_xhok

REST has the same problem as object oriented programming. It's too skeuomorphic. Lots of web applications are wrappers around conceptually monolithic resources, so it's convenient to use a protocol that makes that assumption. But as soon as you need to nest resources, or perform some action that has nothing to do with CRUD, or do just about anything interesting, the metaphor begins to fall apart.

(That's also why OOP has all these "patterns." Many are just attempts to cope with the "object" metaphor falling apart. "Is" an AttackingRock a Monster, or "is" it an Obstacle? Hmm...)

Also, you can compile a Lumen file to JS/Lua by running `lumen -c file.l -o file.js`. More info at `lumen --help`.

This is wonderful. Thank you for sharing! I've been putting off a JS coding project for some interview, which I now think I'll write in Lumen. Another pleasant surprise: it was written by the HN moderators.

Have you used this in any substantial projects?

I used to be the same way.

Wake up at 5am, meditate, exercise, and shower before starting your day. Stop eating processed carbs and sugar. Get off the computer at 9pm and sleep at 10pm. Clean your room. Schedule sprints of work for yourself, drag yourself over to your chair, and force yourself to start typing anything. Talk to your friends more often. Set 1-3 large goals at the beginning of the day and explain to yourself why they're important.

There are lots of reasons you might be feeling this way, and it's different for everyone. Maybe you're disorganized, or you feel your work is too easy, or your health is bad. You'll have to find out which one it is by trying a lot of different things.

If after doing all this you still feel the same way, please seriously consider the very real possibility of clinical depression, and seek professional help.

CoderPad is really, really good. I've interviewed using a bunch of alternatives, and CoderPad is far and away the only one that works reliably all the time. It always cheers me up when a company tells me they're using it, because I know it won't lag, the vi keybindings will work, the built-in terminal will work, there won't be weird interface glitches, every language I need will be there, etc.

This sounds hyperbolic, but I've never wanted a feature during an interview and found CoderPad to lack it.

I used to tell myself I couldn't code or write without the perfect font. I'd spend hours looking for it, and end up not getting any work done. When I finally did get around to actually working, five minutes in and I'd forget about the font completely.

I have a (rather lazy) friend who's been asking me to help him start a blog for years now. I've promised to after he produces his first block of content, and he keeps saying he can't write if he doesn't feel the design is aesthetically pleasing. If he'd spent his time writing instead of worrying about this, he'd have a crappy initial draft, several revised drafts, and probably something decent by now. But no, that prohibitively unattractive font!

It was nice of iA to write this up, and design posts are a fun read, but does anyone who's busy actually writing care about this?

It's really important not to skip the math. As a friend once said to me, doing deep learning without understanding the math is like gambling. It's fine to initially take a more practical, project-based approach for the sake of staying motivated, and you'll retain things better if you have project goals in mind, but, the math is that important.

The good news is that compared to other technical fields, the math is also relatively shallow. Here are some good resources that you don't need more than calculus/linalg for (I've used all of them and they got me off the ground):

http://cs231n.stanford.edu/

http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/

http://course.fast.ai/

Once you feel confident, the Deep Learning book is more math-heavy, but it is really very good. The authors are more or less deep learning gods. It'll teach you a tremendous amount about how/why neural nets work and the principles used to discover new architectures, and gain a strong intuition for how to use neural nets as a tool. Read it slowly---unless you're already good at math, it takes a while to get through. Don't skip the first five chapters. Use Google and Wikipedia to pick up concepts you don't understand along the way instead of skipping over them (it will bite you later).

3Blue1Brown is a treasure. The production value is excellent, and he's great at taking seemingly uninteresting ideas and painting a beautiful picture to connect them in twenty minutes. I used to go through a video before falling asleep each night.

If someone does something wrong, Alice tells them plainly, and they get offended, whose fault is it? Some people say it's Alice' fault for offending; some say it's the person's fault for doing it wrong in the first place, and for subsequently getting offended.

I think we're conflating is and ought here. It's probably a fact of reality that most people aren't happy to be told they're wrong. But arguably people ought to accept the consequences of being wrong, e.g. feeling bad when they're told.

I've talked to lots of startups in San Francisco. Most are failing, just due to the nature of startups, but can survive if they reach a finite set of straightforward goals. They've found product/market fit, they know what they have to do, they just have to do it, and the correct 10,000 characters of code input into a computer would solve all their business problems. There's often a lot of handwringing about why they're failing: the process is wrong; communication is wrong; something or other. But the largest reason they're failing is that they're insufficiently good at technology. You know who'd be really good at fixing that? A team of Alices.

I think Alices get too much flak. Bob is genuinely a toxic character. But if your only fault is telling the truth, which offends people, and you're otherwise excellent at your job--- there's a huge opportunity for twenty Alices to get together, bypass the inefficiencies of being offended, and win big. Tech has an obvious historical example.

