HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

shijie

482 karma · joined October 18, 2013

submissionscomments
shijie··on We finally learned to center a div, then browsers added sidebars
I'm fairly certain you just replied to the author
shijie··on Escapee pregnancy test frogs colonised Wales for 50 years (2019)
Not an inaccurate title, but very hard to parse!
shijie··on Ask HN: How to handle a senior hire turning out to be junior?
Irrationally, I always think that posts like this are about me in my own role at work. Thankfully, I’m not this out of my depth. My impostor syndrome has decreased by 6% today.
shijie··on Switch off bad TV settings
I recently went down the rabbit hole to find a dumb TV. It was surprisingly difficult. I ended up with a Sceptre 65 inch TV, to which I’ve plugged in a rooted, jailbroken Chromecast.

It’s been awesome. The TV is fast to boot up, responsive, doesn’t spy on me, and doesn’t need useless software updates.

shijie··on Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
Something I’ve learned as someone with high proficiency in another language that I learned in adulthood (I would never say fluent, maybe “functionally” fluent):

Poor pronunciation (I.e. thick accent) but good grammar is usually more forgiven by a native than great pronunciation but poor grammar. Because then you sound more native, but you sound a bit… mentally slow.

I am in the latter camp. My Mandarin Chinese accent is really quite good. But I sound like a child.

So my suggestion to all learning a new language: keep a bit of your accent and heavily index on correct grammar and vocab and listening skills.

shijie··on Elixir and Phoenix can do it all
In this context I meant “all but” == “everything except” i.e it is almost impossible. Are you saying it means the opposite of how I used it? I’m not certain what you mean.
shijie··on Elixir and Phoenix can do it all
This is untrue.

https://thinkingelixir.com/elixir-in-the-type-system-quadran....

shijie··on Elixir and Phoenix can do it all
The language is still strongly typed, and with the language being purely functional, I found myself not missing static typing nearly as much as I thought I would. Things just work, and they break during compilation if they don’t.

I will say that editor support for static languages is categorically better due to the language server being able to more completely reason about the state of your code. That’s the one drawback.

shijie··on Elixir and Phoenix can do it all
We’re experiencing this at my place of work. Our backend stack is Python, and coming from an Elixir/Phoenix background, adding a durable queue to our infrastructure should be trivial but because of the nature of Python, it is all but impossible to run the queue in the same codebase and application server.

Elixir and the BEAM make it so easy and pleasant to run extremely complicated infrastructure in the same codebase and in the same application context. Hard problems made easy.

I miss it.

shijie··on Doing laundry on campus without a phone
It tripped my “trying to hard to write eloquent, witty prose” senses. I proofread a lot of papers in college and wrote a lot of columns in the school newspaper. This is a common style. Thesaurus-driven word choice.
shijie··on Owl: A toolkit for writing command-line user interfaces in Elixir
It seems that every ShowHN that features an Elixir project is well-polished, has a sensical API, and has friendly, solid documentation. Is this a function of the nature of the language, the community, or a mix of both?
shijie··on No one wants to have kids anymore
As someone going through a horrible divorce, replete with custody fights and the whole nine yards, I’d still say that you’re thinking about this wrong.

I am the father of a three-year-old girl. I would go through my marriage a thousand times, complete with abuse and emotional trauma, if it meant I could get my daughter in the end.

I’ve found that happiness has never been found by endeavoring to avoid any and all potential suffering. I cannot control how my wife behaves. I can only control my reaction.

Find a partner that is emotionally resilient, calm under pressure, and has a desire to continually better themselves, then go for it. It may still end in divorce, but I promise you it will be worth it.

shijie··on A Mormon housewife turned a fake diary into an enormous best-seller
> Why does everyone leave out the important details??

Most people are more interested in a narrative than they are the truth.

