AlchemistCamp

Of my closest friends when I was in high school, the one with the best social skills had been home schooling since I met him when he was 10. However, he did participate in extracurricular activities at the local public school, like a computer club in middle school and then theater in high school. The only area he was really lagging at age 18 was in math, but that reversed a few years later and now he has a STEM PhD and has been teaching at a large state school for the past decade and a half.

I'd say a lot depends on both the quality of the schooling and maybe even more depends on the person's natural inclinations. He wouldn't have had time for all the reading he did as a teenager if he weren't home schooled, but he'd probably still have been in theater and still have been very open and curious life-long learner as an adult.

Charging devs a percentage App Store sales is very different from shoplifting and equating the two is extremely misleading.

Devs voluntarily choose to publish apps on the App Store and doing so gets them both another discovery channel and a low-friction sales channel. Stores being robbed by shoplifters don't voluntarily enter that arrangement and they get no benefit from it.

Firefox has been my main browser for almost 10 years and I haven't encountered any challenges other than availability of plugins, but even that has been a very rare issue.

SEEKING WORK | Remote | Fullstack Engineer / Fractional CTO

Location: Taipei, Taiwan (US citizen, open work permission)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No, but I can shift my work hours up to four hours in either direction.

Technologies and tools: Elixir, JS, Ruby, Python, Golang, Rust, Tailwind CSS, PostgreSQL, Docker, AWS, Digital Ocean, AI (learning)

Resume/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J5FlE_Yj_x3gZmA5IRZcAywz...

Email: (in resume)

Hi there! I'm Mark and I've worked alternately as an engineer and entrepreneur for fifteen years, in Beijing, in the SF Bay Area and remotely. Most of my work has been with smaller startup teams, but I've worked at a large scaleup as well. Experience building tech for education, real estate, automated trading, e-commerce and gig platforms. I also have some experience rescuing outsourced projects

I generally work in spurts 1-4 year spurts (either a single role or a series of contracts) and then take an extended break to learn new skills. Now looking for a contractor role at a 5-20 person startup. I prioritize learning and impact.

Languages: English (native), Mandarin (years of use professionally), Japanese (previously a ~B2 level, now limited)

Yes. In America, there are over 60 million fluent Spanish speakers, which is more than the entire population of Spain. In many southern and southwestern parts of the country you can do just about anything you need to in Spanish and being bilingual is a big plus for any kind of public-facing work.

That must be nice.

They’re probably blocking based on geolocation or something similar. I’m on an iPhone, using Safari and no VPN.

Sounds like Craig’s list.

I flagged this because upon following the link, all I get is:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access this resource.

Probably the highest profile and most consistent example would be Stripe. The most popular Stripe wrapper for Elixir’s docs point to a 2019 Stripe API version: https://github.com/beam-community/stripity-stripe

Worse still, the quality of Stripe’s own docs have really degraded this decade for anyone not using a language they have an SDK for. Most of their newer docs assume m have a drop-down toggle for on backend language with a few popular languages and no option for “other”. Example: https://docs.stripe.com/billing/quickstart

None of this is a fault of anyone working on Elixir or Phoenix but it definitely has an effect of discouraging some of the fledgling entrepreneur types who Elixir would otherwise be a near perfect fit for, as Rails was in the late aughts.

I don't know what that person meant but, like many in the region, Koreans have family registries (戶籍) that record their family lineage. At least among people I've known who have spoken about theirs, Korean family registry records tend to go back much further than the median east Asian country.

The names of the systems related to this registry are slightly different in Chinese, Japanese and Korean but you can see links to Wikipedia entries for each of them from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%88%B6%E7%B1%8D

Yes. This is a big part of what initially drew me to Elixir. It's more than feasible to run a server on a cheap VPS, get great, though not quite Golang or low-level language performance and have a much easier scaling story when you need multiple machines.

More importantly, you generally don't need an external queue service, in-memory KV store, task scheduler or many of the other things that JS/Ruby/Python stacks need. By consolidating just about everything but the DB in a single, well designed system, it's possible for a very small team to take on relatively large challenges on a smaller budget.

Not knowing what language she’s learning, it’s a bit tough to say. Many have an app with lots of reading material with audio and assistance tracking learned words, tap to dictionary lookup, etc. It’s a pretty good category and a lot of kids enjoy them.

So trading daily time and effort for six years for an option on learning a language in the future?

Almost anybody serious about learning Chinese is going to want to read some things written before the 1960s and for those things, people are reading the exact same books, essays, poems, speeches, etc. The simplified versions of all of those works are literally converted from the traditional versions. Ditto for all kinds of popular content that originated in HK, TW and overseas Chinese communities.

