HN user

gravedave

38 karma
Posts1
Comments51
View on HN

Look for mentorship.

Remember that no matter how you code, there are always both better and worse ways of doing it.

Don't get too polarized about the language you start out with. All programming languages have pros and cons.

When coding, Don't Repeat Yourself, use source control, and learn to be independent and resourceful by looking up stuff on your own instead of looking for someone to ask about it.

It's minor, but it would be nice to be able to drop the subject more often when it's unneeded, like being able to say "Raining" instead of "It's raining". Some latin languages have this, and would provide English with a bit of terseness. For example, in this comment, I used "it" three times before the first period, excluding the quote.

Also, I find verbs to be overused in English, whether for intent, desire, location, hypothetical situations or other stuff. Some extra adverbial suffixes would be a nice alternative.

I don't see why a time crunch is an appropriate reason to ask for help. As a junior, there's little responsibility you have to assume w.r.t. the success of the project. If it fails for some reason that may be related to you, you were probably poorly managed. A competent boss would notice that you struggle and give your task to someone else in order to meet deadlines.

Seems to be here to stay, but I can't quite figure out why. The only thing I liked about it when I tried it out was the gotool, but it was hardly a reason for me to switch, given that I find the language itself kinda poor. Sure, it has cute syntax, but doesn't seem to provide much else that I couldn't do in another language, especially with contenders like Rust and Nim, or just plain old C, which is well-supported almost everywhere.

Are you being serious? Valid criticism isn't the same as hating on the playa', to use your apparent vernacular. Many would consider criticism to be a considerate act and an opportunity to learn from one's mistakes. Just because you're not one of those people it doesn't mean everyone else is being mean, not to mention that many of the comments here are about YC itself rather than the article's author.

Also, YC isn't just about getting "sweet sweet" money, it's also about commitment, many times to the point of collapse due to overwork. This may be a worthwhile tradeoff for you, but it doesn't mean that whoever is critical towards the way YC works is actually broke and bitter. I'm actually quite confident that HN has a sizable population of mature, fulfilled and well-off readers who have better things to do than to pick on the unsuccessful.

Not to mention that many young people are in way over their heads when getting into this, and lack the experience necessary to come out on top. Some pull through, but in this case it was clear more or less from the start that it wasn't the case.

No one's envious nor blaming them for being too young or with half-baked ideas, it's understood that young people are naturally less adept at things. My impression is that they're rather criticizing YC for using inexperienced youngsters as fodder for investors, for just dumping responsibility on them, then leaving them to do the sweating and feel like hell for getting in without a clear plan.

Before being judgemental and assuming the worst about people, maybe you should stop and evaluate your own negativistic projections.

I agree with it being arguably unethical, but mostly because it's a business model that tries to appease two sides (the techies with ideas, and the investors), which, in my opinion, easily leads to one side being product for the other side.

Some such businesses may work, like job recruitment, but I think it's mostly because the weaker side (the unemployed) doesn't have much to lose.

I agree with this, but I don't think it even has to be a startup. Big enterprises may also provide good learning environments, possibly even with experienced developers/marketers/whatevers as mentors, as opposed to a startup's possibly few young, inexperienced recent grads, hellbent on revolutionizing The Way You Think About Shoe Storage with their product called Shoely™ or whatever. Big companies also pay consistently.

I don't know though, the guy seems quite dishonest to me, more interested in means rather than ends, yet still claiming that he "never wanted to start a company simply for the sake of starting a company". To me, he never seemed to question whether he even had anything to give in the first place and address this issue first, if needed, but simply expected to run a successful startup fresh out of college.

Not sure I'd call his closing statements to be humblebragging though, it seems to be just a passing thing for him.

There are ways around it: using the code for the key directly north-west of the problematic character, and if that's a bad character go further, maybe wrap around, or try to follow through the problem character (a/& -> &/| -> |/f, thus f would be the code for a) etc.

As for remembering which sites have what restrictions, I can keep that stuff in my head (looking at you Microsoft), but I guess you may have more accounts than me. Then again, when a password fails, then all you'd have to do is retry with a safer version (and maybe only have two password kinds, for convenience - full-blown char support, and minimalistic lowercase-letters only, so you'd only have to retry a single time after the first failed login).

Personally, my biggest problem with this card is that it doesn't provide enough value.

The rest of us could also make up our own password generating techniques as well, and have c@td0g11!el8oo8, c@td0g11!no5@m@ etc. el8oo8 is google backwards - but coming up with a word scrambling technique isn't hard, as many conspiracy theorists ought to know better.

This wouldn't provide cipher encoding, but someone already mentioned https://www.passwordcard.org/, and as you said, this is for the rest of us.

