lostctown

This is a great goal to strive for. But to play devil's advocate, not all ideas and scopes are clear until several iterations in. Furthermore, some software projects carry around specific dependencies necessarily. If these dependencies are prone to change then there goes your stability. Given enough dependency incongruity, all projects die after a long enough period of non-maintenance.

You are totally correct by the way. I do agree that most software creators hand wave away the potential for their dependencies change faster than they can maintain their own product.

Right. I'm just saying it should be clearer. Ex: I want to have a list of accounts, netflix style, that I'm presented with on an empty chrome window. If in fact multiple identities don't merge data implicitly in anyway than this is just a UI issue.

But I have a hard time believing google truly partitions everything in a multi account setup.

I wish interfaces were more straight up about their intentions and made it easier to implement account level partitions. For work I love Google's magic tracking effects, but at 1 am, hell no.

Done this. Eventually one account always becomes my main account and I'm back to square one. I don't care enough about reddit to keep up with 2 separate accounts.

I'm logged out by default and only log in to comment, which is rare. I don't like leaving my username up for display if a friend/family member has to borrow my laptop for something. I've engaged in a couple of communities that are a little more counter-cultural than my peers.

I append "reddit" to any query not meant for a productive task. Except now the internet is mostly reddit for me, which kinda bums me out. Especially given the new js-heavy design. In 2019, if I want reliable search about something I know nothing about I must first search on google, then try again with "reddit" appended, then change www.reddit.com to old.reddit.com, then parse through what are often questionable answers from anon users, possibly still influenced by marketers, and then maybe, I get the answer or next lead that I was looking for.

Ha, I'm sure it's different for different folks but I attribute my lack of burning out (knock on wood) to caring about what I do beyond a paycheck. That and leaving town for a weekend every month or so to tune everything out and evaluate my progress really helps. I get down when I'm unsure that my time is being well spent. Re-evaluating my trajectory often does wonders to keep those emotions in check.

Which couldn't be more ok. Hacker news comes down hard on people who casually throw out their unrealistic work hours, but for some of us it's the only way we'd stay competitive. I'm 26 with 5 years development experience and frankly, not the smartest man in the world. Things don't come easy to me. I take longer than my peers to learn concepts in software and business. But where I win is in my ability to work harder than my peers and compound the knowledge I do have. Sometimes even, I am perceived as "smart" by those who haven't worked 1 on 1 with me. Watching someone learn something in a week that took you almost a month; or building a reasonably successful company without doing the 80 hour week thing kills me a little inside. But that's life. You're given some amount intellect and if you want success you will have to pay your own costs to reach success, which may or may not be as much as what your peers have to pay.

The only golden rule I follow, never expect another human to work as hard as me for something that mostly benefits me. I do not believe in shaming employees that only put in their 40 and get out. That's great, they care about different things in life. Some of them have hobbies, families, responsibilities, etc, and I respect that. But for the rest of us who have chosen personal business success as our long term goal and aren't particularly intelligent, we should not feel guilty for our 80 hour weeks. Sometimes it is just plain necessary. Stupid if it doesn't work out. But necessary if it is to work out.

Going through this now and boy is this true. Nothing like rewriting a 1k+ lib the day before a feature is supposed to be ready and then praying you didn't blow up some other lesser documented part of the code.

Like all lessons, it depends on the student. Personally, the author's way of thinking has been immensely helpful. I grew up an optimist, not able to understand why others couldn't see things the way that I did. After a few failed product/content launches and a few years of grinding later my self-bullshit meter is way more sensitive. This has led to me producing better products, features, and generally more success in my work life. Like the author, I assume no one wants to use my stuff at the outset, and this forces me to fight to overcome this.

But again, it's probably more a function of who this advice is given to. I've seen plenty of people get discouraged after making this realization. The key is to be aware that no one cares and then do it anyways.

Not a fan of facebook, as a consumer app. But what you're saying just isn't true. This list is crazy impressive https://opensource.facebook.com/

But then how do I sell my mvp startup newsletter to all the people not capable of actually building a quality product? /s

In all seriousness, it is comical how often people apply revisionist explanations for the rise of certain companies. Its simple really. Great product + big market. You must have both, no exceptions.

It is not possible for a human being to work 20 hours a day. No exceptions.

Here's the EIP (Ethereum improvement proposal) causing problems. https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1283.m...

Yeah, as someone who is on the extreme end of introverted (not shy, just happy to be alone) this was the case for me. I got a membership to the co-working space, did many of the social events, attended some meetups even, but the connections just wouldn't stick.

On the flip side, when I have worked at an office I have always come out after a year or so with a couple close friends in the organization. Because of the physical proximity many of the shared experiences are more intense. Putting out production fires, after work beers, dropping in on a co-worker to talk about the product, etc, lead to longer lasting relationships.

