mo1ok

It IS more complicated than that. It's not easy to build within a 1 hour commute of a dense population center. All that land is owned, built, and called for. Calling it "overpopulation" could be fair.

A parallel problem is immigration and, as the top comment pointed out, cheap credit encouraging vacancy.

Wow, thank you for sharing this. I miss the old 00's era of maximalist web design.

No one wants to say it, but immigration is a huge driver of housing un-affordability. Skilled H1b immigration and/or foreign buyers drives up home prices, and unskilled illegal immigration drives up rents.

I feel like most of us were wise to the fact that this was a terrible idea on day one. It was funny to watch MBAs try to cash in on the "next big thing" in tech, though.

interesting - reminds me of what meteor attempted with its data protocol.

any link to or summary of his ideas?

I recently got a subscription to the HBR and am surprised at how...misguided it is. It's shocking how this locus of low competency is destroying American business. Ditto on the outsourcing, too - left a job at a blue-chip American company because its culture had been internally rotted by outsourcing. (Of course, they were hilariously struggling to keep and retain the talent necessary to stay ahead of the tech curve, now institutionally recognizing they've made a massive mistake. Most good engineers had a tenure of 6 months.)

I think it's important to be passionate about your life's work. However, maintaining "good enough" across all dimensions of particular lifestyle or role is actually incredibly challenging.

Even for a standard engineer, think how many you know can code well, be leaders, AND can write good documentation.

For most things, it's always a "pick 2 out of 3" situation.

Dude, thank you for this. My team has been trying to figure this out - we know we will eventually need a way to utilize in a low-level context, but couldn't dig up any cases of such an implementation. In addition, we were constantly frustrated by the lack of HW acceleration that created a performance bottleneck. Great work!

Not disagreeing with you, but worth mentioning proto-lean/agile methodology began with the manufacturing of cars at Toyota.

I would agree that this is narrow minded - and would say that this opinion is a result of exactly what you mentioned - my interaction with them being fairly limited and clinical, despite them having a direct leadership role in my org.

I would argue that this is the problem unto itself. The idea that a manager can work invisibly "behind the scenes" to create these conditions is the squarest negative stereotype of the MBA - that they are clerical, remote, number-crunchers who don't have an intuitive human grasp of the unique challenges their teams face, because they lack experience where the rubber meets of the road of their organization. I think this Boeing case conforms to this stereotype, as does my personal experience.

But I don't believe they're a scourge, or anything. I quantified it with "a lot" but not "most" ;)

Honestly, and I'm being really frank here, a lot of the management "expertise" at fortune 50+ firms that come from traditional (re: MBA) tracks has just two tools in their toolbelt:

1. Meetings to "align"

2. Cracking the whip.

That's it. That's all they have. They have poor insight into creating team chemistry, culture, focused work environments, mentorship, long-term planning, QA processes, sourcing efficiency feedback, etc. - all those things that are crucial to boosting productivity and creating supersonic teams. The people that really know their stuff and can work miracles are people that have been in the trenches for 20 years, regardless of profession. And they hands-down make the best managers.

That's my honest 2 cents, it's a bit of disgruntlement from working in large enterprise environments with engineering and technology.

Let this be a lesson:

Working prototypes trump all theory.

I heard all silicon valley gurus stating they were "bearish on VR, bullish on "AR". This proliferated as a mantra throughout the industry. I thought they were wrong then, and believed the opposite - because I had a working VR headset that was awesome, but had only heard somewhat meh things about existing AR prototypes.

Until great AR hardware comes out, I'm still sticking with the same opinion.

I read Napoleon: A life - it was a great book with fascinating insights.

For example, Napoleon's first big break came not particularly from outstanding competence but because, in the midst of the french revolution, all reputable officers had fled for the hills in fear of getting guillotined. Napoleon was one of the only halfway competent officers still around in Paris, so they picked him for a mission where he performed heroically.

Additionally, the myth that Napoleon only slept for 4 hours a night is both true in false. It's literally true, but he was known for falling asleep in the middle of roundtable meetings, and all those who were afraid of him didn't dare wake him - so his lieutenants just sat in silence for an hour while he dozed off!

Lastly, his infamous defeat in Russia was initially a sound plan - he was going to capture Moscow and spend the winter there - and he actually defeated the Russian army in combat, forcing them into a retreat. What was incredibly audacious of the Russians was that they burned their own capital city to the ground in order to prevent Napoleon from wintering there, which was incredibly brutal and unexpected. It's like the modern equivalent of American military command nuking NYC to prevent its federal gold reserves from being taking.

I'd a big fan of some of the webGL experiments hanging around the internet.

i.e. http://taotajima.jp/

I think it means that contracting can't be a part of a company core business model - as is in the case for uber, lyft, or cleaning services.

Examples of a contractor here would be: hiring a third-party graphic designer for a few months while you ramp up hiring at a startup.

A mantra sort of appeared in my mind watching agile fall apart and fail at a large fortune 50 company - "there is no replacement for leadership."

I think opinions can have equal value - in a roundabout way.

I.e. climate denialism is usually an expression of anti-establishmentarianism married with a fear of downward mobility.

I remember reading about the hysteria of this 4 years ago and wondering if me, a non-foodie, could actually taste the difference in chocolate quality. I finally had my first mast brothers bar recently and...

...yeah. It taste like a slightly better quality hershey's bar, definitely not a $10 bar of chocolate. I was kind of floored, it was actually pretty bad.

FWIW, I know of a bike sharing startup that found profitably by charging cities and municipalities for the service as an urban amenity.

Does this scientifically explain the phenomenon colloquially known as "dad strength?"

100% agreement. It's continuing the trend of offloading management onto the burden of the individual worker. It's the responsibility of the company to create a solid, quiet, accessible work environment - by enabling "remote work", they can effectively write off this responsibility.

in isolation, no, but the problem I've seen is that literal dozens of preprocessing steps for a javascript project, and these add significant cost over time.

In a corporate environment, too, you need to proxy many of these, and set an environmental variable in the shell for SASS to install properly. Over time, this adds significant cost, pain, and stress to the install process.

"oops, there's nothing here!" <posts load, showing everything that's there>.

This happens on every subreddit, every. single. time. I can't believe in 2018 we got a front-end that does this, just shoddy, shoddy engineering.

Oh man, glad I'm not the only one I noticed this. It used to take ~2 seconds to find my favorite playlist and play it. Now it takes upwards of 10-20 seconds.

On the dedicated "select a playlist" page with the squares, it even freaking re-organizes the squares every time you view it! Imagine if your desktop icons re-organized themselves in some arbitrary way every time you needed to open a program, and you get the utter destruction of muscle memory that can make up for the gaps in efficient design.

Ah, I see. Good point.

Not sure if this is a joke or not, but that's actually what's happening right now - many large firms are literally just stowing cash: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-are-the-5-us-compani...

True, but it's going to be hard to convince a small group of people to live a miserable, unrewarding live in an unforgiving desert in the off-chance humanity ends in sudden catastrophe.

The cost:benefit of colonizing the new world was immense and known prior to widespread colonization, esp. in the tropical parts.

Settling mars is like colonizing the Sahara desert, except this time with no oxygen or camels.

It just simplifies an entire field of software engineering (devops) into a simple "one-click" setup.

Before, you had to open an account, provision a server, figure out your machine image, install dependencies, figure out error/process handling, deploy...

...figure out optimization, payment, RAM usage, longevity, how many instances do I need? What are peak hours, and should it autoscale?

No you just run a single command line and it's up in the cloud, figuring all that out for you automatically.