I just dump it somewhere (OneTab extension for web pages, random folders for stuff, note-taking for anything else).

Most of it I'll never need again (and probably look online for it first anyway, if ever), so it's really just to satisfy a compulsive need to have the impression I'm not "losing" anything. Rarely did I ever dearly miss anyhing on accidental deletion of my "stores".

Then what will?

So you assume that TV (80% crap), movies (pure entertainment, excluding documentaries, which are also mostly crap anyway), books (60% crap) and articles (90% assholes with opinions) are the only possible sources of information? Do you really think there's nothing conspicuously missing from there? Here's a hint: it's the origin of all the above and can provide more than all of them combined.

I used to have this problem myself, and the main cause, I think, was a lack of direction. Now I have one, and I discard any piece of info that doesn't concern me, instead of trying to read everything because "it may come in handy".

Assange's typical breakfast while in exile? Yeah, whatever. New distributed computing paradigm? Can wait till proven useful. Uber vs. Lyft? Don't care, using neither. Foreign news? Whatever. Someone got harassed by authorities/uber driver/whoever? Nothing I can do about it. Rant about poor customer support? Them's the breaks. "What I learned" articles? Good for them, don't care. Article about some random niche (e.g. most prolific zipper brand)? Will read first paragraph, tops. Inspirational blog post about "the one thing holding you back"? Bleh, probably wrong in my case, we each have our own obstacles.

I still have hobbies and interests, and feed them, but to anything that's not related I don't even give a second look. I ignore everything related to tech I neither currently use nor particularly like, as well as any "lifehack" article (ooh, 0.5s off my showering time!), or an overly opinionated piece (any of these words in the title: incredible, insane, unbelievable, horrible etc. See cracked.com).

Also, nothing by any writers condescending enough to talk about their reader as if they know him/her in their articles ("the reason you...", "you must..", "you know...", "of course, you may..." - no, that may not be the reason I, that may not be what I must, I may or may not know, and of course, maybe I may not).

So the main takeaway, I guess, is to question whether each and every one of those instapaper/pinboard articles really matter to you. I used to be a big hoarder myself, and wondering when I'll get through it all, but I realized I'm doing just fine not doing so. Sure, let them gather up! Have a 100-item, 1000-item, 1000000-item backlog, what of it? You'll have something to do when bored, but until then, leave them be, and don't dare look at how many are there (it doesn't matter, you'll never clear it anyway).

I still hoard BTW, but just because doing so gives me the sense that "I won't be missing anything, I'll get back to it". I won't, of course, but my lizard brain doesn't know that, so shhh!

As for books, just forget about them. Leave that list aside and only look at it when you feel like reading a book and wondering what to pick up next, and never look at how many are left. May be hard at first, but you may eventually learn to just "let go".

Misc techniques I found useful:

Speed reading - read only the first few words of each paragraph, good articles are well-divided in paragraphs, and you can skip the crap. Generally, I skip case studies, unless the subject particularly interests me - the conclusion may be proven flawed in a few years anyway, once a disruptive element will enter the equation - "How could real estate possibly be a bad investment? Look at these case studies showing how reliable an investment it is!".

Shortlist - make a list of interests (not more than 10, including job-related stuff, and be specific. Say "Northbridge", not "IT and stuff..."), discard everything not related.

Next! - if an article keeps repeating the same thing for several paragraphs ("since they're successful", "because they're successful", "have successfully..."), it's a red flag that it probably doesn't have much content, is just filling up a word quota, and may have even given away the conclusion in the title (as a hook for the reader). Skip to the last paragraph, then move on.

tl;dr

Discard the irrelevant, filter your knowledge input, get used to there always being more out there to read, and to being unable to absorb it all. Disregard how much there's left to read ("oh no, 1000 more news items to go!"), and skip over the boring and the trite. Anything that doesn't help you, your family/friends or your career, and anything you cannot do anything about (natural disasters, conflicts in foreign countries - odds are you won't remember these yourself in a couple of years, remember how many other things you'll get to read about until then), you can do without.

Why do you have to "own" your submissions for them to be left as-is in the first place? Is the only way to go around here with a stick? Just because they reserve the right to change them doesn't mean it should be done at their own leisure, like "fuck OP, here's what the post should REALLY contain".

Disagree. I find it difficult and unrewarding. Like, why should I give a shit about another human? Would it make me that much smarter or better in any tangible way? Don't think so. Frankly, I'm having a hard time thinking of a single person in my life that I would rather not go on without.

Every site has a duty to respect its users, especially when their content is the driving force of the site, this shouldn't be an optional thing at the whims of some "quality optimisation expert". Moderation should be about filtering the toxic users, not about getting in the way of the legitimate ones.