Developers have a tendency to assume that technology can solve more of our issues than possible. I have plans to start my own company with a bit more savings and network under my belt, and I will be doing zero remote, assuming I can afford to.

Here's the real problem. The JS tools got really powerful and the majority of users now experience faster dev cycles and richer features. Now users cannot go back. If we started serving smaller sites with less js people would complain about all the little features they liked that don't exist anymore.

A developer now has a choice: use the big framework where you can satisfy those now entitled users or give up some success and make a tiny site with limited use of js. I'm all for the free web but I know which choice I would make when running a for-profit company.

'People's health is their own concern'

I disagree wholeheartedly. So many diseases today are preventable when you consider that most people take no action to improve their health through any kind of diet or exercise. Its a probabilities game. If you eat fast food frequently, drink/smoke too much, and don't exercise you cannot expect to have the same odds of a long life as someone who is doing those things.

Now if we accept the above argument, even if only to a small degree, than we can conclude that individual decisions have should result in a widespread increase in demand for chronic healthcare needs, such as heart disease. This in turn causes insurance rates to go up for those individuals taking care of their health. Furthermore it funnels more and more human capital away from the rest of the economy by raising demand for doctors, nurses, and all other kinds of medical staffing/machinery.

Its inconvenient to believe that your health has a larger effect on the world you live in, but it does.

Well hopefully this is not a sentiment that continues to grow in the technical community. All nice things have a cost. For all the efficiency gained from the web-view, consider the cost of building the web-view, maintaining it, hosting, and the other myriad of frontend activities. Contrast that process with downloading a few popular libraries, coding up some methods, exposing them via a cli lib, and then publishing to one of the many package managers. I can do the later in an afternoon, but I may never release if I think all my users should have a web-view.

I suspect if all technical users simply stopped considering text based ui acceptable, we'd actually have less quality software overall. There are too many programmers like myself, who can make decent programmatic interfaces, but simply can't put together a usable web-interface to save their life.

The sad truth is that in order to bear the cost of a long time horizon in the pursuit of elegance you need one of two things: extreme trust or total control. Even then the pursuit may lead you astray and ultimately result in failure. Until there are ways to transfer experiences from one mind to another in an efficient manner, few manager/higher ups will sympathize with a desire to take on more long range, highly technical code improvements (assuming we're not talking about a FAANG).

Am I reading reddit? There was no reference in OP's post to the current prices.

I just tried setting it up in the latest create-react-app. The example needed some modification but did work eventually. I wouldn't recommend it.

This is fantastic advice.

As a technologist I couldn't be more impressed by Netflix's rise over the last decade, but the old film artist in me kind of despises the direction they are taking motion pictures.

I recently stopped using it and it was like walking out of an incredibly comfortable, yet subtly depressing cave. I found it hard to get out of the cycle of watching only films that I was likely to watch.

What humans will eventually discover after we've squeezed every last drop of value out of the monolith ML systems of today is that many facets of our culture do not benefit from traditional recommendations systems. Maybe a more democratized and transparent system for model consumption could help. If indie researchers and hackers can integrate their ML models into existing systems and offer truly diverse ML models then maybe recommendations systems have chance. But in their current state they are laughable representations of the average taste of its users, which is generally not great.

Additionally, not all bets on a person's or persons' life will be made with malevolent intentions. A global non-profit can use prediction markets as an exotic form of donating. The donator takes the "bad" side of the market, and if the non-profit is successful at saving lives, or doing some other form of reportable good, they receive a payout from their bet. Now, if the non-profit pays its employees absurd salaries, operates inefficiently, etc then they stand to lose some amount of money in the prediction market.

If you approach it this way there is no reason all bets on the "bad" side have to have "bad" intentions.

This can't be stressed enough. Large swaths of the US population would immediately become immobile. I think OP has never lived and worked in a rural area, say 30 miles outside of the nearest town, where survival depends on your ability to transport yourself.

These two comments sum up the entire progression of my development career to date.

While it may be a ledger that utilizes cryptographic primitives, it is no longer decentralized if run by the government. While I disagree with the idea that base protocols like bitcoin or ethereum make for sound money, I think it's likely that some decentralized stable asset takes the place of existing fiat.

Mirrored my thoughts exactly. Maybe some take to the role more naturally but I've found it quite a struggle. These rosy eyed pieces certainly don't help.

That seems a little excessive? I hope he sees judicial consequences for his behavior.

Interesting approach.

Maybe I'm lazy but avoiding increasing cost to commenting is one of the few absolutes I abide by. Often I find myself tired after a long stretch of code, trying to convince myself that's it's understandable on it's own.

This is one of those systematic rules I have to enforce to shutdown my lazy lizard brain.

edit: But I can see how highly structured comments could actually come in handy as well for viewing configs in a gui