nmat
nmat on Hacker News
Posted by
nmat on Sunday August 16, 2026 @09:47AM
from the economist.com dept.
Posted by
nmat on Friday July 11, 2025 @05:54PM
from the economist.com dept.
To be honest I was expecting the article to focus primarily on internal docs, meetings, long Slack posts, etc. Staff engineers spend a relatively small percentage of their time writing code. A lot of what it takes to be successful is knowing how to communicate with different audiences which AI should be really useful for.
Posted by
nmat on Saturday September 07, 2024 @08:11AM
from the economist.com dept.
There’s also the fact that Europe and the US support Israel and sell weapons that are used in Gaza and the West Bank. Given the West involvement it’s expected that this is talked about more often in Western news and social media. Just like it’s normal that European news report more on the Ukraine war than the US does. It’s closer to home.
And do you go back and update all documents whenever something changes? If you’re swapping people around every month I agree that you must keep everything written down, happens a lot in projects that bring consultants in. But if you have a core team of people and you get 2-3 new people per year then you should be more relaxed about it.
I strongly believe that proactively keep documentation up to date is not worth the effort.
Here is what I recommend in my teams:
- There’s an onboarding guide that is usually only updated when new people onboard. If something is not right they raise it and their onboarding partner fixes it.
- When someone shares a technical document/RFC we add it to a central repository with a creation date on it. These are point in time and usually not updated but still useful for new hires.
- We sometimes do onboarding sessions to walk through the architecture, these are recorded and added to the central information repository.
Note that in the things I wrote above there’s a mix of up to date content and slightly outdated content, ultimately the code is the source of truth. It’s not worth spending time writing docs that no one is gonna read.
Posted by
nmat on Tuesday August 20, 2024 @02:59PM
from the youtube.com dept.
Posted by
nmat on Monday May 27, 2024 @06:59AM
from the thepointmag.com dept.
Face to face communication is very underrated nowadays, probably because of the negative connotations associated with meetings. Talking to someone is by far the fastest way to convey information. I often prefer a quick chat than spending 30 minutes writing Slack messages back and forth. I agree that writing has other benefits and it's better in certain cases but we need to get out of the mindset that writing/async is always better.
Australia participates in the Eurovision Song Contest.
Posted by
nmat on Thursday February 29, 2024 @07:21PM
from the economist.com dept.
Posted by
nmat on Friday February 16, 2024 @01:59PM
from the lensculture.com dept.
Posted by
nmat on Saturday February 10, 2024 @05:08AM
from the theguardian.com dept.
And YouTubers should make content for free?
Posted by
nmat on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @06:50PM
from the nature.com dept.
Reminds how US centric a lot of crypto companies are. An advantage of crypto that often comes up is “instant and cheap money transfers”. In the UK, I transfer money to my friends instantaneously and for free using just my bank account.
Posted by
nmat on Tuesday July 18, 2023 @05:40AM
from the theguardian.com dept.
Posted by
nmat on Thursday July 13, 2023 @05:47PM
from the putthison.com dept.
This is big generalisation. In South Europe leaving at 6pm is early. Most of the people I know have standup after 10h30 and do 1h lunch breaks.
Funny how people keep complaining about companies that don’t allow them to work from anywhere, but then are only willing to accept a salary based on the market value of a very small number of countries.
Posted by
nmat on Saturday February 11, 2023 @04:48PM
from the degoes.net dept.
Posted by
nmat on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @01:06PM
from the twitter.com dept.
Posted by
nmat on Friday January 20, 2023 @08:29PM
from the theatlantic.com dept.
Many successful artists don't paint, sculpt or build anything. It's not about the technique. Art is about sending a message, it's about what the artist is trying to say. It's about what the public feels and thinks when exposed to their work.
AI has a place as a tool to produce content in a fast and cheap way. And yes, as a result of that certain jobs will likely disappear. But art will continue to exist and great artists will still be followed and admired by the public.
Posted by
nmat on Saturday July 02, 2022 @07:49PM
from the theguardian.com dept.
Part of a critic's job is to educate people. A good critic can explain why a certain film is groundbreaking and why another film is recycling ideas that have been done thousands of times. The critic's end-goal is to push the industry to make better films not because of critics, but because the public demands it.
Posted by
nmat on Friday April 08, 2022 @07:53PM
from the wired.com dept.
Posted by
nmat on Saturday February 19, 2022 @10:23AM
from the ft.com dept.
Posted by
nmat on Friday February 26, 2021 @11:57PM
from the postgresql.org dept.