I got so used to GIMP back in my Ubuntu Linux days that I don’t bother installing Photoshop or other image editor on my Mac.
Besides, Adobe is an ugly company with shady billing/retention tactics…
Readit NewsThat is a reason I only buy latest MacBooks to my team.
otar commented on A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work mertbulan.com/2025/01/26/... · Posted by u/mertbio
Mostly a bad advice.
It depends on what you mean by “good enough”. Most developers today aren’t particularly passionate about it, and certainly not obsessed, but the demand for them is high enough so they still are “good enough” to have relatively cushy jobs.
That's a good point, but it can also be that the employer is satisfied with the "good enough" results.
While it is true that the current high demand on a job market allows many to have "good enough" skills for employment, I would argue that passion, curiosity, and obsession are the driving forces that lead to better outcomes both for individuals and the industry as a whole. These qualities inspire deeper engagement and lead to more quality work. For routine tasks, basic competence might suffice. However, for solving complex problems, it won't...
Passion/curiosity/obsession often leads to voluntary, extensive practice and learning. This typically results in faster skill acquisition and a deeper understanding of the subject matter. While becoming competent without any of these is possible, the path is often slower and limited.
Also, both the tech industry and the job market are evolving rapidly. Passionate/curious/obsessed developers are more likely to keep up with new technologies and methodologies, potentially leading to better long-term career prospects and adaptability. The pace of change in our industry demands a continuous hunger for knowledge and a relentless pursuit of excellence.
In the end, if you don't want to be a mediocre developer with a mediocre career, such stuff matters.
> All joking aside, we fledgling mathematicians understood that the single most important thing was not raw intelligence or knowledge (Americans tend to lag behind in the latter compared to all international students). What mattered was passion. The way to become successful in mathematics, like almost every endeavor, is to care about it, to love it, to obsess over it.
This is the most important point from the article. My theory is that if you are not obsessed with something, you won’t be good enough with it, wether it’s a math, coding, business or something else… Thats how most of us got started in tech from the early ages.
otar commented on My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website naya.lol... · Posted by u/fintler
Awesome! I love seeing kids play around with code. Curiosity is very important at any age.
That’s how I started too. Back in the days of Internet Explorer, I used to click View -> Source and mess around with the HTML in Notepad. I’d change the content, blocks, colors...
About 25 years later, I’m still coding, but right now I’m deploying the data transformation pipeline (T in the ELT) on production server to calculate business KPIs.
otar commented on FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations ftc.gov/news-events/news/... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect
Long overdue
otar commented on Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014) agileotter.blogspot.com/2... · Posted by u/ingve
This is why domain knowledge is key. I work in finance, I've sat on trading desks looking at various exchanges, writing code to implement this or that strategy.
You can't think about what the computer should do if you don't know what the business should do.
From this perspective, it might make sense to train coders a bit like how we train translators. For example, I have a friend who is a translator. She speaks a bunch of languages, it's very impressive. She knows the grammar, idioms, and so on of a wide number of languages, and can pick up new ones like how you or I can pick up a new coding language.
But she also spent a significant amount of time learning about the pharmaceutical industry. Stuff about how that business works, what kinds of things they do, different things that interface with translation. So now she works translating medical documents.
Lawyers and accountants are another profession where you have a language gap. What I mean is, when you become a professional, you learn the language of your profession, and you learn how to talk in terms of the law, or accounting, or software. What I've always found is that the good professionals are the ones who can give you answers not in terms of their professional language, but in terms of business.
Particularly with lawyers, the ones who are less good will tell you every possible outcome, in legalese, leaving you to make a decision about which button to press. The good lawyers will say "yes, there's a bunch of minor things that could happen, but in practice every client in your positions does X, because they all have this business goal".
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As for his thought experiment, I recall a case from my first trading job. We had a trader who'd created a VBA module in Excel. It did some process for looking through stocks for targets to trade. No version control, just saved file on disk.
Our new recruit lands on the desk, and one day within a couple of weeks, he somehow deletes the whole VBA module and saves it. All gone, no backup, and IT can't do anything either.
Our trader colleague goes red. He calms down, but what can you do? You should have backups, and what are you doing with VBA anyway?
He sits down and types out the whole thing, as if he were a terminal screen from the 80s printing each character after the next.
Boom, done.
> This is why domain knowledge is key.
Very true. There’s a huge difference developing in a well known vs. new domain. My mantra is that you have to first be experienced in a domain to be able to craft a good solution.
Right now I am pouring most of my time in a fairly new domain, just to get an experience. I sit next to the domain experts (my decision) to quickly accumulate the needed knowledge.
I can't speak for the US since I don't live there although I admit it is a very big market...
In wine producing countries in general, and the US is one, one will encounter a lot of 'non tariff barriers to trade' (i.e., administrative challenges) that make the import of foreign wines difficult. To be frank, and despite the expense that you correctly underline, I can only imagine doing so with the help of an enthusiastic importer.
I know a retailer in Switzerland who would probably love to import Georgian wines (and many others, as long as they fit his taste) but the quantities would be so small to not even be worth your time.
Anyway, I do hope to visit Georgia one day and your cave.
Hey! Thanks again!
This leads us to another problem: you cannot easily sell niche products on a large market (Georgian wine and amber wine is one), mainstream customers want mainstream wines.
So, you are left with several options: 1) Do a mainstream wines - beyond my values; 2) Build a brand, which is very, very hard… 3) Do an exceptional wine, “so good they can’t ignore you”… that’s my long term goal. That’s why I am experimenting a lot, which I believe will lead me to a great results. Right now my wine could be ranked as top 5-10%, but my goal is to make it in top 1-2%. Check back in a few years :))
Fwiw I'm not switching from mullvad
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252366
So, login without mullvad, turn it on after that and it should work.