I usually convey the same meaning with 80wpm typing. Makes it faster to read too

Maybe I’m just slightly adhd – listening to people talk drives my crazy. Get to the point! Much easier if they type it out

Except for the large majority of people who read, type, and click way faster than they can talk. Especially for visual things it’s way faster to drag a rectangle than to describe what you want.

A lot of us also aren’t linear verbal thinkers. It would take minutes to hours to verbalize concepts we can grasp visually/schematically in seconds.

Great book on the topic: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60149558-visual-thinking

Productivity is impossible to define when you don’t know where you’re going.

A lot of companies and teams are finding out real fast they have zero clue where the fuck they’re trying to go or what they want to achieve. Just a bunch of people running in random directions before the funding runs out.

Pick a direction. Then go fast.

Oh don’t even get me started! Labor Day was specifically set for a different day than May 1st to discourage solidarity with international labor movements. Wouldn’t want people to feel a camaraderie with the communists and socialists abroad

My partner frequently brags that she’s the only of her friends and coworkers, in 10+ years, who has ever gotten flowers for women’s day. Meanwhile even Uber drivers have wished her a happy women’s day in various heavy foreign accents.

The 12-month plan was always a fantasy. Even planning 3 months out is too slow. Things change, new information comes in, plans get updated. You have to plan, of course, but never try to stick to the plan.

All hail the prioritized backlog. Toss your ideas on the board, prioritize regularly, work from top down at your preferred velocity.

As a hiring manager, I only read the bullet points. I’ve interviewed startup CTOs who were mid-level engineers at best and “Software Engineer” vanilla titled engineers who have shipped and owned impressive things over years.

The scale, complexity, and variety of the systems you’ve built, shipped, owned, and maintained trumps all else.

And yes we can see through the bullshit. Everyone has built a “semantic document retrieval system” in the last 3 years. That’s a weekend project, gonna need a little more to be impressive :)

> San Pablo, California, United States > You appear to be in San Pablo, United States. Your internet provider is AT&T Enterprises, LLC. We know this because your IP address — 108.xxx.xxx.233 — was the first thing your device sent us

I am in San Francisco. IPs are not a reliable location identifier and never have been. Especially on mobile. Thank you for coming to my ted talk

> For everything or specific products?

I mean, it depends? You probably dont need gold laced toilet paper but a pair of shoes that lasts 10 years instead of 2 years is probably worth it.

I grew up poor. Not like destitute or anything, we had food and all the necessary basics, but there were 3 of us sharing a 50m^2 apartment on a single income with a dad who wouldn’t pay child support. So it was kinda tight.

Now I’m sorta upper middle class in SFBA. There’s 2 of us sharing 1500sqft, each saving almost 2x/year than my parents salary was back when times were tough. The fear of no-money never quite leaves you.

Here’s what I learned: Buy the most expensive thing you can afford. Use that thing until it dies. Do regular maintenance.

Thought I was super clever when I figured that out, but it’s just the Vimes Economic Theory of Boots – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

Also never try to keep up with the joneses or buy things just for status. Unless you can leverage that status into financial opportunities.

No because the document is not the work. Management wants someone to figure out the solution to their problems. The document is just a step in solutioning.

Without the doc, others would have to re-do all that work if you get hit by a bus. Or you’d be stuck in endless meetings conveying the vision instead of figuring out the next problem.

Document length is inversely proportional to the quality of your thinking/insight. When you create fluff, everyone can see you didn’t do the work.

Me too. Try speech to text one day, you may find that you'll use 2x the words than you do with a typed vomit draft. I was surprised

Good for thinking through a concept but unsalvageable in the edit phase. Easier to throw away and rewrite now that you know what to say.

Nowadays I like conversation as an ideating step. Talk to a bunch of people, try to explain yourself until they get it, see what questions they ask. Sometimes in HN threads like this :)

Then write it down.

You get super high signal writing where every sentence is load bearing. I’ve had people take my documents and share them around the company as “this is how it’s done”

It can take weeks of work to produce a 500 word product vision document. And then several months to implement, even with AI.

My high school professors had a really good solution to this:

Minimum word lengths but you have to write the essay in class by hand. You have 2 periods.

Some of us still write a lot but having limited time and space (4 pages) really put a hard limit without saying so. In higher classes they started saying “I’m gonna stop reading after 3 pages so make sure you get to the point”

Minimum word lengths are the greatest dis-service high school and college have ever done to future communication skills. It takes years for people to unlearn this in the workplace.

Max word counts only please. Especially now with AI making it so easy to produce fluff with no signal.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48026382

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There is also the rather famous example of how earlier census data was used in the 40’s.

Once the government has your data, they have it. The next generation of representatives may not follow all the same rules and norms

My time is worth more than tokens. I’m thinking of maybe creating some .md files to save me time in code review. If I do it right, it’s going to cost more in tokens because the robots will do more.

Cursor dashboard. I know they're incentivized to over-estimate but feels directionally accurate when I look at recent PRs.

Don’t really think about it. I think when I talk to it through Slack, cursor users codex, in my ide looks like it’s whatever highest claude. In Github comments, who even knows