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I weigh pasta on the scales pretty much every time I cook it. That way you know pretty accurately how many calories you're consuming. I don't think I'd use this because it looks less accurate.

same - also there isn't much incentive for a manufacturer to produce a "normal" single serving (about 60-70g). By my judgement that single serving looks at least 100g

I don't think this detracts from OP's point.

Has anyone even studied the effect of forcing ten year olds to drink a daily litre of vodka?

This is just called being teenager in the Balkans. Eventually we turn out fine.

Did you consider that this might be part of why Balkans are so far behind the rest of Europe?

No we are behind because our development was stunted by 45 years of socialism and 35 years of wild corruption.

Socialism... you probably mean communism, but OK. I agree.

The wild corruption... no. That wasn't externally imposed on you/us. Estonia, Letonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia started the race to improve themselves at the same time, and they're far ahead now.


It feels like there's some glossing-over and circular logic here:

> Yes children show poorer impulse control than adults. But aren’t we all somewhat helpless in the face of the mighty tech companies?

The fact that adults can also have somewhat poor impulse control doesn't mean we should disregard the argument. And when it comes to the power of big tech - isn't that what regulation aims to mitigate?

> Brain development continues up until around 25 or so, and so it’s possible that social media does cause longer-term problems with brain development. Possible. Not proved. It’s possible social media causes long-term cognitive decline in adults. Possible. Not proved.

I don't know the studies well enough to know whether it's proved or not, but intuitively this feels like an obvious enough concern to at least be investigating it. Surely there are some general studies about whether mental health issues in early life are more likely to lead to long-term problems?


It strikes me as an over-simplification. What about doctors, therapists, firefighters, teachers, bricklayers, scientists etc... ?

Disagree. This is explicitly active: "helping you understand how the things you are doing are actually critical to the success of the team". It could include building out a team dashboard that tracks the consequences of bugfixes, for example.

Sorry, I do not understand which part do you disagree with.

> This is explicitly active

Is merely being active (hopefully towards eventual success) automatically places a manager among "good managers"? What defines an "average manager" then?

I have explored this in more detail in a reply to a sibling. I see "helping you understand how the things you are doing are actually critical to the success of the team" as a critical work of any manager, therefore I find it strange when such duties are attributed to "good" management.


It is critical. Done well, it motivates people. Some managers are better at it than others; some are great at it. Such managers are actually motivating rather employees rather than avoiding demotivation.

Great managers absolutely can provide motivation. They can have a genuinely compelling vision for a product - "we're going to build the best damn FooGadget on the web". They can figure out what motivates their reports and work to make it transparent to them - for example some engineers like to see positive client feedback, whilst other engineers like having thorny problems to solve.

Yes. It stands to reason that if a manager can demotivate you, then they must be able to do the opposite. Both building the vibe and killing it can achieve that in terms of extrinsic motivation, culture, the psychological contract, and so on.

These are important factors to consider for people who work in highly collaborative teams as opposed to those who prefer to be 10x lone wolves, which is the impression I get from the article and the overall startup vibe I've experienced over the past few years.

HN might be over-indexed on the "leave me alone to do my work", "I don't have friends I have colleagues," type of person but it's not representative of the entire population.


> It stands to reason that if a manager can demotivate you, then they must be able to do the opposite.

You share that with no justification. There's no such "reason".


It would be more useful if you explained why the rest of my comment didn't provide a good enough reason (because of your clear dissatisfaction with the first sentence of it), because this is just snark that doesn't further a conversation.

Anyone can quote a subset of a message and drop a remark without substance after all, but I didn't come on HN to read Twitter-quality stuff.


> There's no such "reason"

You share that with no justification.


It stands to reason that if gravity can make things fall down, it can make things fall up.

It stands to reason that if an earthquake can collapse a building that it can build one.

It stands to reason that if rat poison can kill rats then it can make them stronger.

("reason" left to be worked out by the reader as an exercise)


It stands to reason that if someone makes an argument you can make a strawman against it.

In this thread, a manager is compared to earthquakes, ratpoison and gravity… which has fuck all to do with management.

Come on…just say if you don’t like something, like “I don’t like managers and you can’t change my mind.” Be fucking honest for a minute.

Have some god damn conviction instead of this weaksauce shit. Interpersonal relationships are obviously not subject to the laws of thermodynamics.


>> highly collaborative teams as opposed to those who prefer to be 10x lone wolves

I was a decent developer and a much better manager, and I think a big part of it was I learned these are different games. By the time we hit multiple dev teams I had good success framing it wtih senior ICs like this: "If you want to get 10% better (better in context of what they are defining) this year, that's really, really hard. But it would be easy for you to make everyone on the team 2-3% better, and our net improvement would be well over 10%." We then talk & plan relatively straight-forward ways to make this happen, and mix in explicit personal improvement/growth components. They're motivated, they make their teammates motivated, they make me motivated. Meanwhile the 10x'er (not sure I've had one of those) keeps grinding it out in the minor leagues.


They're different economic philosophies, but most Western countries have a mixed system incorporating elements from both. Voting for Momdani doesn't necessarily mean you want total public ownership of the means of production. His manifesto is only moderately more socialist than the status quo.

Learning to sit with your thoughts for a while is a good life skill.

What makes this "Japanese style"? Is it the mayo and the sweetened bread?

I just meant that they are supposed to be very close to the sandwiches they are well known for in Japan.

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