361–370 of 415 posts
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What's a "bypass scanner"?
Bypass tray is the auto feeder on the top of the big copiers, ours can also scam to mailbox via that so it chews through 50 pages and emails it before I walk back to my office. Beats doing it by hand.
This would be a Nigerian scanner then? ;)
“Dear sir or madam, I have come in possession of a very valuable document scan which I am unable to get out of the country...”
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But commenters are taking evidence of how this guy runs his business as evidence that that method is effective. Shouldn't there be comments pointing out if this isn't effective?
It's easy to look at a something in isolation and assume you are qualified to cast judgement on where it can be improved but often a decision might have both a negative consequence and also a much further reaching positive consequences too. The sort of people who like to judge things in isolation miss those kinds of complexities. This kind of arm-chair critic seems to be on the rise on HN as well. People making short…
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You're describing a policy of not making frank assessment of the efficacy of business practices.
That’s a bit far. From my perspective, the point is that looking at inefficiencies in isolation is as bad as looking at benefits in isolation. Making a frank assessment about the efficiency of meetings is probably of limited value in and of itself in abstractly assessing the overall equation of trade-offs in running a distributed vs collocated business. Even more so when concretely assessing this particular company.
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You don't understand that many people prefer interacting with other people in person instead of via a slack channel? You can like your remote job. I agree there are ways to make it work, for certain people and certain jobs, and it can even be better than a workplace in some cases. I am not criticizing it, just explaining the advantages I find from working in an office with other people (btw, I have done remote work t…
> You don't understand that many people prefer interacting with other people in person instead of via a slack channel? > I wonder if you have tried socializing in person and via a computer. It's so much better in person, that I don't care about not having logs. If you don't understand that, you may be a robot. Your point would be a lot more effective without the insults. I also wonder if you are unable to see the iro…
You may have different preferences, I did not say anywhere you should share mine. What I said was precisely that you should be able to understand that other people prefer to interact with their coworkers in the real world, not that you should do the same.
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> You don't understand that many people prefer interacting with other people in person instead of via a slack channel? > I wonder if you have tried socializing in person and via a computer. It's so much better in person, that I don't care about not having logs. If you don't understand that, you may be a robot. Your point would be a lot more effective without the insults. I also wonder if you are unable to see the iro…
It's even more ironic given this person (or an ironic robot?) is socializing via a computer with someone else not even at work and learning about Wolfram's setup, something that'd be antisocial, uncomfortable, or seen as slacking off in many offices...
To repeat my point: I understand there are advantages in working from home, and that for some people the way of socializing may be one of these advantages. What I found surprising was that pault did not understand that I prefer personal interactions when there are slack channels.
I had to stop reading. It's such an obsession with working and technology.
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This is crazy. He is the CEO of an 800 person company and the people talking to him sound like they are completely unprepared for the conversation. Of course the third argument needs to be fucking documented! Their response should have been "yes, this is a clear bad, we'll fix the documentation by tomorrow's meeting." Not just sit silently on the call while the CEO has to go do it themselves.
The people there sound like I did on my thesis progress reports after I had been out drinking with friends. As much as I was ready to hate on Wolfram given his reputation, he's completely justified about his complaints, and he's being professional about it. I see nothing "toxic" about this conversation, as others have mentioned. He is completely focused on the work; there are no personal attacks. The main interlocuto…
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Rather than throwing even more money at Wolfram, it would be even better to put up a fund (maybe a crowdsourced campaign) to buy the rights to Macsyma and PDEase to release them under the GPL.
Except the Wolfram Language provides access to vast information about the world. I worked with the Knowledge Graph at Google and Wolfram Language seems like an easy to use personal version of that. I would be happy to pay for it, forever, if it were more responsive.
Which is mostly pulled in from public data sources, such as the CIA World Factbook, US census and economic data, US Geological Survey data, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, etc. Knowledge Graph was based on Freebase, which in 2016 transferred its database to the Wikidata project (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page). So once again, instead of throwing more undeserved money at Wolfram for appropriating other people's work, the better alternative is to work on integrations of Wikidata into Common Lisp, SciPy, Org mode, etc. and contribute to Wikidata itself.
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It's even more ironic given this person (or an ironic robot?) is socializing via a computer with someone else not even at work and learning about Wolfram's setup, something that'd be antisocial, uncomfortable, or seen as slacking off in many offices...
Why should it be antisocial or uncomfortable? I also prefer to see my family in real life than by telephone, but that does not mean I find phones antisocial. To repeat my point: I understand there are advantages in working from home, and that for some people the way of socializing may be one of these advantages. What I found surprising was that pault did not understand that I prefer personal interactions when there a…
Also, you mentioned that you never worked at a remote first company, and I can say from experience that working for a company that has most of its employees in an office and a few remotes is the worst of both worlds. You get left out of all the decisions and social banter and all you get is a few crumbs when someone remembers to check the slack channel and see what you're up to. It's possible that if you worked for a company where everything happens online you would feel differently.