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8589934591

379 karma · joined October 31, 2019

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8589934591··on Reasons to Quit Social Media
I dunno if this counts. I use reddit/r/funny together whenever we feel a bit bored or just want to kill time. Other things include finding like minded people on facebook groups which you can use to meet other people too.
8589934591··on Reasons to Quit Social Media
I have an account on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, and many more, but I don't use them actively or passively. Maybe the occasional browsing.

On facebook I made it a point to unfollow all friends so that my newsfeed is blank at any point of time. When I did this initially a few years back I felt.. weird. But I got used to it and now I visit once in a while for the facebook groups. After that I don't end up spending time on FB. For quora after I blocked a majority of tags/topics, the feed was cleaner, but it got boring to be a passive consumer. Similarly for Twitter, I blocked a lot of topics/tags/people and followed a certain few which has made it easier to scroll twitter once in a while.

I have an app (StayFree) on android which calculates the time spent on each app. When I see it now for the last 7 months, I see I have used it for 185 hours, of which 40 hours are on reddit. With whatsapp at 11 hours, the rest of the apps are below 8 hours of usage. I also have trackercontrol which blocks the trackers in my phone. In my browser I have ActivityWatch which shows HN is my most visited apart from the occasional reddit.

For me, the benefits of being a part of these social media comes after investing the time to filter and refine my experience. That does take time. Overall I feel my experience with social media has been better, I'm able to interact with people around the world and learn and ask questions. I dunno if I've turned these evil entities (social media) into my friends.

Maybe off topic, does having an account on these social media sites / apps on phone be harmful in any way when you don't consume it that much? If yes then what sort of harm does it have? Is it mitigated by having trackercontrol? What evil happens if tracking my account gives these companies nothing but close to 0 activity? Are there others like me here?

8589934591··on OCW MIT: 6.006 Intro to Algorithms 2020
I'm not interested continuing the discussion any further. Somehow you are making me sound like I'm the villain here unable to see the perspective from your side, when the least you could do is have a saner discussion than coming up with contorted examples.

I'm sorry, I don't get the feeling that you are having the discussion in good faith when the least you could do is read through my reply and answer my questions.

Re: being verbose, english is not my first language, if I'm not articulating things in a way that is comfortable for you, I apologize, I don't know how else to communicate it to you.

8589934591··on OCW MIT: 6.006 Intro to Algorithms 2020
> Can you explain why it matters whether the service is free or not?

I think it matters since the service is being provided out of the person's goodwill and it will cost x amount of money for them in some way which would have already been factored into their finances which does not affect their budget. I also think its unfair and unethical to ask for the free stuff to be made accessible to <any sect> of people when the cost is not borne by the people asking for it (or the govt), when the cost is being asked to be borne by the person who's giving it out for free. I also feel free matters because you are entitled to a service you pay for, not for something you get as a handout. You can merely request to accommodate you, but if you order the person, the most likely outcome is everybody loses except the person providing the resource/service.

I find your questions absurd, but not for the reasons you cite. I find your analogy does not give an equal comparison to what we're discussing. If you would be open to rephrase your analogy to - two companies giving you access to the bathrooms, but no ramps have been provided for disabled people - then that makes better sense to me. There is a difference between allowing only white people (where you are actively gatekeeping the consumption of the bathrooms) vs having an open door policy to allow anyone, as long as you can go into the bathroom somehow. (The only white part seems a stretch since you can't change your color, but you can ask someone to carry you to the bathroom) This is how I see it, the disabled people aren't prevented from consuming the materials provided by the universities, they can still hire interpreters at their own expense to help them. The univs didn't say "hey i'm gonna provide only video lectures". They said "hey, here's a collection of video/audio/text lectures that you can have access to, go nuts". They didn't say "hey if you come to our univ as a deaf/blind/etc student, we won't help you".

