honie

I was wondering if you would mind being a bit more specific about your criticism towards React and the JS community?

If you know React well, it seems like there are things that everyone can learn from or think about. Would you use vanilla JS or other frameworks and why?

I see where you are coming from, but I personally don't find the comment narcissistic: I read it the OP of the comment thinking out load, saying "ah! It's nice to know that I have thought about something similar, and someone made the effort to show that it works!".

Those were my reactions, too! The one thing that I want the most whenever I have to jump out of the CSS per-processor world and write regular CSS.

It is worth noting that in SASS you can already refer to parent elements as they have shown with the `@nest` rule (apologies if I misunderstood what you said and you already know this). I do prefer the more verbose `@nest` syntax though, as the intention is clearer.

I don't disagree with you on the potential financial burdens faced by PhD students but, in this case, and if I haven't missed anything, the infrastructural barrier is not high:

> All experi-ments use a single thread on a Macbook Pro with a 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-4960HQ processor. Unless stated otherwise, all timing results use five trials, with each trial reporting the fastest among 20 executions.

It may also be worth nothing that, even as a hobby, one can actually do a lot with modern hardware if you scope your project well. There is also a lot of free resources such as CoLab available to those who have very limited computing power at home/work.

Last but not least, there is also nothing stopping you from announcing your results on arXiv and, if you can be bothered (as a hobbyist), get it published in a peer-reviewed journal.

So if you still have ideas, I encourage you to go ahead and try them! :)

I think that may be a bit of an unfair statement. They do note just above in the public instances the following:

> Note: Use public instances at your own discretion. Maintainers of Whoogle do not personally validate the integrity of these instances, and popular public instances are more likely to be rate-limited or blocked.

Having tested with various search strings, the time to first search-result paint for the the first public instance [1] feels just as fast a Google.

[1] https://whoogle.sdf.org/

Maybe it was a different time and/or environment, but that couldn't be furthered from the truth according to my experience — even if I read that as a metaphorical door.

Many of the people I have worked for/with who are amazing in objectively measurable ways, including fame, appear to balance their open- and closed- door times well.

If you're just chasing after fame and want to work on what "everyone" thinks is important, then I don't disagree that keeping your door opened and getting "all kinds of interruptions" is likely the way to go.

Also anecdotally, the "forever-open-door" people I have worked with who are always talking about "important problems" to solve; have huge networks; and are hopping from collaboration to collaboration working on a completely different domain of expertise every other year: they seem important to the community but, often on closer inspection, they don't actually produce much that is of substance.

Edit: added "I don't disagree" for clarity.

Location: Sydney, Australia.

Remote: Preferred.

Willing to relocate: No — not at the moment. Would consider when the pandemic eases out.

Technologies (core): TypeScript/JavaScript, HTML, CSS, React, Node.js, Git.

Résumé/CV: Available upon request. For a slightly-outdated overview, and if you don't mind LinkedIn, please see [removed].

E-mail: [removed]

GitHub profile: [removed]

Personal website: [removed]

====================

Hello! I am looking for a junior software-engineering role. I have about 3 years of experience in full-stack web development and am particularly comfortable with JavaScript-based environments.

I prefer working in organisations that do not produce negative social impacts. I am looking for stability and would very much appreciate resources for personal development, ongoing interesting problems to solve, mentorship, and a pathway for growth.

====================

Other things of potential relevance:

  - I have basic knowledge of Python, some machine learning frameworks, and SQL. Currently learning Rust — just mentioning in case there is an off chance that I could learn on the job.
  - I have a background in chemistry and I recently did some applied machine learning work for about a year. For these reasons, I would happily work in data and/or research-related roles, too.
  - I am self-taught. I’m only noting this because some people prefer knowing that up-front. I don’t just “write code that works” and forget about it.
  - Honesty is important to me, and I expect that to be reciprocated.

Any feedback that is not job-offer related would also be very much appreciated! :)

Mn. :( By the time I found out about the 24-hour thing I couldn't edit my original post anymore, the Gist link that I included eventually include for an improved version was also a couple of levels down.

If you are still interested, it can be found here: https://gist.github.com/honmanyau/5680d1c7b823d454122a0275ba...

That's fair enough. We were lucky that hospital capacity wasn't much of a problem, but the lack of vaccination coverage together with a lot of... questionable strategies and mixed messages has done us in.

