tal

I used to really want an icemaker for convenience, because invariably I'd run into a mostly-empty ice cubes tray when I wanted ice cubes. Or I'd fill the ice cubes tray before it was empty, but then I'd partially-melt the ice cubes there and make them unusable until they refroze.

I didn't care that much about chilled water, because I can throw ice in it. But the ice cubes were a pain.

I even got a dedicated icemaker at one point, when I wanted softer ice to run a small shaved ice machine.

But...finally I figured out what I needed to do differently. Instead of freezing water in ice cube trays and taking the ice cubes directly out of the tray, just go stick a container in your freezer. Whenever you get ice cubes, if the ice cube tray is full and there's space, just dump it into the container and refill it. Now you have a big container of ice cubes that's always full. Just replicates what freezer-integrated ice cube makers do. Haven't had any issues since. Maybe this is obvious to some people, but it wasn't to me.

You can get little containers that will fit into the door shelves if you want to stick them there:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ice+cube+container

looks puzzled

Hmm. What are you doing with that? Like, you want to be cooking for a certain amount of time, then after the cooking completes, have a timer trigger to start a second cooking period?

I'd also add -- I think that a better criticism is not his lack of technical familiarity, but rather that he also worked at at Reddit when it was a startup, co-founded it, and despite having sold off his stock and left once before returning, I'm sure has some form of company-performance-linked compensation today. Basically, when he's starting out, if Reddit goes under, he loses pretty big. If Reddit becomes big, he makes a ton of money. Today, if the company does well, so does he. The result is that he has a tremendous incentive to do everything he can to make Reddit successful.

In addition, his personal actions will have always been a substantial portion of determining what makes Reddit do well. If you're one of a very small technical team making early technical decisions, those calls can determine whether the company sinks or swims. Later, he's holding a high-level position where there's a lot of impact.

So he gets compensation tightly tied to company performance, and his actions have a large impact on company performance. His interests are tightly-aligned with the company. And in that environment, yeah, you're gonna care more about company performance and the impact of your actions on that performance.

That gets harder to do as companies grow. Sure, you can give employees stock options or have an employee stock purchase plan. I think every tech company I've been at has done that. And to some degree, yeah, that's gonna align your interests with that of the company. Problem is that any one engineer, if you're at a company with thousands of engineers, just doesn't have as large an impact on the stock price. And usually, the proportion to which your compensation is stock or something tied to stock falls off as the company grows.

Stock in the company is a pretty good incentive when you're a ten-person company. It doesn't work as well as an incentive in a large company, not outside of the people near the top.

You can have companies set up bonus programs with milestones or something to try to replicate that alignment, but I don't think that any bonus program works as well as stock. Lot of issues.

• Say someone doesn't meet a milestone. Then maybe it's the fault of the person who planned and structured the milestone: maybe it wasn't realistic.

• There's information disparity between the people setting the milestone and the people accepting it as compensation, and how much compensation someone gets is always going to have some level of a zero-sum aspect, outside of wanting to have happy employees that are retained. With stock prices, the only people on the "other side of the fence" are the competition.

• Might be ways to game the system, or to influence the people who set those bonus milestones ("Kathy down in accounting is sleeping with Bob who is running the bonus program"). Even if that doesn't happen, if someone feels that there is

and I'm pretty sure that missing a bonus is disappointing

I bet that there's potential for ill will.

I've thought about ideas before to try to figure out how to replicate some of that "startup" alignment of company and employee incentives for larger companies. But they usually smack into one of a number of problems; it's really easy to create misincentives. I wasn't able to come up with something that'll align company and employee incentives as well as a startup. And this is not a new problem, so a lot of people have thought about it; if there were an easy solution, I'm pretty sure that companies would have done it by now.

But point is, I suspect that he's comparing how much time and effort he's willing to put in to what a random engineer is when Reddit is a larger company. And I'm pretty sure that at least some of the difference is that their personal incentives are different; he's gotta take that into account. Maybe Reddit did have people not putting in the effort in 2015 relative to similar companies

I don't know. But I still really suspect that at least some of the factor is going to be the personal incentives issue.

I bet his yearly salary he can’t name a single facet of what he iS referring to as ‘work’ and has no earthly idea how the tech behind Reddit works or is maintained.

You'd lose that bet. He was around when Reddit was pretty small, and I'm pretty sure wrote some of the original (Common Lisp, IIRC) codebase at least, if not the later Python rewrite.

kagis

Yeah, sounds like he was working on the Python codebase too.

https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/67bjm8/im_steve_huffman_programmer_and_reddit_ceo_ama/

I’m Steve Huffman, aka u/Spez. I founded both Reddit and Hipmunk (where I was CTO). Until about a year and a half ago, I was a full time engineer. I started programming as a kid, and worked as a developer through high school and college at Virginia (CS major).

That was from 2017.

Yeah, I can see what you mean. Generally, they're similar-enough, at least in basic functionality, that I don't have an issue using someone else's microwave though. The advanced functionality can vary a lot.

What does kind of annoy me is that they're basically the one device

VCRs used to be the stereotypical holders of this position

that has a clock, but also is a device price-sensitive enough to both:

• Lack an internal battery to keep the clock powered when power is lost.

• Not have a network link, cell link

not that I really want those

or radio time signal receiver to automatically set the clock.

The result is that every microwave I see seems to wind up showing an unset clock.

Inkjet printers clogging and requiring ink refills aside, I don't think I've ever been unhappy with (2D) printers. I've used....continuous-feed dot-matrix printers, a thermal wax printer, laser printers, a text-only line printer, and a continuous-feed plotter. They all worked pretty well.

And honestly, I'm still kind of impressed at what inkjet printers can turn out on photo paper, even if I wouldn't buy one for my own uses.

I had one very elderly Apple laser printer that I picked up once that someone was throwing out. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, laser printers were wonder printers that business users might have, but home users mostly didn't have in their price range

fast output, sharp text, but expensive; always wanted one, but I wasn't going to buy one. It didn't have much memory, so there were some limitations on the complexity of what it could print. I rigged up the lpd on my computer to do all the rendering of vector Postscript images and convert it into a fax-compressed raster image and hand it off to the printer, so aside from taking a while to transfer the resulting image to the printer, it could pretty much handle anything. It served for something like ten years, with the remainder of the original toner cartridge lasting something like five of that, and I only tossed it because I wanted a higher-resolution printer, not because it had any problems functioning. I could probably still be using that thing. Kinda have some warm fuzzies remembering that ancient thing still soldiering on.

I will guess that many of you don’t like Mike Pence

I mean, he's a social conservative, which I'm not, but I think that he'd have been a pretty normal President, in contrast to Trump.

Trump’s tariffs — the biggest middle class tax hike in modern history

I mean, it hurts the middle class, but it's almost certainly dicking over the poor more.

White House walks back film tariff plan

That lasted almost a day.

There is no stronger bond of friendship than a common enemy.

Frank Frankfort Moore

No. Eternity is a fork of Infinity that supports Lemmy instead of Reddit. I use it when I'm on Android.

If I recall correctly, it's not free. I mean, the program is free to download and open source, but you need an in-app purchaseable subscription to be able to access Reddit via API now.