. Then, you act fully, until that purpose, too, is dissolved in the bliss of the love that you are."

— David Deida

I‘m curious as well, as for so many countries ingesting and matching that catalogue including error correction is currently a full time job for more than a dozen people over 6 years and 10k+ per month in infrastructure costs.

Will check for canary traps tomorrow as I‘m suspecting they‘re just scraping us or our competitors. This is far too expensive to build for how cheap they‘re selling it.

Source: I work at JustWatch.

I used to be anti nuclear, then I was pro, but by now I‘m back to anti. Main reason being that it‘s too slow to move the needle by now. Any new nuclear project by now - even if we’d change public sentiment and regulations today - is so time, planning and capital intensive that by the decade it goes online, it‘ll be outcompeted by overprovisioned solar roofs + battery storage even in the worst locations except maybe the arctic circle.

Without proliferation risks and however you get rid of the radiated mess.

I still remember the outcry when the EU banned incandescent bulbs in 2009.

CFLs were crappy and full of heavy metals, Halogen was half-assed, LEDs were expensive, too blue and too weak.

People were defending their radiant heaters in full force, but everybody underestimated exponential development in a market suddenly put into full force solving this.

By the last stage where 40W bulbs were being phased out, nobody was interested in them anymore, because LEDs were simply better with cheaper TCO.

Solar and battery are still on exponential track down the cost curve (with wind saturating, but still going strong).

Nuclear and fossils are not.

The energy world will look very different 10 years from now.