irremediable

Micromanagement, depending on what it means, can be a valuable tool in fixing a broken system. e.g. you take over a team where everything's broken and shipping late. It can genuinely be very helpful for you to dive into the details of everybody's tasks and figure out where things are breaking down. You get a detailed look at the bottlenecks that senior people face (but may be reluctant to share for political/personal reasons); and you get a detailed look at the knowledge/skills gaps that hinder juniors.

It's not sustainable though. The idea is to dive in, figure out what to fix, then fix it into a system you can stop micromanaging. Otherwise you just won't have enough time to do the other important stuff.

The KBoges channel is generally very good. I'd take a lot of care in building up to daily training, though; you only get one body, and if you injure it you may never be the same. He does emphasise this in his videos, but in his shoes I'd be reluctant to even suggest daily training to people, because some significant minority of them will always go too hard at it and wreck themselves.

My preferred style of "everyday training" is strength training every few days, cardio most non-strength days, and walking a minimum number of steps every day (cardio counting towards it).

Push + pull + lower is generally enough to get fit and healthy, yes. It could be a good idea to split it more like push / pull / lower front / lower back, because things like squats tend to work the quads way more than the hamstrings or glutes.

I don't have access to the full text either, but I'd be really surprised if it's five days of total fasting. I'd expect that it's low calorie days with some special restrictions (or even meals) they've set out.

5 fasting days doesn't mean 5 days of total fasting.

2. Hop to a different FAANG, one level higher => Does this actually happen on a regular basis? How might one approach this?

That's the way to do it at the lower levels, yeah.

You apply, ideally via a referral, and at the early stages the recruiter will establish roughly how senior you currently are. They'll be keen to know your current comp, too. It's common advice not to reveal this, and I'd follow it, but that's less crucial when you're at a standardised BigCo because they'll already know what bracket you're in, as long as you're in the same geographic area.

Then you go through the rigmarole of interviewing, and if they want you, they need to offer you higher comp, usually via a higher level (or higher spine on an existing level for the companies that do it that way).

the reality of working in a competitive, high-stakes engineering environment, where your boss WILL call you while you're on vacation, where you WILL go 8-12 months without finding a qualified candidate, where you WILL feel pressure to deliver products by deadlines.

This sounds like an unproductive environment?

Like... a boss shouldn't need to call reports on their vacation, that's why engineers build systems and automate things. Being unable to fill a position in 8-12 months suggests the hiring process is broken.

I'm all for the importance of hard work, but I'd suggest an org like this is working hard but not smart.

They did lose weight, though...

That made me pretty depressed, not just for me but for every overweight person who is being shamed about not exercising.

FWIW most weight change is due to diet. If you're overweight, exercise is probably a much lower priority than finding a way to sustainably eat less.

I'm not just sounding off here; I lost 20+ kg by tracking what I ate and eating less.

Your response is great. Thanks for sharing information about the literature and way more context.

Otherwise, what you're actually saying is, "I'm skeptical of results that pop magazines and press releases have only surfaced to my attention once" - which is a shoddy mechanism for curating your knowledge.

At the risk of nitpicking, this seems like a good principle to follow? Like, assuming skeptical means "I won't instantly buy into this being as great as the pop magazine claims" rather than "I will strongly presuppose that this is untrue because it was in a pop magazine".

People have written books about habit formation, e.g. Tiny Habits. The principles are fairly convincing.

Choose one of [walking more, eating healthy, strength training, sleeping early, etc].

Anchor: use an existing habit as the trigger for your new habit. For example, if you tend to eat lunch at the same time every day, and have free time after it, your anchor could be "as soon as I finish lunch". Maybe set a phone reminder if you're not good at remembering.

Behaviour: do a tiny, accessible version of the desired behaviour. e.g. if you want to walk more, this might be "I'll leave my house". You're going to ramp this up over time, so starting small is fine.

Celebration: do something simple to provide positive feedback for engaging in the habit. Even just something like "I will smile and let myself feel good for five seconds".

Do that for a few days, scale up the behaviour slowly, and eventually you'll have built the habit. Then add on a new habit.

It depends on what you want to achieve, and who you are.

Do a PhD if you love research, and have a good safety net e.g. middle class family who'd support you in an emergency or savings to cover several years' living costs. Have an exit plan - are you planning to go on the postdoc treadmill afterwards?

Go for the BigCo if you're unsure what to do. You'll build your CV, make good money, and learn whether it suits you well.

IMO only go for the start-up if you've got a specific opportunity in mind that you're in love with. Almost all start-ups fail, and sadly it's harder to spin those failures into something positive on a CV.

I, Claudius is a classic that I only discovered recently.

Is anyone here a DeLillo fan? Seems like a natural place for me to ask for recommendations.

If I loved White Noise but didn't get much from Underworld, which DeLillo book would be best to read next?

I make sourdough breads. I highly recommend Mick Hartley's recipes and ebooks at https://thepartisanbaker.com/

His approach really appeals to me, and to other hacker-y types that I've shared it with. He's tested a lot of the various steps that people recommend during baking, and documented which of them actually seem to make a difference.

AFAIK the US got computers earlier than most places, even other First World countries. Large disposable incomes and a large, relatively homogeneous market. My family were middle class (teachers) in the UK, and moderately early adopters; we still only got our first PC in the mid-90s.

