271–280 of 757 posts
In short: choose happiness over money, most of the time.
Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine. Don't be angry at the people who are ben…
How much feel good and drinking relationships matter in upper management. And on the downside, how little facts weight in when compared to a manager's gut feeling. Enthusiastically presenting a (factually wrong) solution can be a winning strategy. In high school, I thought I was a math genius because all of my solutions were judged as correct. Turns out, I was just a good presenter and nobody made any effort to check…
That is the reason the world is burning. Instead of running from where you don't see it, run to attack where you do see it. It's better to fail as a good person than to succeed as a charlatan, and a bit of money can't plaster over the faculties of the mind drying up, among that the ability to resist charlatans in other contexts, including the political. "Business sophistry" is simply sophistry, brownnosing your boss…
Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine. Don't be angry at the people who are ben…
An individual can have an outsized impact while maintaining a low-profile or non-networking approach. . . . Commodities do not usually exist for the benefit of ultimate producers & consumers. . . . You can't fix stupid but you can come up with some appropriate workarounds if you put in the effort of long-term repair anyway.
The most effective team member is the one who amplifies everyone's output. If you can improve a 5 member team's output by 20%, it's the same as if you'd added a 6th member for free. The least appreciated team member is the one who amplifies everyone's output.
I'll never forget the first time I saw a person like this get fired. At a previous job, we had a senior engineer who was an expert in the type of work we were doing who spent most of his day answering questions, helping others, making sure builds were running smoothly, etc.
Eventually, he was let go by management because he didn't close as many tickets in the bug database as the other engineers. Big loss to the team.
Life is fleeting. Most of us here are 1/3 or more of the way done. Divest yourself as much as possible from your job. Find other sources of identity. You don't need that fancy car or to buy a boat as much as you need that ejector seat savings account. And when you realise that conditions have evolved to a point where you're not having fun anymore (and they always eventually do), eject yourself and go spend far more t…
Regarding the "ejector seat savings account", do I receive something like unemployment benefits when I quit my in the United States? If yes, does it matter whether I quit or was fired? Sorry if that question sounds naive, but from what I read here on HN I'm often not quite sure how the system works in the US.
Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine. Don't be angry at the people who are ben…
What I noticed is that every discipline invents their own lingo to describe the systems in play at the ethos of their discipline and they often manifest as some sort of law, principle or concept.
What I'm really curious about learning is to see if there's some sort of overarching discipline that focuses on these sort of systems as a meta and finds improvement points or market opportunities based on a given principle.
Take Moore's law for instance. It essentially describes a relationship between the most atomic component of {system} and the price of the commodity that is offered by that {system}. (system=hardware)
Now apply that to any other field. How about energy production? Is there a correlation between amount of cells in a solar panel and the price of energy at large available to consumers? This is still in the field of engineering so I'm guessing there will be some sort of relationship, but I wonder what taking it further into business and design for instance would look like.
I don't know how that would look like but to clarify I don't expect any of these laws to illustrate a similar pattern, but I do expect them to define how further along or behind any given "system" is, assuming that they are somehow comparable.
Working in VR, the state of the art is closer to Pong than to the Holodeck or the Matrix. That doesn't mean there aren't useful applications for the technology but we won't see anything that passes for reality in my lifetime, or perhaps ever.
I really hope for VR semi-realtime street view for when I'm old and brittle.
When you are an employee at a job you don't like, but you keep staying because you think you are irreplacable, you worry about your colleagues, or for whatever reason: just leave. The only reason you stay is a feeling of responsibility. But you are not responsible for the company or it's employees. You are responsible for your own life and your family.