I can think of another analogy. Lectures with just (text) notes and resources, would be discriminating against blind people but not deaf people, because the univs are supposed to provide text to speech software which can convert the text correctly to speech, similar to how the deaf people expect that the univs should be giving CC for the videos. But they are not actively discriminating against the blind, it's just the resources that they feel they can share out of goodwill. Now if the blind campaign against this as discrimination, the likely outcome is the univs paywall the lecture notes as well. Wouldn't this affect the deaf community? What would be the response in this case? IMO (might be wrong), the deaf community would feel bad for the actions of the blind community, where they could have used the opportunity to read the notes, but now have lost access to it. Conversely if the video lectures get paywalled, the blind community would feel bad for the actions of the deaf community since they could have listened to the lectures by themselves. Note that these are resources don't belong to the public/either community, they are merely accessible by the public/either community. Thus I feel we can't/shouldn't ask for accessibility help from the entities providing it for free. And if at all we do require help, I feel we should ask the govt to enable us to access the resources, rather than ask the govt to force the institutions to accommodate us (the institutions do accommodate when you are part of the institution itself). If anything, it is the responsibility of the govt to enable the communities to access the resources. Mandating it on the institutions to bear the extra cost for no return whatsoever does not seem to have the right outcome in any way for anyone.

I still feel the ADA is barking up the wrong tree for the wrong/mismatched outcomes or expectations. The intentions are right, the actions and the outcome of the actions seem wrong to me.

Another question I have is did the univs settle with ADA with money for the lawsuits? If yes, then ADA use that money to do something good out of it, say hire interpreters to transcribe the lectures? If yes, then great (also please do cite it). If no, then what did the lawsuit accomplish other than paywalling the content from the general public and ADA making good amount of money? The least I would expect is ADA using that money for the cause they are campaigning for. If you say/feel that ADA is not obligated to provide the service to help the deaf community, but only campaign for it, then the same logic applies to univs who do not have obligation to cater to the disabled community for resources they provide for free.

8589934591··on OCW MIT: 6.006 Intro to Algorithms 2020
> "people with disabilities should receive reasonable accommodations to access the content that is provided".

I would agree with this if this is something that they paid for or is for govt services. Govt libraries/buildings/hospitals, definitely not for private services. And they do accommodate in majority of universities. I disagree that whatever is available for free should also have accommodations made for people with disabilities for which it costs extra for the person providing the free service.

> For you, it's a simple case of "it's the ADA's fault". Is it so difficult to think that it's {the UC, MIT, ...}'s fault for not captioning their material?

Yes I find it difficult it's their fault since they are doing this for free. CC is available for deaf students of those universities, where they do help them out. But I don't see why they should help out for a free service.

> Between providing captions and removing their videos, they chose removing their videos.

I'd wager that's the more economically easier route (and likelier outcome from a cost standpoint) considering that they don't get anything in return out of this goodwill in the first place and that it would cost them more either battling the ADA in lawsuits or creating the CC.

> It is terrible of you to make disabled people the villain in this story

Why not? I'm all for campaigning for equal opportunity/accommodations for everyone, for services we pay for, for services we are entitled to. For any free service, there is no obligation for the service provider to do anything to accommodate anyone unless they want to. The argument feels like someone who has peanut allergy suing someone who hands out free cookies/biscuits.

Also, the ADA's lawsuit and approach is the reason disabled people are being portrayed badly here, I'm not saying that the people are bad.

> The point of the ADA is to generate legal pressure to improve accessibility and create justice. I cannot say this is the best outcome, but it is an improvement on the previous situation where you (and countless others) were not even thinking about accessibility. Now you are.

What was the outcome? Restriction of access to all the courses available. Was that beneficial to the disabled people? I don't think so. Was that beneficial to the non disabled people? I definitely don't think so.

My disagreements and questions stand. Can you please answer my questions? Why is the ADA targeting a free service ? Who will/should bear the costs of the CC to be created for the free service that's provided and why? Why isn't the ADA collaborating with the govt/univs to enhance the free service provided? If you feel that disabled people do not have the opportunity to use materials because of lack of CC, don't you think that the actions of ADA has now resulted in opportunities being lost to everyone instead of a few? How is that a good outcome or even a win for the disabled people from the eyes of the general society?

I repeat again, the approach and the outcome of this is bad and unfavorable to all parties involved and has accomplished nothing for free services, in this case OCW.

