nkangoh

Thought: Why would anyone use this when they could use Anki for free?

Honestly? Just practice a lot and get people who have some familiarity with Software Engineering/Computer Science to interview you. It's also important that you ask those people to not take it easy on you.

The initial discomfort is necessary if you want to get better at this.

Excellent website. What did you use for the front-end, is it based off a template? It looks great!

What exactly is wrong with using notepad to code? No syntax highlighting?

I've read quite a bit on standing desks and I'm curious if there is any study/research that shows, experimentally, that it's actually [standing] that leads to some of the proposed benefits. I only ask because I wonder if simply exercising while sitting [1] or in general [2] lead to the same benefits or if the very sedentary nature of the circumstances surrounding sitting that lead to these poor outcomes (which then are solved by standing).

[1] http://www.amazon.com/FitDesk-v2-0-Desk-Exercise-Massage/dp/...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B1VDNQA/ref=psdc_3407781_t3_B00C...

EDIT: Forgot to mention, when I say exercising, I mean during the same time where you would be sitting (e.g. during work, continuously)

I've been doing some heavy investigation to how (and where) I should start my career in terms of maximizing learning. I have friends who will be working at Microsoft, and other friends who criticize said 'Microsoft' friends, saying that they won't learn much. Others say you learn the [most] at big companies, and a small minority say that start-ups are the way to go when you're early in your career.

I wonder what advice Jessica (and the HN community) would have for people like me, as I imagine there are a lot of people like me visiting HN.

This is slightly off topic, but why aren't folding bikes or scooters more popular? Their folding mechanism allows you to take them with you which would presumably prevent theft more than a lock. If a bike lock is the only thing that's keeping your bike from being stolen it doesn't seem like it'll work more than it just delays the inevitable.

Plus aren't locks really inconvenient to carry around with you? 10+ pounds is a lot when your bike is only 20lbs.

I find this paragraph interesting:

"From the outside, it might have looked like I was crazy to feel this way. I had graduated from Stanford, I had a CS degree, and I knew how to play the startup game. In college I had started an ed-tech company, ClassOwl, that raised nearly a million in seed funding."

Pardon my ignorance, but if a startup is a game, wouldn't knowing how to play be knowing how to win, i.e. an exit? I feel like getting venture capital would be the equivalent of prolonging the game, which is a +0 type of action. Is raising money really "playing?" From what I've read raising money just results in needing to raise more money.

I would be interested to hear the opinions (or more accurately, experiences) of developers regarding "practice." I'm beginning my career as a software engineer this summer and I would like to become an "excellent" engineer. Employable, of course, but also the go-to for knowledge in a subset of computer science (let's say natural language processing, for example).

Given I have a very long life (hopefully) ahead of me, what would you say is the best way to do this? Yes, coding is good, but is it the best way? I spend a large amount of time doing side projects, but eventually I'll have a family and other obligations, so I would need higher impact, less time consuming practicing options.

An example of this I guess is how many expert violinists actually "practice" for a surprisingly small amount of time because the practice is so deliberate. What's the equivalent for us?

I once had a conversation with someone who described themselves as "rich." They claimed the poor had it easy. I asked him: "If the poor have it so easy, would you switch places?"

There was silence.

Do the poor not have to pay for things that the rich have to pay for? Yes. Is their life ultimately easier as a result? I don't think so. Coming from a poor background and now having experience with the average software engineer's salary, I'd rather have the latter, 100%.

The mentioned book really talks about how Korea, China (and Hong Kong) along with some European countries do education much differently.

I REALLY wish teaching was as prestigious as say, being a doctor, or investment banker. I read a very interesting [1] book on this and it really just opened my eyes regarding the mediocrity of teaching (not quality per say, but as a profession, which eventually leads to poor education).

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Smartest-Kids-World-They-That/dp/14516...

It's really nice to see there are others from a C.C. background. For some reason I thought I was the only one (coming into this community I thought everyone went to Stanford, CMU, MIT, etc).

That would only be true if community college were an equivalent alternative. Unfortunately it is not.

Unless you care about education for education's sake and nothing of jobs or career prospects, then a well motivated individual could learn a ton at a community college.

I went to community college and transferred into an excellent, top 5 (according to some rankings anyway) school. I would say that most people in community college don't really want to be there. Many of the students that I started with are still there (3 years later), and will likely not graduate nor transfer.

From my experience I still think the education problem needs to be solved in K-6th grade. I believe my successful transition from community college to a university was the result of excellent classmates who I joined in middle and high school (many of them went to schools like Yale or MIT so perhaps there was some sort of exposure effect) and/or very encouraging community college teachers/professors. Personally I found community college professors to be way more invested (on the upper end, anyway) then my high school teachers, and I went to a pretty good high school.

The reason it should start at K-6th grade is because so many people lack solid foundations. There are people in community college who are not good at algebra. These fundamentals need to be well taught. In addition, kids need to learn how to teach themselves and also need to be properly motivated, but not coddled.

Increasing the pay of teachers and making teaching as a profession more prestigious and rigorous will solve the K-6th grade education problem, which will help with education as a whole.

Oh, and we should do something about poverty (because let's face it, if you're poor and in a terrible neighborhood, the odds are against you. I know, because I was that person).

A friend of mine has been trying to get me to learn awk, sed, perl or grep. Honestly I only have the patience for one at the moment, which do you think is the best (taking the ease of learning into account)?

Though I agree that in many situations it is anti-competitive, I think it would be difficult to tell someone who has a small data to work with that you're going to take away their currently free access to Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.

You built a beautiful project and task management tool, make a post about it, yet fail to show us what it is (e.g. link)? That's pretty much your problem right there. You need to advertise the service.

Anyone watch Black Mirror? Remember 15 Million Merits? Heh...

Agreed. I also had a Yuneec E-go and realized that electric skateboards, despite their low weight, are very annoying to carry around. I'm personally waiting around for a good electric kick-scooter or small foldable electric bike. Mainly because it's easy to travel with it, e.g. you just roll it around.

Just a question: why should your friends want to work on side projects? Or, why do you believe your friends should want to work on side projects?

Do you really think that acquihires are becoming the default failure mode? What about all of the startups that fail silently? I'm seeing some selection bias here.

Is it really a good idea to undervalue yourself like this? I feel like problems that "matter" couldn't be solved by a single person in a single day (or even a few days), otherwise they would have already been solved.

Just a thought.

What do you mean by "write a shell script to build and demo it"? Pardon my ignorance.

This is true, but it's also possible that the very treatment that supposedly decreases cancer deaths also decreases the "other illnesses" such that the distance between the cancer death and other illness death is constant. In this case, lifespans could increase and still result in other illnesses killing more than cancer in spite of increased life expectancies.

Either way, we are living longer though.

It's very difficult to say if this is good news or not. Is it not possible that people are actually dying from other things that have actually increased since 1991 that occur before cancer? In other words, couldn't the other illnesses that occur before cancer explain this decrease if those have been increasing?