mepiethree

A home, yeah, not a home in downtown metros. My uncle is a teacher and owns two houses in rural Ohio with his wife, kid, and two dogs. Living the American dream.

Ughh here I was at 1:30AM after a hard week, checking the news one last time before going to bed, and see this. I hate this dang industry and regret ever becoming a tech lead. I know the Heroku engineers have it worse and all, but just venting.

For electric power it’s an especially tricky physics problem; you can’t overproduce power, or things will just blow up. Grid operators must perfectly balance supply and demand at every moment of every day and electricity moves at the speed of light, so the electricity powering your lights was a hunk of coal or a gust of wind within the last nanosecond.

large scale batteries could make the jobs of grid operators like me soo much easier.

Sounds to me like you just have a bad manager.

In my experience the idea that you will catch all bugs by just reading the code is just wishful thinking - I saw plenty of bugs merged into the development branch on codebase I worked on at Google despite somewhat strict PR review process.

Now that I’m in startup land, we use Heroku’s Review App feature, which is by far my favorite Heroku feature, and helps us catch bugs all the time

> unintentionally building a universe where it was the "internal team" who developed it

0% chance it was unintentional given that he said “no ad agency would have done this ad”

Her tweet gets her firm attention from people who may believe that Coinbase is bad/run by men who want to take credit for other peoples’ work, which is probably… a lot of people. Her tweet is probably good for business.

No way it gets litigated or that they win, given that other people at Coinbase publicly gave her credit even before she Tweeted

I’ve worked with plenty of people with “bad experience”. People who don’t learn from their mistakes, and consistently repeat the same errors, even things as basic as not testing their code before creating PRs.

I guess this model works if you identify and fire those people early, but in general, this seems like a great way to retain proven career underperformers.

I really like the “no guilt, but start on time” model, especially now that we don’t have the disruption of someone entering the room. I am often late because I am in meetings 6 hours a day which can lead to a “doctor effect” of cascading lateness. But for things like standup, just GO!

Why is it considered a dick move to be early as an employment candidate? As long as the candidate is unobtrusive and keeps themselves busy, all it shows me is that they value the opportunity enough to budget extra time for things like traffic, etc.

(Of course, now we do everything remote, so I wouldn’t even know if they are early)

Oh man I want this so badly. Might build it.

I have those headphones and they do indeed rock. The problem is: most cellphones don’t have headphone jacks. My cellphone broke last summer and everything with a headphone jack was backordered. So now when my headphones die on (say) a long flight, I just can’t listen to music anymore, because they don’t work while plugged in. Bluetooth sucks, and not just because it’s unreliable.

This is great context that I didn’t fully understand until your comment. Thanks!

“it’s hard to justify any real value for a US copy of Super Mario Bros, no matter how old or sealed it is, as it’s just a newer copy of the same game.”

This point is lingered on for a while and I don’t get it. Nothing about pricing collectibles is a rational assessment of utility: value is essentially a function of rarity, desirability, and condition. Obviously, in this case, the US versions score higher on “desirability” for US collectors, because the whole point of buying the things is for the sentiment. You can, after all, emulate the games in a million different ways.

I collect civil war stuff, and we have a similar ‘paradox’. Confederate relics score low on “condition”, because the confederacy had worse iron. Yet, confederate relics fetch very high prices. Why? Because they score high on “desirability”: many of the few people who are VERY interested in the civil war are (unfortunately) very sympathetic to Confederates.

My wife put on an Oculus Quest and threw up within 5 minutes from simulator sickness. In this case, I think the average HN-Folk is _more_ likely to be interested in VR than the average person

Isn’t that what the state of VR has been for the past decade? I used an Oculus for the first time in 2013 and it was exactly that feeling of exploration and joy

I think about this all the time. I’m pretty young, don’t want kids, and tech pays so well right now, that I’m quite optimistic that I’ll have the opportunity to pursue a pure passion project like this in my 30s or 40s, heavily inspired by ConcernedApe

Certainly not billions, but it’s still pretty astounding that basically one developer made a game that grossed >$200 million (15 million copies!)

Obviously not. In such a case, a much better option would be to fall back to the camera system or, worst case, force the car to go into manual mode with a human driver if it detects that nearby systems are unresponsive

The effect is called Jevons Paradox. That is not a relevant consideration in this particular case, but it is a major concern for things like air conditioning efficiency.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

The total amount of wind and solar in the world is several orders of magnitude higher than the amount that we would harness so this isn’t really a relevant consideration. It’s like asking if a piece of dust on an Olympic sprinter would slow them down due to air resistance.

Yep! Sunrun (largest residential solar company in the US) has partnered with Ford to make their new electric pickups into “power walls” in this way

Of course I agree and was just being rhetorical! I just think it’s better to applaud the progress here than fault it for not having yet solved all the world’s problems

Tech has to start somewhere. How much RAM did the first supercomputer have? Might’ve been easier to use pen and paper.

Nice! Would love to read your paper :) I worked on this project, which is why I am all over this comment section :)

https://its.berkeley.edu/news/new-tsrc-report-shows-benefits...

I like this (very pro-EV) video which gets into this exact question https://youtu.be/1oVrIHcdxjA

The most important point, IMO, is that localized emissions do the most harm. Even if the emissions were equal, keeping pollution out of the urban core will literally prevent (or defer) millions of cases of lung cancer etc. This paper quantifies the social cost of atmospheric release: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-015-1343-0

I’m not sure what country you live in, so this may not apply to you, but most countries, including mine (USA) do heavily incentivize the use of green energy. Globally, renewable energy growth is accelerating, now that costs have come down so far. It’s both/and, not either/or.

One other thing is that EVs have huge potential for energy storage. Smart energy policy will effectively use EVs as both a source and sink. In the daytime, when solar is dominant, EVs can charge at work. At night, they can discharge and power your home (V2G). There aren’t many EVs that do this currently (there aren’t many EVs at all currently), but many, like the F150 Electric, will.

A lot of things, in my opinion. If you do work that can save even one life, it's worth it on a utilitarian level. It's not that hard to think of life-saving things to work on. You could imagine, perhaps, COVID vaccine distribution, solar energy technology, suicide hotlines, lots of food solutions (impossible meat perhaps), even autonomous vehicles if you've drank the kool aid, etc.

Of course this assumes that the 40th-80th hours provide marginal utility (perhaps a big assumption).

Yes. It's hard to find a good one.

We aren't "poor sods" or carrot-led horses. We're just motivated by different things than you. In my case, fully mission driven

Workaholism is an addiction and a mental health problem. I have worked for 50+ hours a week for 4 years and last year I became a manager and have worked 60-80 for the last year. On bad weeks, I joke to my wife that I am headed to my 9-5... because I sometimes work 9am to 5am and get up the next day for another 9am meeting.

I am absolutely doing real work, if anything, it's my non-work life that is "theater." I won't check my phone, or even eat because I'll lose minutes of work. It's clearly bad for me and my productivity.

I'd love to "work on" my workaholism but...