Viewing profile — pumblechook

Am I the only one who is as tired of the 'kids can't use computers' meme as the 'digital natives' meme? The vast majority of people have never been able to 'use' a computer like th…

Not just students - I experience this in the workplace too, and it just boggles my mind. We hired a recent grad, and after about 10 days of watching him type a password into a term…

I've found journaling on paper to be one of the best morning rituals for calming anxiety. It really is amazing how just writing a few sentences creates a sense of awareness of what…

Appalled is probably a better word. I'm not sure how the process is now (I got Global Entry, which pretty much short cuts the entire horrible experience), but I remember coming bac…

We obviously won't know until all the data is in, but looking at the county by county results seems to suggest that rural voters (who are predominantly working class whites) in swi…

Personal reason: in many ways, the old versions are much purer expressions of the timeless concepts of software usability. It is becoming much more difficult now to separate platfo…

As someone who's lived in the southeast US my entire life, this is spot on. The Bible Belt gets a lot of flack, most of it deserved, but it is hard to overstate the importance of t…

I faced this same question on a recent small project. For anyone dipping their toes into React, it's a huge leap of complexity. I thought I could jump into Flux just like React: ge…

Yes! It needn't be a lot of detail either. Example: I interviewed with a leading UX consulting firm, and they were very up front about the process. It was essentially 1 short take …

Man, if this would've been around a year or so ago! The whole 1099 process was by far the biggest pain point for me of being a contractor/sole proprietor. What led you to address t…

Exactly. The lower bound I'm prepared to give is always a raise from my current salary. I may be prepared to accept less if the opportunity is right, but my only purpose in offerin…

A little bit of both (I've been doing iOS for less than a year), but mostly the latter. I don't live near a tech hub or major city, and the cost of living is pretty low. So good da…

One technique I've tried that seems to get a particularly stubborn hiring manager or recruiter past the salary question is giving a generic number range. Before talking to anyone I…

I've been meaning to do an agenda view for weekly reviews for awhile, but my master view works well enough. What I'd really like is an agenda view that approximates a burn down cha…

I combined a few different views into one using Bernt Hansen's custom agenda as a starting point ( http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#CustomAgendaViews ). It includes everything I …

Kudos to the author for trying to bring org mode to a wider audience. It was definitely the gateway drug to Emacs for me, and now that I've been using org for awhile I honestly can…

The saddest part is that this kind of 'feedback' isn't out of the ordinary, but is actually pretty common. I've found in my own reviewer feedback a striking tendency towards pedant…

This is all good advice, but this article falls into the same trap that most other career related advice does: it assumes only one type of job seeker (in this case - ambitious, exp…

Perhaps it has to do with someone's dominant behavior style? Someone who is naturally gregarious probably doesn't enjoy sitting still for an hour during a lecture, just like someon…

When Bonobos first came on the scene, it was difficult to find a pair of men's pants with a decent fit at a decent price. I don't consider myself a Bonobos enthusiast, but I can sa…

Most companies don't have interesting engineering problems to solve, so all they have to attract talent is a shiny new stack.

NPR is targeting ARC, but this is actually a bigger, more difficult problem for the charity industry than one organization not disclosing where it spends its money. I used to work …

Blindsight, by Peter Watts. One of the better sci-fi novels I've read in awhile. Reminds me a lot of Arthur C. Clark in that it successfully strikes a really hard balance between s…

The ironic part about this is that companies think this is a benefit to the employee, when in reality this seems to be a classic example of the psychological anchoring bias that in…

Honest question: is this not a classic example of the fallacy of claiming causation in an observational study, in the presence of a potentially infinite number of confounding varia…