wayfarer2s

It's very different from what the article is concluding. Knuth's outcome was a "good life", not a "great life".

The premise doesn't hold up when you think about it. If to be great is to be good repeatably, then what does it mean to be great repeatably? Is that also great or do we need a new word?

Producing good work consistently means you are good overall. Being great means you produce great work consistently.

One of the linked articles in the piece contradicts the notion that consistently being good would lead to greatness. (Well a link to a tweet of images of the article -- https://autotranslucence.com/2018/03/30/becoming-a-magician/). That author argued that while they were consistently very good at body painting (top 5 in the world championships), they were not able to conceive how the 2016 winner produced the work they did in the same amount of time (6 hours). Even though they were improving incrementally, they were so far behind the winner's work that they couldn't wrap their head around what sorts of improvements they would need to add in order to reach the same level of competency. So it was not just a matter of being consistent. Their mental model was off.

That seems to fit reality and greatness more than the original article. A good mathematician does not simply reach the level of Terence Tao by being consistently good over time.

Isn’t cache invalidation the hardest part of the feed? Once a user with millions of followers tweets, doesn’t that essentially invalidate millions of caches? That doesn’t sound like a trivial problem.

WhatsApp and twitter’s latency calculations are on different things.

Twitter’s latency stems from calculating what tweets should show on a given request. Even if you try to show tweets from 1 minute ago, it’s hard to cache that stuff using traditional systems because of the fan out. If an account with 50 million followers tweets, you need to update 50 million timelines. How do you do that quickly?

And you would have to define maximum latency, is it seconds, minutes, hours? because you can’t have the timelines be inconsistent for too long as that leads to some people getting news faster than others.

I think affordable was implied by "state".

> This stuff is staggeringly, mind-wreckingly expensive for people who aren't in tech, and yet functionally required because of the structures we have allowed to be built.

Society has always worked this way. Those who have rare skills get paid the most. Supply and demand and what not. Universities are gateways to advanced skills, especially in traditional occupations where equipment is often expensive (medical, chemical, mechanical, etc). The reason you go to a university is so that you can get advanced skills in order to make an advanced salary. It makes no sense to go to a university by default and come out with a degree that doesn't teach you advanced skills that get you a high wage. If the jobs that your degree are going to get you aren't going to pay for what that degree cost you then you made a poor decision by taking on that debt.

This sort of thing is why I believe basic economics should be a hard requirement in high school. You shouldn't be able to get a high school diploma without understanding the mechanisms of debt/leverage. So many people have screwed themselves over because they don't understand that the only reason to ever take on debt is to use it as leverage so that you can earn even more than the debt you took on. Any other reason is foolish.

It's really sad when you think about it, so many people would be way better off if they knew the definition of leverage. Such a simple concept, yet so powerful (it's funny how knowing about leverage gives one so much leverage in life).

> I'm graduating with my master's in CS now and still haven't been taught in class many of the things I had to figure out to make what I wanted to make.

Maybe the fact that you figured it out is an indication that it doesn't have to be taught in a CS curriculum. Most of the things that you mentioned have great documentation and tutorials outside of the classroom. The fact that so many people use them without them being taught in schools should be proof enough. I think the current situation makes sense -- Computer Science education should focus on teaching the fundamentals of algorithms, data structures, discrete math and how to think conceptually about problems without regard to implementation. By learning about data structures and the like, you indirectly learn how best to use memory, redis, MySQL, write servers and whatever else.

I'm surprised the author's takeaway from the Joyce quote was disillusionment. He's actually quite close to the secret sauce. I don't think writing more code and ending up with less code are at odds. In fact, I think you need to write more code to end up with less. You write more code in order to understand the problem space. Once you understand the problem space, you can then refactor everything that you wrote into more concise code that more accurately reflects the problem.

James Joyce wrote Ulysses at the rate of a hundred words per day if you only consider the finished product. However, I doubt every word that Joyce wrote ended up in Ulysses. I'm sure he did quite a lot of cutting and rewriting.

