wheelinsupial

Foreman had to keep a quota.

I have worked on production lines and I’ve worked in the manufacturing and quality engineering side of things.

I know a lot of companies do have that old school production at all cost approach, but the better places I’ve worked at have put quality metrics ahead of productivity metrics.

Usually the metrics are safety, quality, delivery, and cost in that priority.

I know Goodhart’s law, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure,” gets quoted a bunch on HN, but then nothing else is offered up. In my opinion, having these additional metrics with their own targets serves to balance out and constrain a single metric screwing things up. For example, if productivity is going up by producing lower quality parts, this will be shown in either the quality metrics (e.g., scrap rate, yield) or the cost metrics (e.g., material costs have increased, rework costs have increased).

The other component of it all is that the operators can only produce to the level of the systems they have. They can make some small, point improvements to help, but generally there need to be larger process or system level changes supported to make significant improvements.

In my observation, there are a lot of unaccounted for and unintended issues that can arise from this.

Where I live, we are going through a lot of this right now (98+% of population growth is from immigration).

Immigrants have more kids than the non-immigrant population, but they do not actually have above replacement rate amounts of kids, so they are going to require more immigrants to take care of them later on. Also, the children of immigrants have non-immigrant level fertility rates. So, it's not a long term, sustainable way to "replace the aging population."

On top of this, immigrants often want to bring their elderly relatives with them when they are possible. I know there are some ways to try to mitigate this (e.g., immigration limits, charging them extra fees on immigration), but at some point there becomes a large enough immigrant voting bloc that this changes. Now you have extra, unaccounted for elderly people that are required to be looked after.

I have no idea what the solutions are, but if we are trying to plug the gap through immigration, it'll require perpetual immigration. Most countries globally are now at below replacement fertility rates, so this opens up a huge can of worms. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but it doesn't seem like anything other than a quick band-aid or a solution that's doing anything other than adding "debt" to the issue.

It's going to come across very naive and dumb, but I believe we can and people just aren't aware of or they simply aren't implementing the basics.

Harvard Business Review and probably hundreds of other online content providers provide some simple rules for meetings yet people don't even do these.

1. Have a purpose / objective for the meeting. I consider meetings to fall into one of three broad categories information distribution, problem solving, decision making. Knowing this will allow the meeting to go a lot smoother or even be moved to something like an email and be done with it.

2. Have an agenda for the meeting. Put the agenda in the meeting invite.

3. If there are any pieces of pre-reading or related material to be reviewed, attach it and call it out in the invite. (But it's very difficult to get people to spend the time preparing for a meeting.)

4. Take notes during the meeting and identify any action items and who will do them (preferably with an initial estimate). Review these action items and people responsible in the last couple of minutes of the meeting.

5. Send out the notes and action items.

Why aren't we doing these things? I don't know, but I think if everyone followed these for meetings of 3+ people, we'd probably see better meetings.

software engineers' body of knowledge can change 52 times in a year

I understand I’m replying against the spirit of your point, but the IEEE has actually published one and it seems to get updated very slowly.

https://www.computer.org/education/bodies-of-knowledge/softw...

Depending on what you're looking for in industrial engineering, there are a lot of blogs on lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System. INFORMS, may be paywalled, also publishes a lot of pretty interesting articles on applications of operations research to industry.

In general, though, my very limited experience working in manufacturing was that much of the blog equivalents were covered in things like white papers from hardware manufacturers or articles in trade publications. We always had a bunch of magazines delivered each month and there were usually some interesting articles to review.

The list of exam fellows can be found online [1]. Probably their research or any personal blogs would be the closest you can find.

[1] https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/people

Which proof assistant did you use?

In case you’re not aware, there is a podcast by Jessica Livingston and Carolyn Levy called “The Social Radars” that interviews founders.

I’m not sure if it’s similar to what you’re talking about, but there is something called “TRIZ” that’s a collection of “things” we were introduced to in a mechanical design class I took.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ

Do you mind elaborating on the definition of "cross functional team" here? It seems either non-standard or something that may differ by industry.

Where I've worked, a cross functional team is one made up of functional experts from different groups. A team where everyone could do the work of everyone else was a team that was cross trained.

Yeah, sorry if I wasn't clear. I 100% agree with definitions, theorems, counterexamples, and proof techniques being incredibly important. Those are the "warm ups" or "scales" or things that need to be repeatedly drilled in my mind before trying to jump into the "game," which, to me, is solving problems.

For what little it’s worth, the thing that finally made it click for me was a series of comments on HN that were discussing musical scales.

I don’t have any musical training, but I related it back to the practice and warm up sessions we had before we’d play an actual game in the sports I played as a kid.

Perhaps some explanation like that will get it to click with someone.

