I've bought quite a few of the cheaper earbuds from Aliexpress, and there are problems with the really low end ones that you should watch out for:
- left and right earbud need to first pair with each other on startup before pairing to your phone. Otherwise you get one side paired to your phone and the other side is just dangling
- lack of volume controls on many
Battery capacity was actually never a show stopper for me - some earbud charging cases are 550 mAh while others are 3500. But the 550 one would already be enough for a whole day's worth of use, so by the end of the day I could just charge the case all the same.
Seems like being able to not see the holes in your own ideas, believing your own ideas are infallible i.e. narcissism as mentioned below, are very valuable traits in a founder, at least in certain phases. To this day, I still don't get why WeWork is a thing, but it just shows me that the whole system can be hacked given enough levels of self-delusion. And often times not for the better. I mean, people mentioned in religious writings are just like us, all the same, except their headspace is somewhere far different than the average man, and their responses to external stimuli end up being completely different or uninfluenced. A bit of reality distortion field, if you will. There is certainly a phase in the beginning of founding a company where few people will believe in your idea except yourself. And sometimes maybe those beliefs need to be a bit irrational as a defense until they gain traction in reality.
Projecting a little bit here, but, I personally am the opposite, always seeing holes in everything about what I think, what I know, shooting myself down all too quickly, such that a lot of my interactions with other people seem to end up with them sympathizing for my lack of confidence but glad to see me being honest. Sometimes, I'd wish to just be a bit more of the opposite.
I’m currently prepping for these kind of questions and “online assessments” as well. I have accepted that my worth as a developer is in most part going to be dictated by how diligently I can game this glorified IQ test.
There are common patterns to these questions and I’ve found that they get more predictable after having done 50-100 of them, with very careful attentiveness to what your mind is coming up with to solve them. All these questions can only vary so much in how they are asked, and unfortunately we just have to do use repetition by numbers to enforce better pattern recognition.
Sounds exactly like me. I was and am still in somewhat depressed states. Lot of anxiety preventing me from putting myself out there, impostor syndrome whispering "you're not smart enough to be a developer", self shaming, etc. The internet being too accessible, yet not having enough of a BS detector myself, and getting sucked into believing polarized, weakly true viewpoints (9-5 is not the way to go! Etc...).
Surprised to see you hang around here! Your TED talk with the ukulele + chords was also an eye-opening introduction to this idea.
Also check out this guy who documents his progress playing table tennis everyday for a year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y21uwFUgkE. I'm nowhere near his level but I can tell he got pretty good.
Heck, English is my most fluent language (though Chinese is my mother tongue) but I always have trouble understanding comments here on HN. I can understand every word and don't need to open the dictionary, but then I can't follow the logic / the point being debated / the thought being conveyed.
To play devil's advocate a little bit contrary to what other people have commented: you being rude is just an efficient way of filtering out unnecessary interactions and social niceties. If you were polite like everyone else, then you end up wasting more time with watercooler chit-chat and having to maintain all these subtle relationships. If what you're doing works for you, then by all means, as long as you are conveying useful information and not actually insulting other people.
If their phones have some sort of surveillance and catch them bad mouthing the government, they are going to have a bad time. In an authoritarian government, every level of society lies - it's not worth it to do otherwise.
There seems to be a lot of hate on Sapiens every time it's posted here in HN. From what I gather, the criticism of his book comes from getting a lot of things wrong, or pushing some incorrect narrative. I assume that those who critique his book have read far more than myself and so have a stronger foundation to assert this critique, because as someone who just hasn't read that much nor has the appetite for digging through more dry tomes related to these subjects, Sapiens was very readable and reshaped my perspective a lot. Many people cite it as one of the best books of 2015(?). So is the criticism here just incessant nitpicking without respect for a palatable narrative, or are there books that provide another perspective that I'm seriously missing out on?
I use Ubuntu inside Virtualbox at work, but it has caused almost everyone on my team issues at some point - the whole thing freezing and needing to be restarted, very laggy GUI (scrolling in VS Code gets ugly), network connectivity issues when switching WiFi hotspots (also doesn't work with Starbucks), running out of hard disk space if you didn't allocate enough to begin with, to name a few. Sure, there are always workarounds, but the time and productivity it has costed my team would have easily justified
getting a Mac, which IT thinks is too expensive :shrug:.
I did the same, but it was because I have very low self control since a young age, and telling myself "OK this will be the last round I'll ay tonight" (of League of Legends, Super Smash, etc.) never, ever worked. The cumulative result of all that gaming means next to nothing for my career now, aside from being more calm when getting trolled. Not worth it.
+1 to this. If you try to live the same way as you did in the States, without trying any of the more hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and only go to like, Pizza Hut (which is considered a decent mid-end fine-dining restaurant), for sure you will spend 100 RMB+ per meal. But getting buns, dumplings, beef noodles for 10-30 RMB is in no way a remote possibility, but they definitely don't look Western.
Grew up in a very traditional Chinese household - never thought of it that way - somehow connects the dots with how my culture values being conservative, being stable, not rocking the boat - because there isn't much to go around in the first place.
This quote actually captures the sort of issue/gripe I have with being a developer (let's say you don't ascend high into management) for the rest of your career. No matter how good you are, you still have to write individual lines of code out, one-by-one. You'd be a glorified factory worker, albeit a very efficient one (years of experience would make your solution more efficient and architecturally sound from the get go).
Not to mention some very keen, obsessed younger developer could easily replicate what you're doing.
