jimsojim

I noticed the courses are tied to a language, any reason behind that design choice vs keeping it language agnostic and letting users choose their preferred language?

Another frustrating thing that has emerged from this is where managers “vibe code” half-baked ideas for a couple of hours and then hand it off as if they’ve meaningfully contributed to the implementation. Suddenly you’re expected to reverse engineer incoherent prompts, inconsistent code, and random abstractions that nobody fully understands.

In their mind they’ve already done the “architectural heavy lifting” and accelerated the team. More often than not it just adds cognitive overhead where you spend more time deciphering and cleaning up garbage than actually building the thing properly from scratch.

While this is a legitimate set of rules to follow for maintaining code sanity and a solid mental model of how a codebase may grow, it’s always challenging to stick to them in a workplace where expectations around delivery speed have changed drastically with the onset of AI. The sweet spot lies in striking a balance between staying connected to the codebase and not becoming a limiting factor for the team at the same time.

So I'm building this: https://summaryworld.life

It gives you clean text summaries of YouTube videos. There are obviously other tools that do this, but I wanted something that is aligned with actual principles of learning and retention, not just quick TLDRs.

Also added a feature called Related Videos. It extracts the key themes from a video and recommends the top 3 related videos, essentially creating a small “knowledge web” of sorts around the topic. Similar to youtube recommendations, but you don't watch you click and read.

You can do YouTube search directly inside the product. When you click a video, it generates a summary. So you’re still browsing YouTube, but click turns a video into something you can actually consume. Personally found it better way to consume youtube, quicker for me to get through the content I want to consume than have those 10+ Youtube tabs sitting in my browser forever.

There’s also a public library feature I added where you can make your summary public. It’s kind of fun to see what other people are learning.

Still early, but iterating on it, scratching my own itch.

Searching for what to solve becomes far more important than how to solve it. Which niche you serve, how underserved the problem is, how quickly you build a solution, and how fast you iterate based on user feedback become the real differentiators. As a problem gains popularity, competitors will enter at an increasing pace, and the product’s price will be competed down to the bare minimum. At that point, the only real advantage for a builder is to be a serial builder for deep niches, spotting them faster than others and delivering quality product to users before anyone else.

Excellence in anything is a byproduct of having fun. Fun is a byproduct of understanding. Understanding is a byproduct of going slow. Going slow is a byproduct of curiosity. Curiosity is a byproduct of saying "I don’t know," of shunning beliefs and attending to what is in front, with zero baggage or impositions of your own—shunning the ego in the moment, moment by moment. Excellence comes when each piece is as equal as any other, when preference is shunned, when space is created to allow what is in the moment, without resistance, without insistence.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

This book has stayed with me for years. It's a quiet, deeply reflective journey about self-discovery, the search for meaning. What resonated most was this idea that true understanding can't be taught—it must be lived and experienced.

It’s a short read, but one that invites you to slow down. Each time I return to it, I take away something new depending on where I am in life.

Could you have completed the entire curriculum on your own using ChatGPT without needing Math Academy?

Location: Bangalore, India

Remote: Open to remote or onsite work

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: JavaScript, Node.js, Express.js, Python, MongoDB, Redis, PostgreSQL, MySQL.

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BFc3aJt5dZ32j7xSc4Kb8BOHCgh...

Email: reach.anurajs[at]gmail.com

I'm a Product Manager turned Coder, I had a strong stint as a PM for 7+ years, at my last company (YC S21) I scaled the DAU from 10k to 250k+ & MAU to 1 million+.

Now I'm looking to get to the fundamentals of building. That's why I have been learning backend development for the past 1 year, you can view my resume for more details on my coding projects and my achievements from 7+ years of PM career.

Can bring a good balance of user centric mindset to feature development. Since I'm sort of rebooting my career here, I'm looking at SD-1 level roles at the moment. Would love to chat about this.

