nevdka

You need to be able to hold facts in your own working memory while you think about them. If you do this with the same facts, and think through different combinations, they’ll stick in your memory for longer.

I never sat down to memorise trivia about the Roman calendar, but I know Julius Caesar was assassinated on the 15th, the ides of March, because of repeated exposure while thinking things through.

It seems like old assessment techniques could luck in to testing comprehension, because the people who understood things would also remember them. This devolved into the recall being seen as the goal, instead of as proxy measure of something harder to test.

Americans use their social security numbers like id numbers in all sorts of systems. This problem has nothing to do with id numbers.

A big problem with online discourse about programming if that so many people are in bubbles that they think are normal and think that anything outside of their experience is niche and rare.

‘Enterprise’ software includes SaaS, internal LoB software, integration work, and a bunch of other things I can’t name. The LoB and integration work is usually boring from a technical point of view, so articles don’t get written as much, and they likely wouldn’t do as well on HN, compared to something highly technical about scaling something to serve millions of users. There’s probably many more hours of work, and more programmers, doing LoB and integration, but people in a SaaS bubble don’t see what happens elsewhere.

Redundancy is easy to misclassify as waste, particularly for someone who has incentives to find more ‘waste’ they can cut and claim credit for.

There are a lot of group chats I'm not in because I'm not on messenger.

I work with Australian tax - lots of regulatory complexity, add the documentation often assumes the reader is a CPA. I've got decent results by telling the chat bot to ask questions instead of making assumptions, and then grilling it to find edge cases.

I did a live demo in front of the CPAs, using their documentation, and Claude asked clarification questions they hadn't thought of and exposed gaps in the old manual processes.

Then there’s perl, which doesn’t free at all.

None of which were made by accountants. They were instead made by engineers who have experience and training in dealing with complex software systems.

Native apps are where power users and other non-developers can do programming. The type of things that an engineer who lives in the terminal might make a CLI or TUI for, an accountant or project manager might want to do with a GUI. This is where VB6 and VBA lived, probably also HyperCard. Web tech has too much complexity for that.

People will often write about something that worked for them, and from that pull out abstractions they believe are generalised and universal. They rarely are.

Organisational patterns that work for startups rapidly iterating to find product market fit won’t work well for a consultancy building a better defined product for a single client, or a corpo IT department trying to shoehorn a new distribution channel through a 30 year old logistics system.

A team of experienced engineers who know the problem domain and have worked together for years needs different organisational structures than a team of new hires and grads. A team of introverted hermits and a team of extroverts will function differently regardless of organisational structure.

You need to have some idea of where ideas work and don’t work before you can design the ones needed for your specific situation.

I think the observed feminisation isn't a causal factor, but instead shares a causal factor - that every space must now accept everyone. This causes a few problems.

0. One of the ideas that has tagged along with inclusion has been changing from an input focus ("e.g. No girls allowed in treehouse!") to an output focus (Fewer girls than boys are in the treehouse). In the input focused model, you want to change the rule to stop excluding girls. In the output focused model you also need to change the treehouse to be more attractive to girls. From this, any 'deviant' interests that happen to be gendered (or racial, cultural, etc) get suppressed in the name of creating inclusive outcomes.

1. Most humans have a natural urge to conform to those around us, some just experience it stronger or weaker than others. When 'deviants' are included in a non-deviant space, their deviant tendencies face a subtle yet strong conformity pressure that wouldn't be felt if they were excluded entirely.

2. 'Deviants' being accepted more widely means they don't need to create or find their own spaces. Hence there are fewer spaces where the deviation is locally normal, which would allow the conformist pressure to enhance and refine the deviation.

You mentioned restrictions around sending money, but not restrictions on receiving money. If you put obligations on the banks receiving payments to refund scam victims, those banks will have incentive to stop people using their services to conduct scams. Basically, unusual payments get stopped or delayed until the bank can confirm their own customer isn’t running a scam, identities haven’t been stolen to open accounts, etc.

It wasn't just storage. In the 90s, most servers were single core. Databases already had network interfaces so they could be shared by non-web applications running on desktops, and so were the natural place to split a website over multiple machines. This turned into the received wisdom of always putting your database on a separate machine, despite processing power and storage latency improving so much since the 486 and pentium days that network overhead dominated response times.

