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In my experience, I have used coaches that don’t have more technical skill than me, but are able to provide insight, questions, and provoke me to think through my problems in ways I might not have otherwise.

I break things down into coaching vs training vs mentorship.

Training is when you need to learn a very specific skill from someone that knows more than you. A great example is learning how to drive - it requires training from someone who knows more than you.

Mentorship is when you need to grow more holistically and are learning from someone that is significantly more advanced in your chosen area of study than you. Usually this involves not just technical training, but also a mindset that you wish to learn. Examples of this are apprenticeships or when you seek out a mentor that you think has done well and wish to learn from.

Coaching is when someone may not have more technical skill than you, but is still able to help you improve by probing, prompting, reflecting, or observing. A great example are sport coaches, who are not necessarily more skilled than many of the players they coach.

These are loose and blurry definitions, but I hope it helps frame another perspective on coaching.

DAT (Convoy / Convoy Platform) | SWE II – Principal SWE | Seattle, WA | $121–$274k + annual bonus | Hybrid (~2d/wk)

Building the broker<->carrier freight marketplace for the next decade of Convoy/DAT (small, senior, low-BS team, real work/life balance).

Hiring for:

* 2× SWE II - Broker ($154k–$209k)

* 1x SWE II - Integrations ($121k-$157k)

* 1x Senior SWE - Broker ($154k–$209k)

* 1× Senior SWE - Integrations ($154k–$209k)

* 1× Principal SWE - Broker ($218k–$274k)

* Staff-ish? Between Senior/Principal - email me and we’ll talk.

Email: kelvin(dot)luu(at)dat.com (hiring manager)

Recruiter: becca(dot)fernyhough(at)dat.com

Subject: HN - Truck Yeah! <Broker|Integrations> <Senior|Staff|Principal> <Your Name>

Apply: Principal, broker – https://careers.dat.com/jobs/?gh_jid=5653581004

Apply: Senior, integrations – https://careers.dat.com/jobs/?gh_jid=5649517004

Other Roles: email me.

P.S. We’re in the Maritime Building downtown, directly across from the ferries. The ~2d/wk in-office is real - I don’t care about butt-in-seat time.

18F should; as should DSes at agencies.

If people are looking for hard (the hard mostly comes from the ambiguity of problem space and autonomous nature of our teams) impactful work, send em our way (USDS).

If they’re looking for impactful work, but not necessarily some of the things that make USDS “hard,” our partners are also great places to land.

There’s plenty of work for those that can do it though

USDS is not slower paced or for the faint of heart.

I messaged them and might try and reboot it

My org should be able to host an event if you want to try and throw something together.

Unicorn start up and all that jazz. Likely they will want someone to give a short spiel.

Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad. A lot of anecdotes about “important” historical figures or institutions that use copy by hand as a method for learning.

I would have preferred citing actual research, not an appeal to historical methods.

Given that some of the conclusions that word for word copy may be less efficient than summarized copy[1], it may be a less efficient and less effective way of learning than going through a reading and summarizing every paragraph.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret...

At the beginning of diving into a topic area or when I want to go very deep on a subject.

Books tend to have good comprehensive overviews of an area/technology, whereas most online tutorials are very shallow, even if more current.

On the flip side, when I need /deep/ understanding it’s almost always a combination of a book on the topic to fill in holes I missed, the docs, and live repos if available.

If it’s just for day to day use, or a technology I’m only using in passing - no.

I do vet the authors though. A lot of trash is published.

A few threads:

Volunteering

Open source

Teaching

Meetups

…the criticisms of people who fall below some threshold at some specific task, with dubious claims about the effect on their overall performance

It’s unclear to me where this criticism is coming from.

If someone doesn't like how I work, then don't watch me work. I get paid for the fruits of my work, not how I get there.

Similarly it’s unclear to me where there is anything about anyone measuring how you get your work done. That seems unrelated to the article at hand that only passingly mentions any work context (only of a co-worker making a claim about their own effectiveness) while spending most of the article on games and typing competitions.

I might have read too much into your use of the term “safe” as being indicative that there was some danger or concern.

I agree with this sentiment: > I said I spend not a lot of time typing. Therefore, a device that is aimed at improving typing speed, has a low impact on my productivity.

