the_cramer

> Defining the activities of an organisation is management.

while being a developer myself and thinking that 70-80% of all management decisions are well undercooked, i believe that there is so much more in here that is not what developers do or want to do. Yes, we write how software and - in the long end - companies work, but to actually specify this there are so many factors to be included.

What is the market doing? How do the customers react to certain approaches? What are our ressources? How competent are the users in our company with using processes/software/communcation?

IF we are the new managers, we should try and raise our heads from time to time and look at the whole company. I've seen so many developers producing good software, but software that is not working with and in reality (being a running business with people and real life problems).

Back in the day when i played the Witcher 3 on PC the first time, i noticed fairly quickly that my main focus was on the mini map. It displayed a navigation system like path to the next quest/POI. It took away all my exploration because i didn't look at the world anymore, my eyes kept looking at the mini map.

Shortly after i deactivated not only the minimap but the whole GUI and only elements of need would popup (health when damaged, status effects ...).

It was another game. You can focus on the world, take in what the designers meant for you to take in. Follow paths that don't lead to the quest.

Although just a compass would've been nice (without quest markers) "less is more" was the case here.

True. As long as you don't use any external dependency like APIs, libraries, databases.

I agree partially. Passwords are posing an indirect security issue. But in my opinion this is more due to the handling of those by humans. So many different places where you can login, you need 20+ passwords. These should all be very long so that they are deemed secure enough.

Remembering this is a chore leading to one of two things - the user tends to create short passwords or mneonics that only change a few letters/numbers per password - the user will use a password manager, completely giving up control in case of a disastrous failure (e.g. data deletion) and having potentially finicky setups.

There should be better options for the broad usership than passwords, but password managers are imho a good solution for today.

Is there any detailed explanation on these points? I only find this exact quoted list in my searches. Seems that the original was also only a list of these points.

"Give up blood sport" - Why? Did martial arts for 10 years, helped a lot with some other points in these list, especially the self-awareness and decency (humble-ness?). Or do i misunderstand this point?

"Live memorably" - That's straight up a wall tattoo quote, isn't it? /s

One thing i didn't catch is how they are sure that this is "one" great actor. Surely some of these servers were registered with the same fake mail address, but it seems that otherwise they are spread around the world and pretty anonymous. Did i miss something?

We haven't. We just can't produce enough carbon nanotubes cheaply to build a space elevator. Amongst other technical issues.

One limiting factor of a rocket engine is the exhaust cone. This big dome-shaped piece of internally cooled structure tries to make the burning of fuel most efficient by controlling the shape of the exhaust reaction. In atmosphere you need a different size than in orbit to burn optimal, that's one reason why staging is done and the second stage is much different in cone size.

Since in aerospike the direction and shape of the exhaust gasses is different, air pressure is used as a "dynamic cone" making single-stage to orbit" rockets much more feasable. I'm not sure if we want that at all, though.

It was also told in star trek : voyager by chakotay. Seems to be a popular philosophical metaphor.

I once had a chinese colleague who came to europe for a few years. She always thought we were lazy for working so short and every argument i brought up about mental health and work efficiency was met with a: "but it works for us".

What i did not understand back then is the absolute replaceability of personel in the chinese market. You work long and hard or tomorrow someone else does it.

Not only is this a big reason of the economical prowess of china in my opinion, i fear that this work-ethic will come back sooner or later to europe to "stay competitive".

In the face of bankcruptcy or market pressure... managers tend to make irrational and/or unethical decisions. And they will find a way to circumvent the laws. I am also sure that chinese companies will find a way to circumvent the 996 ruling here.

That's even worse. Estimated, highly subjective performance grading that decides over a possible future for a student? Not a fan.

I think that some of HN people don't like this. The more popular it gets the less quality (or more mod work) will HN comments have.

But since the article is paywalled... maybe it's protecting HN :)

It seems to me that the article is suggesting that the last 2 years were exceptionally different.

What I'm wondering is what the factors truly are here and what to do with this data.

In my opinion these grades are there to differentiate the skill levels of the people, "short-term-memory" being the major skill here (another topic for another day). But if nearly half of the people are the same elite... this system of skill-measuring is getting useless.

Maybe there should be a better alternative?

Is there any collector site that states what titles are Linux compatible and what are not? I'd like switching and gaming is keeping me from it.

Browsing to all developer studios websites for my favourite 50 steam titles is a bit tedious... in other words... I'm lazy.

Please take this from a guy who is not in any way a finance/economy expert:

Why does the currency have anything to do with the wealth of the bankers.

Bitcoin is, as far as i know, a fiat currency too. The value depends on the believe (demand-supply) of the people. You accepting it as means of payment gives it value.

The reason bankers and others have yachts are interests, Investmens, tax avoidance schemes and so on. Nothing Bitcoin solves. The issue is a political one and how we do business and laws.

I am very much wondering why it is that if i go on a public instance of invidious all videos shown are from my personal preferences... shouldn't this be random?

Seems like YT is reading cookies or mapping the IP anyways...

They are probably pointing out that there could be a better way to kill/remove/move the urchin without releasing the spawn.

Although it's very hard to get them off their spot and handling them.

"Developers have expertise and know what they're doing."

Unfortunately this is not always the case. Currently there are other "developers" getting access to our sql servers that drag down performance a lot. It looks to me that they may be coming from an OOP world and now trying to force these patterns onto sql which doesn't scale at all.

So developer != developer and not all developers are good imho.

