I worked at a very large Ruby shop where errors in production were very expensive. This meant that we spent many times more money on instances running the test suite for every build than we spent on all production…
Let's be realistic here: The US supreme court always tells us what the law is, every time, regardless of how clear the law's writing is, and how the court had rules in the past. The same can happen in lower courts, as…
I worked with Ferrucci in BW. The internals of the employee rating system that preceded him were hilarious. In short: Everyone is encouraged to rate anyone else in a variety of categories, as often as possible. Every…
It's a turbulent time in games media: See how Yatzhee just quit The Escapist, taking with him most of the video team. Either way we slice it, we'll all soon see what is what brings people to certain publications? The…
I've been a part of a system like this (a financial system that happens to not be technically a bank). The system was constantly under attack by fraudsters: You could find subreddits with guides on how to try to…
And it gets worse the smaller the market is: There is a chance that a youtuber with sufficiently large following could actually choose to buy said mac pro, because their revenue might be pretty large. But then you look…
It's a matter of letting things degrade so that the maintenance becomes outright firefighting. I am currently working on a project where a processing pipeline has a maximum practical throughput of 1x, and a median day's…
No modification is perfect: While all GMO modification tries to be as narrow as possible, it's not like things are ever so perfectly narrow as to only just express a bonus protein that you wanted. The problem is…
There was an old patent about making generations completely infertile, but yes, never used. Bayer's corn seeds are optimized enough that, while the next generation grows just fine, the yield loss makes it not worthwhile…
This tells me you don't know much about Monsanto / Bayer Crop Science. Roundup Ready is a relatively good idea: Roundup applies easily, and after the first few generations, when the control of how to add the GMO genes…
It often has to do with the size of the company: the larger you are, the weaker your decisionmaking. I work for a very large corp. As part of a round of layoffs earlier this year, they cut an entire foreign office, to…
An unsung part of the economic disadvantages of supersonic is how often the value of speed in the connection of two cities is not anywhere near even in both directions. Say we are looking at London-NY. The flight takes…
Oh, I've seen a team get completely obliterated by moving back to in person, even though everyone really did live in the same city and with reasonable commutes. This was a startup, that had one big problem: a CEO that…
That street's sin is not the lack of trees, but having 6 entire lanes for cars, which apparently all go in one direction. An uncrossable nightmare that only even has stores at one side! Those nice trees take a few…
There's a little more to it: Make sure your manager, and maybe even your manager's manager, likes you. If your manager doesn't like you, change teams. If your manager's manager doesn't like your manager, you should also…
For the same reason Monsanto sequences basically anything: Because we can tell what proteins are encoded in there, and what is near them, and we can have good ideas of what proteins are expressed together. When dealing…
In what mature organization takes it more than a week? My current org is quite mature: You probably use it. It's also not a cloud provider: Our aws bill is in the high 8 figures a month. And yet launching a new service…
Iger wasn't sure about the purchase of ESPN in the first place, and we can see why. The story is really about how the internet has done a lot of damage to sports television, and sports media in general. Basically…
One of the strangest experiences in my career involves working for a very well known startup, which had lucked out into an extremely high talent pool, thanks to some key early hires. The problem is that while they had…
Document mishandling can lead to a slap on the wrist if you let the investigators come in and take a look (Clinton, Biden), but if you refuse to give investigators access, and brazenly lie to them about the documents…
I have seen platform teams work extremely well. I have also seen them fail spectacularly. The main reasons? The organization's ability to identify, or hire, the kind of developers that do great on platform teams. At the…
But the issue about the multiple return types is not pointless at all: Optional types, and pair types, were added to the language way later than checked exceptions. We didn't even have actual generics back then! So the…
A big part of this in the US is our continued evolution in suburbs: In practice, in person contact with others is a lot more work than historically. This makes children have very little contact with adults other than…
The idea of making fuel on Mars was popular enough to have the calculations be part of undergraduate thesis' over 20 years ago, back when I was in college. I bet that people far more serious than Aerospace Engineering…
The actual interest rate isn't really that important: Its stability and predictability is. In practice, every loan and long term contract that is made is implicitly a bet on expected future interest rates. We could…
