Makes me think of the Peter principle. Pretty depressing conclusion though: a large company is bound to be an environment with many distractions by underperformers. Any way out?
It's just entropy, honestly. Growth = complexity/debt/escalating coordination cost. Success = complacency/greed. Like a cancer, the fruits of growth and success eventually burn the house down.
It's just the way of things, apparently. I try hard to not worry about it too much and instead side-step it as best I can.
Sensorfact | Utrecht, Netherlands | Full Stack dev, Devops, Frontend | semi-ONSITE (mostly REMOTE but in-office a few times a month) | Full-time
Sensorfact is a fast-growing, well-funded, English-first scale-up saving energy in SME industries with IoT, data science and consultancy. We have hit a clear product-market fit and are scaling rapidly to different European markets. Our small dev team (~10) could use some help making our systems ready for another multiplier growth, improving our product and building a professional, solid team that is a joy to work in and with!
It's wonderful that this device may help people perform for very long stretches of time where that is unavoidable. It will probably make easier to deem a long shift 'unavoidable' though: if you can have people be alert for 12+ hours while sleep-deprived, why avoid it?
It’s a good read about what scientists do when they have an idea of what they need but not a direct way to measure it, and it was a lot better than the mouse/rabbit tests which involved killing the animal:
Here's a quick estimate: The potential energy of the wave will go like mass x gravitational acceleration x height. If the depth (front to back) of the wave is about 1 meter and the height is also about 1 M, then per meter of wave we get
M g h
g = 10 m / s^2;
M = 1 g / cm^3 = 10^6 g / m^3 = 10^3 kg / m^3;
H = 1 m
MGH ~ 10^4 Joules per meter
If a wave comes every 10 seconds —> 10^3 joules / sec, not far from what this person quoted. We need to add to this the kinetic energy, which might double it. Playing with the other parameters we can get close to what the parent quoted.
This is a consequence of Brexit and the election of Trump, democratic decisions that caught many people in power by surprise. Sophisticated use of social media platforms turned out to have a significant influence on public opinion. Although I agree that in principle everyone should be enabled to seek out their own information sources and form their own independent opinions, this is not what happens in the age of polarized sensationalist identity politics.
Same here. With so much high-quality information and entertainment available the choice of what to invest time in becomes harder and harder, eventually consuming a significant portion of that limited time budget to begin with.
I'm considering implementing part of this at work. It feels less ritualistic than scrum, and leaner for a small organization. The 'appetite' concept brings out the discussion of cost (time) vs (business) value. I feel this is often lost in scrum, where putting something on the backlog and estimating its size are often consecutive.
Does HN have any experience with this framework?
I am often impressed by the things that can be done with these old-school UNIX tools. I'm trying to learn a few of them, and the most difficult part are these very implicit syntax constructions. How is the naive observer to know that in bash `$(something)` is command substitution, but in a Makefile `$(something)` is just a normal variable? With `awk`, `sed` and friends it gets even worse of course.
Is the proper answer 'just learn it'? Are these tools one of these things (like musical instruments or painting) where the initial learning phase is tedious and frustrating, but the potential is basically limitless?
