Hacker News: plumbees

New comment by plumbees in "The IT Productivity Paradox (2008)"

plumbees — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:41:18 +0000

And now you have to create your own portal that hosts the pdfs so that the client can download it.

yeah at some point my job was: "I create complicated PDFs for clients that want them but will never read them."

New comment by plumbees in "The IT Productivity Paradox (2008)"

plumbees — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:40:16 +0000

Very interesting site. I share the consensus that the premise is bold and it has the "feeling" of having some good questions. I never thought of asking whether a computer is really adding "productivity". Maybe the "productive" element here for the company question is volume?

Not more efficient at handling this but more able to handling things at a lesser quality at scale.

New comment by plumbees in "What British people mean when they say 'sorry'"

plumbees — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:39:19 +0000

Oh I'm sorry, but this makes total sense. I say sorry so much that I have seen people take it as admission of responsibility. And it's not good. Glad there are laws that understand the nuance of language.

New comment by plumbees in "What British people mean when they say 'sorry'"

plumbees — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:34:35 +0000

Sub question if anyone is interested. I often have to ask people to repeat themselves but when I go get hearing tests they say I'm perfect. It's a little annoying. I've copped it out to this framework: the hearing tests only tests the range of the human voice, but it doesn't test say, understanding through other systems. For example, I cannot for the life of me understand anything my nieces or nephews say over the phone. Speech practice aside I believe that given that their voices are high pitched, I'm assuming the phone lines (and online meeting rooms) collapse the human voice to a smaller wavespace for efficiency, hense forth clipping the highs and the lows making it harder to distinguish the nuances of the sound. I can understand them just fine in person, but over the phone is such a nightmare. I've developed a bit of an ear as you when when you are around a group of people for long enough. (I.E. parents not able to understand customer service folks when they resort to short form, "slang" English, vs standard pronunciation.) Wonder if anybody else has gone down this rabbithole a bit deeper and can share their insights. (All this because I wanted to qualify the "actually interesting" statement....

New comment by plumbees in "What British people mean when they say 'sorry'"

plumbees — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:29:24 +0000

I came here to say sorry.

Actually interesting I remember saying sorry in the sense of, "Can you repeat what you said?" and it annoyed one of my friends so much that she essentially trained me to say pardon instead because it was annoying her. Didn't realize it was part of my Canadian heritage.

New comment by plumbees in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

plumbees — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:19:12 +0000

The friction in everyday interactions feels higher than it used to be. I'm noticing a common thread: a lack of emphasis on training. I see the gap shows up everywhere. The result is increased friction for everything in life and it's happening regardless of the industry.

I've seen baggers in grocery stores, place cans and bottles of water on top of bread. When I visit the doctor I have to constantly advocate that I want to see the document they are making me sign in writing as they typically won't share the document with me at all unless I sign. And just over all lack of empathy and understanding of what services are being provided, all due to the lack of training.

This forces everyday interactions to have an additional layer of distrust and having to pay attention to things that would have normally been taken care of in the past.

New comment by plumbees in "Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people"

plumbees — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:49:43 +0000

Many mangers shouldn't be managing anything.

New comment by plumbees in "Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people"

plumbees — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:48:19 +0000

Without context of who these people are, yes perhaps malicious but perhaps not consciously so. Merits a frank conversation of indicating that the action of AI reinterpretation introduced errors that poorly reflect on OP's reputation and THAT deserves rectification. My worldy observation is that people in all industries lack training. It's all been offloaded to automated systems. And nobody is there to ask questions or think logically. The hospital staff doesn't understand why I'm angry when they call me using an AI to give me information and the AI is asking for so much PII. (You called me! You already have that information! How do I know you aren't a scammer?) They are not the users of their garbage. They aren't trained to serve the customers, they are trained to serve their managers and that disconnect is occuring everywhere. Why do the grocery baggers put heavy objects with the bread. This was never a think in the 90s and 00s, and now baggers are just not being trained properly. Like, wtf...

But yes do be on the lookout for malicous people, document, log and look for patterns... don't write it off, document.

New comment by plumbees in "Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people"

plumbees — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:41:24 +0000

Based on other comments in the thread but not any direct reply to mine. I would also express that I was surprised when a coworker of mine complained that nobody read message boxes we put up to help the user. It was my first corporate job and I had already learned and ingrained from my experience at a small office that nobody reads technical instructions either. That alas also requires training. Usually by having the documentation open and doing exactly what is written with them watching, or with them doing (better). (Helps reveal gaps in documentation such as, Oh most users don't know how to traverse a file system, let alone what one is... how?, It's an analogy to office filings which they did everyday? why??? I never understood but, alas I've never been able to teach somebody who doesn't understand the file system, the file system.... my weakness)

New comment by plumbees in "Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people"

plumbees — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:33:04 +0000

I thought the reply was generally helpful. Something to consider about in my equally exacting wording as I share the same frustration as the original comment and this give me a framework to view possible issues with my own writing. I.E. You can't change what others will do, you can only change what you yourself do. In this case: Carefully crafted exacting documentation is being ignored = frustrating to me = can't change if others don't want to read it =;;; sorry I have a more elegant way to do this: My meaning is thus: While it is sometimes easier and apt to blame others for their actions, blaming others doesn't actually contribute to any meaningful growth or change. If you take on the blame yourself, even if 100% of the blame falls on the somebody else, then it leads to open ended questions on how that process can be better. Given that you have no control over other people, blaming yourself shifts the issue back onto you for a solution. This can reveal a treasure trove of oppurtunities not before explored. It can be as simple as understanding that there are different levels of technical documentation: How-tos, vs explanitory, vs laymen, etc. Or it could lead to a different exploration as to: How did I end up in this situation, what is the mistake that *I* made? Which could be an easy fix or it can be a philosophical or temporal fix. I made the mistake of:

+ Assuming people cared about this as much as I do

+ Allow another person to control then narrative: (I could have sent it out to stake holders myself; and bare whatever consequences from my hiearchy)

+ Not written any documentation and given the endpoints to an AI to communicate to laymens (because I may or may not have communication skills)

+ Take a course in communication The list goes on and on, but the beauty is that sometimes it's truely and deeply philosophical such as, because I trusted somebody who wasn't to be trusted; because I'm in the wrong place and *know* I know I should be here.