I worked at a very large Ruby shop where errors in production were very expensive. This meant that we spent many times more money on instances running the test suite for every build than we spent on all production…
Let's be realistic here: The US supreme court always tells us what the law is, every time, regardless of how clear the law's writing is, and how the court had rules in the past. The same can happen in lower courts, as…
I worked with Ferrucci in BW. The internals of the employee rating system that preceded him were hilarious. In short: Everyone is encouraged to rate anyone else in a variety of categories, as often as possible. Every…
It's a turbulent time in games media: See how Yatzhee just quit The Escapist, taking with him most of the video team. Either way we slice it, we'll all soon see what is what brings people to certain publications? The…
I've been a part of a system like this (a financial system that happens to not be technically a bank). The system was constantly under attack by fraudsters: You could find subreddits with guides on how to try to…
And it gets worse the smaller the market is: There is a chance that a youtuber with sufficiently large following could actually choose to buy said mac pro, because their revenue might be pretty large. But then you look…
It's a matter of letting things degrade so that the maintenance becomes outright firefighting. I am currently working on a project where a processing pipeline has a maximum practical throughput of 1x, and a median day's…
No modification is perfect: While all GMO modification tries to be as narrow as possible, it's not like things are ever so perfectly narrow as to only just express a bonus protein that you wanted. The problem is…
There was an old patent about making generations completely infertile, but yes, never used. Bayer's corn seeds are optimized enough that, while the next generation grows just fine, the yield loss makes it not worthwhile…
This tells me you don't know much about Monsanto / Bayer Crop Science. Roundup Ready is a relatively good idea: Roundup applies easily, and after the first few generations, when the control of how to add the GMO genes…
It often has to do with the size of the company: the larger you are, the weaker your decisionmaking. I work for a very large corp. As part of a round of layoffs earlier this year, they cut an entire foreign office, to…
An unsung part of the economic disadvantages of supersonic is how often the value of speed in the connection of two cities is not anywhere near even in both directions. Say we are looking at London-NY. The flight takes…
Oh, I've seen a team get completely obliterated by moving back to in person, even though everyone really did live in the same city and with reasonable commutes. This was a startup, that had one big problem: a CEO that…
That street's sin is not the lack of trees, but having 6 entire lanes for cars, which apparently all go in one direction. An uncrossable nightmare that only even has stores at one side! Those nice trees take a few…
There's a little more to it: Make sure your manager, and maybe even your manager's manager, likes you. If your manager doesn't like you, change teams. If your manager's manager doesn't like your manager, you should also…
For the same reason Monsanto sequences basically anything: Because we can tell what proteins are encoded in there, and what is near them, and we can have good ideas of what proteins are expressed together. When dealing…
In what mature organization takes it more than a week? My current org is quite mature: You probably use it. It's also not a cloud provider: Our aws bill is in the high 8 figures a month. And yet launching a new service…
Iger wasn't sure about the purchase of ESPN in the first place, and we can see why. The story is really about how the internet has done a lot of damage to sports television, and sports media in general. Basically…
One of the strangest experiences in my career involves working for a very well known startup, which had lucked out into an extremely high talent pool, thanks to some key early hires. The problem is that while they had…
Document mishandling can lead to a slap on the wrist if you let the investigators come in and take a look (Clinton, Biden), but if you refuse to give investigators access, and brazenly lie to them about the documents…
I have seen platform teams work extremely well. I have also seen them fail spectacularly. The main reasons? The organization's ability to identify, or hire, the kind of developers that do great on platform teams. At the…
But the issue about the multiple return types is not pointless at all: Optional types, and pair types, were added to the language way later than checked exceptions. We didn't even have actual generics back then! So the…
A big part of this in the US is our continued evolution in suburbs: In practice, in person contact with others is a lot more work than historically. This makes children have very little contact with adults other than…
The idea of making fuel on Mars was popular enough to have the calculations be part of undergraduate thesis' over 20 years ago, back when I was in college. I bet that people far more serious than Aerospace Engineering…
The actual interest rate isn't really that important: Its stability and predictability is. In practice, every loan and long term contract that is made is implicitly a bet on expected future interest rates. We could…