I write down:

- To-do items (with empty checkboxes)

- Notes about what I did, every so often. Or what I talked to someone about, what was decided.

- If I'm programming, I try to have a kind of plan for the next fifteen minutes / hour in a few sentences. "Going to refactor this now." "Updating the state here so it can hold this information." "Adding a component for this". Just so that I do think about what I'm going to do for a bit.

That sort of thing.

Apart from the to-do's the main point is to keep my focus, when I'm writing thoughts on paper I'm not on Hacker News. It doesn't matter all that much what the writing is, to me.

> In my view nonnegative real numbers have good physical representations: amount, size, distance, position.

Rational numbers I guess, but real numbers? Nothing physical requires numbers of which the decimal expansion is infinite and never repeating (the overwhelming majority of real numbers).

I should've mentioned nonnegative integers, as they correspond to the amount of discrete things.

I don't see any difference between rational numbers and reals. Their decimal expansion has nothing to do if they correspond anything physically existing or not, nor do any other difference between rationals and reals seem relevant.

But you won't have poverty related stress.

There is no actual "panther" animal though, the word is used for several different animals (leopards, jaguars and pumas at least, I think).

They can all have melanistic coats and are then often called black panthers. But that's not a species.

I believe the poster you're replying to understands that. They're noting that the complaint about panther was curiously because they had already listed tiger, which is practically never called a panther, and not because they already listed leopard, which is a cat that is often called a panther. The statement about meaning "any big cat" I would guess to be a confusion based on the name Pantherinae for the subfamily of Felidae of which all these big cats are part. Though the puma, which as you note is also called a panther, is in the different subfamily, Felinae.

I personally just tend to avoid the word panther, because it very often causes confusion as to which cat you're talking about.

I think the bacteria in your gut outnumber the human cells in your body.

This is about the engineering department, which apparently has 16000 employees now. With 4500 managers!

They're going to 1500, 1300ish can become engineers, 1700 are let go.

Apparantly ASML had 4500 managers of 16000 employees in the engineering department, and engineers spent a third of their time in meetings.

1500 managers of 14400 employees sounds a lot more normal to me.

At a ratio of 10:1, at least in my experience, there's no time for those managers to be hands on with the work and keeping their engineering skills current. I don't personally feel that's a problem, but reading other comments on this post it seems like many HN readers do have an issue with engineering managers who don't keep their tech skills sharp.

For the past year I've only had three direct reports, which would have been too few to keep me occupied if I wasn't also acting tech lead.

IMHO, if you want engineering managers who can occasionally do hands-on things, you probably want a ratio around 6/7:1

Yes, I have no idea what the expectation of a manager in de engineering department of ASML is.

Personally, my "manager" has about 35 reports and also other duties. Basically as long as everything is going OK I don't have much to do with him. This is a company of 75 people, there are no managers except for two of the four directors. Not quite like ASML :-)

There is an ongoing move from Whatsapp to Signal. It's just very slow.

"In the US you cannot make jokes about failure"

There is also the phenomenon that serial failure Donald Duck is still a very popular character in several European countries, while we don't care about Mickey Mouse at all. Isn't it the other way around in the US?

Mickey always does good and always wins, that's deeply boring. Donald is flawed and relatable.

Interestingly growing up as an American, I watched Duck Tales which while tangentially related to Donald Duck it’s about his ultra rich uncle going on awesome adventures and just being so smart and awesome. Donald shows up every once in awhile but I don’t really remember much about him.

Duck Tales is basically an attempt at doing Carl Barks era adventure style minus Donald, but Scrooge being made more heroic/sympathetic (he's pretty much a lovable jerk at best in the old stories). I think Disney really wanted to tell the Donald stories Europe loved to Americans.

The persistence of Carl Barks and Don Rosa style stories here is surprising even to me. My son, born 2005, seems to know every single Barks story by heart - and I can't say I pushed it that hard.

I don't think many people care about Mickey as a character. They like the image but that's about it.