tareqak

> Delivers change because, in a work context, a task only “matters” if something is different because of the work.

I think maintenance tasks may require more effort / more expansive qualification when it comes to the meaning(s) of "something is different".

I think the topic of "breaking down tasks" could very well be its own book genre or even podcast genre. My experience with self-help and organization titles has been that the activity of breaking down tasks is a sort of known primitive human operation that many authors assume their readers to have. However, my own personal experience and the accounts of others I have heard while participating in group sessions is that breaking down tasks can be very difficult and provoke emotions of avoidance and despair.

The most broadly relevant advice that I have come across when it comes to breaking down tasks is to keep breaking things down until I am 90% certain that I can successfully complete the task. The certainty here would vary on how much self-confidence an individual has and their risk tolerance, so some people may break down tasks to 70% certainty of success.

I think crypto-mining could be help with bringing on more electricity from renewable resources online faster and more gracefully in the absence of sufficiently large scale grid batteries.

Imagine a solar or wind power plant that currently has sufficiently problematic swings in electricity production. A crypto-mining data center nearby could consume some if not all of this problematic excess electricity production more gracefully than disabling sections of the solar or wind power plant. In this application, crypto-mining would not be the primary reason to have all of this crypto-mining hardware. As the local grid requires more power generation, crypto-mining nodes could be turned offline to offset their electricity use.

This thought is just something I had, and there might be problems with it.

I don’t know if the following is related, but I find it very strange that title insurance is necessary. I would assume that both municipal and state governments would know exactly who owns what piece of property/natural resource rights/air rights/other property-related right at the click of a button.

> The vehicle—priced at 1.68 million yuan ($233,450)—can reach 100 km/h (62 mph) in 2.36 seconds and reach a top speed of 309.19 km/h, the company said. It can also spin in place and enter dance mode, as videos posted on social media showed.

> The car will be available only in China for now, though traders taking advantage of a loophole have been selling luxury Chinese EVs to overseas customers who view them as status symbols—even in markets where they’re not yet officially available.

The luxury one is only officially available in China. The cheaper one ‘s paragraph made no mention of where it would be on sale.

The iOS reader mode seems to yield what seems like the full text of this article as of 00:50 Pacific time Monday, February 26, 2024.

> But BYD, backed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, is more versatile than many might realize.

I assume “backed” here means that Berkshire Hathaway has an investment in BYD, which is news to me.

The way I see it right now, the situation with NVIDIA and AI companies is like shovel sellers and gold miners. Picking which gold miner is going to strike gold and which ones will go bust is difficult to tell, but knowing that all of them will need shovels/mining equipment means that shovel sellers are a safe but extremely rewarding bet for the next little while.

I wonder if those accounts ever make it back up to the C-level executives and the board of directors.

What about when companies are doing layoffs but still continue hire at exactly the same time? Sometimes, they even hire for the same positions that were just laid off.

Are there ever conversations where employees are asked to take a pay cut instead of being laid off?

Following the link for Gasoline took me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Etymology

> The term gasoline originated from the trademark terms Cazeline and Gazeline, which were stylized spellings and pronunciations of Cassell, the surname of British businessman John Cassell, who, on 27 November 1862, placed the following fuel-oil advertisement in The Times of London:

> > The Patent Cazeline Oil, safe, economical, and brilliant [...] possesses all the requisites which have so long been desired as a means of powerful artificial light.[12]

> That 19th-century advert is the earliest occurrence of Cassell's trademark word, Cazelline, to identify automobile fuel. In the course of business, he learned that the Dublin shopkeeper Samuel Boyd was selling a counterfeit version of the fuel cazeline, and, in writing, Cassell asked Boyd to cease and desist selling fuel using his trademark. Boyd did not reply, and Cassell changed the spelling of the trademark name of his fuel cazelline by changing the initial letter C to the letter G, thus coining the word gazeline.[13] By 1863, North American English usage had re-spelled the word gazeline into the word gasolene, by 1864, the gasoline spelling was the common usage. In place of the word gasoline, most Commonwealth countries (except Canada), use the term "petrol", and North Americans more often use "gas" in common parlance, hence the prevalence of the usage "gas bar" or "gas station" in Canada and the United States.[14]

> The diesel engine, named after Rudolf Diesel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine

My question is, "was the defect tracking process influenced negatively by spending cuts?"

Shareholders are more than willing to reward the relevant executives for cutting spending, but they rarely hold the same people who made those cuts for issues stemming as a consequence of the aforementioned cuts.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39437387

Some numbers for context/sense of foreboding: https://layoffs.fyi/

159 tech companies w/ layoffs ∙ 41793 employees laid off in 2024 (as of 8:26 AM PST February 20, 2024).

I have been applying on and off for much longer with no success (I would stop because I would just get discouraged after a while).

