HN user

monospaced

159 karma
Posts0
Comments20
View on HN
No posts found.
$27,000 a Year for Health Insurance. How Can We Afford That? 7 months ago

In Germany a couple of two software developers would earn above the threshold of ca. 70k EUR per year each and therefore pay each around 15.000 EUR per year, which would be higher than the number given in the article ($27.000 for a family in US vs. around $35.000 in Germany currency converted). This applies for the public insurance where adults each have to be insured but kids are included for free.

People with lower incomes pay proportionately less, government employees and high earners can also switch to private insurance where they get much better service but for non-government employees this comes with risks and has to be done at a younger age.

0ThreadHN
LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day 3 years ago

In a follow-up post a day after his initial Tweet, Johnie noted “inaccuracy in the ASUS router tool.” Other LG smart washing machine users showed device data use from their apps. It turns out that these appliances more typically use less than 1MB per day.

0ThreadHN
Time to subsidize e-bikes? 3 years ago

In Germany employers can offer the employees a bike leasing program through one of several providers (like Jobrad). This is tax exempt and allows people to pay the monthly rate from their gross salary. The contract lasts three years after which you can return the bike or buy it for a small price. This greatly accelerated e-bike prevalence in Germany.

The vast majority of e-bikes in Germany are pedelecs that offer electrical support for riders up to 250 watts and only up to a speed of 25km/h (15mph). Bikes that go faster or where one doesn’t need to pedal at all need a license plate and special insurance.

0ThreadHN
Ask HN: How to effectively communicate results of my work to non-engineers? 6 years ago

I'm advising top management for a large corporation and can stress what others here mentioned as well: communicate often, in simple terms, and in written form

Executives have a lot on their plate and usually work on a wide variety of topics at the same time. Therefore try to help them when they have to switch context

Concrete example:

* create a (bi)weekly status report with four sections (achievements last week, focus this week, current risks/impediments, decision needs)

* to every risk add a measure (don't admire the problem but bring a solution)

* to every decision need add the alternative(s) (usually something like "Option A", "Option B", "Option do nothing") and show the pros and cons

* show your vision and achievements. Every manager has another boss and will need marketing material to advertise what an important kind of work is going on. Show what you are working towards ("We want to use state of the art AI to improve drug development") and where you stand right now ("We have built the foundation by creating a structured training data set with records of more than 1 million drug trials")

* use abstraction to simplify (not "we switched our legacy adapter from SOAP to REST" but "we switched to a future-proof interface integration")

Regarding the meetings, cancel enough to show you are busy but participate in enough meetings to stay on people's minds

Concrete examples to improve meetings:

* ask for an agenda for each meeting and for your expected contribution

* keep meeting minutes, send them around if no one else does that

* everything that is dicussed should be related to actions that have been undertaken (status update) or will be undertaken (next steps). Every action has to be assigned to someone and has to have a due date

* I mentioned it before, focus on solutions not on admiring a problem (not "no one is providing the data we need" but "We currently lack the data. Who can we contact today to get access to the research data?")

While I don't know whether this would have helped you in the case you described, these are some general points for management communication that offer a good return of investment from my perspective.

0ThreadHN