They perform elaborate cleansing rituals on any item brought into the crystal-writing room. When they enter, they wear special clothing, lest the impurities of the outside world taint the crystals.

We use invisible light to draw patterns on crystals to control the power of lightning. Definitely magic.

This is also the reason perl was used before python began to dominate. It was installed everywhere before python was installed everywhere.

Pre-covid, the real estate conspiracy was that management was pushing for smaller and more crowded open offices so that they would spend less.

Maybe the books that they're trying to market aren't books that kids want to read. There are a couple of quotes that point to that:

> Connor was more blunt: “Maybe you think a book about a school shooting is really important,” she said, “but kids want to read a fun book. That’s what kids want today—they want to have fun.”

> But if you’re a new author who’s written a quiet, issue-oriented debut, “you might have to think about adapting, in a way.”

> Eberly, the book agent, doesn’t think the supply of serious, “award-winning” books will dry up. “Knowing the editors that I sell to, those are the types of books they want to shepherd into the world.”

Maybe kids would rather read fun adventure stories rather than the issue-driven stories that adults are pushing on them.

You need a way to assign technical debt to a process or practice, then you can evaluate the cost of that process over time.

Could be something like... Our team spent 500 hours fixing bugs introduced during overtime, and we spent 250 hours of overtime to introduce those bugs in the first place. So an additional hour of overtime will likely introduce 2 hours of technical debt.

Or maybe... Code written using inheritance hierarchies creates 40 minutes of muda per hour, but using composition only creates 20 minutes. Or... every hour spent on throw-away prototypes reduces muda by 2 hours.

You don't need a monopoly, you need competition. Renewables sell into the same energy market as fossil fuels, and get paid the same price. So you end up with low cost renewables making higher profits than high cost fossil fuels, and so attract more investment.

Long term, when renewables have displaced fossil fuels, then profits will fall. But that only happens after the renewables get investment.

Being capable of spending millions on lawyers doesn't mean a rich company wants to spend millions on lawyers.

In many (if not most) cases, loosing at a fair arbitration would be cheaper for the company than winning in court by outspending on lawyers.

Of course, there's also the 'stopping class actions' thing.

A corporation is an organisation. It has internal processes, both documented/formal, and undocumented/informal - 'the way we do things here'. There are teams and departments, and relationships between them. There are contracts and commitments to and from other organisations. Handshake deals. Unspoken agreements. Expectations around whose turn it is to get promoted. Culture. History. Group identity.

And sometimes these are bad and need to be dissolved.

IMO, it should be the bank that receives the money that should have to pay. Banks (even small ones) need to know their own customers, and they take on the risk of not knowing them well enough. They can impose verification rules to stop typical scam behaviour, at least up to the level of risk they're comfortable carrying.

The third value on that list is efficiency. Is staying at the Ritz-Carlton an efficient use of company resources?

There's the 'arrested' part and the 'taxes' part. There are limitations on the power we give the government to arrest people and to collect taxes. But the limitations are only there because of the freedom we loose in exchange for criminals being arrested and public services paid for.

If there was a law that said everyone must only wear blue clothes on Wednesdays, that's taken away your freedom to choose what to wear. If there's an exception to that law that says socks can be either green or blue, that's not the law granting a new freedom to wear green socks, it's a law not taking away a freedom that existed before the blue clothing law.

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

You can go further than that. Monitor every plant's lifecycle and yield, and save the best for seed. How many generations before you get superwheat? You could even have multiple strains for the varying soil conditions across a single field. Add genetic testing, and you can boost genetic diversity for disease resistance. All without attracting 'GMO' labels.

One way I've found fiction books that I wouldn't have otherwise read is to find High School curricula and go through the required/authorised/recommended books. Neighbouring school districts, other states, and even other Anglophone countries will give you a broad list.

Treat it like any other utility - it continues to run, just without servicing its debts. Most of the expense is paying for capital. Stop that (because bankruptcy) and the ISP can be profitable, and sold to whoever pays the most.

The infrastructure those companies have built already exists, and the subsidies are mostly going to pay debt. If the subsidies stopped, the companies would go bankrupt. Their assets would be sold to another company, likely at a price less than the debt. The new company could therefore have a lower debt burden, and wouldn't necessarily need the subsidies to provide the same level of service. The subsidies are stopping the market from efficiently allocating capital.