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BJanecke

65 karma · joined May 24, 2013

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/otherben; my proof: https://keybase.io/otherben/sigs/vXsGkDnDi5lQry2LpckuM542IIRPpTMtdERHeVH9rQc ]
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BJanecke··on Ask HN: Can engineers from Google or Facebook solve whiteboard questions easily?
There is nothing about learning how basic data structures and algorithms work that won't help you in your day to day development.

You might be "fine" without it in a certain category of job, but rather than be dismissive about it you could be excited about having a massive wealth of information that you can use to do your job better.

There will always be something else to learn, wether it be how to apply Domain Driven Design to your work or how to work with graphs when munging data. It's always worth it.

[edit] Run on sentence

BJanecke··on Ask HN: Can engineers from Google or Facebook solve whiteboard questions easily?
This book https://www.amazon.com/Data-Structures-Algorithm-Analysis-C-... Don't let the "in C++" scare you If you google about you'll find free copies of older editions online
BJanecke··on Vue.js: the good, the meh, and the ugly
The new module system makes it easy ;)
BJanecke··on How modern Linux systems boot
A bit more lightweight version of that is https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/installation_guide The first time I tried to install arch I had many aha! moments
BJanecke··on Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?
humility
BJanecke··on Sony Aibo
He writes about Design, and also likes to call it a game of constraints(paraphrasing).
BJanecke··on Sony Aibo
Someone's been reading Fred Brooks ;)
BJanecke··on Ask HN: What is your profession?
I'm the Riddler
BJanecke··on Ask HN: What books had the greatest effect on how you structure your code?
Just like the other non programming book on the list(Thinking Fast and Slow) GEB is a lot about perception to me.

Understanding that nothing is purely logical nor is it purely expressionistic; by pigeonholing your perception of any design whether it be Code, Math or Art to either Logic xor Expression you are blinding yourself

The other angle for GEB is design

I read GEB along with Design of Design years ago following my mentor at the times suggestion, I would highly recommend doing this. Think of it as the Gödel, Escher, Bach, Brooks (Although Brook's writing style can be laborious at times) Recognizing patterns in all design work helped my understand my own design process better.

BJanecke··on Ask HN: What books had the greatest effect on how you structure your code?
Nice catch, thanks :)
BJanecke··on Ask HN: What books had the greatest effect on how you structure your code?
* Douglas Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

* Fred Brooks - Design Of Design

* Fred Brooks - The Mythical Man month

* Eric J. Evans - Domain Driven Design

* Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

* Kent Beck - Extreme Programming Explained

* Kent Beck - Planning Extreme Programming

* Michael C. Feathers - Working Effectively with Legacy Code

* Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow

[EDIT] Correct the author for legacy code

BJanecke··on Ask HN: What are some of the best job boards you have seen (any industry)?
https://www.offerzen.com/

* Upfront Salaries * Talent treated with dignity * Companies/Talent held accountable for showing up to interviews

BJanecke··on Popular People Live Longer
I have always held the belief that everyone is entitled to their own life and can do with it as they please. This exchange reinforces that.
BJanecke··on Popular People Live Longer
I respect that, and accept that you have the right to your own life. You and your life have had great meaning to me and I will forever be thankful for that.
BJanecke··on Popular People Live Longer
I'd suggest you pay a visit to your nearest ER and have the staff there give you some advice. Melancholic depression, fairly often is a symptom of other known health problems, that we as humans have ways of alleviating. I'm sure you've spent time and effort towards trying to solve what you are wrestling with now, but if you would like to give it one more chance the best possible thing you could do is pay your nearest ER a visit.
BJanecke··on How Student Debt Reduces Lifetime Wealth
Doesn't all debt reduce lifetime wealth?
BJanecke··on Individual behavior in clonal fish despite near-identical rearing conditions
We need Pshycohsitorians a la Harry Seldon
BJanecke··on Code boilerplate: Is it always bad?
I think that's really cool, although

// Find the first foo with bar foos.map(f => f.bar).uniq().orderBy(f => f.baz)[0]

does the same basic thing, the ability to collapse and display intent is incredibly rad for lack of a better word

BJanecke··on Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?
Software

The Mythical Man Month && Design Of Design by Fred Brooks

Everything else

Hitchhikers Guide (Existentialism does not have to be edgy) The Foundation Series (Bureaucracy and Institutionalization will never undermine Ingenuity) Dune Series (Plans within plans)

BJanecke··on It's time for the US to use the metric system
In the same way it's hard to explain why you are most comfortable with your first language ;)
BJanecke··on An Indian village addicted to chess
Somehow this immediately made me think of Player Of Games by Ian Banks
BJanecke··on Ask HN: Is Digital Ocean safe enough for production?
What does that mean?

