harterrt

Agreed. Fwiw, Mozilla’s style guide prohibits rivers like this.

https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/concepts/sql_style

What would you change?

Yes! I can’t see the point of enforcing fussing with indents to get a river.

For comparison, here’s Mozilla’s SQL style guide: https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/concepts/sql_style

blog.harterrt.com

Mostly data science - been slow lately, but I’m working on a couple pieces again.

Thanks for sharing. I want to hear more from him. Do you have a recommended book by McLuhan to start with?

First time I've seen a good argument for tabs over spaces. Richard Hendricks would be proud

+1 to servicability. It's hard to get someone who knows how to clean my minisplits. This looks really cool, but I'd need to be confident that I could maintain my units myself.

Probably he’s referring to zettelkasten systems.

OP hints at this - but the problem seems to be net metering lumps capacity payments in with the cost of power.

Some markets run a separate capacity market that rewards power generators explicitly for their capacity - independently of whether they actually generate any electricity. (California's market (CAISO) doesn't do this)

A long time ago I was involved in setting capacity market prices if y'all have follow up questions.

Writing is useful even if nobody reads it. Writing clarifies and sharpens my thinking. I have ideas I wouldn't otherwise have.

I wrote for the void for a long time. At the time, some folks on my immediate team found it useful. Now, a few years later, I'm still referencing those posts.

The important hard work was actually writing and polishing the idea until it was good enough to publish.

Thanks for the note and I'm glad the piece was useful!

Thanks for the note! Doing opportunity sizing early in the product life-cycle definitely helps with this type of situation. Though, I've found it only really helps when it's a forward looking analysis or (rarely) when part of a no-blame retrospective.

Author here. I fully support prioritizing a project because it's fun! We need to own that rationale though.

In OP's situation, it sounds like their counterpart is trying to argue that this project is a "good thing to do" for the user/system. In reality, it's a bit of code hygiene that makes it more fun to do work (still important [1]).

That dissonance hides the true value of the work and makes it difficult to reason about.

[1] https://blog.harterrt.com/bad-tools

The other posters are right, we're not going to be able to give you general OKRs that work everywhere. It's important that your goals ladder up into your companies goals.

I just wrote a piece on how to break down corporate goals into something that's meaningful for you and your team [1]. If you're having a hard time figuring out what your goals should be it might be that your company's goals are too broad and need to be broken down more.

[1] https://blog.harterrt.com/cascading_metrics.html

lol, dang. Reverse psychology!

Original author here. Super excited to see this on HN!

That's a great breakdown. I hadn't put my finger on stakeholder or customer empathy before, but I agree they're critical skills.

> Unfortunately these three areas are soft skills and you won't know you've improved until you find yourself reciting a fact. Usually you'll think "well duh, because the customer thinks this." It'll seem obvious, but it is only because you went through the trenches to learn that fact.

Definitely. This reminds me of Siver's "Obvious to you, Amazing to others" (https://sive.rs/obvious).

I'm trying to spend the rest of the year documenting as much of this soft-knowledge as I can. A lot of the data science hype over-focuses on hard skills and misses these soft skills.

We can deal with this issue by running a randomized trial. Here's a link to a randomized trial [1] that establishes a clear causational relationship between Vitamin D and reduced admittance into the ICU.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096007602...

Here's a link to the study [1]. It is a randomized trial so there's clear evidence that there is a causational link. Specifically, Vitamin D reduces the risk of needing ICU treatment.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096007602...

This is drastically different than having a government mandated program. Airbnb and Uber are both are both opt-in and it's not all that difficult to get a fresh profile on these services.

To start, I appreciate your effort on this post. It looks like it took a lot of work and it does a great job of explaining difficult topics like why controls are important.

That said, I don't think it's fair to characterize the COVID study as low-quality. It's worth mentioning contrary results, even if it's an exception that proves the rule.

Unless I'm reading your comment wrong, this p-value (0.03) is actually significant for a 95% confidence test.

I disagree with your interpretation of the statistics. There are going to be inter-group differences with any controlled study. This is sampling error and it's exactly what the p-value and confidence intervals are meant to account for.

It's unlikely that the strongly significant result we're seeing in the study is due to sampling error.

+1 - VTel [0] provides symmetric gigabit fiber to rural communities in Vermont for ~$80/mo. Again, they are a co-op. The other benefit is that their customer support is spectacular.

[0] https://www.vermontel.com/