Thursday24

Remove the law, and all that remains is a jungle, where the strong domineer the weak.

Excellent perspective. Organisations are similar to individual human minds in structure, but scaled. They will make mistakes, just like people do, but also correct themselves over the long haul so that they can survive.

*200 year old

A more stark example is that of Newton. A true philosopher, by hacker news standards he'd be considered a misguided madman, since he spent 2/3rd of his life on "unproductive" topics such as religion and alchemy. However, the "productive" 1/3rd cannot be separated from the rest.

One must remember that the word "scientist" was coined merely in 1834...the word isn't 100 year old even. Newton saw himself as a philosopher, he studied the ancients intently, etc. The same applies to many of his contemporaries as well.

My overall point is, one shouldn't judge a person too harshly for any particular piece, while ignoring their larger contributions and efforts.

That's fine, my focus is on mastering software engineering (rather than text editing) :p

VSCode/IDEs and Vim need not be mutually exclusive. I tend to rely on vim emulation within my vscode, chrome and in other applications. Usually, all I need are the basic vim modalities with the nicer amenities provided by modern editors.

Rickover was near the top echelons of US navy for ~60 years, as far as I know. Definitely, he knows a thing or two about burnout and turnover. He executed many, many sophisticated projects throughout his life. That's why he had such a long & successful career. I'd recommend reading his book - The never-ending challenge of Engineering. In my readings, this has been the best book on Engineering management.

Secondly, about burnout and turnover. Let's discuss from an empirical standpoint. The number one proximal cause of turnover is lack of "commitment". There are longitudinal empircal studies which demonstrate this. Job satisfaction is important as well; however commitment dominates every other factor.

Hence, it is important for managers to generate commitment, one way or another. I believe from these aspects, Rickover truly understood engineers and technical folks... In fact, he went against the US military books, and emphasised Individual initiative and judgement, regardless of what the rulebooks said. In a way, Rickover was able to work around the navy rules to create sufficient commitment to get complicated jobs done.

However, Rickover was deeply against non technical people managing technical people in the organization. One is reminded of the Newton quote:

"Errors are not in the art but in the artificer"

I'd say: No, not at all!

Read about Admiral Rickover. He built the first practical nuclear submarine in the world, for the US navy, in record time of 3 years. He cleared bureaucratic hurdles, played the politics when needed, kept tight control, delved deep into the technicalities of the project, recruited and trained a large number of people into the program, and ultimately made the project successful.

Dig deeper into any other large scale projects, you'll find great engineering management. The Manhattan project is another example (It should be categorised mostly under engineering management & not scientific management, according to some of the members in the team).

I for one consider social methods part of the problem solving process.

Knowing who knows what, and who can help, and asking for help the right way is key to getting better at problem solving.

Perhaps it is the school system that discourages problem solving through social means, and people feel guilty about taking help.

However, consider this perspective. What if the ones who could put together people into functional groups could be considered great problem solvers? Consider any of the great American enterprises, there are people at the top who figured out how to put people together to get things done.

I recommend you dig deeper into Buddhism to grasp how flexible & responsive the religious leaders are to scientific advancements.

A book from Matthieu Ricard, an ex western scientist who later became a Buddhist monk and Dalai Lama's interpreter, wrote a book with a western quantum scientist [Quantum and the Lotus](https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Lotus-Journey-Frontiers-Buddh...). What is notable is how the exemplary practitioners are highly knowledgeable in scientific and philosophical subjects.

Moreover, you can see that both Dalai lama and the other top leaders of Tibetan Buddhism proactively collaborate with scientists on experiments and discussions to learn more.

Thanks for sharing additional context, wasn't aware of them!

I have a question for experienced/skilled FOSS maintainers.

Are there any good ways to convert those who comment/suggest into contributors? I feel like instead of simply dismissing suggestions with "you get what you paid for", there must be a better way to handle the situation. Or perhaps I'm too naive on the topic

In buddhism at least, developing compassion is seen from a skill-building perspective as far as I know. Most human capabilities have to be amplified through deliberate study from our ancestry, accumulated wisdom and constant practice.

The key idea is that we can "develop" various attributes to a degree which is orders of magnitude larger than the next animal. To me, doing that is meaningful.

I tend to use the human potential framework. As a human being, I have a potential capacity to do sophisticated things or to merely operate at the level of an animal. Developing capabilities & skills is what differentiates me from an animal. This always fires me up.

Second thing that helps is, defining "huge" within the right context. Your project looks large from a self-centered point of view. Think about human flight - took 2000 years, multiple generations to figure out. Go into the history of various inventions, they all took lots and lots effort. Once this context is understood, you'll find that whatever you're doing is not necessarily such a "huge" task. Such perspective helps too.

Third, the characteristic of good goals is this:

Good goal = Difficult + Specific

The whole point of good goal is it helps you extract more effort from yourself. In a way, you set goals so that you can do more. If your goal demands more of you, it means the goal is doing its magic! So why'd you become discouraged when a goal demands more of yourself? By stretching yourself, you'll become more capable.

To become wise, get beneficial results without compromising quality of life to a great extent. Much better, do this not only for yourselves, but those around you as well.

Prime example worth studying: Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore

Looks like everything a human does can fall into one or the other sort of fallacy. I sometimes think we should have a fallacy named merely for being around: "the breathing fallacy" (the mother of all fallacies)

I prefer Norvig's "Design of computer programs" over this: https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--...

I learned how to build a vocabulary for the problem domain first, and then use the vocabulary to solve the actual problem through this course. Norvig has great examples on bottom-up problem solving approach.