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fiveoak

235 karma · joined April 16, 2015

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fiveoak··on Mozilla patches Firefox zero-day abused in the wild
"This simplifies the code a bit because ElementAccessHasExtraIndexedProperty checks for length-overflow and sparse-indexes so the callers don't have to do that anymore."

simple code best code, the less opportunity you give people to shoot themselves in the foot the better

fiveoak··on Student Loan Debt Crisis Is Bankrupting Millennials
It's easy to say that but kids (yes, kids) that are age 17 aren't really the best equipped to make great life altering decisions in the first place. People fuck up all the time and our response as a society shouldn't be "well, too bad" because 1) that's a terrible way to treat other people 2) if a ton of people are bankrupt due to student loan payments it WILL affect you indirectly, and potentially your own children/family members/friends

I'm not sure of a great solution and it's way outside my knowledge/expertise but ignoring the issue and basically just saying "should have got a STEM degree idiot" isn't good for society

fiveoak··on The Science Behind Why Some Are Shy
What's interesting is that some of my best friends have been people that society would judge as unsuccessful, not smart, and not cool. Mutually feeling accepted by one another is a big part of it I think, but I never really thought about it other than "chemistry".
fiveoak··on I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected
That's an awesome story, did/do you find it hard as an entrepreneur to get off the ground with a lack of social proof from the ivy league degree? I guess after achieving some level of success from your entrepreneurial endeavors that itself is a far stronger signal of social proof but it seems difficult to "break in". Any tips?
fiveoak··on Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog
Honestly I really appreciate tools like this exist but I'll probably keep using Medium out of laziness. I don't want to have to worry about maintaining my own blog and I'm cheap so I don't really want to pay for hosted Ghost/Wordpress since I'm not trying to make money off of my infrequent dumb blog posts. The cheapest Ghost plan is $29/mo :(
fiveoak··on Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote
Probably lower them, which is bad if you're part of that demographic, but better for everyone else outside that very small group (which admittedly is probably a significant proportion of HN readers but a small proportion of the entire population)
fiveoak··on AWS Web Console Down?
It's annoying how often status pages for various services (when they even exist at all) show that things are working when they really aren't
fiveoak··on Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers
Any kind of ads are annoying to me and well worth the couple of $/month alone, but I also like being able to skip songs I don't like and having in general a better set of songs that I actually enjoy
fiveoak··on A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health
Anecdotally I use Facebook to coordinate social events with friends and find that it's been a helpful tool to easily keep in touch with friends. I've reconnected with friends through it too. I try and avoid political things and post a lot of cat pictures from a local cat shelter that I volunteer at, which people seem to enjoy. I dunno, I just try and keep my feed filled with mostly positive/upbeat things so maybe that helps?
fiveoak··on US shutdown: Flight delays caused by staff shortages
A lot of people have a hard time showing empathy for others. Part of it can be due to immaturity or being overly sheltered, lack of social skills, etc. It's easy to be critical of others that make bad decisions but EVERYONE makes bad decisions, being imperfect and making mistakes is part of being human, and what might be easy for one person might not be easy for another person.
fiveoak··on Demystifying Radix Trees: How Radix trees made blocking IPs 5000 times faster
No one is forcing you to read it... I'm a self taught developer and I lack a lot of low level data structure/algorithms knowledge. I really enjoyed reading the article myself and learned something from it. Sorry that you didn't enjoy it.
fiveoak··on Roadmap to becoming a React developer in 2018
Definitely agree with that, it's a tough balance between code quality and efficiency. But at least as a beginner that is trying to learn new things, you usually don't have to worry much about things being supported later on compared to just getting something out there/working and improving as you go along.
fiveoak··on Advice
Ahh thank you, I've never been good at accepting compliments and don't really feel like I did anything too special since many people each day are able to handle their nutrition/weight in a much better way than I can. But I appreciate the kind words.
fiveoak··on Roadmap to becoming a React developer in 2018
Very true, in the end everyone has limited time and it's impossible to learn everything. However, I do personally like roadmaps/guides like this since, as a beginner, it's hard to figure out what you dont know. So being able to see a list of what's considered some of the most important/relevant topics is useful in that regard.

Still I totally agree that getting paralyzed is a big problem, it's way better to program something "the wrong/inefficient/bad way" rather than to program nothing. A big part of my learning and growth as a programmer has come from coding something terribly, realizing "hey, this kinda sucks, I bet there is a better way to do this.." and googling a bit until I learn a new/better method of doing X.

fiveoak··on Advice
Same here, I actually lost 200 lbs in my mid-late 20s and it's amazing how many positive ways it has affected me beyond the physical health benefits. Growing up I never had an interest in sports/physical activities but I wish I had.
fiveoak··on Advice
I don't really think there are any negative effects to having good social skills. If anything, being able to effectively communicate with others probably helps with coming up with new/unique ideas. Very few great ideas are created in a vacuum. But, I do agree it's important that people don't feel afraid to be an independent thinker, and it's easy to fall into the trap of forced conformity in order to feel more socially accepted.. but I don't think that is really necessarily a product of having good social skills.
fiveoak··on Earliest images of the moon were better than people realised
I never thought I'd have to worry about bowling alley equipment DDoSing my servers, or having them mine monero
fiveoak··on Ask HN: How to find a mental health professional?
Not sure if your insurance has it, but my health insurance has a website where I can login to it to view my EOBs/etc and also has a section to lookup doctors in the area that accept my insurance.

