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shard

3,567 karma · joined May 1, 2008

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shard··on AI Product Management
Is it me or does this sound like a Project Manager and not a Product Manager? Where is the discussion and negotiation with customers and engineering teams on specs/targets/requirements? Where is the roadmap alignment with strategy and marketing teams? Where is the discussion with research teams on future features? Product managers don't babysit engineering teams on their deliverables. Calling someone doing the work listed on the grandparents post a product manager does not make them one.
shard··on A Man Who Thought Too Fast (2020)
Does this formulation work?

You have 6 wooden blocks, each can be 1 of 6 colors. There will always be either (A) 3 blocks of the same color, or (B) 3 blocks of different colors.

Iterating through all possibilities:

6 of 1 color - case A

5 of 1 color, 1 of another - case A

4 of 1 color, 2 of another - case A

4 of 1 color, 1 of another, 1 of yet another - case A and B

3 of 1 color, 3 of another - case A

3 of 1 color, 2 of another, 1 of yet another - case A and B

3 of 1 color, 1 of another, 1 of yet another, 1 of another another - case A and B

2 of 1 color, 2 of another, 2 of yet another - case B

2 of 1 color, 2 of another, 1 of yet another, 1 of another another - case B

2 of 1 color, 1 of another, 1 of yet another, 1 of another another, 1 of another another another - case B

all colors different - case B

shard··on Caffeine suppresses cerebral grey matter responses to chronic sleep restriction
I've learned to drink coffee only in the morning. If I drink coffee any time after 12PM, I'm not going to get much sleep that night. Therefore I have limited my coffee intake to medicinal purposes (i.e. as needed in order to stay awake).
shard··on I Spent a Week with Gemini Pro 1.5–It's Fantastic
Whatsapp now has an AI chat feature which includes chatbots such as relationship coach, travel expert, career coach
shard··on Biologists discover four new octopus species
Joke's on you, we're into that:

Hongeo-hoe is a type of fermented fish dish from Korea's Jeolla province. Hongeo-hoe is made from skate and emits a very strong, characteristic ammonia-like odor

Skates (hongeo) are cartilaginous fish that excrete uric acid through the skin, rather than by urinating as other animals do. As they ferment, ammonia is produced, which helps preserve the flesh and gives the fish its distinctive, powerful odor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongeo-hoe

shard··on Tiger moth jams bat sonar (2009)
At first read I thought the title was a secure password example along the lines of "correct horse battery staple":

https://xkcd.com/936/

shard··on Farscape and Henson’s Lasting Legacy (2011)
Thomas Riker was mentioned again in the animated show Star Trek Below Decks, when one of the characters gets doubled by a transporter accident.
shard··on Museum of Obsolete Objects
I still see calculators being used by salesmen to show numbers and results of simple calculations. The most recent at a car dealership two days ago.
shard··on Rolex fined $100M for preventing its watches being sold online
Have you heard of the women who would not date men using an Android phone, as well as the kids being pressured or excluded? In some social circles Apple devices are definitely status symbols.
shard··on The transparent chip inside a vintage Hewlett-Packard floppy drive
> Given the billion of dollars at stake and thousands of human-years of R&D needed, none of these companies are "winging it"

You'd be surprised. My personal knowledge of one major fab is that they have policies such as regular rotation of employees which make it difficult to maintain institutional knowledge. I have heard complaints from multiple people of their teammates and managers "winging it" to think it's isolated incidents.

shard··on Bit banging a 3.5" floppy drive
I remember having to realign my Commodore 1541 floppy drive, which involved a lot of banging sounds if I recall.
shard··on Gemini AI
Are there people paying for Google's weather predictions?
shard··on Canned food went from military rations to fancy appetizers
Are cans not all lined with plastics nowadays and therefore a source of microplastics and endocrine disruptors?
shard··on Critically Acclaimed Horror Film of the 2010s or Your PhD Program?
I don't know how contrarian I am but I thought the movie was about an upside-down world where the women held all the power and the men were oppressed, and when the men tried to change things, the women reasserted their oppression as the rightful thing to do. To me, it's quite a tongue-in-cheek interpretation of feminism actually.
shard··on Critically Acclaimed Horror Film of the 2010s or Your PhD Program?
Many also apply to life at certain multinational conglomerates. Although I suppose the pay is better than PhD life.
shard··on Impacts of lack of sleep
I have the same feeling regarding much of what you said, with the slight difference that even though my body didn't feel the need to go to bed, strangely enough, after lying in bed for 20 minutes or so, I often fall asleep without noticing any sleepiness before that, just wide awake, and the next thing I know I am waking up in the morning.
shard··on Impacts of lack of sleep
I think is a combination of physical activity waking the recruits up and keeping them alert, as well as physical exhaustion helping them fall asleep. I suppose anyone who is chronically unable to stick to that schedule would get weeded out quickly.
shard··on Pillows to help workers snooze at desk
I used to go out to my car and nap in the car during lunch, until I started working at a company that was close enough to not need to drive, and away went my nap time. With WFH, nap time is back on the table and I am a happy man.
shard··on Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics
I was in Shenzhen recently, walking around the shopping districts, and I was constantly feeling a sense of unusualness. Eventually I figured out that it was because that despite all these cars and scooters on the road, I felt like I was waking in a forest, as most of the sounds I hear are from people, and the cars and scooters are pretty much silent, since so many of them are electric.
shard··on Ask HN: Sales Tips for Solo Devs?
Just want to be clear if you are looking for sales tips (converting potential customers into actual paying customers) or marketing tips (creating potential customers)? Because the tips are very different. As a starter:

