aquilax

Somebody apparently once went up the the great philosopher Wittgenstein and said “What a lot of morons people back in the Middle Ages must have been to have looked every morning at what’s going on behind me now, the dawn, and to have thought that what they were seeing was the sun going around the Earth, when as every schoolkid knows the Earth goes around the sun and it doesn’t take too many brains to understand that.” To which Wittgenstein replied, “Yeah, but I wonder what it would have looked like if the Sun had been going around the Earth.” Point being, of course, is that it would have looked exactly the same. swans on tea » You See What Your Knowledge Tells You You’re Seeing

There’s a standard way to understand the relative danger of any activity. "A micromort is a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death " Risk: micromorts, microCOVIDs, and skydiving (Interconnected)

There’s a standard way to understand the relative danger of any activity. "A micromort is a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death " Risk: micromorts, microCOVIDs, and skydiving (Interconnected)

There’s a standard way to understand the relative danger of any activity. "A micromort is a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death " Risk: micromorts, microCOVIDs, and skydiving (Interconnected)

It doesn't take long before the high performers on those teams get sick of picking up the slack. The high performers move on to companies that care, while the team's output continues to decline as everyone pushes the boundaries of how little work they can get away with. Eventually management wonders why certain teams have so many people but so little output, "restructuring" occurs to trim the slackers, and the hiring cycle starts again to build the teams back up. What changes when you work outside an office? | Hacker News

Western culture has a very unhealthy attitude towards sleep in general. There is only one socially accepted sleep pattern: Eight hours a night, in one block, starting at between 10pm and 11pm and ending between 6am and 7am. This "early-bird" rhythm is celebrated in to the point of fetishisation and held up as the goal to which all productive adults must aspire. To behave otherwise is to be lazy, slothful, and not putting forward your all It’s Time to Stop Nap-Shaming | Hacker News

Whenever I feel like going off my diet, I just go to my happy place. The snack drawer. You Can’t Out-Train Your Diet — Believe Me | by J.J. Pryor | BeingWell | Nov, 2020 | Medium

I applaud this, but I also advise against this for your career. Unless the change you're making has immediate and significant business benefits, from a PM/EM perspective you're 1) wasting time 2) potentially introducing bugs. The correct move is to wait until the org is so bogged down with tech debt that meaningful progress cannot be made, then switch companies/teams. Always leave the code better than you found it | Hacker News

Insisting that your company with 200+ employees will only hire people who will work themselves to the bone without any mention of how those people will be properly compensated is wild corporate propaganda. Hire people who give a shit | Hacker News

New repository: aquilax/hugo-task-management - Using Hugo as a task management system

Halving requirements is the same as doubling capacity. - Nigel Calder Hundred Rabbits — off the grid

Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all “Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all”*… | (Roughly) Daily

The benefits of the stochastic life are clear. It is quicker and cheaper than almost any other system. The results are guaranteed to be fair (across the population). And it is impossible to cheat or influence. Living the Stochastic Life – Terence Eden’s Blog

Pornography and prostitution are popular because they arrive at sexual end goals, or a reasonable facsimile, with more clarity and lower costs than in the mating market. Uncanny Vulvas – DIANAVERSE

If there's one phenomenon that marks the modern era more than any other, it's the replacement of the relational with the transactional. The rise of platonic co-parenting | Hacker News

No amount of belief makes something a fact this isn't happiness™ (“No amount of belief makes something a fact.” ―...), Peteski

To paraprashe Mr. Engelbart: it's a failed tool if you use it exactly the same way the day you bought it and a year after. Re-Thinking the Desktop OS | Hacker News

I dread package upgrades because it can instantly turn into an all-hands-on-deck emergency, and these are just the stand-alone packages, not all the ones I mentioned above. Webpack 5 | Hacker News

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”*… | (Roughly) Daily

There is a palpable difference between the universe described by many religions and the universe described by science. The former is all built from concepts rooted in human society such as father, son, judgment, commandment, obedience, sacrifice, punishment etc. The latter is built from eerie ideas such as force field, wavefunction, observable, reference frame, superposition etc. The former feels small, ordinary, familiar and manmade. The latter feels like we're fumbling for words to describe something that fundamentally transcends ordinary human experience. 100k Stars | Hacker News

When I am angry, frustrated and disappointed or depressed, I think of the pale blue dot every single time. It helps me put things into perspective. Our little knotted lives and our petty concerns are meaningless and inconsequential in grand scheme of things. Just let it go. Enjoy what little time we have here! 100k Stars | Hacker News