I also learned of the existence of soft question tags on Math Overflow and Math Stack Exchange that contained an incredible amount of guidance that I think was never possible in lectures. Sharing links to those websites in the syllabus may be helpful for the odd student that actually looks at the syllabus.

When I was doing an associate's in engineering, our calculus and differential equations courses were like this. We'd learn some math, do some problems by hand, then we'd have a lab component where we were introduced to either methods in a computer algebra system or some numerical methods. The problems we solved there were word problems that had the higher level physics already set up for us, so that we ended up just having to solve the calculus or differential equation portion of the problem.

The calculus books we used were not set up like this and the books that focused on learning the CAS or numerical methods weren't structured any better. I think this only worked because it was a small program aimed at technical education with a faculty that cared about developing a unified curriculum.

When I transferred to a different university to finish a degree as a stats major, all of our courses and most of the textbooks were structured in a way to use R. We did some problems on simple linear regression by hand, but very quickly it becomes impractical do to it any other way. This seemed very natural to me, but apparently it was not the typical experience of studying statistics.

Perhaps there are some calculus books out there that do a good job of both teaching calculus concepts and using CAS / numerical methods, but my narrow minded view is that calculus is a tool for physics, engineering, or other applications, and you'll be bogged down in teaching the relevant domain knowledge to get interesting examples. If you're looking for your own examples, perhaps this could be done purely through the differential calculus topics of related rates and optimization or the integral calculus topics of simple ordinary differential equations.

having a course based on this as a credential.

I'm assuming you mean a single course? If so, this material would not be a standalone course. It would be baked into the entire bachelor's degree program. Some of the topics would maybe be more advanced or something that need to be demonstrated by being an EIT or writing the appropriate exams. For example, chapter 15 on engineering economics is a single class, but chapter 17 on mathematical foundations would cover at least 4 classes (discrete math, differential calculus, integral calculus, probability).

The US of A did have a software engineering principles and practices of engineering (PE) exam, but it's been discontinued, and I haven't managed to find an archived snapshot of the exam spec. I'm not American, but I think there is a common fundamentals of engineering (FE) exam [1] that has to be written to register as an EIT and then the PE [2] has to be written to be licensed and given the PE.

I'm not familiar with which American schools were ABET accredited in software engineering, but in Canada, several schools do have accredited software engineering majors. You can review the curriculum and see a fair amount of alignment to the SWEBOK topics. Again, some of these chapters could be split across multiple courses, but some chapters look more like a couple of weeks in one class.

For comparison, there is a 61 page industrial and systems engineering body of knowledge [3] available from the IISE (Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers), which is really just a couple short paragraphs on each topic, a list of key areas within each, and a list of reference books. At a quick glance, all of the areas correspond to sections in the industrial FE [4] and the industrial PE [5].

There are way too many software engineers with lofty ideas about how physical engineers can magically know all the answers to all the problems they could ever have.

I'm not an engineer. I did an associates in engineering technology in Canada, so I'm a "pretengineer" at best. As far as I know, engineers in Canada have a discipline and then areas of practice. For industrial, there are 9 different areas of practice, but people are generally licensed to practice in 1 to 3.

In my region, software is not even broken out into its own areas of practice. Software is an area within computer engineering. I think software is way too vast right now and the expectations are much too big. So, the traditional engineers have much more limited scope problems. But I could be limited by my perspective and lack of license.

[1] https://ncees.org/exams/fe-exam/

[2] https://ncees.org/exams/pe-exam/

[3] https://www.iise.org/Details.aspx?id=43631

Links to PDFs

[4] https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/FE-Industrial-a...

[5] https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/PE-Ind-Oct-2020...

This was posted as a comment on a thread about a new Google tool for LP [0]. It was in response to someone asking for resources on learning linear programming for business applications. It looks like the examples have been solved using Excel, and it's for business students at MIT. Definitely not cutting edge.

The original posting is about new tools and algorithms, with some more analysis. Well beyond my background from undergrad courses in LP and OR, but probably more relevant and insightful to you.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41609670

Have you considered calling it Rapids development?

A variation of this exists with one more word thrown in for good measure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development

Doing so misses any state you can't hit via small iterations (you'll find a local minimum rather than global).

When I worked in manufacturing, we distinguished between “continuous improvement,” which were these smaller improvements that will get you to a local minimum, and “radical transformation,” which will get you significant improvements and requires redesign of the entire system.

They do not cite it, but searching that sentence on Google brings up a few articles mentioning a “20-year study by The Williams Group involving 3200 families, show that 70% of families lose their wealth in the second generation and 90% lose it in the third.”

But I can’t find an article in a quick check on er website.

There are some mentions on their website about how splitting the family fortune dilutes it and causes families to lose money.

There are families in Europe that pass the bulk of the family fortune to the oldest son. That son does what they can to help the rest of the family live comfortably, but the rest certainly aren’t rich. So, this statistic may only be applicable to American families or places where it’s common to successively divide the fortune up.