shijie··on A/B testing gets misused to juice metrics in the short term
Not every critical or mean-spirited comment is bigotry. You got your fee-fees hurt because there’s probably some truth to the comment, even if it’s mean. Buck up, quit complaining, prove the parent comment wrong in your day-to-day work. Right now you’re just deepening a few MBA stereotypes at the moment.
shijie··on Kaketsugi – A technique for repairing holes or tears in fabric (2021) [video]
I’m not aware how prevalent this technique is in Japan, but here in the US it is totally unheard of. I watched the whole video. What an exquisite result. So impressive. It makes me realize the level to which some people dedicate toward their craft. I am not at the Katetsugi level of craftsmanship in my own profession, but this documentary inspires me to get there!
shijie··on Father who used a signal jammer to keep his kids offline at night faces jail
So for parents of phone-using-age kids, what is your tactic for healthily limiting screen time? Behavioral, technological, etc… As the father of a 2 1/2 year-old, I’d love to hear suggestions, even though this scenario for me is a few years down the road.
shijie··on Django, HTMX and Alpine.js: Modern websites, JavaScript optional
Yes, basically. Fun fact: Blazor and LiveView were developed independently, around the same time as each other! Just two similar implementations in disparate communities.
shijie··on Divorce does funny things
I’m going through this right now. I’ve done everything I could to try and save the marriage. My spouse is on the warpath. We have a 2 year-old daughter. I would be willing to work on myself and expect nothing in return for the rest of my life if it meant my daughter could go to the park with her mommy and daddy together. I cannot say the smallest part of how I feel. Unyielding personal torment and failure. Breaking up a family is truly lose-lose.
shijie··on I'm sorry
I was also struck with commenter’s swift label of her apology a “non-apology.” I’ve seen this on Twitter and elsewhere. It’s basically a proxy for “I don’t think you’ve suffered enough to be forgiven.” And that strikes me as honestly a little bit terrifying.
shijie··on 112 Gripes About the French
This just seems like a rather clever permutation of ad hominem.

“The reason I won’t refute your argument is that it is so incorrect that it would take me forever to explain why.”

shijie··on Social virtual spaces with Elixir at Mozilla
I have had a completely opposite experience during the last 5+ years as full-time Elixir dev, but I can empathize with running into a few scenarios where some library wasn't implemented in Elixir, or the library you want to use is no longer supported.

If you're looking for an "every feature I will ever need to implement has a library for it" experience a la Rails or JS, you might not be happy with Elixir (although we shall see what 5 more years does to the ecosystem).

I don't have problems wrapping a service's API and creating my own library every once in a while, if it means I don't have to trade off slapping together a 5+ service behemoth just to get a good concurrent queue working. This is where Elixir/OTP shines: the hard stuff is easy.

shijie··on Charts.css
Lowdefy looks great. I'm currently looking for something like Django Admin that isn't necessarily a part of Django (I'm an Elixir dev myself). Have you used Lowdefy extensively? Pros and cons? Limitations? Are you involved with the project itself?
shijie··on Ask HN: Always on low power home server
This is a great list of suggestions. Also, Halo CE is one of the greatest multiplayer games of all time. My friends and I still play Halo CE (NHE) on LAN all the time.
shijie··on Birdwatch Overview
I would say that with SO, amortized consensus is fine due to there being a "right" answer to a technical problem or question (more or less). Twitter deals mainly in the market of human opinion, which is necessarily far more nuanced with n sides to a story. This makes Twitter the arbiter of truth for their platform. Perfectly legal, as it's their platform, but I wouldn't expect a free exchange of ideas on such a platform.
shijie··on Elixir Is Erlang, not Ruby
As a daily user of Elixir since 2016, having come from a Python/Django background, I can assure you that you can know very little about OTP/Beam and still be immensely productive. But once you learn the underlying concepts that gird Elixir, so many solutions that normally require queues/caching/back pressure/state machines/distributive architectures are all possible with Elixir itself. I can say this honestly that Elixir is the most powerful I’ve ever felt as an engineer in any language.
shijie··on The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
Do you eat nose-to-tail? I hear a lot about people’s carnivore diets and they sound mostly like an “animal flesh diet,” which is lacking in myriad key micronutrients. It seems one would absolutely need to supplement animal flesh with kidney, liver, heart, etc... I’m curious to hear your experience.
shijie··on Fragile narrow laggy asynchronous mismatched pipes kill productivity
My thoughts exactly! As the Elixir code at my company continues to grow at a rapid rate, writing OTP services for everything has allowed me to never have to think about entire classes of bugs and edge cases simply by virtue of the patterns inherent in OTP and Elixir/Erlang.

Right tool for the right job.

shijie··on Vitamin D and Inflammation: Potential Implications for Severity of Covid-19
I’m surprised to hear that you believe this to be a myth. The only sources claiming this to be a myth seem to be popular news sites referencing each other in a circular fashion. Here’s a detailed study on the matter: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3312275/
shijie··on Much of the lockdown effect was not imposed by top-down fiat
Citing RationalWiki as your source doesn’t lend a great amount of credence to your argument. That section on Quillette sounds like it was written by an angry teenager. Maybe you could cite Wikipedia instead: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quillette which disagrees with your argument rather completely.
shijie··on Much of the lockdown effect was not imposed by top-down fiat
I would imagine Quillette, being a conservative-leaning publication, routinely disagrees with this person’s socio-political beliefs, so ad hominem must necessarily be used.
Page 1 of 4Next →