Go read https://www.digitalocean.com/business and https://status.digitalocean.com/ if that doesn't put you at ease send them an email.

However it shouldn't matter. Droplets are essentially just on demand "vps's" most of the operations work is done by your operations team(in this case I imagine this is you). Where your hosts(machines, containers, vps's whatever you want to call them) are shouldn't matter very much, what is important is that you have repeatable infrastructure, so that when you spin up a new VPS anywhere(AWS, DO, Vulcan, Your Garage) you can get up and running again fairly quickly.

[edit] Added status page

BJanecke··on Kotlin Is Better
Kotlin is really nice and I am very happy to have more than one great/fun/productive language however I feel like mentioning typescript might be worthwhile (yes I know it's "just" a superset of JS and you have a personal gripe with whatever you think JS is but hear me out).

* Runs everywhere js/asm

* MIxed bag of tooling, but generally you can find something amazing and you won't have to venture to sourceforge or similar to submit a patch

* Doesn't suffer from the coljure/scala "We can totally use other JVM libraries but we only really do that If we have no other option"

* Absolutely beautiful generics and spot on inference

   ```
    function pluck<T>(key: keyof T, from: T[]) {
       return from.map(item => item[key]);
     }
   ```
* First class functions

* Incredible flexibility

   * sketch in js then annotate  

   * decide on strict nulls

   * decide on implicit types

   * various approaches to composition 
* Amazing IDE support(VSCode)(This technically falls under tooling ;))

* One of the few cross-platfrom languages that feel pretty much identical on all the platforms

[edit] Formatting

BJanecke··on Don't overuse interfaces
Most compilers :)
BJanecke··on Don't overuse interfaces
This is fairly dangerous advice and amounts to. "Hey folks, I think it's a great idea to friction weld parts of your code together"

It's not YAGNI or duplication, if you can't understand why we program to an interface and not an implementation then you just very seriously need to go look at your codebase and decide to extend a core bit of functionality, one that usually comes to mind is Authentication/Entitlement

BJanecke··on The tragedy of 100% code coverage (2016)
So generally, I write a test when I want to make an assumption an certainty. If I can't be certain that something is doing what it's supposed to I write a test for it, make sense?

So

``` Int => add(x, y) => x + y; ```

Doesn't get a test, however

``` Int => formulateIt(x, y) => (x * y)^y ```

Does

BJanecke··on Total.js Messenger – A small alternative to Slack
what if my address is bob@accounts@localhost ?
BJanecke··on They Used To Last 50 Years
I'm going to assume it's got to do with the multiple layers of clothing they no doubt have to wear in that climate.
BJanecke··on How I Ruined Office Productivity with a Face-Replacing Slack Bot
I'm so happy right now. There really are hackers(In it for the lulz) left in the world :')
BJanecke··on A US-born NASA scientist was detained at the border until he unlocked his phone
Obviously appreciating that NASA has some sensitive data but just for a second also try and appreciate how would this play out for someone who works in the financial industry, where unauthorised sharing of sensitive data is not only a breach of contract with your employer/clients but a crime(insider trading) in almost all countries.

Or imagine how the people who enforce these new regulations can exploit this.

Query from the traveller at the border what their job is, if in the financial industry request that they relinquish their email find something that could tip you off and go buy stock. If they don't you lose nothing, you deport them, you do your job.

I understand that you might want to tear this apart, but keep in mind the person that requests your data will often not be the person viewing it, so you are in no position to just "Take some names" and then ensure that your data remains confidential.

This is terrifying.

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