Either way, sending positive thoughts your way and hope you can find someone helpful :(. Struggling with mental health can be a profoundly shitty time.

fiveoak··on Becoming a 10x Developer
Yeah, I know the spirit of the term. I'm really not trying to play dumb here or anything. I agree that other people can be more productive than others on an individual basis.

I just disagree with using a "10x" quantification without a clear way to measure individual productivity when you're working in a team. It's not like we can just point to something like.. hey, Person A has 10x as many line changes as Person B, therefore Person A is 10x as productive. And unless we have two individuals working on features completely alone, we can't say Person A shipped 10x as many widget features as Person B either.

I dunno. I honestly don't have a good answer for how to measure individual productivity on a clear, quantifiable basis, again not trying to play dumb here I'm admittedly not sure on it and was hoping to get some feedback from others about it.

fiveoak··on Becoming a 10x Developer
For the sibling comment, are you referring to this comment?

"10x developer is absolutely a thing, in the easily observed phenomenon that some developers are 10x more productive than other developers. The "other developers" are earning good wages and doing good work; the 10x developer is usually found making 2x or 3x the norm. That said; I just can't believe that a team can perform 10x by the actions of one person. This claim is so outlandish I may just have to skim the article. It is often the case that having a 10x developer nearby can greatly improve the quality of a product, but that's not the same thing as improving the team."

I don't agree that some developers are "10x more productive" than others. I agree that some developers are more/less productive than others but I agree with the article's premise that teamwork is a much more important metric than individual talent. I understand the spirit of "10x developer" in that some individuals are more productive than others.. but the quantification of 10x seems very unrealistic, and IMO is overshadowed by potential productivity gains by having a well-functioning team. Again just my opinion here so feel free to disagree with me on this.

The relevant paragraph in the article is this:

"Software engineering today is a team sport; like water polo, you can’t build incredible software systems alone. So when I first heard the concept of the 10x engineer, I was confused. How could someone be so talented that it overshadows the power of teamwork? In my experience, individual excellence is necessary, but not sufficient, for greatness. Focusing purely on individual achievement misses the larger picture that teams are required to build great software. So I decided to change the definition of a 10x engineer to this: "

It doesn't give a very clear definition of what a "10x engineer" is. Again I agree with them here that the "10x" number and lack of a clear objective "individual productivity" metric makes the term hard to clearly define. Since most work is not done on an individual basis, but rather in teams.

fiveoak··on Becoming a 10x Developer
I don't even think there is a clear definition of what the "10x" is measuring in terms of output.

Features/story points (velocity)? well.. this is a productivity metric of the team rather than individual.

Without a doubt some people can be more "productive" individuals than others, but I -do- think in the real world, it makes more sense to look at productivity on the team level rather than individual. Ex: someone is very productive at making lots of commits but obnoxious to work with or has shoddy tests/documentation that end up sucking time away from the "less productive" developers that have to clean up their mess...

fiveoak··on Becoming a 10x Developer
The article says "A 10x engineer isn’t someone who is 10x better than those around them, but someone who makes those around them 10x better."

I'm guessing you disagree with the author's definition of a "10x developer". I don't really think there is a clear accepted definition for it.. so how would you define the term?

fiveoak··on Learning Web Development? Skills to Make You Stand Out
The importance of soft skills is underrated. Technical skills are important, sure, but I would much rather work with an "average", friendly teammate than an insufferable genius.
fiveoak··on Generating $32,000 in 30 days selling a crypto-filled USB stick
I don't really think this is true in practice. There is a risk to scamming, plus even with zero risk not every customer would choose to scam them (given morals/etc).
fiveoak··on [dead]
Personally I think more people would be turned off by the fact that someone thinks they are a "loser" for having a Facebook account. Though it's a bit harder to quantify personality.
fiveoak··on A hot bath has benefits similar to exercise
Lifting heavy while dieting actually is helpful for not losing muscle, as long as you eat enough protein: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2016/01/26/ajcn.115....
fiveoak··on Silicon Valley Investor Peter Thiel Wins Bet on Trump
Yep, and by calling Trump a bigot, racist, sexist, etc, they're inadvertently calling his supporters the same thing as well, causing a lot of them to just become more entrenched in their support for Trump.
fiveoak··on Ask HN: How do you keep motivated if nobody supports you?
I'm a 27 year old programmer that was in a similar situation as you when I was 25 (although with much less lines of code written). I still struggle a bit with motivation for working on personal projects, but I did eventually get a job as a software developer at a non-tech oriented company. I noticed you applied to several highly selective companies like Google, Facebook, Uber but have you tried looking at less selective companies that might be in other industries? You'd be surprised how many companies hire software devs although it might not be the most interesting technologies (for instance I spend a lot of time on "out of favor" technologies like Java EE) or applications (like banking or medical software). For me at least it helped to actually get a real software job where I could focus my efforts a bit more and learn from working with co-workers.. and being paid to code helps my motivation too :). I also don't live in a city, just a random suburb in Connecticut.

edit: By the way I didn't realize you were in Mexico at first. I only have experience with getting a job in the USA but hopefully what I wrote is at least slightly helpful.

fiveoak··on Google+ Redesigned
Eh, my opinion is probably an unpopular one but I would've preferred to have my main social network integrated with my email, my phone, etc. The main problem for me was pretty much no one else used it. I'm not a huge social network person in general though. I do agree that it didn't "deserve" to be popular just because google made it - which google probably ended up learning after they made it.
fiveoak··on Google+ Redesigned
It's too bad that Google+ never really caught on, but I'm not sure if redesigning it is enough to fix that.
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