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stiglitz

Re:Why do we have so many meetings? on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:38PM (#50169009)
My theory is that it’s an intuitive rate limiting scheme devised to cope with the corporate fire hose. There’s no limit on the amount of text coming into an office worker’s inbox in a unit of time. But if one focuses on verbal communication, there’s always going to be a single stream.

Personally, I don’t do this; instead I deal with the stress of the fire hose by grinding my teeth to stubs at night. And for the messages I don’t get to, instead of “let’s discuss”, the sender gets nothing at all.

Re:Writing by hand is good for your brain on Thursday July 23, 2026 @04:01PM (#49027254)
I’ll never forget seeing a girl in a cafe highlight, line by line, nearly an entire page of a textbook. Watching the page curl from the wetness, almost as if writhing in pain.
Re:A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering on Friday July 17, 2026 @10:52PM (#48954736)
It's a Skinner box of productivity. Of course it's polarizing.

My own enthusiasm varies wildly day to day. I've been sick of squinting at punctuation marks and opening sequences of of tabs to trace through annoying abstraction layers for a long time; so I'm really excited to see those activities effectively automated away. But the same tools enable some really bad behavior (in myself and others), which really gets me down.

Re:A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering on Friday July 17, 2026 @10:47PM (#48954723)
Kudos to the lucky few artisans that the modern economy will support, but becoming a stocker at Ikea will probably be more lucrative than picking up a saw and plane.
I disagree- when I googled this knot I came immediately to https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknothistory.htm where this “Ian” fellow goes to great lengths to establish himself as the inventor. Screenshot of a davinciesque yellowed inventor’s notebook and so forth.
Facebook is widely thought to cause significant societal damage; anyone who thinks so, would probably consider employees of Meta to be the ones lacking empathy.
Re:We've made the world too complicated on Sunday May 17, 2026 @02:48PM (#48171981)
I think the two concepts are not easy to disentangle. It isn’t the craftsman who decides the chairs should be built in an assembly line- it’s the owner, who wants to maximize the number or consistency of chairs. And the abstraction of that assembly line is what keeps the craftsman from saying, “that is the chair that I built.”
Re:We've made the world too complicated on Saturday May 16, 2026 @07:25PM (#48164678)
Described by Marx (in too many words, unfortunately) as “alienation”
Re:The Quiet Resurgence of RF Engineering on Monday April 27, 2026 @09:16PM (#47929391)
As someone with a EE degree followed by 12 years of SWE work, that pivot is quite daunting. A degree is just a piece of paper to get you an entry level job to do some real learning IMO
Re:Should QA Exist on Friday March 27, 2026 @02:20PM (#47546347)
In the Windows team (back before the test org was decimated) I saw the described "class divide". Anybody who was good enough would switch from SDET to SDE [disclaimer: obviously there were some isolated exceptions]. The test team produced reams of crappy test frameworks, each of which seemed like a "proving project" for its creators to show they could be competent SDEs. After the Great Decimation my dev team took ownership of many such frameworks and it was a total boondoggle; we wasted years trying (and mostly failing) to sort through the crappy test code.

This was all unfortunate, and I agree in principle with having a separate test org, but in Windows the culture unfortunately seemed to be built around testers as second-class software developers.

Re:New accounts on HN 10x more likely to use EM-dashes on Thursday February 26, 2026 @04:17AM (#47163773)
I’ve always been bothered by instances of your first example, and I mostly use “XD” instead of “:)” to sidestep the issue in my own writing.
That doesn’t seem like an accurate synopsis of the article at all.
As a Windows driver developer: LOL
Re:AI-Generated "Workslop" Is Destroying Productivity on Monday September 22, 2025 @07:10PM (#45340762)
Another possibility: your teams are working less now.
Re:The Members of the Dull Men's Club on Tuesday June 17, 2025 @01:22AM (#44295971)
Speaking of paying close attention to the mundane, it’s an escalator.
I don’t think I’ll ever be convinced that there’s some kind of fundamental “randomness” (as in one that isn’t a measure of ignorance) in the world. Claiming its existence sounds like claiming to know what we don’t know.
Re:I won't connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud on Monday March 24, 2025 @06:57PM (#43466278)
Why make it work with a mobile app at all? How is that even a convenience? This is an appliance you need to be physically present at to load and unload.
Re:Why TCP needs 3 handshakes on Friday October 04, 2024 @09:07AM (#41740992)
TCP Fast Open does you one better:

A: If you can hear me, what time is it?

B: Yeah I can hear you; it’s 5.

FYI quic is compatible with bbr, and at least the google and msft quic implementations have bbr (albeit not by default afaik).
Re:Reflection for C++26 on Monday July 01, 2024 @07:36PM (#40851990)
By ”stagnation” do you mean “not getting new features”?
Re:Reining in America's $3.3T Tax-Exempt Economy on Thursday June 20, 2024 @01:02PM (#40740855)
> The median operating margins for hospitals is around 0% or some times negative

I found this page that seems to agree- https://www.definitivehc.com/resources/healthcare-insights/h...

That shows a negative median operating margin for the last 5 years. How can an industry carry on losing money like this? This must be only part of the story, right?

Re:Procrastination is connected to perfectionism on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @08:41AM (#38841490)
>I've turned in so many things I'm not happy with and gotten a "this is great"

Great if this feedback is from users; not great if it's from somebody who's just been waiting for you to finish it so that they can sell it. Unfortunately in a big-company environment like the one I work in, the initial and dominant feedback is usually from the latter.

Re:The Rise and Fall of the 'IBM Way' on Friday December 15, 2023 @10:08PM (#38661382)
Sorry for the tangent but I have to know if it’s really “picadillos” you meant to type.
The campus reconstruction isn’t finished yet. I’m certainly curious what will happen when it is.
Re:Let Maintainers Be Maintainers on Saturday August 26, 2023 @11:24AM (#37273707)
Unfortunately missing in the article is any plan for this to actually happen: for stability and quality to be valued by the CEMBI when their boss demands proof of “impact”.
I enjoy drinking alone.
Re:Programming Culture in the Late Aughts on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @11:22PM (#36236768)
"12 years ago everyone was wondering how we'd program on multicore CPUs" is either laughable or enlightening to read as an OS developer.
That’s odd- the first film mentioned by this article (Ben-Hur from 1925), which it describes as completely lost, is not lost, at least according to its wikipedia article. Apparently it was (at least) partly considered lost until being found again in the 80’s. Not sure whether to trust TFA on any other claims now.
Re:The Age of Average on Thursday March 30, 2023 @11:32AM (#35374326)
Album sales have become an increasingly obsolete metric for popularity during the last 20 or so of those 40 years.

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