> For years I’d tried to learn algorithms to clear big 4 style interviews. But for reasons ranging from subject matter difficulty to motivation I’d fail again and again. When I got an interview call I had a competitive programmer teach me over chat every night one problem at a time explaining his thinking.
I'm stuck in the same rut of lack of motivation. Interested to hear what clicked after he explained it to you?
I personally almost never comment unless I feel I have an original opinion, and one that isn't stupid so it'd get shot down. I guess I have a very strong filter. I wonder how many people voice things out that really shouldn't be a thing because they don't have a strong filter.
I can identify a lot with what you said; one of my biggest weaknesses is being afraid to ask questions, fearing it might signal my lack of trying to figure things out on my own, and I can't seem to know when I'm actually wasting too much time not asking.
Personally, if I were to join a new team in the future, I'd first ask what the preferred toolset to debug is, along with any shortcuts (bash commands, way of setting up terminals, any admin UIs) they use, because it can greatly tighten your feedback loop when you test code you write, or poke around, etc. Maybe even pair with one of them while they solve a not so trivial bug, asking them to voice out what questions they're asking in the their head, how they know which file to look for or what to global search for, and articulate how they traverse through their tree of knowledge.
I've seen interns that were energetic, enthusiastic, and really felt no shame or stupidity in asking questions, even more trivial ones, because they looked like they were genuinely curious. They soaked up knowledge like a sponge and it was evident that they had nothing to lose after months of relentless question-asking - and very fortunately my team's culture tolerated that. Your team should encourage and support curiosity, speaking the language of logic, reason, and hopefully even helping others somewhat selflessly.
Agreed. I actually spent the early part of my 20s thinking money wasn't so important, but I started to regret it when I realize I wanted to become independent, eventually start a family, and it all required money to achieve those means. I also used to despise the idea of having to get married, playing life by a to-do list of checkboxes (that society forces upon you in some sense), but I realize you can always have your cake and eat it too. Besides, higher levels of income usually require you to be reaching some level of competency and proficiency in a hierarchy of other people speaking the same language (productivity, logic, etc.) Also, it also serves as a very pragmatic and quantitative metric, something to continually strive towards. Sure, I can grow my own vegetables, read/write a bunch of books, go travel the world, and be a really interesting person, and that would be great, but where are you getting the roof over your head and the meal every night? Good news is, you can have your cake and eat it too.
I have thoroughly consumed a lot of Peterson content. I can vouch that aside from the political controversy, that he has a powerful message for young men: to find the meaning in life through responsibility and sacrifice, to go out there and make something of themselves. I have no idea why that it is "controversial" to be told to strive for something, and I don't see much alternatives other than self-help books. There are much more troubled, aimless people out there than you think, because if you've lived a fairly decent life yourself, you almost never come into contact with the guys that aren't doing so well and are in need of such a message. He's almost filling in as a father figure for young men where self-help did not suffice. The opposing side likes to attempt to character assassinate him by labelling as a right-wing bigot, but have never bothered to really listen to his message while holding the empathy that more unfortunate people DO need a message like that.
Interestingly, the biggest eye-opener of reading the 4HWW is the part when Ferriss defines the word muse. I used to only think that it was a dichotomy of 1) boring 9-5 selling out your soul for the rest of your life, or 2) VC-backed startup scaling like mad and ending in a 7+ figure acquisition, but never considered the option in between: lifestyle businesses that are "automated", so you can actually do other things with your life.
sadamznintern, are you Asian by any chance? Because I'm Chinese, and I feel that this "comparison" sort of mindset has been ingrained into me since I was born and I've struggled to ignore it my whole life. It most likely came from hearing the sort of reverence my dad would have for people that made it (hold an Ivy League degree, become a doctor/lawyer/banker/someone of prestigious esteem, have FU money, etc.), and the sort of resentment he held for himself not having made it, and projected onto me. I flunked out of the best university in my city/province, and imagine how angry he was that I ended up in a community college (to him, lack of prestige signal = trash). Its the same mindset/attitude that holds a sort of disdain for arts majors, any occupation that doesn't spell out long-term stability and financial capability. I also found myself not really respecting someone off the bat unless I saw that they went to a proper brand-name school on LinkedIn, and while I know its irrational, the feelings are still triggered. Its pretty unhealthy black-or-white thinking, which tends to make one judge and tyrannize oneself.
Imagine the rude awakening and cognitive dissonance I've had over the years as I've met people who barely went to school but were way better programmers than I am.
To add to this (as a Hong Kong native):
Hong Kong is definitely a weird, special case, having belonged to Britain until 1997 and basically most people growing up there on some level despise the mainland, communism, and the language. To this day there's a certain level of disdain and judgment against you if you speak Mandarin there, almost like you're branded as "the others".
It's also true that provinces with rich cultures far away from Beijing continue to have their local dialects thrive. This is very true of Guangdong and Sichuan/Chongqing (see Sichuan rap). Yunnan also is quite noted for having many minorities and dialects still being preserved. The same cannot be said for Shanghai, where the younger generation have been eager to adopt to just speaking Mandarin as the mainstream thing to do. I had a girlfriend from Wuhan, and she grew up listening to the dialect there but her parents never encouraged her to converse in it, so she only speaks Mandarin.
Well put, I definitely grew up with resentment of my parents ways, especially when all the cool kids around me were partying and having fun and they told me to go home for dinner, and I felt this really hampered my social skills which weren't given enough activation energy to blossom.
Great "advice" (on a deeper level) in this book - It's scary how many of these points frequently drift on you, such as rule 1: stand up straight with your shoulders back. Peterson also lays an interesting point - you should schedule your (ideal) day as much as possible because, after all, life is essentially made up of many, many days.