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andreaja

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For a lot of articles like these, looking at the answers to see if they're interesting is futile. The real insight is in the questions. In this case, you can reflect on your own friendships, and how the other side of them might see them differently.

Bus Bunching 12 months ago

Anecdotally, I'm pretty sure this phenomenon occurs even with bus lanes.

This is completely incomprehensible and very funny. It's also amusing how different this is to what Twitter has done. It seems incredibly unlikely that any consultants (overpriced or otherwise) were involved in Twitter's rebranding, whereas the Pepsi document seems like outsiders trying very earnestly to deliver to an executive they don't understand.

Medium is Winning 13 years ago

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Not everyone writes with you in mind as their ideal reader. Some people write for themselves and publish to keep themselves honest, though I don't presume to know what OP's motives and goals are in this case.

It's feels great to be able to blame managers when something goes wrong, but that's the only real difference between having or not having your 'accountability chain'. And if your company is structured to have someone to blame when things go wrong, you're not really building for success.

I get that everyone is afraid of prioritization going out the window without managers, but in my experience (and ymmv), managers are no better than productives at prioritizing. Grown-ups are used to taking responsibility.

You can add collaborators to private repos (ie people with push rights). You can have organizations with private repos and use the collaboration tools within the organization.

For me, the private repos are more about having them where I have my other code.

Not once does he say anything about independence or labels. He just says that the focus needs to be on shipping, everything else is secondary.

There's nothing "out of touch" about that. It's completely, and trivially, true. If you want to ship, ship. Don't tweet that you're half-finished writing a lyric for a song you have the opening riff to. Ship it.

Bilingual here (so this is anecdotal). When I'm immersed in the different lingual environments I notice fairly substantive differences in my identity. It's not stuff that's necessarily very apparent to bystanders (as far as I can tell).

The differences aren't necessarily as sweeping as 'world view'. I don't change political preferences by changing language.

I've recently ditched paper in favor of org-mode. It took about 3 months of using org-mode before I was comfortable enough to consider using it for my task items. Even then I needed to wait until org-mode was more embedded in my daily workflow than going through my stack of paper notes.

I think part of the problem with other task apps is that they try to be really good at one thing; organizing tasks. The problem with this is that you want to spend as little time as possible organizing tasks, which means the apps marginalize themselves by nature. You don't get enough time to learn how to use them, you forget to check in, you keep stuff in your head, etc.

For me, org-mode worked because I spend a lot of time organizing things other than tasks in it. But if I wasn't already familiar with it, I'd be spending too much time trying to figure out how to use it and I'd probably forget to check it.

The problem generalizes to this: organizing tasks is not a generic problem. The problem is highly informed by your life. Paper works because you can do whatever you want with it. It only looks like people using paper are using the same system. They're probably not.

Surely it's not about who does your R&D so much as what they produce?

Most of the MS R&D papers I've read have been very good, with excellent ideas. Let's also not forget that GHC is maintained at MS R&D.

The problem lies in converting research into product. One example is the data mountain[1]. The data mountain was way before its time (3d desktop in '98, which is still struggling to make inroads), it's a bad interface for a mouse-driven UI, but a good one for a touch-driven UI (probably not on a phone, but maybe on a tablet and definitely on a 20" or larger screen). But they haven't done anything with it.

I don't think the right stuff from MS R&D is transported to the product development people, which is sad, but highlights one of the differences between Google and MS. At Google a lot of research papers are driven by actual solutions (cf. BigTable, GFS etc). At MS there's more 'pure' research going on and as a consequence the divide between the research people and the product people is larger.

That's what it looks like to me anyway. I don't think there's any problem with the quality of the research being done at MS, quite the contrary.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/dcr/work/datam... (The video sadly seems to have fallen off the web.)

There are some very powerful commandlets (basically scripts) for control over various pieces of MicroSoft infrastructure components (Exchange, Active Directory and more). Having access to these commandlets on my favored environment would be useful. I wouldn't even need to be running a PowerShell session to run them, but that would occasionally be nice too (there is something to be said for object pipes).

It's hyperbole to make a rhetorical point, don't read any more into it than that.

Whether or not a degree is a worthwhile activity is an interesting discussion, but it is not one that begins with 'degrees are not accomplishments'.

Maybe all we need is 'bad, average, good, great' to be shown alongside the comment. Or something along the lines of what slashdot do with allowing you to vote for comments as 'insightful' or 'funny' etc.

Not absurd, just human. People are generalizing and deliberately misinterpreting each other. That's why I find this so odd. It's _easy_ to find out if an SSD is right for you or not. Why are people's identities so tied to spinning metal vs flash storage?

I'm amused at how strongly the for/against sides are arguing in this thread. This is a case where the cost benefit analysis is quite simple. I used to start my day at work by doing git status on my project repos to warm up the disk cache, then go get coffee. Now I just dive straight into whatever's on my plate. Then there's the 20 seconds I save whenever I start up Eclipse. The 2 minutes I save on every reboot. It all adds up.

What I'm interested is why people are so adamantly against. People drop huge amounts of money on RAM for their development rigs, but making the slowest I/O device faster and more predictable is a bad idea?

I'm not saying it's right for everyone, but is there a backlash because the people who are happy about their SSDs are so enthusiastic about them? I realize this is the internet and spending energy wondering why people are so angry is pretty futile, but what's the point?

Could you explain how this affects your view of the reflections in the article?

I found the article held some bittersweet sentiments on what it was like to have (a good deal of) money. To the point of the title he spoke of a false sense of security and casual arrogance. Both of which I find reasonable, but not universally applicable.

I don't see how the positions you list alter this interpretation, but I'd be very interested in hearing how they altered yours.