"Who Am I?" by Ramana Maharshi

Start by questioning every aspect of your life, your actions, your intentions, your thoughts - why are they the way they are? Books and mental models are mere tools that won't get you anywhere, they just add to the conditioning and the "burden" of knowledge. To find your own philosophy of life you have to start by unconditioning your mind so you can become sensitive to the reality as it is and not what the world around you has taught you.

Just finished it last week, it made me revisit the idea of "What it means to have meaning in life?" and how personal that is, and have a wholesome view of my personality without any prejudice.

Discourse on the Method by René Descartes

Recently picked up an interest in electronics, almost finishing up with Ben Eater videos, this looks amazing!

If you can, try getting a Sales/Partnership role for an early stage B2B startup. Pitching to CXOs of different bossinesses would push you to be coherent, concise, and confident about what's coming out of your mouth.

Just be ultra honest about the point you want to make with supporting evidence/arguments without being disrespectful. The way you speak to your manager doesn't necessarily have to the same you speak to your CEO, because their motivations may differ (usually do). Speaking to CEO, you should try to be aligned with the company goals, whatever you're speaking about try to connect with company's goals. At the end of the day, that is all CEO cares about. However, manager might have ulterior motives, politics etc. So here you formulate your points without causing too much trouble or insecurity to their position.

I prefer anything ambient by Trent Reznor; especially his tracklist for The Social Network.

https://trello.com/b/rbpEfMld/data-science for data science

1) Find the equivalent of Schaum's in any domain, a book of problems with worked answers.

2) Grind through a bunch of representative problems without studying. Just give it your best shot, you might be able to figure it out.

3) Check your answers and use this as a form of placement test to identify deficiencies.

4) Specifically, if you're getting the complex questions right, you understand the domain. If not, go back to the source material and read it. You'll have a new focus in reading it as you know exactly what you got wrong and you know what points to fix.

Doing it this way is (IMO) the most efficient way of spending your learning time. First do problems with worked answers to find out what you don't know, then fill the gap with focused effort.

Great read, thanks for the links

here's a post from mathstackexchange that I always get back to: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/843697/learning-high...

Freakonomics - http://freakonomics.com

RadioLab - http://www.radiolab.org

For my Iphone, I use an app called Overcast - pretty decent.

Context switching has more overhead cost than we usually estimate. I've found that focusing on a single activity (assuming that activity requires considerable mental effort - maths/CS etc) in a day, and then gradually increasing that count to 2-3 activities over weeks/months while carefully measuring the context switch cost, has been consistently effective for me. Instead of fighting distractions and draining your mental energy, use simple tricks tips to block them out, such as - switching your phone off putting it in a separate room, or blocking websites etc - the idea is to create enough friction/blockage to make it difficult to indulge or even get started with them.

During the breaks from your work, every once in a while try to push yourself to seek boredom - this does 2 things - first, you're building your will power against those quick dopamine hits of info/media we keep craving for, and secondly depriving your brain of any kind of interesting stimulus or any mentally stimulating task makes your brain better at seeking those through your work, because your brain is not getting it from elsewhere. On other occasions, you can put that time for your hobbies, too. Generally, you should try seeking for activities that require longer attention span and are fun.

Could you elaborate a little more on why you feel that way?

I've found that creating systems & not setting up a definite goal (stretch goal) makes the whole act of doing a task or practicing a skill feel little more on auto-pilot - which kills the drive for pushing it little harder. Creating systems towards a set goal has been more sustainable and effective for me

In that context, it would be more about the number of tasks in your time table instead of how well managed the time is for each one of them (or overall). A schedule with a lot of tasks (context switching), will not serve ADHD person well.

Deep work by Cal Newport, great book on how to develop intense focus to be creative/get more done. Highly recommended.

Race Against The Machine - a concise and informative discussion of the impact of technology on employment, income distribution and macro economics. Highly recommended as well.

Recently came across this interesting guide on this: https://www.igorinternational.com/process/igor-naming-guide....

I keep getting back to this thought that a lot of what Peter does is to make a point about contrarianism - that is to stay a consistent contrarian (publicly atleast).

Statistics 110 Harvard University video lectures by Joe Blitzstein is a good place to get you started.