It isn't. But change like that is exactly what you need to do. If it's good or bad to change it via a drug instead of mental discipline is another question.

But you could change your food and eat tons of it. I am a pretty slim person and i eat a lot compared to my friends. I also don't do much sport and as a developer is sit a huge part of the day. So for me it comes down to WHAT i eat and it's serving me pretty well. You don't need to fight your appetite, you can serve it and still loose weight.

To this day I don't see how this "revelation" had an impact on anything. It's certainly interesting and I think it's inherently true (we're based of the same biology) but it doesn't change anything. Agent Smith certainly was the most high-tech philosoph...

Money goes to the state, which is outright alien to me. The fact that the company pays a fine totally makes sense to me. But the country getting the money and the employee just getting their "right" is a major flaw in this system from my point of view.

You need to compensate these people... at least a little bit.

-> Lets be honest in here, most of the programming jobs are not really that complex

I am pretty positive that this notion is one part of the problem. Seen in the SQL area: Code has been created to do a simple task. Code does it's job. Data gets bigger and bigger. Upon analysis we found out that Code is very suboptimal, no thought put into indexing, partitioning or operating on set-level overall.

SQL isn't complex to learn and to be honest, it's not difficult most of the time. But there are points in knowledge where people think: "That's it, i figured it out" and the general topic is sooo much more complex underneath. This hidden complexity leads to statements like yours, given off by relative beginners (not assuming you are one).

Even this is some boilerplate text for the reality (at least how i experienced it)

You had a two week course in University on ML? That goes right on your curriculum as Skill. Had an Excel course in school? "Office suite knowledge" Created one endpoint in a C# .Net Core API? API programming check.

So our company hired some of these full stack freelancers. While the code "works", it is not anywhere in a acceptable performance range and full of bugs. A SQL server job that runs two hours to create some 1000 simple new datarows is just not okay.

But for the business end, server job performance is not a value they can "feel" unless there is some UI connected to it.

The point I want to make that it's a potentially harmful game in the long term for any company that reads the skillsets of a developer without ever asking 1 or two questions.

Could be, yes, but how to find out? The users won't read it, and the only reason i get for that is "I don't have time for this, just tell/show me how it's done".

My user documentation is usually hand written and in a rather linear style, split by tasks. "You want to reach this goal, do the folling". On the other hand i am aware that as a developer, our style of submitting information to peers is sometimes different. Non-developers have a hard time to follow and sometimes a few explanation attempts are needed to get the information over the river (both ways).

This would tell me that an in-between person should create documentation. This person does not exist in my vicinity...

I will however take the feedback from this thread into account and point at documentations more often. Maybe it has an effect.

My experience as a developer is

- people don't care about my status (e.g. "busy", "dnd")

- people don't care about my communication preferences

-- if i'm not blocked they will call, no matter the priority

- they are not interested in any priortization not done by them. And last and the most related to this approach:

- They do not read any documentation I write about me or my software. They hardly read the contents of mails.

I shoud remark that i do not work for a software-house but in medium scale distribution. Still did not find a way to communicate to my peers on how important phases of concentration and defined communication channels are. In my opinion, another documentation is not gonna work...

edit: formatting

> So, while far from perfect, they work. Emotions and instinct kept most of our ancestors and most of the currently living animals both alive and thriving.

This is the point. Instincts developed to keep you alive in a world where the classic laws of the jungle where true. Since the modern world, the definition of what is "strongest" and the threats you find yourselve exposed to differ vastly from that back in the days.

While instincts will generally give you a good direction to start with, problems are too complex today to just rely on instincts. Heck even I had my instincts tell me "this feels wrong" and upon reading and getting smart about that topic i completely changed my mind.

If you have time to prepare for a discussion, try not to rely on instinct but let it push you to gather facts to undermine it or to oppose it.

It's important to understand that not only the opinion changes, but the situation in itself. Producing renewables is now much cheaper than a few years ago. Production processes are getting more efficient, thus less co2 intensive and energy conversion rates are getting better.

A few years ago it maybe was not clear that people had a legitimate interest in renewables. The producing companies probably do not care about the environment outside of laws, but if the request for renewables is high enough, a market can emerge and prosper.

This is very hard to predict even for smart economy people unlike me.

"infinity" is also a great alternative for android.

I feel like SQL is in general "Misunderstood". How often did I see application developers put the same principles and design patterns onto an sql database like they do in js or c# or rust. They use functions to encapsulate functionality, write sequential code, use cursors where not needed.

Then the language is blamed for not performing well or yielding different results than expected.

Some points in this article are valid but I think the main issue is the general notion sql would be like javascript or c#. It is not, it is very different and needs a deep understanding, including the works of the underlying dbms, to perform well.

I guess i'm just not a fan of throwing new languages and tools at problems we identify, which seems to be a trend nowadays.

"I wish we could leave the framework and name-dropping behind and talk more about what it takes to evaluate predictions, how to cope with biases, etc."

We can, can't we? "We" as in professional software developers. I always thought of this word-hyping of a management thing and a buzzword pool for non-techies. I know this influences our work, but that doesn't keep us concentrate on what's really up... or am i wrong?

By the way, I tried getting into ML but i'm really poor at maths and at that time was not willing to put time into maths. And nearly every tutorial back then threw formula after formula at my face... So a bit of mathematical education could not hurt. Doesn't have to be a PhD though.

I wonder how much energy it would take to spin it at all