8589934591··on OCW MIT: 6.006 Intro to Algorithms 2020
I'm not from USA so yes I don't know how the law works in USA.

> The ADA does not work that way. Nobody has to make prospective changes. But if you build a new building, or do significant renovation, then you must do that work up the the modern code, which includes ADA accommodation.

But this didn't apply for the existing MIT/UCB courses did it? For any new courses, I might agree that the mandate might be necessary. But imposing this on older courses does not seem right to me.

Someone is doing something for free out of their own money and time. Someone else comes along, who has the power to sue and win, says that the service that was provided for free didn't include them and hence the rest of the folks who were beneficiaries of the free service should not benefit from it unless they were also benefited. It's one thing to ask for and mandate accommodations for things you pay for, it's another to ask for accommodations for a free service. I wholeheartedly disagree with this opinion and idea. Because of ADA's law thousands if not millions across the world are losing out on wonderful resources for education which might not be available.

On the one hand I can see some people do not get the benefit without captions while many people benefit from the free service. What the law has done is to accommodate the some, now no one will receive the free service. The intention behind the law seems noble, but the outcome does not remotely justify it. Neither party wins. Is there any benefit of robbing someone else's education because you're not able to get it?

> Taxpayer dollars are supposed to be spent on things that benefit everyone.

Again, not from USA. But if i'm in such a position, my questions would be why aren't there closed captions for which I paid tax for? Is the tax dollars actually budgeted for creating captions? What and where is the budget being allocated for govt institutions like UCs? From the univ's perspective, captions might be available for the students, but should/is there budget for accommodating the general public? Is there a budget split up of taxpayer dollars which mandates that univ's should allocate some amount for captions for the public (note- for the public, not the students who pay for the education)? Is there difficulty in hiring? And so on. But the way I see it as a general outsider is that a "law" has been put forth saying it should accommodate deaf people too. I'm sure UCs and other universities are doing everything they can to accommodate for disabled students, I believe they have zero obligation to do anything out their goodwill for people who don't pay for their services.

I believe the law pretty much backfired for whatever intentions it had.

> I’ll give an example of Vint Cerf. Aren’t you glad he was able to be productive, attend university

IMO this is the wrong example to give. Vint Cerf went to university which he paid for which would have probably accommodated for his disabilities. It'd help me see a better viewpoint of your side if you can cite examples of people who were deaf and benefited from the captions and significantly moved forward in life in comparison to Vint Cerf.

8589934591··on OCW MIT: 6.006 Intro to Algorithms 2020
If ramps are not available, does shutting down the building's access to the general public justify it? Does this benefit everyone/anyone in any way? I think that's the point the parent comment is trying to make.

I'm not from USA so I don't know how the law works there. I feel that the law should enable/empower/assist institutes like OCW/UCB to incentivise or help them to create captions for the groups that the law is campaigning for. What good is going to come out of punishing access to general public is something I don't understand. When someone does something out of their goodwill using their time and money you should at least help them to enhance their goodwill for your cause, in this case, the govt or NAD employing people who can transcribe the videos for a fee.

I feel the law is doing more harm than good to the general public.

8589934591··on Show HN: The Cloud Resume Challenge Book
I left this comment on a previous thread. I'm hoping this thread gains traction.

I like the challenge and I'm definitely interested in learning new stuff. Who is the target audience? Will this be helpful for existing software developers who don't normally work neck deep in cloud?

Does anyone have any link on salary comparison between cloud engineers (or posns working on cloud) vs the regular SWEs (software engineers) ?

8589934591··on Show HN: The Cloud Resume Challenge Book
I like the challenge and I'm definitely interested in learning new stuff. Who is the target audience? Will this be helpful for existing software developers who don't normally work neck deep in cloud?

Does anyone have any link on salary comparison between cloud engineers (or posns working on cloud) vs the regular SWEs (software engineers) ?