Though, setting aside that efficiency =/= effectiveness/productivity, I think the spirit of the article is that if a coworker is typing a lot, that may claim that their efficiency has increased greatly, not that every single person will see equal improvements.

FWIW: this is being typed with two thumbs on an iPhone because that’s as efficient as _I_ need to be right now ;)

What hardware/software are you using? I’ve looked into it a few times, but the cost benefit hasn’t been there for me for doing the research without knowing anything about it yet.

Do you code with it as well, or is it primarily chat/browsing/etc?

I agree with you here entirely. I don’t really see how this is transformative compared to any chorded typing system.

The specific op I was replying to was saying

…and 0.5% actual typing, I think I am quite safe with my good 'ol QWERTY.

And there were a host of similar comments initially.

100% on fighting snake oil. 0% on pushing back against people trying new things that might improve the status quo

My point is more of it being not a bad thing to improve on.

Most of the cases where you needed actual really fast travel have been covered for a long time and the number of careers or situations where a person need to travel fast have been declining for a long time, but I think we can all agree faster travel times are better.

Side note: stenography and chorded words with something like Plover (similar to the above) is where really fast typing usually comes into play for. I have not looked into any of the above because the pain of changing my habits hasn’t been worth the benefits to me yet.

I’ve considered it when I had to do interview transcripts, but ultimately I didn’t want to make the investment. I hope future generations are able to learn on something more designed for contemporary use than QWERTY and classic keyboards - I know my wrists have thanked me for moving to a split keyboard for the ergonomics alone.

I think things like this are not “everyone must use this new better way of typing,” but more “hey there may be a better way of doing this task.”

I am always surprised, though at this point I shouldn’t be, that there is always pushback against any attempts at improving the status quo when it comes to typing speeds on HN - as though the creator is attacking all of us with lower typing speeds personally…

From another perspective: sure you might speed up only 0.5% of your workday - but how is that a bad thing?

Repetitive stress injuries aside, even if you only spend an hour a week typing (I suspect it’s honestly more) then if you end up increasing your typing speed by double you’re still saving yourself 25 hours a year. Assuming my a career of 35 years that’s 875 hours and you increase your time fighting imposter syndrome by 0.25%.

Scale up as appropriate for how much time you actually spend typing.

Plato’s republic is primarily about the soul…

Could it have been “Sanji and the Baker”?

Agreed. On my journey to some sort of personal meaning I ended up going through psychology, physical sciences, philosophy & meditation - roughly in that order with poetry and literature interspersed…

But understanding life has, in my experience, been similar to the hermeneutic circle: to understand a part, you must understand the whole, and to understand the whole, you must understand the parts…

That is: the entry point is here - learn about the world and about how humans think about and perceive it. Start anywhere, but start.

*edit: I forgot to add also history. It also helps to shed light on the different meanings people have discovered over time.

I’d consider studying philosophy.

When I had questions, I ended up changing from chemistry to philosophy in undergrad (before dropping out after realizing no one had the answers). Despite the aforementioned realization, the grounding in Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and a few others gave me fertile grounds to later plant seeds of wisdom from thinkers and artists from every walk of life.

I wish I could help you with the struggle, but unfortunately, like most learned things, it’s something that only you can do. If you ever want to, I’d be happy to chat seriously about what it means to be human, beyond making money, any time.

From one sick bed to another: best of luck, and happy birthday.

For myself: how I think when I’m writing is somewhat different than when I’m speaking. I still prefer writing _and_ typing despite the ability to record myself.

I also think we’re a bit of a ways off before speech-to-text will work for programming…

Maybe what I’m looking for isn’t stenography, but chorded typing with the ability to break out of it when I need to.

Hard agree here.

Seneca’s letters are intended for a public audience; Aurelius’s meditations are the self-reflective journal writings of a stoic (and emperor).

Additionally Epictetus has the enchiridion that is the closest thing to a textbook on Stoicism we have

I studied philosophy about ~7~ 9 years ago (edit: pandemic time).

Similar to a lot of other commentators here I use it every day, and for everything.

