snakey (u/snakey) - Readit News

snakey commented on Love being interrupted when my monitor asks me to accept user agreements twitter.com/snwy_me/statu... · Posted by u/h2odragon

rglullis · a year ago

I am seriously considering creating a dropship company focused exclusively on buying and selling electronic components that are sold for parts and people can assemble them at home, Ikea-style.

I would start with selling 50" and 65" inch "dumb" TVs. Just the panel, a nice enclosure and a board with an IR receiver, TV tuner and HDMI outputs. BYO top box and Soundbar. I wonder how fast it would take to get 10000 orders.

snakey · a year ago

I’ve also thought about this in quite some depth. I think people would be willing to pay a premium for simple, quality electronics.

I also think there could be a good opportunity to expand this to kitchen appliances too. Premium quality but really dumb. I would be a loyal customer

snakey commented on Use a work journal fev.al/posts/work-journal... · Posted by u/charles_f

huevosabio · a year ago

I like having a "devlog.md" file for each project/repo.

The log is jut a reverse chronological order of comments/todos/rants.

I have mapped on VSCode cmd+shift+I to write a timestamp. Whenever I want to write something I just insert a timestamp at the beginning of the bullet-point list and write it out. This is stored alongside the repo.

It is particularly useful for recovering in the morning where I was the night before.

snakey · a year ago

Along the same lines, I also find it useful to have a text log for each sizeable task I undertake. This could contain anything, notes of module structure, code & data snippets for testing, everything!

Like one of the top comments mentions, it acts as a node of knowledge within a wider system (graph) and I end up revisiting these logs more often than you would expect! It only gets better as you explore/document more and edges form.

snakey commented on Show HN: Anki/Duolingo-like app using educational YouTube videos platoedu.org... · Posted by u/kirill5pol

rollinDyno · 2 years ago

I've always wanted to do this for Wikipedia, it could even be a Wikimedia add-on.

However, I have recently transitioned towards becoming better at compiling information quickly rather than spending a chunk of my day memorizing facts that I am not quite sure will be useful.

snakey · 2 years ago

I’ve been doing something similar. If I read a blog post / paper, etc. where I learn a lot on a topic I’m interested in, I will catalogue a pdf of it in Obsidian with a tag and an optional note. This makes it easy to access information locally very quickly and I find I learn a lot more because if I forget something, I open up the resource, read the doc and, come out learning a little more. A kind of convoluted version of spaced-repetition but more passive learning.

Granted, I’m aware this probably won’t scale to many topics but a few years and hundreds of notes later, it’s still working well for me.

snakey commented on x86-64 Assembly Language Programming with Ubuntu (2022) egr.unlv.edu/~ed/x86.html... · Posted by u/generichuman

snakey · 2 years ago

Slightly off topic but does anyone have any recommendations for a similar style of book that focuses on ARM and/or RISC assembly programming?

snakey commented on Ask HN: Struggling to Find a LinkedIn Substitute? · Posted by u/okokwhatever

snakey · 2 years ago

There’s read.cv which is a network, portfolio and job posting site that’s more focused towards the design community. I have seen software dev jobs posted in there too.

I’ve also struggled to find an alternative to LinkedIn (which is unbearable at times). Maybe the way forward is for each community to have its own unique platform, like read.cv for the design community, another for games, embedded, etc.

Aside from that Hacker news who’s hiring has been the most useful in discovering opportunities for me personally although I realise this is focused mainly on technology roles.

https://read.cv/

snakey commented on We have used too many levels of abstractions unixsheikh.com/articles/w... · Posted by u/riidom

onetimeuse92304 · 2 years ago

I think there is one interesting angle to this problem.

I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge.

As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to the problems and logic behind all those new solutions. Understand how we come to have JavaScript and the browser mess we are in and so many other curious features of todays digital world.

I understand pretty much all of the layers of the computing from how CPUs achieve some of the things they are doing to bus protocols, to instructions, physical memory, low level OS internals, high level OS internals, virtual memory, userspace platform communication with OS, programming language runtimes and linking, shared libraries, IPC, networking, virtualization, etc.

The issue, as with any automation, is that new players on the scene (younger devs, devops, etc.) simply have no chance to learn the same things and go trough the same path.

For them, spending a decade working with a low level programming language before you jump into high level programming language is simply not an option.

We, people who really understand the technology that the world runs on, are a slowly dying breed. We are still here as tech leads, managers, directors, business owners. But there will be a point in time when we will go on retirement and there will be only precious few people who had perseverance to really understand all those things by diving into obscure, historical manuals.

snakey · 2 years ago

Excellent point. Giving my perspective as a relative newbie (~5 years) to the industry with no comp. sci. background.

It was around the year 3-4 mark that I decided to knuckle down and try to improve my fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, memory models, concurrency, CPU architecture and some network fundamentals) by reading popular papers and literature and writing all of my personal projects in C and C++. I’m about two years into this study and while it’s been immensely rewarding, I’ve found it to be a huge undertaking while juggling life and a full-time job.