COL is high in London and cities around it, but way cheaper in other parts.

FWIW I'd recommend other places over Nottingham, though. Birmingham is a vibrant "second city", with low prices and good connections to London. Several decent universities. Manchester is cheaper still. Southampton is cheaper than London and has good culture and a good university. Glasgow is a cheap and rapidly rejuvenating city.

Nottingham is IMO pretty dull. Maybe the parent commenter has better experiences though.

It's not cherry-picked, actually; the historical standard in the UK is three years. However, it's not common to do any qualifying exams or courses in a three year program. There's a new trend of so-called "Centres for Doctoral Training" where students take four years, and get a year or courses and qualifying exams at the start.

Consequently, UK PhDs are often quite a bit more junior than US PhDs -- although it works brilliantly if you're an academic high-flier, as you show up and start doing research on day one, leaving with a doctorate three years later.

Any more information on the data science and ML roles? I had a quick look on the jobs part of the Skyscanner site, but didn't have much luck.

These Paul Hollywood recipes are a pretty good starting point. They don't mention the buttermilk trick, but it's easy enough: squeeze half a lemon into your milk.

The nice thing with Hollywood's bloomer recipe is that lots of people have tried it, and share tips for debugging problems you may encounter.

Bloomer: https://www.bbc.com/food/recipes/paul_hollywoods_bloomer_846...

Soda bread: https://www.bbc.com/food/recipes/soda_bread_24837

I've been getting into baking bread lately, so it's very cool to see an article like this on HN.

That said, if you're new to baking, I wouldn't recommend this as a starting point unless you strongly prefer sourdough to other breads. Sourdough is trickier, and this recipe is quite minimalist: lots of ingredient ratios and timings should actually vary with your ingredients, equipment and supposedly even atmospheric conditions.

I'd recommend one of two loaves for fellow newbies: a bloomer or soda bread.

The bloomer requires more effort and time, and is a fun way to try out all the basics of baking: kneading, yeast, proving, shaping. It'll give you a loaf like the kind you're probably familiar with, albeit at a higher quality than supermarket bread.

Soda bread is very easy to get good results from and very fast to bake. It doesn't require kneading, and doesn't use yeast -- instead using bicarbonate of soda and buttermilk. You can substitute buttermilk with anything milky and acidic; I use soy milk mixed with lemon juice. This is a great way to get quality bread with minimal effort, and you can make it sweet or savoury according to your preferences.

I'll post some recipes later...

Edit: recipes in my reply to this comment.

Do you do this for several companies at once?

And how do they pay you, if not with equity to offset low co-founder salary?

Really intrigued to know; I wasn't aware this was a model that worked.

The freelancer thread can work, and hopefully you have a network you can ask.

Please, though, tell us more about it! What's the project in a nutshell? What kind of developer skills do you need? Rough ideas of time investment and compensation?

Hey, I was one of the people talking with you in the comments of that original thread. Thanks for sharing with us.

I can't give a very long reply now (it's approaching bedtime in the UK) but I will tomorrow.

Just one thing to ask right away, though: are you sure you can't get on disability? Would you mind telling us more about your condition and the appeals process in your state?

That sucks. :(

While I doubt anyone is going to summon some kind of miracle plan, I think there are lots of people here who'd be eager to read your story and try to help. So yeah... if you're up for sharing, please say when you're ready.

You make an interesting point about something I thought I understood, but actually didn't.

I always assumed the point of this advertising approach was that it's messy, but it works. Someone who just bought shoes probably won't be buying a new pair ASAP, but there might be better odds than for any random person. Maybe they like shoes, maybe they'll return them, maybe that's their go-to gift for friends.

I genuinely hadn't thought it might just be an exercise in fudging correlation numbers to make ads look more successful than they are.

I'm really sorry to hear you're struggling with loneliness.

Out of interest, how are you stuck? (Obviously, feel free not to indulge me if you'd rather not discuss your situation with a well-wishing but uninformed stranger.)

Estimate how many people are searching for property at a given time, how many of them would use your view-focused site (a tiny fraction), how many of them would find something through it and hence give you income (probably referral bonus from whatever big property listers you're partnering with).

Now weigh that against the cost of creating/running a site, and digging out the properties with a view.

I've not done this rigorously at all. But in the site I worked on, I suspect people filtering by facets similar to "has a view" were, optimistically, about 1% of our engaged audience. Conversion rates were like 5%. So that was probably a few tens of people per day (we had a fairly big audience!)

If you monetise by referral bonuses, you'll probably get tens of dollars per referral. So at most ~100USD per day.

Now consider the costs of setting up and running such a site. Remember that we were a global property search engine -- to get that thousands-strong audience, we were running all over the world.

IMO it just doesn't add up.

You can always prove me wrong! One way might be to focus on high-end clients, and somehow make more money from them... larger referral bonuses, for example, or having the clients pay you to find them properties with a good view.

But yeah, I remain sceptical.

Probably too small a demand.

The general problem is property search with lots of options, and even that is a tricky niche... I worked at a company that tried to do this, and in the end we found it's too much work per niche.

Maybe if NLP gets a lot better.

What did people use before brushes?

(I love that the user complaining about curling minutiae has the username "stan_rogers", by the way. Possibly the most Canadian thing ever.)

Is there any readable book that's "right for the right reasons"? I'm interested in learning more.