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dostoevsky

283 karma · joined March 5, 2016

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dostoevsky··on Ask HN: What are the underrated newsletters you like reading?
Not sure about their underratedness, but I find the following newsletters interesting and insightful:

Two Truths and a Take by Alex Danco (tech, VC, and broader topics): https://danco.substack.com/

The Uncertainty Mindset by Vaughn Tan: https://uncertaintymindset.substack.com/

The Diff by Byrne Hobart (finance, tech): https://diff.substack.com/

Kneeling Bus by Drew Austin (urbanism, tech): https://kneelingbus.substack.com/

dostoevsky··on Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager
I've been using Yabai[0] for a few months and am generally pretty happy with the i3-like experience on macOS.

[0] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

dostoevsky··on People with Greater Intellectual Humility Have Superior General Knowledge
This resonates with me to a surprising extent. My perceived threshold for expressing an opinion is very high, and I also find that I don't really have any particularly _strong_ opinions to begin with.

The "hedge my answers extensively" bit is spot-on, as is the isolating nature of this "trait", unfortunately.

dostoevsky··on Bandaid – Dropbox service proxy
Interesting. I wonder if that choice would lead to a noticeable impact on perceived latency (from the perspective of a human end-user) under some high-load/pathological scenario.
dostoevsky··on Bandaid – Dropbox service proxy
The justification for using LIFO (vs FIFO) queues for requests is interesting: at no/low load it makes no difference, while at high load the requests least likely to time out get serviced first.

Is that a common architectural decision in reverse proxies or queuing systems in general?

dostoevsky··on Ask HN: Do you like where you live?
That's close enough that I can look at the weather report in the morning and decide to take a day off work.

This is an amazing advantage.

How's the tech scene there?

dostoevsky··on Grit is a muscle, train it
Regarding your last point: this is an idea I first encountered a couple years ago in Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness", and it's been on my mind ever since.

Monetizing successful people's advice on how to become successful seems seems to be a pretty profitable endeavor.

Accepting that success, among many other things, is more random than post-hoc explanations make it seem is scary yet somewhat liberating at the same time.

dostoevsky··on High-Speed Trading: Lines, Radios, and Cables
IEX is an example of an exchange doing just that.
dostoevsky··on Ask HN: Career advice for a new grad
Over the years, how has your perspective on the stack + the type of work you're doing changed? I feel like due to my age I don't have the context to make a decision based on factors that will actually matter in the long term.
dostoevsky··on Ask HN: Career advice for a new grad
I'd be working in Kanata and would prefer to live somewhere closer to downtown, hence the estimated commute times (by public transit).

Thank you for adding some perspective. It seems whatever choice I end up making, my brain will find a way to rationalize it post-factum.

dostoevsky··on Ask HN: Career advice for a new grad
Where did you move from? Curious to hear about things you like and dislike about living and working in London.
dostoevsky··on Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017
Interesting how "Knowledge of algorithms and data structures" is the third most important thing developers think should be prioritized when recruiting (3.77/5), following communication skills and track record.
dostoevsky··on Ask HN: Invaluable Command-line Tools
The ranger [0] file manager is probably my most used app -- it's fast, extensible and has VI bindings.

[0] http://www.nongnu.org/ranger/

dostoevsky··on Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave
As a soon-to-be engineering graduate, I am very thankful for Octave. I've used it (instead of MATLAB) for projects involving numerical methods, control systems, image processing, and all kinds of data manipulation. While it may not be as powerful as MATLAB for certain use cases, it is an amazing piece of software.