What I’ve also noticed is that, while I understand a lot more about what the CPU is doing, memory manipulation and how to write more efficient programs, I haven’t found it be particularly beneficial to my daily work (still Python and JS). I would love to be able to put these concepts into practice for many hours of my working day but it’s difficult to move from general web-stack development to more performance-oriented development (embedded, low-latency, OS, etc.).

My guess is that this is one of the reasons we have ended up in this situation. You can get away without knowing the fundamentals (a good sign of progress?) and that if you really do want to pursue these areas that promote building this kind of knowledge as part of your career, the barrier to entry is quite high and the positions are fewer than say a decade or two ago. I find it a shame because in my eyes, these areas are the most interesting and exciting areas of programming. It’s an art.

snakey commented on Role of Algorithms matklad.github.io/2023/08... · Posted by u/GlobalFrying

angarg12 · 2 years ago

> Somewhat related, I noticed a surprising correlation between programming skills in the small, and programming skills in the large. You can solve a problem in five lines of code, or, if you try hard, in ten lines of code. If you consistently come up with concise solutions in the small, chances are large scale design will be simple as well.

Well, my anecdotal evidence doesn't support this.

I've done 500+ interviews for big tech, and often it is easy to spot people who have grinded leetcode. They excel at DSA, but fail at system design, or even low level design.

The thing is that overall I kind of agree with this article. Leetcode is great as a fun coding exercise. I also think they help the craft like katas help martial artist to practice.

The problem is when me getting the job depends on solving a coding puzzle. Sometimes I can solve a leetcode hard with ease and sometimes I get completely blocked in a medium one. Getting a job becomes more of a random toss than assessment of my skills. And yes, my company, and by extension me, are very guilty of this.

snakey · 2 years ago

> Getting a job becomes more of a random toss than assessment of my skills.

I’ve coined a term for this throughout my long job search, it’s called the “leetcode lottery” (patent pending).

You can do a couple of hundred leetcode problems, but you’re still at the mercy of the Gods when your technical interview comes around. The worst part of this whole charade is that I come out of most interviews having learned nothing valuable and I can say the same for the interviewer. They haven’t learned about my strengths and weaknesses, etc.

I don’t have a better solution for how you can get an idea of my knowledge and skills over 2-3 hours of technical interviews though. And until someone does come up with a better idea, we’re stuck playing this game.

snakey commented on Ask HN: How is Rust used in the Linux kernel today? · Posted by u/nequo

KingLancelot · 2 years ago

I hear that Akashi uses it for Apple Mx graphics drivers, but I’m not aware of any widespread real world use.

snakey · 2 years ago

They did! They wrote an excellent blog post about it too:

https://asahilinux.org/2022/11/tales-of-the-m1-gpu/

snakey commented on The Development of the C Language (1993) bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www... · Posted by u/gus_leonel

AnimalMuppet · 2 years ago

The best way to do it (if you can) is to get paid for making the change.

First, study C and/or Rust on your own. Maybe do a personal project or two.

Second, find something at work where Rust or C would bring some benefits. Tell your boss that you think this would work better in a language like Rust or C, and explain why. Volunteer to try to do it. (Note: Appearing too eager at this point might be a mistake.)

Do the second step a few times and you become the Rust/C expert. And you get paid as you do the work that helps you get better!

snakey · 2 years ago

Thanks so much for your advice! I agree, having the opportunity to use the language as part of your daily-work helps massively, and is one of the best but most difficult options to realize. I'm aware this will come with some sacrifices (pay reduction, longer hours to catch-up) which I'm willing to make while I become more competent.

As for the second point, that is a great suggestion. However, I'm very limited by my current working environment (regulation, corp. restrictions, etc.) so it becomes a little more difficult.

I believe I will just have to push very hard for option one and continue to study areas of interest in my spare time. I'm reading xv6: a simple, Unix-like teaching operating system which is helping me grasp some practical applications using C.

snakey commented on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2023) · Posted by u/whoishiring

snakey · 2 years ago

Location: London, U.K

Remote: Yes | Hybrid

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Typescript, React, (Learning C)

Dream role: I would love the opportunity to work with C (or Rust) in a professional setting. I think there are a lot of interesting problems that are being tackled in this space (audio processing, embedded, linux development and latency sensitive applications). I realize my experience is limited in this area but I hope that my current skills can bring value to your team (and business) while I build up confidence and competency. I'm hungry and always willing to learn. I enjoy working for smaller companies and teams :)

About: Currently working for a trading team in a large investment bank. Prior to that I worked across the web-stack for 3 years at a start-up. As of the last year I have found myself becoming increasingly interested in performance focused programming and I find great joy in learning how the fundamental components of our software works (think memory allocation, semantics, concurrency, os basics).