Given there are still a lot of unknowns with the virus, I still think we should all be more cautious. But it's just personal opinion at this point, so I don't want to dwell on that.

Maybe I'm missing your point: but wouldn't one be more concerned if there are more people vaccinated and the number of cases is higher?

Also, I was under the impression that the long-term effects of COVID isn't well understood yet, and that people who are vaccinated can still be carriers. If I'm not mistaken on both accounts, then everyone should be just as cautious until basically the majority of the population is vaccinated -- otherwise those who are vaccinated are basically just walking around infecting those who aren't since everyone has the guard down?

Edit: potentially abrasive choice of word.

I guess "big" and "tiny" are subjective.

My point still hasn't changed: that people who are saying that "we have X many cases in our city, your ~200 cases is nothing compared to ours" are perhaps over-trivialising the problems we are facing.

I'm not sure whether military intervention is right or not, but for everyone making comparisons based on absolute numbers, please note that the population in Sydney is tiny. If you take the lower population density into account, all of a sudden ~200 cases no longer appears to be a trivial number.

I see people constantly breaking lockdown restrictions outside of my window here. It's pretty damn frustrating for those who are obeying the restrictions.

No pressure at all! I could just... not think about it if I didn't want to. :p

I took another stab at it and this is what I ended up with: https://gist.github.com/honmanyau/5680d1c7b823d454122a0275ba...

It's now a Gist because I only realised later that the original note will be deleted after 24 hours.

There are now two mechanisms that persist data between sessions:

1. Auto-saving to localStorage every 5000 ms (adjustable as per the instructions). 2. Manual data saving/download implemented using an anchor element that triggers a download. We can now restore markdown by loading a downloaded file (in principle this should work for any plain text file).

One important thing to note here is that localStorage doesn't work in private browsing mode and its behaviour is not entirely consistent between browsers. So I wouldn't rely too much on it!

I was bored, here you go! A completely offline browser-based markdown editor!

https://notes.cx/ZkZNL9vFr

Edit: Updated styles. Clarified what it is.

I forgot to say that what you said is perfectly reasonable and not too different form my initial reaction. This is indeed very weird (but cool) science. :)

The title is not misleading, and the golden layer formed is metallic water and not any of the metals used -- where electrons are delocalised/shared between water molecules. They have strong evidence that the layer is indeed metallic water and not something else:

> Experiments at a synchrotron in Berlin confirmed that the gold reflections produced the signatures expected of metallic water.

In my opinion, the ingenious part of the experiment is the following part, and I'm glad that they were lucky enough to find the right conditions:

> The key to avoiding an explosion, Jungwirth says, was to find a window of time in which the diffusion of electrons was faster than the reaction between the water and the metals.

Edit: added "in my opinion".

> ... receiving sincere and well-expressed praise can feel as good as an unexpected windfall.

Going on a bit of a tangent: I think giving "sincere and well-expressed" criticisms is just as, if not more, important.

Some of the most profound lessons I have learnt in life come in the form of criticisms from people who don't know me well or at all. As far as I can tell they all have this in common: they are not afraid to be honest and they make sure that I know they are just looking out for me.

> The effects of the flattery were dramatic, with 79% of the participants offering to help with the event publicity, compared with only 46% of participants in a control group, who had not received the compliment.

In contrast, and somewhat related to the quote above, I feel that compliments are just short term "hacks" and, at least to me, don't really shape me in any meaningful way.

Thank you very much for taking the time to address my question! I feel that the system you already have at the moment actually works quite well, and investing the time to "speak directly with hiring managers/CEOs" is, I guess, something that most people don't do because it doesn't scale (?).

If nothing else:

> I don't want people like me getting jobs that cause suffering.

> I'd rather make 10x less money than compromise on the mission.

I feel that by saying those you have answered my questions already! :) It's quite possible that your answer is somewhere in there, too! All the best with it!

P.S. The "Why you shouldn't" section for the Pallet role is great. At least it makes me feel like it's a frank conversation about what both sides want.

I'm only asking because this looks like a great initiative, and it's something I care about: how do you plan to keep yourself accountable in the process?

I have seen a lot of job boards catering to various niches popping up in recently years, and they all eventually become just a regular job board that generates passive income for the creator without much curation.