Shifting the blame to the self is less about accepting blame and more about introspection and it is the most valuable lesson I learned from my wife when we first started dating. (It help me identify that as a person I tend to blame others first before blaming myself, and to spend 10 years practicing the muscle to reverse that order)

TLDR: You have willpower, use it by taking ownership over yourself. This is a learned skill and is not enate and requires breaking preconceptions and stepping out of yourself to find.

New comment by plumbees in "Why Japan has such good railways"

plumbees — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:38:51 +0000

Something that peeves me where I'm at is that the transportation system here (not Chicago) is not coordinated across the systems. Here there's a bus that could take me to where I work, but it stops once every hour and is often late by 20 minutes. Local businesses also sponser a "free trolley" that follows the same route. It's overfull at peak hours and as a form of transportation the seats and setup make it much less safe for passengers. (Park benches as seats, and when the driver breaks you're holding on for life) The worse part is that this "free option" now competes with an existing valid option that cost a dollar. But that means that based on fares it's likely they will reduce stops and reduce hours (they have) it would have been better had the business incentive had just sponsered the existing bus route instead. Additionally comparing to china's awesome bus system (depending on the city), there, there is always two buses that come every 20 minutes. So you're never really ever suffereing. (Major cities anyways) The trolly is poorly managed and often three of them will come at once as they don't sync them when they run late they just all go so often you have three trolleys following each other and a very late bus. So it just... I never understood with the advent of GPS why buses aren't syncing so that they could just be traffic bound instead of time bound That way a bus could always arrive every x minutes instead of well the bus is scheduleed to arrive at x time and it might not arrive due to traffic woes. This should be syncable. ... Like why is the system so... I can't avoid saying it... capitalistically bound instead of populas bound. I mean it would better for capalism if that was more human centric. /political rant blah blah

New comment by plumbees in "I don't chain everything in JavaScript anymore"

plumbees — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:13:47 +0000

I guess I'm struggling because I also do like the IDEA of the unix commands being text that is piped around through commands so I do enjoy the concept of the purity of that mechanism.

New comment by plumbees in "I don't chain everything in JavaScript anymore"

plumbees — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:12:37 +0000

I agree that debugging these pipelines are a nightmare sometimes. It's something that frustrates me sometimes because even though in OOP it won't be terse the action would be clearer. OOP can at times also introduce less cognitive load as well. I wonder if the issue is the mixing of paradigms. Although I don't think everything should follow purity boundaries: functional must always be functional and OOP languages should just be OOP but perhaps the mixture of doing functional programming in a OOP paradigm introduces unintended quirks that are cognitively taxing when bugs occur. (I've written 10 drafts and I'm not sure what I want to say so I'm going to just land it here and see what happens)

New comment by plumbees in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

plumbees — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:25:56 +0000

I'm genuinely trying to understand this comment. Can you /explain

New comment by plumbees in "Build123d: A Python CAD programming library"

plumbees — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:46:39 +0000

I've been wanting to get into OpenScad. Wondering what you've identified as an issue. I dabbled a little and I think I remember wishing it was more object oriented to make it a bit easier to make reusable adjustable pieces and I had found a python library that does openscad conversions; Wondering what gripes it solves for you.

New comment by plumbees in "The case for becoming a manager"

plumbees — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:13:16 +0000

Also I do understand the whole, if you lead you will be respected bit; but counter act that with mega corps that will let your wage stagnate and being a leader might be detrimental to your work/life balance given how much is taken for what is given. (tldr: Unfair wages kill motivation and leadership)

New comment by plumbees in "The case for becoming a manager"

plumbees — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:09:21 +0000

> Park as far as you possibly can from the store and walk that thing for a solid 3 minutes both ways. Find one with a really noisy wheel. Make a whole production out of it. Leading by example is unbelievably effective if you lean into it just a little bit.

I might be a little base, how does parking as far from the store show 'leadership'?

What's complaining about a noise wheel going to accomplish other than being like a Karen? (noisy wheel might be non important to the day to day and literally just noise.)

I think I'm missing context as I can't get the grocery store scenario from another comment out of my head.

New comment by plumbees in "Seed Oils, Early-Onset Cancer and Human Metabolic Variability"

plumbees — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 12:59:33 +0000

Is this just pseudoscience?

New comment by plumbees in ""Your" vs. "My" in user interfaces"

plumbees — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 14:53:20 +0000

Every platform and application seems to do things differently. On Linux, I end up with a mix of dotfiles in my home directory, some apps putting things under ~/.local/..., and then tools like Miniconda insisting on a top-level folder. It feels inconsistent and messy. Windows isn’t much better—despite having an AppData folder, some programs still scatter their files in random places. \s I guess we'll just need to create a brand new standard, that will make things better. \s

New comment by plumbees in "GNU Artanis – A fast web application framework for Scheme"

plumbees — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 23:18:42 +0000

I can finally read a website without squinting despite having glasses on already. Yay!