sirgawain33

I've been partial to Heinlein's idea of the "general specialist" lately:

"Computermen sent up to install Mike were on short-term bonus contracts— get job done fast before irreversible physiologlcal change marooned them four hundred thousand kilometers from home. But despite two training tours I was not gung-ho computerman; higher maths are beyond me. Not really electronics engineer, nor physicist. May not have been best micromachinist in Luna and certainly wasn’t cybernetics psychologist. But I knew more about all these than a specialist knows—I’m general specialist. Could relieve a cook and keep orders coming or field-repair your suit and get you back to airlock still breathing."

from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Instead of "buckling down", I have found the opposite the be pretty effective. William James explains:

"If, namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing them from the inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of egoistic preoccuptation about their results.

...

Say to yourself, 'I won't waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I don't care an iota whether I succeed or not.' Say this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the method permanently."

Unless I'm being thick, I think the point of this parable is to question the developer, not the interviewer.

Despite using a bunch of fancy new language feature, name-dropping Knuth, and describing the solution for an hour, the result is code with no additional benefit and significantly worse maintainability.

Sometimes being smart doesn't have to look so smart.

Would be interesting to see some specs/measurements to substantiate their proposed energy savings -- without an insulated heating vessel it's hard to believe this is more energy efficient than existing technology.

Haha, I am not an expert in the least. I would be happy to hear my evidence is bunk. I'm just trying to point toward a source that I found interesting and informative.

Indeed, with food production, the evidence and points of view are always very diverse and nuanced. It's a complex subject--endless, really.

Here's a clip about banana chemical treatment...

> "...Zemurray finally addressed the problem. He found a solution, which he called 'Bordeaux Mixture' and that combined copper sulphate, water, and lime. Zemurray's experts cautioned him against its overuse but he had it pumped on the plantations in increasing quantity. It was a cocktail with quite a pleasant name, but the giveaway was in the title of those employed to spray and pump it: veneneros, or for want of a better translation, 'poisoners'

I would be very interested to find out if the industry decreased the pesticide/fungicide load since this was documented. I'm quoting secondhand here, Chapman notes in the 2007 book

> Of the world's food crops, the banana is the most chemically treated (so we depend on its skin's ability to prevent disease)

The story of marketing bananas is such a strange one. The 'Father of Public Relations', Edward Bernays, was heavily involved. There isn't a compelling dietary reason to eat bananas (expect, I suppose, if it's the only thing you've got). They resorted to the same marketing tactics that were used to sell cigarettes.

> "Samuel Crowther...looking back on nearly twenty years later on these early days of United Fruit in his book The Romance and Rise of the American Tropics, what was being discovered was that 'demand is a thing which must be created" (51)

Without getting into too much of a discussion about health and diet... I find that the heuristic that "anything new is bad" seems to work pretty well with food. Trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, factory farms, etc.

The history of bananas shows that the production and demand for the fruit is both very new and completely artificial.

Again, please feel free to draw your own conclusions. The only point to make here is that I found the reading surprisingly fascinating -- a banana is not just a banana.

We don't eat bananas anymore in our house, largely for the reasons outlined in the article.

The thumbnail summary: bananas only started being widely consumed in the 1960s because of heavy marketing efforts by Central American railroad builders (they had to do something with the land along the sides of the newly built railroads, and bananas happened to fit).

They are heavily chemically treated, more than any other fruit. They've been a monoculture almost since Day 1.

Oh, another fun fact, those little stickers on bananas? They were one of the first examples of 'branding'

I didn't find this article all that well written or informative. I recommend Chapman's Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World

I also happened to read John McPhee's Oranges at the same time. The contrast between the orange (an ancient fruit, widely consumed, hardy, with a rich literary tradition) and the banana is stark.

Both books, by the way, are great little studies in technology business. Techno-optimism, marketing, PR, globalization, manic CEOs; it's all there.

I used to think I had this problem, too. I developed an elaborate categorizing and indexing scheme. I tried to apply it outside of my personal knowledge, creating a crawler/indexer for research and web sites in one my areas of interest. I thought "if only we organize things better we can change the world!"

I realized over time that the collection wasn't the hard part. It was the categorizing and simplifying. The author hits on it a few times:

"It is the extraction and organization of the information that takes time... I know full automation is not feasible, since the imposition of meaning onto the raw information is something that I must do, not the computer."

In my experience, the simplifying is really where you get all the gain.

What is simplifying?

It's distilling a complex research paper into a few key data points. It's naming files well so that you can search them with Spotlight. It's learning to write more clearly. etc.

That last one -- clear writing -- should have been obvious. Good writers manage to convey so much information in so little space. How do they do it?

The parallel to programming should be obvious. When you name things well, they become very easy to find and use.

We can expand this to a bigger point: if you really want to get smarter, you need to be learning to simplify because your brain can only hold so much at once.

It's like learning the law of gravity rather than cataloging every time an apple falls from a tree.

The following unintuitive conclusion arises: you should be looking to make your "Personal Knowledgebase" more difficult to grow because it forces you to go through the simplifying process sooner.

I stole this idea from someone on HN: anytime I find an idea or quote that I think it important, I clip it into a Word Document and print it out. I keep these in a binder. I have gone back to these notes so many more times than anything that I have in any digital form. More significantly, these bits of information have influenced my life more often and more deeply.

I could dig up examples of nicer looking finned pots. The name escapes me at the moment, but I remember seeing one at a conference last year.

The point is that the technique was well known. It's not manufacturing or aesthetics that's been holding back the technology.