8589934591··on Competitive programming is useless
Just for my understanding. Is the person who I replied to saying that even though state univ are "considered" better, their personal experience is that community college (which is considered inferior to state) students performed better?
8589934591··on Competitive programming is useless
EDIT: TLDR: There are bigger issues at play at the country's economic level that students take up skills (CP) to get the best paying job possible. This in turn drives companies to make interviews harder to separate rote memorizers from the crowd. I don't see this going away anytime soon and although I agree that leetcode questions aren't the best measure, there is no better alternative as an interviewer to quickly filter out candidates.

---

> As a response, college students now pursue competitive programming obsessively to stay on top. In this weird arms race against prospective hires, companies keep asking harder and harder questions in a misguided attempt to raise the bar.

You should understand that more students pick it up because of the higher salary offered in the tech industry in your country (India) and this is one of the best bets to lift themselves and their families economically. To be fair, I don't blame them, majority would pick up ~CP~ <job/skill> because it has the highest returns for the effort put in. It's a fault in the system, not the students.

Personally I would be wary of anyone who says only competitive programming excites them. I feel that testing algorithms and data structures in some slightly realistic situation is the only way to weed out the pretenders.

Anecdotally, I have interviewed screening rounds from junior to senior. The juniors who pretend to like programming are usually filtered out when I change the application of the data structure slightly as compared to a leetcode/geeksforgeeks question. Something as simple as "reverse a paragraph/sentence" as opposed to "reverse a string".

Mid level candidates are the most difficult to filter out and this is exactly where the leetcode type questions come into the picture. They are able to talk about their projects as if they designed the entire stack. I have seen them draw the system design diagrams, tell me pros and cons of the stack/tech chosen, but they would usually fail in easy/medium level leetcode questions.

Seniors are the easiest to filter. We give them the easiest question possible and ask them to solve it. This is done with a huge disclaimer that this is a screening round and that the intention is to see you can actually write code and answer questions about it in real time. Questions are easy array/string leetcode setting them up for success. The good ones just finish it up in hardly 10 mins and move on the the design round following immediately. The bad ones just beat around the bush saying they wont code despite the disclaimer. The really bad ones are ones who cite N yoe so they shouldn't be tested on coding (this is when the senior dev steps in and recommends not to proceed with the interview anymore).

Coming back to the article, unless you have candidates/people who are actually interested in building software, and only when other jobs around you on avg pay a decent amount of salary for the place you live in, I am positive people will do everything they can to get the best ROI to become more sustainable in life. This is evident in > 5 yoe hires when people are in a more stable posn in tech economically and as interviewees they realise what they like/dislike and as interviewers you can discern whether they can actually do the job properly.

8589934591··on Competitive programming is useless
I'm someone outside USA. Can you clarify your comparison between state vs community?
8589934591··on Pyret Programming Language
A new book which serves as an introduction to CS in Brown university has been released just yesterday. It uses Pyret.

https://dcic-world.org/2021-08-21/index.html

PAPL - https://papl.cs.brown.edu/2020/ is an older version of the current book.

8589934591··on On Digital Minimalsim (2016)
You can share on mastodon. Or even better, write a blog about it. Another alternative is to write in a journal, but that defeats your purpose of wanting to share.
8589934591··on American parents are sending their kids to 'Russian math' (2017)
I wonder if there's an equivalent "hardcore" curriculum for computer science and/or software development and programming vs a softcore "US" curriculum. Would SICP be the hardcore version vs HtDP/PAPL be the softer "US" version?
8589934591··on The LaTeX Font Catalogue
I use roboto light sans serif font for my resume. Are there better alternatives to CM for reading on the screen? I found mlmodern so far to be a good alternative, but would like to know from others as well.
8589934591··on Ask HN: Best tool for software architecture diagrams?
> For smaller architectures https://diagrams.mingrammer.com works really well, but it often breaks for more complex layouts.

I'm curious, can you share some examples about when/how it breaks? So far I have had nothing but success with it.

8589934591··on SQLBolt – Interactive lessons and exercises to learn SQL
I guess we were just a few minutes apart in our comments. I have gone through the website and yes I highly recommend it.
8589934591··on SQLBolt – Interactive lessons and exercises to learn SQL
I recommend trying out https://www.sql-ex.ru which has some good exercises which can trip up a lot of people. I have used quite a few questions from here as an interviewer. Going through it completely is a solid foundation for tackling SQL at work.