Processing TV schedules

Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters. You're enlightened – now what? | Hacker News

Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water You're enlightened – now what? | Hacker News

New repository: aquilax/grafana-ledger-data-source-php-server - Grafana server wrapper for ledger data

Look into problems, you'll find solutions. Look into solutions, you'll find problems. Ask HN: How do I learn to write better code? | Hacker News

Probably career suicidal (never admit it in your application) but honestly the thing I've found helps is just not caring about work at all. It's like the equivalent to acceptance in grief. Get the day done, look forward to the weekend, when you book time off make sure to book the following Monday. I'll do the job as best I can for as long as I'm paid but if you think I'm here for any reason other than money to pay the bills you're completely delusional. Survey: The average worker experiences career burnout – by the age of 32 | Hacker News

My wife has heard all of my jokes and all of my excuses. She now criticizes the former and laughs at the latter, instead of the other way around. Ask HN: What is it like to be old? What advice would you give to younger people? | Hacker News

📚 Finished reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

📚 Finished reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

📚 Finished reading The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey to Mastery by Andy Hunt

📚 Finished reading The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey to Mastery by Dave Thomas

Jugaad is an attitude towards delivery which originated in India and consists of three simple tenets: Humility: use whatever works without prejudice Openness: keep your options open Frugality: small expenses keep regrets small Jugaad takes agile to the extreme – George's Techblog

New repository: aquilax/newsferry - Modular RSS/Atom Feed aggregator prototype

trust is the use of any assumptions about the behavior of other people Trust Models

Sometimes the things you create grow way beyond your capacity to handle and become soul crushing endeavors that bear little resemblance to the early years of adventure, fulfillment and satisfaction in serving others, and the wise thing to do would be to step aside and preserve your sanity and peace of mind. Ask HN: What Happened to Larry Page? | Hacker News

📚 Finished reading The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

📚 Finished reading The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

The contradiction in management is that you must somehow know what's going on, but it is not helpful to interfere constantly. Managing Teams Through Interfaces | Hacker News

I've found "efficiency as the opposite of stability" a very powerful concept to think about - even though it's fairly simple, it seems to be almost a fundamental law. Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better | Hacker News

📚 Finished reading Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss

📚 Finished reading Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss

Your developer won’t get hit by a bus. They’ll get hired by Netflix! Your developer won’t get hit by a bus. They’ll get hired by Netflix!

Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough Richard Feynman's Perspective of Life | Hacker News

Each generation thinks it invented sex Robert A. Heinlein - Wikiquote

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do”*… | (Roughly) Daily

Since you cannot go back in time to change the past, forgiveness is about giving up the hope of a different or better yesterday. It relates to forgiving actions that were taken, that gave you the feelings of loss of control over your happiness. It’s about acknowledging those things that another did or said that caused pain and making the decision that you are not going to let that hurt or control you anymore. Forgiveness can be very empowering. It can give you the chance to be free of another person’s emotional control. It has nothing to do with the other person. As was said before, it is something that is for you and you alone." Why forgiving someone else is about you | Hacker News

I call it "performative productivity" since it's actually a performance. We Don’t Need to Work So Much (2015) | Hacker News

Wonder if we have a working system already

Despite the authors best attempts, the truth peeks out in the article: merit is often a necessary, but not sufficient cause for success. Not sufficient, particularly, for extraordinary success. A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you | Hacker News

What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day. Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive? | Hacker News

Very few people tend to look at the mind as a system, and also seem to ignore that depression, anxiety, panic disorders, etc. happen for a reason. The reason why modern humanity have increased risk of these symptoms is because they know, given their perhaps wrongly learned models of the world or otherwise, that even when they achieve their so-called life goals, that they wouldn’t achieve philosophical nor psychological satisfaction that they seek. Their mind has predicted the conclusion of their efforts, and the conclusion lies far below what they seek. Thus the mind desperately attempts to re-understand, re-configure, and re-model the world to achieve its goals. Perseverance Toward Life Goals Can Fend Off Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders | Hacker News

Are employees paid a proportional amount to the value they bring to their organization? I would say no. I do not believe every talented European is 40% as capable as the average developer in the US. I do not believe that the same software engineer that made $10k in India, suddenly brings 10x as much value due to a 1 year masters, once they move to the US. Ask HN: Should a remote employee’s salary be tied to their physical location? | Hacker News

New repository: aquilax/renamed - Renamed - use your favorite text editor to mass rename files

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. Ask HN: Which book helped you understand the world? | Hacker News