It sounds like if you have production issues, there is a priority to put out an actual fix immediately.

What was the time to implementation for the real solutions?

Was there any cost considerations associated with prioritizing the implementation or even limiting the scope of the solution?

I’m neither of the previous posters, so I may be off…

For simplicity, I’m going to assume each variable in the model is independent of every other variable.

We can interpret the coefficients in linear models. This relationship holds for the model for the range of values it is based on. This relationship is the same for the whole range of the model. (We can’t extrapolate outside of what’s been modeled.)

y = c1x1 + c2x2 +…+ cnxn (excuse the poor formatting)

The sign tells you the direction (+ means it will increase the value of y, - means it will decrease the value of y), the value of the coefficient tells you how much the y will change for a given 1-unit change in the x value.

Since this is linear, you get the same change to the output for the relevant increases no matter your starting point.

So, the regression model would say x1, x3, and x5 have positive coefficients and variables x2, x4 have negative coefficients. If you want y to increase, either start doing more of x1, x3, x5 or do less of x2, x4. Depending on what these are and your limited investment budget, for example, you may pick doing x3 if that is the largest positive coefficient.

Again, since this is linear, you can keep on putting resources into the largest coefficient and get the same increase up until your model is no longer valid.

For non-linear models, you can still interpret the coefficients, but the interpretation depends on your starting conditions and where you are on the graph.

There may be asymptotes in your non-linear model, so there is a point of diminishing returns where if you keep putting resources into a variable with a positive coefficient, this will not keep getting you commensurate results.

Sorry I don’t have any actual examples here and I don’t have time to go digging through my old textbooks to look for any.

If you don’t mind sharing, I’m curious what your first degree was in and what you think you got out of studying that subject?

Lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System are absolutely about manufacturing. It's rooted in industrial engineering and operations research. It is about addressing root causes and truly solving issues. What we see in the lean books is a bunch of solutions to problems Toyota was facing at the time and how they solved them.

Even the person who coined "lean manufacturing" says, "Don't try to bring lean manufacturing upstream to product development. The application of Lean in product development and manufacturing are different. Some aspects may look similar, but they are not! Be weary of an expert with experience in lean manufacturing that claims to know product development."[1]

There are a couple of books that have tried to capture the design process from Toyota. [1] is the Wikipedia page for [2]. [3] is an alternative take. Unfortunately I haven't read these books, so can't provide anything beyond the table of contents.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_product_development

[2] the table of contents needs to be downloaded from https://www.lean.org/store/book/lean-product-and-process-dev...

[2] https://www.routledge.com/The-Toyota-Product-Development-Sys...

I had a math instructor in my small, unknown technical school for my mechanical engineering program. He took a huge amount of initiative to work with the profs in the engineering department to make our assignments into word problems showing us exactly how what we were learning would be used later on.

I think it was a lot more useful because we could see how each of the subparts in a multi-part question worked together to solve engineering problems.

I know this isn't possibly in a generalist class with students from many departments, but there are some ways to make them less boring.

Within project management, there are predictive, adaptive, and hybrid approaches to structuring a project. Predictive is waterfall, adaptive is agile, and hybrid is a mix.

Yes, everything has cost, timeline, and quality requirements, but the way they are represented or discussed vary a fair bit.

There is the Franz Edelman award from INFORMS [1] that used to publish accessible articles about how OR techniques are being used in industry.

The MIT LGO program has some theses published online that show how OR techniques are applied at smaller scale in industry.

I’ve been involved in some smaller scale projects that used mathematical programming techniques to help with scheduling manufacturing lines and call center shifts. We’ve used simulation to help understand how improvements can be made in call centers and warehouses.

Lots of this stuff is under industrial engineering at the operational level.

At the supply chain level, often a company is using the services of someone else. Sometimes they’ll have industrial engineers working with these techniques.

[1] https://www.informs.org/Recognizing-Excellence/INFORMS-Prize...

As far as I know, there are only a handful of places in Vancouver where you can have alcohol in public. https://vancouver.ca/streets-transportation/alcohol-consumpt...

So, the answer is: no. People smoking meth today do so freely in and around the Skytrain stations where alcohol is not allowed.

In case you aren't aware, you can select a few builds and quickly compare the stats using: https://mk8dxbuilder.com/

Another thing is the coins. Collecting them gives you a speed boost for each coin you collect.

What do you mean by mind map? What's the objective of this exercise?

You may have better luck by searching for code to UML diagram generator. There are probably too many UML diagrams, but there are some ways to generate diagrams from the code. Once you have a diagram or two, you can probably simplify it into a mind map that you want to make.

Are you referring to an actual interview with Boris Johnson or are you referring to the debate with Mary Beard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k448JqQyj8