There is no long-term gain from storing "hair" and "emit" under the same entry in your database. Storing 髮 and 發 separately, along with 发 as the simplification of both is a small effort now that will constrain you a lot less in the future. I've literally seen this pitfall happen with about 40 different Chinese learning apps over the last 15 years. Only a few (like Du Chinese and Pleco) got it right early on.

If you're speaking in the context of language learning, there definitely are some great tools for "mining" audio cards from YT/Netflix and also for getting text from the subtitle tracks. Some are open source, free and easy once you get used to working with them (much like Anki itself). They're not frictionless for first-time users, though. Others are paid and a bit more newbie-friendly.

That's a great idea. I was an early Anki contributor and ended up wasting a lot of time with SRS. Basically every language blogger I knew in 2008 was obsessed with it.

If I were to go back and learn Japanese again, (which I may do since I haven't spoken it in 20 years), I'd use Anki for the following:

- drilling the sounds, single syllables, 2-3 syllables, and identifying pitch accents in sentences

- relearning hiragana and katakana

After that initial phase, I'd probably make the core of my practice listening to podcasts for foreign learners while reading the transcripts at home and then re-listening to those same podcasts later while outside for practice. It's way easier and more helpful to recall words in a context you already understand.

I'd also use Anki for learning kanji if I hadn't spent years reading traditional Chinese. Since I have that background and Japanese character simplifications were so modest, I think I'd just read some audio books while listening to the audio and see if I could figure out all the kanji from context. TV series are also great once you can access them because they tend to use similar vocabulary and revisit similar throughout a season arc.

Very well, but it's very slow compared to what you can do if you mix it up with some higher effort activities.

Sure. This kind of project seems to be pretty common. I'd strongly suggest using traditional characters as a base because it's very easy to map multiple characters into simplified forms but much harder to disambiguate simplified forms into the traditional versions.

Related comment on another app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43769831

”I realized I was hitting an issue where I theoretically "knew" a word (would get it always correct on the card), but wouldn't always recognize it in a novel context.”

Some of the problem is due to the specificity of the training effect. I.e., if you mostly practice something through flash cards then you’re going to be training your ability to work with that on flash cards.

With language, there’s an additional challenge—many if not most words have different meanings in different contexts.

I grew up in America and didn't find it incendiary at all. The extreme reaction was surprising to me, as well. The word was very common in 80s and 90s songs with no illicit or incendiary connotation whatsoever! In fact, I find headlines phrased like this article's annoying. It's just unclear and poor writing, IMO.

Partner doesn't mean that at all.

Warren Buffet and Charley Munger were partners. So were Jobs and Woz. Or Buffet and Gates while playing Bridge many times. There's absolutely nothing romantic or sexual about the word "partner" itself, though of course partnerships exist in those realms as well as in business, sports, music, dance and countless other pursuits.

Strange. I don't think "lover" sounds illicit in any way, though maybe it suggests youth and romanticism.

Most times I've read "partner" the meaning has been "business partner", e.g. a cofounder or a partner in a law firm or agency, etc.

I've noticed a trend, especially in Commonwealth or European countries to use "partner" to mean "sexual partner" or "romantic partner". However, it's also used in business, sports and many other contexts. Just saying "partner" on its own is less clear than "lover".

They felt fake 10 years ago. Some good still came from them but except the one I did at Facebook, they all felt dominated by BS. FB at least had a separate room for people actually coding who didn't want a constant stream of interruptions from advertisers, announcers, etc.

It reminds me of an older dev I met when I was just beginning who had worked even more years and said Fortran 95 was "fine". And he could use it to build pretty much anything. That doesn't mean that more powerful language features couldn't have increased his productivity (if he learned them).

Hours so? I’ve found that Phoenix LiveView has made integrating the server and client code much simpler. It’s dramatically reduced the need to write JavaScript in general, including for things like image uploads. Or are you speaking of one of its many clones?

I did, in 2023.

One of TikTok’s largest markets is Japan. Their shop revenues in particular, doubled in Japan last year. Those earnings are taxed locally and have nothing to do with Ireland.

Maybe Alibaba is a better example. Why should Alibaba increasing its global revenue through growth in the Chinese market mean that Ireland should fine it more? If it's because earnings in Ireland or even maybe the entire EU went up, then I can see the justification. But if Alibaba's revenue is going up because of Alibaba improving logistics within China, why should Ireland get anything for that?

Sure. A country can set "whatever level of fines they want within law". For example, Russia assessed a $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 against Google. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/31/tech/google-fines-russia/...

At the base level, I suppose my point was about morality, but my intent was about rationality. A country can write laws that it can take all the money a company earns across the entire globe, but it's not a very reasonable position, IMO.