I was wondering if someone could comment on the pronunciation of "q" in Chinese (Mandarin). From time to time the advice that "q" is pronounced as "ch" pops up. While I have no issues with "q" sounding like "ch" in "quan", but it bothers me that the "q" in "qian" sounds nothing like "ch" to me.

Thank you very much in advance!

Edit: added "but", "to me".

Yes, but that's not related to code example I gave, which produces a syntax error.

> The lowdown: you can copy and paste just about any website directly into your JavaScript code without modification and it won't break anything.

The following doesn't seem to be valid though. :( Am I missing something?

    https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Statements/label

    let a = 1;

I'm not sure what it is, but something about the colour palette used in the examples shown feels a bit off to my untrained eyes.

Is there actually a job market for pure UI designers? I often see UI as only a small part of job description that involves other non-art-related technical skills.

It feels like the market is already saturated with people who can do UI design and a lot more (or the other way around for that matter). I am glad that the author managed to find internship as a UI designer and I'm aware that the author plans "to extend into UX", but the emphasis on UI design as a career change for "traditional" artists sounds... dangerous.

Edit: removed confusing parenthetical.

> 8. Apologize for their mistakes.

I haven't read the post, and I think it it's fine if you decide to do that yourself in exchange for higher sales (assuming that there is a correlation).

But please don't expect someone you hire to do that. It's just not okay.

> Off topic - I like the template/theme used in this site. Initially thought it could be like Hugo or Jekyll theme, then couldn't find more details. After some time using it felt this is custom made site with all animations and all.

The site is indeed custom built on top of Next.js. You may be interested in this the "How I Built My Blog"[^1] article on the same site.

[^1] https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/how-i-built-my-blog

Absolutely this.

It feels like everyone either hasn't read the rest of the article, or conveniently ignored the "Mixing guided and unguided learning" section, then went on to cherry-pick quotes to trash the article. The irony...

The author does say that it's problematic, but the relevant paragraphs only say that they are unexpected and then mixed the discussion with what would or wouldn't be more natural.

The sentence you quoted is there to give context so I could give the example and the rest of the information. In retrospect, I probably should have used a quote. I apologise if you feel offended.

> It's the best introduction to these methods for the mathematically-minded that I've seen, in the sense that it gives quasi-rigorous justifications for a lot of claims, but at the same time doesn't get bogged down in rigor.

Agree! I remember that reference by heart exactly for that reason! :)

> They mention in the book that simultaneous updates with a checkboard are in fact OK.

Yes, the algorithms discussed in the reference were designed to do exactly that. However, and using the Wolff algorithm as an example, in a perfectly checkerboard at low temperature, a cluster would still not grow beyond beyond its confinement. So the initial iterations actually gets reduced to the single-flip Metropolis algorithm under these conditions, but would eventually break most of them and start updating large clusters every iteration. The only time where one would see only two states alternating is at when the simulation temperature approaches 0, where the cluster always covers the entire lattice.

I have only skimmed through the article but spent a bit of time on the "simultaneous update" part because it caught my eyes.

If I'm not mistaken the author made a mistake in assuming that it's okay not modifying the spins in the first pass and then doing the update in the second pass, which would cause the system to approach a strange equilibrium with that flips between two states.

For example, if you set the simulation temperature to well below that of the critical temperature of the system, a robust algorithm should eventually cause all of the spins align (to take the same sign).

Also, and if I'm not mistaken, the author may have misunderstood that these simulations show the evolution of a system over time -- I think they are meant to show the possible states that a system can be in under a set of conditions, trying to rationalise whether or not it's sensible that spins should or shouldn't is perhaps not quite the right approach.

The robustness of these algorithms are usually tested by carefully collecting many samples, and at different temperatures, and use them to estimate known properties of the systems. If an algorithm fails to estimate those quantities reasonably, then there is a good chance that it's not correctly implemented.

If you're interested in this topic, one paper that I can immediately remember and is easy to read is this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/9703179.pdf. The section on Wolff algorithm, in particular, should solve the "mystery" of the simultaneous update. Here is a demo I have played with a few years ago that has the Wolff algorithm correctly implemented: https://mattbierbaum.github.io/ising.js (make sure you change sweep skip to an odd number for simulations at lower temperatures).