When people are born, they all start good, but even though they all start out about the same, you ought to see them after they have had time to become different from one another by picking up habits here and there!". Translation Dr. Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith Ask HN: Which book helped you understand the world? | Hacker News

Geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck in it. Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay Geography is only physics slowed down and with a... - Quotes from Terry Pratchett's Discworld Books

When in challenging or sad situations it's only reasonable to be grumpy, or pessimistic or what have you. Negative emotions or feelings are part of our natural range and appropriate depending on the cirumstances. Forced positivy to me always has something ghoulish, Truman-show like. It pays to be grumpy and bad-tempered (2016) | Hacker News

The benefits of being attractive are exorbitant. Beauty might be the single greatest physical advantage you can have in lif The Greatest Privilege We Never Talk About: Beauty | by Saeid Fard | Jul, 2020 | Medium

Basically all current social media ends up optimizing for creating outrage, spawning mobs, less thoughtful discussion and more vitriolic arguments, etc. PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN | Hacker News

Being right in a relationship doesn't count for much. Even if you are objectively correct, relationships are about helping the other person live their life. All partners in a relationship compensate for the other's shortcomings. That is one of the benefits of a relationship. Beware of Being “Right” | Hacker News

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. . . . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth. The machine learning community has a toxicity problem | Hacker News

This is one of the major life-lessons I've taken away from card games, summarized by Captain Jean Luc Picard: "“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.” Recruiting Is Poker – Not Chess | Hacker News

Have we forgotten what a "degree" actually means? When you receive a diploma, it just means some institution is willing to attest that you have achieved some sort of qualification. A 28-year-old with no degree becomes a must read on the economy | Hacker News

Diversity at all costs: except diversity of opinion. Politically-correct witch-hunt is killing free speech | Hacker News

Part of the wisdom of meditation lies in the following: There is baggage we all carry, the self, this belief we're the center of it all, the author of (and subservient to) our own thoughts. How do I stop doing what makes me unhappy, if that's "who I am"? But, in reality, I can abandon "who I am" and find new processes of living and new ways of thinking about the world. A researcher on how to live a happy life | Hacker News

When I read this I see a a niche, super premium hardware company that managed to acquire tens of thousands of customers by word of mouth. Not only that, their customers are all in-effect self employed or small businesses with huge average revenue per employee. They manage global supply chains, intense competition, all while taking on and managing huge legal/compliance risk. How is is that supposedly "dumb," criminals can do this, and yet many of us are stretching our intellectual capacities to learn new technologies and maths, developing our nth stupid app, trying to achieve a fraction of the customer traction and revenue that street thugs manage to do every day. Are these people much smarter than average, or does it mean that if you sell something people actually want, literally nothing else matters about your intelligence, education, character, background, or anything at all. When I read these drug stories, it just reinforces for me that growth solves everything. You can succeed with a crew of violent, drug addicted idiots whose only reliable characteristic is short term thinking, and who spend half their time in prison if you have product market fit. What I'm beginning to think is that the "smarter," people are in a company, the less anyone will want their product. It's like the success of a venture is inversely proportional to the number of ostensible geniuses it employs. reply How Police Secretly Took over a Global Phone Network for Organized Crime | Hacker News

The social status of computer scientists is zero. Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017) | Hacker News

the Stainless Steel law: “the better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero.” The Iron Law Of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules · Gwern.net

The Iron law: “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero” The Iron Law Of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules · Gwern.net

All infra teams eventually become platforms. All product teams eventually become experiences. When viewed negatively this is called scope creep. I don't know what it's called when viewed positively but I expect the word "holistic" to be used unironically. The Rise of Platform Engineering | Hacker News

I believe trauma instills scientific-type knowledge that is factually false but locally adaptive. False beliefs need more protection to be maintained than true beliefs, so the belief both calcifies, making it unresponsive to new information, and lays a bunch of emotional landmines around itself to punish you for getting too close to it. This cascades into punishing you for learning at all, because you might learn something that corrects your false-but-useful model. Emotional Blocks as Obstacles to Learning | Hacker News

You waste years not being able to waste hours Crossing the ocean of my ignorance

nothing in psychology makes sense except in the light of individual-differences May 2020 news · Gwern.net

Doing technically brilliant work may be enough for your personal gratification, but you should never think it's enough. If you lock yourself in a room and do the most marvellous work but don't tell anyone, then no one will know, no one will benefit, and the work will be lost. You may as well not have bothered. For the world to benefit from your work, and therefore for you to benefit fully from your work, you have to make it known. Sell Yourself Sell Your Work