Edit: I reread the description of Alice. All right, maybe don't browbeat your point into others.

Am I the only one who finds the VSCode icon generally ugly as sin? This is most striking on OS X, where it sits in a tray alongside a bunch of other meticulously designed icons.

x is text editing style, y is efficiency.

That's fascinating. I'd lumped IDA in with e.g. Photoshop. Was wrong.

Did they ever retract their public freaking out?

It's expected that hobbyists will pirate it.

If jobs of all levels of difficulty are to be compensated the same, what then counts as a job? Would I be able to get paid for sitting around thinking?

It also sounds like you're basically proposing we give people free money. That could be a fine thing to do, but then why not give it out explicitly, instead of holding wages fixed?

I like how it takes them six paragraphs to say "VR is underperforming." I really need to learn how to speedread...

I think he means the unobfuscated code is proprietary.

This started out pretty good (and on the whole was fair and measured), but then at one point included this:

> Then you seem to make a giant leap from group differences between men and women on such measures as interest in people rather than things, or systematising versus empathising, to differences in men’s and women’s ability to code. At least that’s what you seem to be doing; you don’t quite say so.

Well, if he "doesn't quite say so," how do you know that's what he seems to be doing? If you analyze his essay without searching desperately for subtexts, and if you listen to his clarifications in his interviews, it's fairly clear he's talking about interest, not ability. Unfortunately much of the next seven paragraphs then consists of breaking down their presumed argument as if it were the one he made.

It wasn't until this memo that I realized how many people, when presented with a body of text, immediately start performing motive inference, subtext analysis, dogwhistle detection, etc.

What about first time entrepreneurs who want to become unicorns, or serial entrepreneurs who don't?

>recent years

>2004

:)

People say that most of coding is thinking, but I'm not sure that's even true, and even if it were, it's still possible if you typed faster and stayed in the flow you'd also end up thinking faster.

My friend used to type at 70 wpm in a regular editor. After failing some interviews because he couldn't work fast enough, he started doing http://keyhero.com and practicing vim keybindings half an hour a day. Now he types at 130 wpm, more than doubled the amount of code he writes a day, and won't shut up about it.

There's certainly nothing to lose by getting faster at typing/editing code.

I used bash/tmux/vim exclusively for development for about three years. The whole time I felt very pleased that I was minimizing bloat in my toolchain, understanding everything I used, and getting amazing speeds. Six months ago I switched to Visual Studio Code with vi keybindings. I found every benefit above, plus plugins for everything that just worked, an intuitive configuration system, and all the benefits of being an IDE instead of just a text editor. Some functionality is even faster: ctrl+p filename search, for example.

I've come to think that insisting on minimalist tooling is misguided once you have fast computers.

I like the idea, but that Python code doesn't look like "without much real work." The bash script is so much shorter.

If getting 30 days shaved off your sentence is such an appealing offer that an optional bargain involving sterilization is considered coercion, surely it's putting people in prison that's inhumane here?

Is it taking in raw pixels or reading from game memory? How did they gather data to train for this? (Did Valve give them an API?)

I imagine the knee-jerk outrage fizzled out after everyone realized they could just read/judge the source for themselves, and the quiet, thoughtful people who spent a couple days writing substantive articles are now finishing them. Also seeing the guy interview and realizing that he's just a socially awkward dude and not the Richard Spencer of misogyny.

To be clear, not stating the people thing as my own belief, just stating the premises of the argument. Grr, too late to edit now.

(I read your entire comment, but don't have anything meaningful to add on.)

I always enjoy reading your thoughtful comments on this topic.

What do you think about the indirect rebuttal to some of your points made here — http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... — in sections II and IV? It seems to respond to two arguments you've made: that (a) other countries having better representation of women in STEM shows that the issue is culturally determined; and that (b) the relative smallness of the gender gap in fields like law, math, and medicine contradicts the idea that women caring more about people than things would necessarily show up in aggregate career choices.

My totally unrigorous theory: you don't have to be obsessive to be a reasonably successful employee, but you probably do in order to have a $1b exit. Those people then set the culture, because a bunch of the next wave of ambitious 20 year olds now want a $1b exit just like them. Some people say this is a bad thing, but what can you do about it? Culturally devalue money/success? How?

People don't like impersonal explanations, but I haven't seen a theory on this subject that includes in its model the cultural residue trickling down from the ultimate ability of 23 year olds in our industry to become insanely rich.

This is the sort of convenient take on things that incites immediate curiosity. Forced to its conclusion, you're arguing that people who code for fun in their spare time don't see any substantial increase in their chances of success as an engineer at all. Do you think that's true?

I would agree with your original comment that you don't have to be obsessive, but without further substantial reasoning, xienze's position sounds like the more reasonable one here.