As a baseline, if one can solve https://www.jitbit.com/news/181-jitbits-sql-interview-questi... then you can be confident you can nail entry-mid level positions involving SQL.

8589934591··on Gitlab 14
Hey thank you very much. I was not available about a lot of features that you have mentioned. I have set this up properly now.

The thing is I'm working with a new team who are not aware of git / gitlab. So it's a huge learning curve for everyone. And gitlab has a lot of features and terms which are confusing for everyone.

8589934591··on Back to the Future with RSS
Is an RSS full article extractor hard to implement? I'm using elfeed in Emacs and I would love to have this functionality.
8589934591··on Gitlab 14
Off topic, can someone help me with the following on gitlab? Maybe I'm not searching with the right search parameters to get the right answers.

1. Who exactly is the assignee? When I'm working on a feature and raise a merge request, why am I given the option of selecting the assignee?

2. How can I cancel build pipelines when team members raise merge requests? I don't have a pipeline setup yet, but I don't want it to run in the first place (and fail)

3. Why is it that people who raise merge requests can approve their own request ? Is there a way to disable this? I would like to have people raise the merge request, but the ability to approve should lie with a few maintainers and developers.

8589934591··on Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?
Fwiw, this has been an issue from last year. My wife has been having the same problem with her notebooks. This is the same for both her company data and her personal data. I'm sorry you and others have to go through with this, just wanted to highlight this isn't a new issue.

She has now migrated all her personal notebooks to emacs orgmode and her company notebooks to gcloud/docs and MD files.

8589934591··on Organizations announced for Google Summer of Code 2021
I didn't mean GSOC are trivial. Apologies if I came across like that. My understanding is things approachable by students would be slightly easier compared to things approachable by someone working in the industry. Maybe my understanding is wrong.
8589934591··on Organizations announced for Google Summer of Code 2021
1. Is it possible to work on these open source projects with some guidance/mentoring opportunities without the pay? I'm really interested in contributing/being part of an OS project but I have so far not been able to find beginner-intermediate level bugs for which I would need some level of handholding at least in the initial stages. I tried this for 2 apache projects trying to contribute but I could not get anyone to respond to my queries and I didn't continue with this further.

2. Are people who are not students allowed to work on these ideas/issues now or in the future? I have found these "ideas" to be available only during gsoc, but orgs in general I'm finding it hard to find these starter level ideas to get going.

If people are available for mentoring please let me know. I would be really grateful to learn from you guys. I'm open to learning languages as necessary. I'm good with Python, exposed to C and Java, able to read go.

I like the projects - django, mariadb, postgresql, python, git, kde - but i'm open to other projects as well.

8589934591··on Show HN: I created an off-the-grid password manager that you can save to a file
Just curious, how does this compare to bitwarden?
8589934591··on From coding bootcamp graduate to building distributed databases
Great article. I wish BradfieldCS would offer some kind of discount for people from countries who don't have a USD salary. I make $600 a month before taxes and expenses. I can put aside $100-150 a month if I live slightly frugally and be strict with my savings. I don't see myself saving $1800 (12-18 months) to take up one course. Same goes for their new program - https://bradfieldcs.com/csi/ - $19500.

Does the author or anyone have any other free/affordable alternatives for BradfieldCS? teachyourselfcs is the only one I can think of which I'm following currently.

8589934591··on Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?
Just FYI. When I try to subscribe I get "Sorry! Something went wrong while submitting the form. Please try again using this link."

When I subscribe through mailchimp and try to confirm my email, it shows 404.

8589934591··on Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?
This is amazing. Couple of questions.

1. Do you offer ppp/student discounts?

2. Any roadmap for more projects that you wish to publish?

8589934591··on Select a muscle and it provides the exercises to workout the selected muscle
Works now thanks. Yup HN hug of death lol. Someone should write about it. The influx of HN users and how they had to scale things up. Etc.

It'd be a useful read for beginners.

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