Scrum is a way to take a below average or poor developer and turn them into an average developer.It's also great at taking great developers and turning them into average developers. Leave scrum to rugby, I like getting stuff done | Hacker News

Upgraded ubuntu to focal

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. — Claude Shannon, 1948 A brief introduction to the beauty of Information Theory

7 helpful tips on how to be miserable: 1. Stay still. 2. Screw with your sleep. 3. Maximize your screentime. 4. Use your screen to stoke your negative emotions. 5. Set vapid goals. 6. Pursue happiness directly. 7. Follow your instincts. this isn't happiness™ (7 helpful tips on how to be miserable, Brandon...), Peteski

Cities are meant to stop traffic. That is their point. That is why they are there. That is why traders put outposts there, merchants put shops there, hoteliers erected inns there. That is why factories locate there, why warehouses, assembly plants and distribution centers are established there. That is why people settle and cultural institutions grow there. No one wants to operate in a place that people are just passing through; everyone wants to settle where people will stop, and rest, and look around, and talk, and buy, and share. Cities Are Meant to Stop Traffic

The 4-Second Workout. Intense bursts of exercise throughout the day may have surprising metabolic benefits. The 4-Second Workout - The New York Times

It’s bad form to mention money-laundering. Instead, you talk about asset-management structures and tax beneficial schemes.   — John Sweeney “Money laundering is a very sophisticated crime and we must be equally sophisticated”*… | (Roughly) Daily

New repository: aquilax/flash-cardon - Flash Cardon - browser extension to help with learning new languages by reading web pages

Cows make milk. They milk themselves. Other cows check the milk (for free). Cows - get this - PAY THE FARMER to take the milk away. Then the farmer (you won't believe this, honestly) sells the milk back to the cows. Sometimes the farmer lets the cow drink a tiny bit of its own milk. The farmer calls it 'longstanding commitment to Open Access'. What Is a Sustainable Path to Open Access? | Hacker News

If powerful forces consistently push us toward premature exploitation, we should almost always be biased towards exploring more. The Embarrassing Problem of Premature Exploitation - LessWrong 2.0

The world is an incredibly complex place and everything is changing all the time… trying to plan your career is an exercise in futility that will only serve to frustrate you, and to blind you to the really significant opportunities that life will throw your way. The Embarrassing Problem of Premature Exploitation - LessWrong 2.0

Hence venture capitalist Marc Andreesen’s first rule of career planning: don’t. The Embarrassing Problem of Premature Exploitation - LessWrong 2.0

Babies love putting things in their mouths: dirt, insects, bits of grass, their own poo. They have no sense of fear or self-preservation, and come up with endlessly creative ways to place themselves in mortal peril. Once they learn to talk, their constant experimentation with the world transcends the physical to the philosophical. They want to know everything. They are bottomless pits of curiosity, with very little in the way of attention span or self-discipline. Your typical two-year-old can only concentrate on a task for six minutes at a time. Young children are not self-aware enough to feel much in the way of shame, or embarrassment. Nothing is off-limits. The Embarrassing Problem of Premature Exploitation - LessWrong 2.0

Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. It prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better. The Technium: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

"Lazy" is just another way of saying that you're not doing something somebody else thinks you should be doing. Ask HN: How do I overcome mental laziness? | Hacker News

Should read `man bash`

One reason why the world is in a mess is because, for a long time, the ratio between 'explore' and 'exploit' has been badly out of whack. Entities like procurement have been allowed to claim full credit for money-grabbing cost-savings without commensurate responsibility for delayed or hidden costs. The Illusion of Certainty | Hacker News

New repository: aquilax/rssarchiver - RSS archive command line tool

Most people think of “evil” as being synonymous with “malicious” and “doing really, really bad things.” But I have a broader view of “evil.” I consider a thing to be evil if it creates bad outcomes not just out of malice, but instinct or carelessness. Peep Show – The Most Realistic Portrayal of Evil Ever Made – Dormin

The tragedy of domestic cats is their minds are as rigid as their bodies are flexible. Cat Psychology & Domestication: Are We Good Owners? · Gwern.net

Suffering is all the more cruel when those suffering do not & cannot understand why. Cat Psychology & Domestication: Are We Good Owners? · Gwern.net

If you don’t rephrase something in your words, you probably don’t care enough to learn it How to Take Smart Notes :: Up and to the Right — Jonathan Borichevskiy

New repository: aquilax/bookmarks - Netscape Bookmark File Format Parser Library

Updated ubuntu works fine so far

It is amazing what one can accomplish if one does not care who gets the credit. -- JohnDoveIsaacs Egoless Programming