lacampbell (u/lacampbell)

lacampbell commented on Ask HN: How is your mental health? · Posted by u/smithmayowa

BlameKaneda · 6 years ago

Contrary to what he thinks, I do believe I have improved since I began, albeit not to the level he wanted. The "should know X by now" quote has bothered me, though, where I have asked myself his question in my own head.

For the most part he seems okay around others, but there have been a few times where I think people have picked up on his attitude.

lacampbell · 6 years ago

Yeah sounds like it's his problem. Maybe he sucks at on-boarding, or maybe he's over-worked and it's easier to blame the underlings. Hope it doesn't mess with your head any more.

lacampbell commented on Ask HN: How is your mental health? · Posted by u/smithmayowa

BlameKaneda · 6 years ago

I started a new job in January and although it was all right at first, it wasn't until long when my boss and I started being at odds with one another. As early as three months in he said multiple times that I "should know how to X by know" and later on said that I "hadn't improved since I started."

I dreaded going into work everyday, primarily because of him. I started looking for a new job six months in and I'm still looking.

About a month ago I started working with a remote dev, and it's been like night and day. Not only is he incredibly patient with me, but we have a good rapport and I'm unafraid to ask him questions. While he does give me fair critiques (never harsh), he's also complimented my work which has been a huge bonus.

This new arrangement's supposed to be temporary, and I'm hoping I can work under the remote dev full-time. I'm dreading the possibility that I may work under my original boss again.

But for now, my mental health has improved ten-fold. My original boss still works in the same area as me, and although his presence still gives me some anxiety at least I don't have to converse with him.

lacampbell · 6 years ago

Criticisms often bother us when we suspect they might be true I find. Not at all saying that your boss was right, but a lot of people have 'imposter syndrome' so it can become a case of 'agh, my negative internal monologue has been confirmed by an outside source'.

Is your boss just a bit of a dick that a lot of people dislike? If other people like your work it's probably way more about him than you.

lacampbell commented on Ask HN: How is your mental health? · Posted by u/smithmayowa

lacampbell · 6 years ago

It's pretty good. Mainly in 'maintenance' mode, doing minor improvements. The whole stop letting stuff you can't change bother you and focus on what you can change. Common advice, but easier said than followed.

lacampbell commented on A new book on cannibalism in the 1921 Russian famine airmail.news/issues/2019-... · Posted by u/the-enemy

dang · 6 years ago

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're all the same, which makes them tedious and off topic, and they lead to flamewars, which we don't want.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

lacampbell · 6 years ago

What would an HN guidelines compliant post have looked like? Genuine question. This was an event that might have killed as many people as the holocaust, and someone said it was "well meaning". I thought I made a polite and non flamebaity response. Am I unable to disagree with that, or start a discussion about it? If I am, how would I do it?

lacampbell commented on C++ 20: The Core Language modernescpp.com/index.php... · Posted by u/juice_bus

lacampbell · 6 years ago

What are people using C++ for in 2019? Last time I used it was for a Qt desktop application of all things. I would imagine its main usage is in high performance or hardware constrained environments these days, but I'm curious what people are doing with it.

I do a lot of node.js programming, which uses C++ to write extensions, so here's hoping I rememeber it if/when I need to.

lacampbell commented on A new book on cannibalism in the 1921 Russian famine airmail.news/issues/2019-... · Posted by u/the-enemy

lacampbell · 6 years ago

It's interesting though how very well meaning utopian policies

The largest tragedy of the 21st century is that people still think these policies and these people were 'well-meaning' or 'it just went a bit wrong'. It seems that only when we defeat murderous totalitarians militarily that we understand them for what they are.

lacampbell · 6 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB4o5n2EGyA

Two times this video has been posted, and two times it's been flagged. Politician in center left UK party saying historys greatest mass murderer "did more good than harm".

lacampbell commented on A new book on cannibalism in the 1921 Russian famine airmail.news/issues/2019-... · Posted by u/the-enemy

lacampbell · 6 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB4o5n2EGyA

Here it is again. UK labour politician saying Mao did more good than harm. Why does this continually get flagged?

lacampbell commented on A new book on cannibalism in the 1921 Russian famine airmail.news/issues/2019-... · Posted by u/the-enemy

commandlinefan · 6 years ago

> still think these policies and these people were 'well-meaning'

It’s awfully hard to imagine that Mao actually was hoping that people would die, and that they would die en masse of starvation: even if he was strictly self-serving and heartless, he must have known in the back of his mind that huge populations of starving people are unpredictable and difficult to govern. The only way I can picture this taking place is that he (like all dictators) successfully instilled such fear in his direct reports that they never gave him bad news or challenged what he thought sounded like good ideas at the time.

lacampbell · 6 years ago

How do we know?

Remember the Nazis were brought before an international court. The CCP never had a Nuremberg.

lacampbell commented on Algebraic Structures: Things I wish someone had explained about FP jrsinclair.com/articles/2... · Posted by u/jrsinclair

tel · 6 years ago

That gets closer to the problem, but the solution is further away. You don't want to return "Functor" (which is like a vtable, the interface itself) but instead the thing itself which is implementing the Functor interface.

So you end up with

    interface Functor<A> {
        map<B>(f: (a: A) => A): Self<B>
    }

where `Self` needs to recognize that the type being defined to implement this interface has a "slot". This tends to make things tough.

lacampbell · 6 years ago

You've lost me. Returning an interface isn't returning a concrete thing. It's returning the thing that implements the interface

I'm a very low level functional programmer. I'm big on immutability, big on not using loops and instead using map/flatMap/filter/fold, I tend to roll my own either and option implementations when they don't exist because it's the tidiest way of handling errors I've come across, etc etc. But when it comes to stuff like functors I don't get what it's buying me. What interesting stuff can I do if I know that both an option and a list can be mapped over?

I really need to look more deeply into it at some stage. I might be missing out on some powerful tools. Or it might be a bunch of stuff that's theoretically interesting but practically useless.