The takeaway from me from the two quoted stories was that quality and quantity are not at odds, but instead are the yin and yang of productivity. They reinforce each other. The more things you produce, the more patterns you are exposed to which in turn leads to higher quality since experience leads to efficiency, giving you more time to get things right.

I think I get it, but I'd suggest sticking with the same example when explaining the confrontational aspect of it. When you switch contexts it makes it hard to imagine the inverse. If you don't mind, can you explain the confrontation aspect in the context of getting onto the rollercoaster?

> Depriving people of their livelihood for expressing political views is absolutely a free speech issue.

I don't think free speech is the issue here. There's a difference between expressing your views on your own time and involving the company that you work for to adopt those views. We've all seen the disclaimers that people put on their twitter profiles and blogs distancing their personal views from the companies they work for. Such a disclaimer was not issued here. Colin involved the 49ers Franchise and the NFL in his political views. He used their broadcasts to send out his message. Not all the owners necessarily sympathized with his views, especially when it started bringing negative attention to their business. In that regard, I don't think it's all that surprising that it cost him his job.

Note also that there are plenty of current NFL players who express the same sentiments as Colin on social media and in interviews, and they still have their jobs.

Audio books help a lot. It makes reading a more passive activity that you can do while doing other things that are less taxing on the mind. If you have a long commute and you can knock off quite a few books just going back and forth to work. My commute is around 30 minutes, which means I can listen to at least 5 hours of audio each week. I also tend to listen to audio books while doing chores -- tending the yard, cleaning the garage, cleaning the house, buying groceries, etc.

Most nonfiction books tend to be around 8-9 hours so you can usually finish one book a week, maybe 2 or 3 if you listen at 1.5x. If it's scientifically backed with a lot of studies and arguments, then it's closer to 15-18 hours. Novels are all over the place, from a short 4 hours to epic 50 hours books. But since it's all passive, it becomes less about finishing because it's easy reading. You'll finish it eventually.

Audio books are also great in the sense that they save my eyes for things that I can't listen to passively, like technical or mathematical books.

> valid certificate trusted by a fake CA

I don't think that's possible. A fake CA can't issue out valid certificates because you wouldn't trust their certs to begin with -- it's all about trust and if you know they are a fake CA, then you would never trust them or anything they issue. It's like if a known counterfeiter claims to be selling legit products, you probably wouldn't trust them.

> Something that was previously complicated enough to consider a product may now be trivial enough to become a feature.

Mp3 players for example.

I was thinking the same thing about those sortBy code snippets. I use shorthand for lambdas all the time because the individual item names are implied by the collection.

> when you actually want to know when the component was put into the DOM

You can use componentDidMount for that and its semantics are still the same.

Oh that sucks..How about "yarnish"? It's available on npm, sticks to your roots, and you can play on varnish if you like. Or you can always go the thesaurus route and use fleece, wool, cotton fiber, flaxen thread...

Another pro for wireless is that you get more space inside the phone, which means more room for chips, batteries, etc. And you have to consider things like headphone jack make it harder for your phone to be waterproof since that's one more place you have to figure out how to seal.

Honestly I'm glad they're moving towards wireless. I replace way more headphones than I care to admit just from them wearing out with normal use. It's usually just the wire itself that is worn out, the earpieces are almost always in good condition. The only thing I worry about is losing the AirPods, but they seem like a step in the right direction.

It might look more familiar, but it's not better than JSX. It gets really tedious to write the pure JavaScript versions of components especially when specifying lots of attributes and nested components. It's also hard to follow. Everyone I've worked with on React projects has had similar initial reactions, it just looks weird to have html inside JS. But try it out first, I'm sure you'll grow accustomed to writing JSX and the tooling built around it.

That's an easy one, just have to restate it differently and it works: (not dead) == alive. So, is there any evidence that you are alive? Well, yes, there is.

