ksikka

1. What are you basing this answer on? 2. If you don't want to meet their expectations, what can they actually do?

In practice, the main difference is the pay / relative "rank" within a company. Employer's perspective: Want to hire a software engineer but don't have the budget? Create a new role, call it something else, now the pay difference is justified.

Context - I'm a software engineer by title but my job is application development. Which is hard, mind you! It looks like simple coding but it involves prioritizing, making smart decisions, and making all stakeholders happy.

This bolsters the point that the future of online dating is not a computer estimating compatibility with creepy accuracy, it's someone engineering an app to be addicting to get the largest userbase.

Understood. But they have so far avoided asking the user for structured data that they could use to vastly improve their matches. Clearly it took a back-seat to usability.

Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word "dumb" - I do not mean to imply the Tinder strategy or algorithms are stupid. Just meant that instead of prioritizing matching to the best of their ability, they prioritized usability.

Dating apps/sites that employ the strategy of "get as much data as possible and match intelligently" have failed to compete for users against Tinder, the dumbest, simplest dating app that hardly does any intelligent matching at all. This implies that it's not the sophistication of a dating app that matters, it's the simplicity and ability to attract a userbase that in turn attracts a larger userbase etc in a virtuous cycle.

What is the HN type?

Do FB/GOOG distribute facts? They have some pretty good returns.

Javascript is not easy to learn. Many language quirks, and doing anything fancy with asynchronous code will require an understanding of closures, functional programming, and perhaps promises.

I was so on-board at the beginning - yes, html and css skills are undervalued.

And then the essay tried to generalize the lack of respect for HTML/CSS specialists as an example of lack of respect for specialists compared to full-stack devs. This is where I think the essay took a wrong turn.

The technical community has tremendous respect for backend or math specialists. Now more than ever, ML and data science is cool. High performance is cool. Security and cryptography are cool. Etc.

But HTML and CSS? There is a general attitude that they're "easy" and javascript is "harder". But writing good HTML and CSS should be considered one of the highest art forms. Good HTML and CSS makes the end user go "wow, this is nice and clean" and makes the javascript developer go "wow, this is nice and clean". Achieving both of these is so fricking hard!

For 1 and 3, it's the process that matters more than the tool. One process I found effective is maintaining a spreadsheet of tasks and a spreadsheet of larger milestones, updated in periodic meetings.

For the task spreadsheet, you can have a twice-a-week stand up where everyone goes around and updates their own tasks on a google sheet in turn.

For the milestone spreadsheet, a period between one month and one quarter works well.

Although meetings are often eschewed by software engineers, they really do help to keep projects on track.

Also appoint someone to be in charge of tracking the "health" of various milestones, red = needs course correction, orange = at risk, green = on track, etc.

Thank you.

What is Ethereum _useful_ for? When would I need it? Why is AWS (et al) not sufficient?

Oh you're right. That's what I get for badly skimming the article. Thanks, I take back my comment.

Not bad, at least they're being proactive about fixing the dubious decisions that were made at some point.

As of June 2016 the average age was around 29.

https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/

IIRC Google is very open to internal transfers and theyou also have a 6 month grace period for you to return if you decide to leave.

It sounds like you're bored, and you don't have a very good reason to start a company. Starting a company is hard.

A less drastic move is to find a job you'll actually like. They exist.

Disappointed - not much on why these life forms are "weird".

Oh, oops. Missed that.

How is this legal? It's just one step away from prostitution. The payment here is not $ but a penny saved is a penny earned. Maybe this is technically legal but it seems against the spirit of the law.

Strong rec for stratechery. It doesn't cost much, the writing is excellent, it's insightful and enjoyable.

The Deis team was extremely helpful over IRC when I was building on top of their PaaS. Great team and culture, Microsoft is lucky to have them.

There's no endgame - such a thing would cap Tesla's valuation.

I tried this a few years ago actually. Search for Appcubator.

The issue is the market is bimodal and there's not really any room for a middle ground. Developers prefer to have full control over their architecture and they have varied and evolving opinions. Non-technical folks tend to churn once they reach the "download your code" step.

Ultimately I think the best software will be created by the developers, who don't need a tool like this.

I'd argue that laws and the links between them are not being published in ways that the average person can easily process or understand.

So true. A premise of this blog post is that laws need to be easier for computers to understand, but that's skipping a step: making laws easy for humans to understand.

I really like what TLDRLegal did: made software licenses digestible by humans. I would love to see similar sites pop up for other verticals of the law, but it's a lot of work and there's not much incentive to get it done at the quality-level of TLDRLegal.

Thanks for sharing that blog post! I really liked this aspect of it:

"You finish a thing by starting it until it’s done."

I read another blog post whose thesis was "To avoid procrastinating, think about starting instead of finishing". That helped me a lot too. Once you start, work isn't as bad as it seemed.

Constrain the time you have to do something.

Work often fills the time you give it. If you try to achieve something in a short amount of time, you'll be forced to work at 100% with full focus to get it done ASAP. I'm always amazed at how sometimes a dreadful task takes 10-20 minutes when I'm forced to do it in that timespan, but if I have an hour to do it, it'll take an hour.

To make the constraint feel real, put yourself in a situation where you only have a short period of time before something else must happen, like a meeting. Then you can trick yourself to get started and see how far you can get in 20 minutes.

Relevant Movie: The Thirteenth Floor.

If you showed Dropbox's RPC API to a REST advocate, they'd probably frown and tell you it's a terrible API because it's not RESTful. You could try to argue that it's not so bad for various reasons, but you still wouldn't be able to win the argument against an ardent REST advocate.

But at the end of the day, Dropbox is probably going to be just fine with their RPC API. So what gives? Why should Dropbox care about REST? How would you sell the CEO on it?

I'd love to read a follow up blog post called "What does REST buy you anyway". Related: https://xkcd.com/1270/

Trying to do all of this at once will result in failure. Reducing procrastination boils down to changing your habits, which is _hard_.

One thing that's helped me is writing down what I do and observing it as a 3rd party. Writing the log daily is easy. Observing allows you to notice patterns over time, tweak a small habit, and observe if it's working. I wrote about it here - http://ctrl-c.club/~ksikka/articles/02-write-it-down/