For sales, e.g. people who have already landed on your page, you are working on improving your conversion funnel. It could be beneficial to have a high touch process in the beginning for a few to find out what they are looking for, whether they found the info they need on your site, and whether your product satisfies their need or not. (Maybe a survey page? Ask for email and try to talk to them directly?)

For marketing, it's about getting the word out to people who might need your product but don't know about it. Look to creating blogs, engaging in discussion forums of relevance, and creating a web presence where people can find your product easily.

shard··on EU Grabs ARM for First ExaFLOP Supercomputer
I think typically a company having shareholders all over the world does not make people think that it is stateless. However, ownership transfer does make a difference, especially when considering how much the new parent company alters the original company's image/culture. For example, I think that Segway has pretty much lost its US company image after being purchased by Ninebot, with Ninebot products being prominently displayed on the Segway website.
shard··on LibrePCB
Why is auto routing a PCB so different from IC design? It's not reasonable to expect humans to route a full IC with hundreds of thousands of standard cells, so constraints are defined and the auto router is sicced on the mess. Do PCBs just fall in the range where designs are still simple enough for humans to do by hand, and due to board size limits, will not go beyond that range?
shard··on I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
> Yet we're not seeing Samsung massively moving institutional operations to US centers for instance.

Culture matters a lot. Korea is a high context society, and relationship building is extremely important. Its very difficult to migrate functions to other locations when the way to get things done is through building trust and relationships over long periods of time. That said, Samsung does have significant offices all over the world.

shard··on Global trends in incidence, death, burden and risk factors of early-onset cancer
As promoted by Famine in the book 'Foodless Dieting: Slim Yourself Beautiful ("The Diet Book Of The Century!")'

https://wiki.lspace.org/Famine_(Good_Omens)

shard··on Are Naps Good for You?
Working out give me a mood boost. I've found that if I skip workouts for a couple of months, I'm more prone to depressive moods, which is an alarm to get my ass back to the gym.
shard··on I fixed a bug the other day
Sounds like the four stage strategy of the Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis in the BBC show Yes Minister:

In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.

Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.

In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.

Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.

shard··on All that glitters is not gold – emulating luxury in the ancient Greek world
Is that poem where the saying is from? It seems to be a 3rd category, separate from the two in the parent comment.

Saying: For the set of all things that glitter, none of it is gold.

Implied meaning: For the set of all things that glitter, not all of it is gold.

Poem: For the set of all gold, none of it glitters.

shard··on Cut out everything that's not surprising (2019)
I read somewhere that it takes ten exposures to a new word before you learn it. After reading that, I started tracking how many times I see a new word before I recall what it means. Unsurprisingly, it falls along a distribution, but for harder words it does take me quite a few exposures before learning it. By the time I learn it, the feeling is often recognition that I have trouble with this word, and boredom that it's this word again. =)
shard··on Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
Kids can keep themselves entertained very easily nowadays, YouTube/Tiktok/games can suck hours away in the blink of an eye. It's not like when I was young where going outside and hanging out with friends was the most fun choice.
shard··on Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
> wouldn't kids with more balanced extracurricular lives have an advantage over those who fill their day to the brim?

Depends on what you mean. Afterschool activities often include sports, so there's some balance between academics and physical activities, but physical activities won't get you into a good school unless you are at a competitive level, so there are high pressures there as well.

As for parents who recognize the importance of downtime? The ones that can afford it... send their kids overseas. But of course, even with added downtime, those kids are more academically competitive, so they end up ratcheting up the standards in the area they go to.

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