malort (u/malort) - Readit News

malort commented on 3blue1brown YouTube Bitcoin video taken down as copyright violation twitter.com/3blue1brown/s... · Posted by u/talonx

butlersean · 8 months ago

Unlike (say) French, English has no central authority determining correct or incorrect usage.

Anything literally goes.

malort · 8 months ago

Including, unfortunately, this usage of "literally."

malort commented on Many software companies are a joke liou28335.medium.com/many... · Posted by u/openplatypus

frank_nitti · 3 years ago

From what I understood, they are talking about the author’s complaint that he doesn’t get to spend 100% of his workday coding/testing/documenting. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the companies were poorly run - larger enterprises with more projects, teams and customers are going to require more meetings.

Maybe he worked at poorly managed companies, who knows. The fact that he was asked to participate in meetings instead of only being assigned purely code-related tasks isn’t very compelling evidence of a company being a “joke”.

malort · 3 years ago

> the author’s complaint that he doesn’t get to spend 100% of his workday coding/testing/documenting

The author's complaint was that he only gets to spend 12-25% of his time on these tasks on a good day.

malort commented on Insect Hotel en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ins... · Posted by u/keiferski

tomcam · 3 years ago

> Solitary bees and wasps

Makes me imagine middle-aged mail bees in their insect hotel late at night, watching too much bee porn and drinking too much naturally fermented blackberry wine, wondering where their lives have gone

malort · 3 years ago

Wishing he had chosen a path in life like most of his drone buddies who settled down, mated with a queen, had their genitals explode, and then died immediately after?

malort commented on Life advice from NYC chess hustlers annekadet.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/gautamcgoel

syspec · 3 years ago

How were they cheating? Moving pieces when you were not looking? Adding more time to their clock?

malort · 3 years ago

You can see a classic example here (around 2:20): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5vnpOp0U_g

malort commented on Ask HN: How do you get started as independent consultant or contractor · Posted by u/mr_o47

Haydos585x2 · 4 years ago

I started doing a lot of contracting through recruiters which could be anywhere from a few days work to 6-12 month longer contracts. This allowed me to meet a lot of different people in my industry/city and build a reputation as someone reliable. After that's done then it's a matter of growing those relationships and once the recruiter lock-in period ends you can start to approach them directly and offer your services. This can be either independent if you want or it could be with a team.

The most important thing in contracting is being reliable and showing up. So many contractors just don't show for work or leave before the signed end date so if you avoid that you're already ahead of the pack.

malort · 4 years ago

Can you elaborate on "contracting through recruiters"? Did you respond to recruiters who were reaching out to you with full-time positions and say "no thanks, but what about a contract instead?" If so, do you have any particular strategies for getting to a "yes" with that approach?

Or did you mean that you reached out to recruiters and worked out a finder's fee arrangement if they brought you contracts? If so, how did you find recruiters to work with who weren't already engaged with clients and might therefore have a conflict of interest?

malort commented on The Spacing Effect fs.blog/spacing-effect/... · Posted by u/durmonski

dceddia · 4 years ago

I’ve used flash cards with Anki in the past for memorizing the IPA symbols, Swedish words, and a few other things. It worked pretty well.

What I’ve realized recently while learning Rust (no Anki involved) is that, for me at least, new information needs something to “cling on” to. I wonder if this Spacing Effect is another facet of the same idea.

My process with Rust was to first read most of The Book [0], and after this I had a decent understanding and I _thought_ I’d be able to write some code. The I tried (and mostly fumbled) writing some code. But it turned out I couldn’t remember much of the syntax, nor the finer details of how the borrowing system worked. Most of the stuff I’d read hadn’t really stuck.

After some time coding I went back and reread parts of The Book that I was fuzzy on, and those things came into clearer focus, and I was able to get further with the code.

The cycle repeated itself a few times - first with basic syntax, then with how to specify generic types, then with various ways I tangled myself up with the borrow checker, then lifetimes, then how to write iterators. With each stage I needed the sum of my previous experience PLUS another visit to either The Book or Programming Rust or some other explanation. Reading it all up front wasn’t good enough; ingesting the info needed to come at the right time.

I’ve seen this a lot also with people learning to code (especially in the web dev world), where they’ll watch a whole course and then lament that they still can’t build anything on their own. I think it’s the same core issue: too much information-up-front with nothing for it to stick to.

0: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

malort · 4 years ago

The first versions of Anki (ca 2006) were based on spaced repetition algorithms developed for a piece of software called SuperMemo, which came out 21 years earlier in 1985 [0].

Piotr Wozniak, the author of SuperMemo, writes a lot about spaced repetition and memory in general. What you're describing are basically items 1 and 2 of his "Twenty rules of formulating knowledge" [1]: "Do not learn if you don't understand," and "Learn before you memorize." It's an extremely useful article if you're a heavy Anki user.

0: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_Algorithm:_30-year-lon...

1: https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru...

malort commented on Starting with microservices arnoldgalovics.com/truth-... · Posted by u/feross

scanr · 4 years ago

I have a theory that auto-wired Dependency Injection in a single DI container is partly to blame for monolith spaghetti. Once an app reaches a certain size and anything can depend on anything else, reasoning about the whole can become difficult.

I think there is value in wiring a monolith together in such a way that each course grained subcomponent exposes a constrained interface into the rest of the system (payments, orders, shipping, customers etc) before needing to break it into distributed micro-services.

Note: I quite like Dependency Injection, I just think the 1 giant bag of dependencies can lead to complexity at scale.

malort · 4 years ago

This is exactly what Shopify does with their monolithic Rails app [1]. I worked at a company with ~200 engineers that used the same general architecture and I really enjoyed it. We got a lot of the benefits (clear interfaces, teams able to work on their system without having to understand the whole platform, build optimization, etc) without any of the operational headaches that come with microservices.

[1]: https://shopify.engineering/shopify-monolith