The TARP bailouts should have have been conditional on allowing the affected to borrowers stay in their homes. Those borrowers could have paid a monthly amount corresponding to fraction of their loan that the US government ending up taking over as part of the TARP program. Staying in those homes would have allowed those borrowers the possibility to continue to work and pay property and income taxes. Over time, this government intervention would have paid for itself instead of just paying the banks.

Thread from 9-10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39331771

What about having paid internships / apprenticeships for everyone regardless of whether or not they have started or finished a diploma or degree program?

This story parallels the stories here of people staying at their employer hoping to get raises, but then ultimately switching to another one who values their experience more than their former employer.

The kind of experiences that the post and I am talking about are where the platform user or the customer end are dissatisfied by the platform's conduct.

The question of the company itself being defrauded by some number of customers and having to defend against that as it becomes increasing larger is definitely valid and difficult to tackle at scale. However, I think it is a totally separate one. I do not think it is a necessity for the company to compromise the ability to make any one dissatisfied customer whole just because they are being targeted by a whole lot of fraudsters all at once. The company might have to increased their costs on their products to pay for things like additional training, tamper-evident packaging, improving supply chain management, and so on.

> In my social circles, many people have read James Scott's Seeing Like a State, which is subtitled How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human World Have Failed. A key concept from the book is "legibility", what a state can see, and how this distorts what states do. One could easily write a highly analogous book, Seeing like a Tech Company about what's illegible to companies that scale up, at least as companies are run today. A simple example of this is that, in many video games, including ones made by game studios that are part of a $3T company, it's easy to get someone suspended or banned by having a bunch of people report the account for bad behavior. What's legible to the game company is the rate of reports and what's not legible is the player's actual behavior (it could be legible, but the company chooses not to have enough people or skilled enough people examine actual behavior); and many people have reported similar bannings with social media companies. When it comes to things like anti-fraud systems, what's legible to the company tends to be fairly illegible to humans, even humans working on the anti-fraud systems themselves.

I think legibility is one aspect of it, but I think another could very well be empathy. If you want to support a user who has a problem, then you have to want to help them and follow through. If you want to make a customer whole after they lost money on your platform, then you want to pay them back and follow through. If you want to stop your platform to be a tool used to disseminate hate, then you want that outcome and move heaven and earth to make it happen. You have to want to see the problems and you have to want to follow through and fix them.

OK, fraud exists.

Irrespective of whether or not a platform is small or large, can they make their customer whole 100% of the time? Why or why not?

> The traditional capitalism has ideology rooted in liberalism and the concept of meritocracy. You are good at what you do, you sell it in the free market, you make money. So how this transformed in the cloud feudalism?

"Move fast and break things." [0]

"Software is eating the world" [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Move_fast_and_break_things_(mo...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Industry_influ...

I was thinking something closer towards "total cost at maximum vertical integration", but expressed succinctly in a word or phrase.

> "Start by eliminating the margin stacking," wrote Keller, implying the cost or profit margin added by each participant in the supply chain to deliver a product to the end user. "There are two–three layers.

Is margin-stacking the most correct term what Keller is describing?

> Fasting is the abstention from eating and sometimes drinking. From a purely physiological context, "fasting" may refer to the metabolic status of a person who has not eaten overnight (see "Breakfast"), or to the metabolic state achieved after complete digestion and absorption of a meal.[1] Metabolic changes in the fasting state begin after absorption of a meal (typically 3–5 hours after eating).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting

Somewhat related to your question:

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/6855333...

Previous threads with about this article: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island for anyone interested.

This part seems like an unfinished thought. I thought they meant to say that being on the inside of the arm would mean that the crown is less exposed towards splashes, debris, and whatnot from the outside.

> There’s another less obvious protection as well. A watch on the outside of your wrist will have the crown facing down (when hands are down). On the inside, the crown is protected. This matters when you’re knee deep in water and mud sloshing around. The water is less likely to get inside of your watch and mess with the movement.

I think we should find ways to get ahead of the disruption that construction creates.

I know people and cities do not at all work in the way that I am about to describe, but imagine being able to shift the population of a city and all its necessary infrastructure to a second backup city so as to minimize disruptions.

All the necessary modifications could be made to the first city without affecting people living there because they would be living and working elsewhere until the work was complete.

Once the work is complete, everyone would go back to whatever address they previously had in the first city, and then work could start on improving the now vacant second city.

Obviously, there are lots of issues that I have not described like how this works when many places already have a housing shortage, and having to build that second city in an “empty” area that can be provisioned with the same quantity and quality of resources enjoyed by people of the first city.

In addition, I think a large complicating factor in construction today is something that I have not seen people talk about: when is it a good time to tear down existing structures. The lack of a “best before”/“expiration date” means structures stay up until failure or until the current owner wants to build something new in its place. The building stays up with possible inefficiencies (heating, cooling, energy use) that might be too expensive to remedy because of the age of structure.

Dinner has to end on or before 5. No calories from 5PM to 9AM.