Unfortunately, proving that you are "not (not Satoshi)", doesn't prove that you are. The negative space is not one to one, but one to many.

That seems like it would take longer than just manually labeling the things to begin with, especially with edge cases (what happens when there are 2 items in the picture? how do you handle mislabeling?).

I think you are right in that other inputs are needed to decipher meaning. Humans for example tend to have quite a lot of different sources of input -- as when we are children and learning new words we have the spelling (visual), how it sounds (auditory), and possibly another image that shows what the thing means ("cat"). Or maybe we have the auditory ("mommy") and the visual (the child's mother). If you were trained strictly on text, then the meaning of concepts is harder to decipher. It might be why abstract concepts like higher level math are hard for a lot of people to grasp -- their only exposure to the concepts is usually just in the form of text.

As an exercise, when I think of the word "circle", images of circles and spheres show up in my head. Also the equation of a circle. My quick definition of it would be "a perfectly round object" which leads to questions of what "round" and "perfect" mean. The more I think about it, all my knowledge seems quite circular in that there are no axiomatic concepts, everything is relative and it just builds on itself. I wonder if that's the key to decipher meaning, increase the connections of the web -- with strong enough references you can pinpoint which of the nodes in the web something refers to.

Actually no, in most professional leagues the rookie of the year/season award is handed out to the best rookie whether that rookie performed below, above, or at the same level as their more experienced peers. They are graded only against other rookies.

Competition is a tricky concept. If there is competition, that can be seen as verification of the concept, but at the same time it offers valid counterpoints. If there is no competition, it might be because the idea is so hard that nobody else has figured it out or so unpromising that everyone else dismissed it.

What role does competition play in your evaluation of a startup?

An initial config object would probably be ideal, and then you could have the chaining to supplement those values. You could have the initial method take in the config and use the values in that in place of the defaults. So

  textures.circles()
    .radius(4)
    .fill("transparent")
    .strokeWidth(2);

could initially be

  var circles = textures.circles({
    radius: 4,
    fill: "transparent",
    strokeWidth: 2 
  });

and later updated to be

  circles.strokeWidth( 1 );

Which works rather nicely especially when the config object is generated dynamically.

A bus station is also where a bus starts. Ditto for trains and train stations. ;)

It sounds like you lack confidence. Which is not a "bad" thing. It's a completely understandable state to be in. You could probably do well with having a buddy or partner who supports your projects and builds up your confidence.

Know that when undertaking anything ambitious, the feelings of uncertainty you are having are par for the course. It's only natural to question whether you are worthy of even attempting such a grand idea. And it's only natural to try and set a safety net for yourself with "best practices", but if you are aiming high enough, safety nets aren't gonna save you anyway...

At some point, you have to venture out on your own and do things that tutorials and textbooks don't cover. A lot of great software was written in shit languages with shit computers in shit conditions, just because that's what those people knew. All those "best practices" you mentioned are relatively new, but think of all the great stuff that people had already created yet had no idea those concepts even existed. At the end of the day, you have to learn to fight with what you have because you're the important piece of the puzzle not the tools.

But as I said before, it's a very natural feeling to have. Some of my favorite quotes on the topic are:

  In large-scale strategy, people are always 
  under the impression that the enemy is strong, 
  and so tend to become cautious. But if you have 
  good soldiers, and if you understand the principles 
  of strategy, and if you know how to beat the enemy, 
  there is nothing to worry about.
      - Miyamoto Musashi

  There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, 
  no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to 
  follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own 
  mistakes; people learn only by error.
      - William Faulkner

  The good artist believes that nobody is good enough 
  to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No 
  matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants 
  to beat him.
      - William Faulkner

Well, since it was pg's idea, I'd guess "hacker" would slant more towards MIT-style hacks than anything to do with the valley.

I think the lack of Vint Cerf stories has more to do with the temporal nature of news than any biases that people might have. I'd chalk it up to him just not making news lately. Any text on the history of the Internet, TCP/IP, and networks in general liberally mentions him.