An general apology of philosophy would be something like:

Philosophy is the pursuit of the truth. That pursuit, and the development of mental tools and models to reach it, ends up spilling out into, and enriching, every other aspect of human thought and experience. Whether you end up questioning if there is any such truth (epistemology), attempting to determine a moral truth (ethics), or working out models of correct/truthful reasoning (logic), you end up building up a robust toolset and understanding of being human. Even the schools of thought that hold there isn’t an absolute truth have a little problem in that _that_ is a truth they are stating. The point being, if you are to be human, then you must act on things being more or less true (did that person do that thing? On a more fundamental level, does that chair exist? On an abstract level, does the money in your bank account exist?). If you accept that being able to evaluate the truth of things is fundamental to operating as a human, then philosophy is a necessary undertaking that everyone practices to some extent. It is, after all, just the love of wisdom.

A few specific examples of how it has been _useful_ to me and my career are:

1) Using my studies of logic to ground my understanding of programming languages - everything boils down to to binary, see “The Mathematical Analysis of Logic” or “The Laws of Thought”

2) Applying abstract mental models directly to code (see Plato’s theory of the forms and object oriented programming)

3) Understanding ethical issues with anything I do and being able to articulate them to others so that we can move forward on a decision not based on just everyone’s feelings.

4) Seeing things from the other side and arguing people to my own by showing them inconsistencies in their arguments - or by changing my own mind by discovering my own inconsistencies

And so on and so on.

As for the final complaint about who said what being an issue - naming is useful. It’s important to identify the source of an idea if you’re going to discuss it with others and share common frameworks (see my references to Plato and Boole above). Beyond that - I don’t know much, or care, about their personal lives.

* Note: idk about the whole student debt to study philosophy thing though. There are huge advantages to taking it while in university (discussion with peers, context from professors, immersion in thought), but I can’t recommend the experience of student debt for a degree with such a low signal (for employment) and such a low barrier to entry (I.e. you can do this outside of the university as well). Ultimately I did well, but only because the Seattle barista scene was too competitive and I had to find a fallback career.

Amazon web services runs a fair share of the internet. Around 33% as of Sept 2020 according to Forbes [^1].

[^1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danrunkevicius/2020/09/03/how-a...

https://smeqa.usds.gov/

We do work on hiring as well

Note that host is hardcoded to localhost. This means it should never connect to any machine other than the developer machine.

Just to help with the postmortem:

1) “localhost” is just a loopback to whatever machine you’re on

2) the user and pw are pulled from config

So someone was running this from the production server or had the production DB mapped to localhost and ran it with a production config for some reason (working with prod data maybe). The hard coding to localhost will only ensure that it works for the machine it’s called on - in this case the prod server.

Things you might do to avoid this in the future include a wide spread of things, the main recommendations I’d have are:

1) only put production artifacts on prod

2) limit developer access to prod data

Best of luck

Current USDSer -

We hire from anywhere. If you have the skill set, battle-scars, and a willingness to dive into hard problems, we want you.

Another format that I find instructive:

http://tractatus-online.appspot.com/Tractatus/jonathan/index...

If anyone else is interested in research on note taking, this is a survey of the research with citations: https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/note-taking

Unfortunately it doesn’t look like there’s been as much research on specific methodologies (e.g. Cornell method), but it may also be the case that the methodology doesn’t matter at all, only that the strategies are employed.

I’m surprised it doesn’t mention the encoding and external storage paradigm, but https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/node/31875 has some additional context for anyone that wants some vocabulary and a very short “methods” and “strategies” document.

the accomplishment of an aim or purpose

Not trying to be cheeky, but that you understand immediately that I’m not talking about happiness here tells you that success =/= happiness. We can argue over what we should consider successful, but in the context of what Sam Altman is saying it’s unproductive: we all know Sam is talking about professional success, and most of us also know there is more to life than professional success, but we (collectively) have been so burned out (either by not achieving it, or by missing out in our lives achieving it) chasing after professional success that have a knee jerk reaction to anyone talking about it.

I also think it’s presumptuous of us to think Sam and whoever else did pursue success ambitiously are not happy - everyone’s definition of happiness is their own.

“How to be successful” always struck me as the wrong phrasing. It suggests a guarantee, the way “how to make a pie,” suggests if you follow these steps perfectly, then you will have the pie they were trying to tell you how to make.

Maybe a better title for everyone that is responding negatively to this might be: “How to slightly increase your chances of success”