npsimons

It's pretty clear that if you want to shorten time to market, you leverage existing assets - when it's people using React or FLOSS databases, no one bats an eye, but farming out tasks here and there that aren't worth your burn rate (pay someone cheaper who can do it faster), how is that different?

When the government hires contractors they're not considered part of the government workforce (ie, civil servants).

I did. I'm still not happy with the way it was forced in, and how the predictions of teething pains of a from scratch init system being developed by inexperienced developers came true. I still remember the growing pains from PulseAudio, the previous project by the same developers.

But SystemD was a response to the definite problems of past init systems. It might not be the optimal UNIX philosophy architecture, but it's grown into something stable and powerful.

At the end of the day, as a working IT or SWEng professional, you just want to get shit done, so you learn a new abstraction for the zillionth time, put it to practice, and get on with the problem you were trying to solve. Having moved from MS-DOS, to OS/2, to Slackware, to RedHat, then Debian (and staying on Debian for decades, for desktop and server), I trust the Debian devs to put out the most stable and reliable OS I've ever seen.

Same; I've yet to find anything more stable and well put together.

In order to get any truly deep thinking (or masterful practice of anything for that matter) done, you need to have focus and that almost always means alone without interruptions, at your own pace. Yeah, yeah, you need input to correct mistakes, but that's mostly at the beginning anyway, before one develops the mental model to self-correct. And I learned that by reading Ericsson's "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise".

> Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius. - Edward Gibbon

That's fair, and it might even lead to the truism that access to a mediocre mentor could actually have better results than reading books by the best mentors. But we must also take into account that different people learn best differently.

Me, I've never really gotten much out of the mentor/mentee model, possibly because I've never had a good mentor. But I feel it goes farther than that - even good lectures have problems holding my attention, and for reasons said elsewhere in the comments, I've found well-developed written sources to be immeasurably beneficial to my learning.

One thing that strikes me is I wonder if there's any correlation to those who can work well remotely and those who learn better from books. This whole "in-person is always better" smacks of the chauvinism the corporate world suffers from in regards to work sites.

That said, yeah, you have to apply and practice eventually. And having someone to imitate or model after, or better yet impart constructive criticism, is invaluable. But there's a whole heck of a lot that can be imparted from reading a book.

All of this is why I strongly favor reading. Well written books are just so worth sinking the time into, and then you have references/bibliographies. Yeah, you need to do something instead of "reading all the time" (stramwan from the article), but sometimes doing it correctly, or even just better, starts with a good book.

That's great! Guess what the vast majority of people don't have access to? Really great mentors. Unless, and hear me out here, those mentors wrote down their wisdom, say some great work of philosophy[0] or even a groundbreaking technical work[1]. Even better, you can access these founts of knowledge after their authors have passed on!

[0] - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2680

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica

Part of what bothers me is that he lumps together all "reading" (in his defense, often defenders of reading do the same). If you're reading and not thinking, not asking questions, hell even just not vividly visualizing fiction, then yeah, "reading" won't be much better than TV.

And yeah, you can read too much; you can do too much of anything, which is why I feel strongly that the vast majority of people spend too much time consuming media in the form of TV/streaming and Internet, and not enough time reading well researched books/papers and thinking about them.

The "reading" I (and I suspect others) would recommend is:

    1. Find really good material.
    2. Read it deliberately, with an active mind.
    3. Act on that material, let it change your life.

My wife at the time bought an SUV, a Toyota Highlander. She never went off road, we didn't have any children, she never hauled anything. 90% of her driving was to and from work on paved roads, a job that could have been accomplished with a Honda Civic.

Now let's play another fun game: how many truck and SUV owners do you think are like you, and how many do you think are like my ex-wife?

Also, it'd be nice to do this all the way down the line, then maybe we'd finally see the legislation implemented for disposable packaging that the "Keep America Beautiful" propaganda was designed to counter[0].

[0] - https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec...

Considering the top comment when I got here was almost exactly that, I'm not surprised one bit. There's a lot of money to be lost by the FF and ICE industries.

And that is precisely the problem. Once website operators get it through their thick heads that the browser is user property, not theirs, things might start to improve.

If your checkout system connects over anything but port 443, you done fucked up.

He may be a dealmaker these days, but that doesn't take away that he is a luminary in the nerd community.

80% actually[0], and that only uses 8% of agricultural water in California. Given that dairy consumes 15% and only produces 1.4% of world yield (plus it can easily be done elsewhere), perhaps we should focus on that first.

[0] - https://www.truthordrought.com/almond-milk-myths

Yet we never see beef or dairy demonized the way almonds are.

Believe me, there are better plant milks than almond milk (pretty much any of them), but dairy has such a higher impact on the environment (as does beef), it's incredibly disingenuous and hypocritical to complain about almonds before addressing dairy and beef.

Yup. Beef and dairy are far worse, yet almonds get shit on: https://www.truthordrought.com/almond-milk-myths

Deal with beef and dairy first, then we can talk about almonds: https://www.truthordrought.com/almond-milk-myths

This is the thing that really gets me. It's so bloody obvious from the second law of thermodynamics that animals are going to require more resources than plants. There's even a name for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level

This, much like weight loss and treating mental illness, seems to be one of those communal Dunning-Kruger areas of HN. Probably because people don't want to admit that their diet is contributing to global warming, or they have some "hurr durr, vegans suck!" attitude.

Then again, I've noticed an influx of people denying the fact of the January 6th insurrection, so I shouldn't really be surprised.

Yup. I spend a good deal of time training for and rescuing people in the Sierras. Snow pack is very obviously lower than a decade back. Sure, sure, we'll get the occasional outlier like that massive snow pack a few years back, but ever other year, it gets lower and lower.

Deal with animal agriculture first, then we can talk about the fruits and nuts.

[0] - https://www.truthordrought.com/almond-milk-myths

But stating opinion as fact or "just asking questions"[0] is not conducive to understanding.

[0] - https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

Criticism is the crucible in which crazy new ideas are forged into crazy viable ideas.

> However, the main problem I have with with this article is that it divides people into domain experts and the rest.

Let's be honest: in this day and age "the rest" are far too vocal and need to STFU on things which they have no knowledge. Sure, domain experts can disagree - let them be heard, but the know-nothings should be given zero attention.