coder-3

Time is what's been preventing me from getting into DF. Do I need to spend a significant amount of time on this game to get a good experience? Could I get away with, say, one hour once in a while? I'd probably need to invest time upfront to learn the basics though.

Any predictions about where they'll move to? I'd be surprised if they start picking a set of different apps.

Get thicker paper

Getting a tech job with no degree or relevant work experience just requires you to have skills and proof of those skills. Keep improving your skills and strengthening your proof until you land a job. The only cost is time and effort.

My experience has been very different. People have been quite happy to chat about their experience using the product and the pain-points uncovered were consistent across users.

In a nutshell, what we did was email users asking for a 30-45 minute remote interview in exchange for $50 gift card. We started the meetings letting the user know that there are no wrong answers, that it's quite informal and they can leave at any time. We then spent the first half of the interview finding out who the user is, what they do and how they use the product. The second half was spent uncovering pain-points and maybe even asking users to share their screen and show us.

We'd take notes during the interviews and then once we've done a few we'll collate the notes at which point the improvements to make to the product would become obvious.

It's case-by-case. You can calculate whether ads are worth it for what you're selling by using cost per click, conversion rate and customer lifetime value.

My general sense is that paid ads is still valuable for niche markets as the ad will be cheaper and ad platforms allow quite specific targeting (they do gather huge amounts of data after all). It's probs too expensive for big competitive markets.

As an aside, it's quite risky to rely too much of paid ads as your business becomes subordinate to the whims of Google, Facebook etc.

Some advice on increasing your rate of improvement:

Practice

- have a 3 hour weekly practice session (minimum) outside of work. Won't do much for you in the beginning but it'll add up a lot over the years

- focus on the fundamentals related to the type of work you're doing

Reflection

- Identify what went wrong

- Identify the root cause

- Come up with a solution

- Implement the solution

- Identify what went right

- Come up with how you can further improve it or at least keep doing the right things

Feedback

- You can ask for feedback and advice about the areas of improvement you identified in your reflections

Concentrate

- When you work, make sure you're concentrated. Don't check IMs/email/socials

Interesting. Do you have a good source for this? Googling it is just the same (Chinese source) line repeated over and over:

> National Health and Family Planning Commission spokesman Mao Qunan said the agency’s work had reduced the number of births in China over the years by “400 million”.

Nothing much about the effect of the removal of the policy either.

Snowden has shown us that governments encourage and benefit from this surveillance thus are unlikely to put an end to it

Easy to game the system and offer credible bribes to yourself to collect the bonus. Just giving it some brief thought and it doesn't seem hard to make the chances of getting caught really low.

> powersnail "start with something smaller"

> iratewizard "Learn to be bored"

Spot on! And the final ingredient: build habits!

Atomic Habits (I know, I know) has some great techniques. The two I have used successfully are:

- Glue a new habit to the end of an existing habit (e.g. meditate after brushing your teeth)

- Set a time, day (and if required, location) for the task

One thing to remember when interpreting those stats is the popularity of a profession in general. Elementary and middle school teachers come up a lot because either there's a huge number of them or they disproportionately responded to the survey.

TIL UX designers are behavioural economists

The orgs with unecessarily complex and unecessary setups does not make sense though. Aren't the more experienced devs responsible for that? If so, shouldn't they have the wisdom to avoid those newbie pitfalls?

I do agree that writing is not _necessary_ to improve your thinking. However, I think that writing about a topic will often if not always improve your understanding of that topic as well as your ability to communicate it. I think that's because when writing about something you have to be slower, more deliberate and more structured than thinking about something in your head which helps you identify gaps in your understanding which you can easily miss when the idea is in your head.

I think the better way overall though is just to try different methods of thinking and do what works for you. I also think more than one method is almost always better than just using one.

It means doing things that you can do when you have 0 to a few users but that would not work beyond that. For example, Doordash validated their idea with posters and manually taking orders and delivering them themselves, no app, no drivers.

It is counterintuitive at first but when you think about it actually makes a lot of sense. When you're getting started you should focus on doing things to get started. Worry about scaling when you're scaling.

> inequality is primarily an urban phenomenon, arising from underlying social dynamics

I'd love for West to provide some corroborating evidence for that claim...

> obviously there are internal problems

Exactly. If 150 employees are not productive I hesitate to conclude that that's entirely the fault of the employees. Maybe it's not that those people are wholly unproductive, rather that they're culling the worst ones as a weird way of boosting productivity (also scares the others into working harder, I guess)

It is so interesting to see the CCP try to navigate the dichotomy between state planning and free markets. Trying to make diametrically opposed systems play together. I would even be rooting for them if it wasn't for the complete disregard for human life, personal liberties and all the fucking genocide...

There definitely is. However, we must remember that we are enjoying a standard of living unimaginable only a few hundred years ago. I think the system has some inherent flaws, but it has still served us extremely well.

> Does anyone know why this happens?

I think it's because of incentives. For-profit companies are incentivised to maximise profits. There might be resistance against doing so in unethical ways at the start but as the company grows it becomes harder to control until eventually it just does whatever is most profitable, limited only by laws (most of the time). Any CSR or ethical decision becomes a PR stunt to distract from the unethical behaviours.

A lot of not-for-profits also fall into this trap unfortunately as they try to maximise revenue or as they become bloated with administrators.

I think at the founder level - trying to start B-corps, keeping them small-mid and embedding ethics deeply into the culture is the way to go but that is quite different from startup culture.

My current method of learning new languages/frameworks is to read the theory (documentation/book) and write questions as I read. Then, I would try to apply the concept (exercise/project). The next day, I would start by reading the questions I wrote. If I know the answer, I just quickly answer it in my head and move on to the next question. If I don't know the answer, I would look it up. Also do add some sort of tally mark next to questions you have successfully answered so that you don't have to keep reading them each day as your list of questions grows (though it might be worth answering a few times to commit it to long term memory).

I think this incorporates spaced repetition and active recall well enough while not being entirely theoretical.

I'm no fan of the Chinese government but from what I'm gleaning online, they seem to be leading the charge with adoption of green technologies and are taking climate change relatively seriously.

Yeah, probably. But we need to be careful about higher order effects of those interventions. Climates and ecosystems are complex systems, thus, perturbations/linear solutions usually cause unexpected behaviour.

Things like desalination where we aren't disturbing the system is fine. Cloud seeding on the other hand I wouldn't be so comfortable with widespread adoption.

I was going to recommend the Zettelkasten method then realised you asked for something simple. But for others who are curious or don't mind a more involved system then I would recommend it. Works digitally as well.

Well, I'm rooting for you and hope that you get what you need from it!

Your more general enquiry seems to be around how to be more grateful and less neurotic and I think that mindfulness meditation should help improve those areas.

Being more mindful helps you become more self-aware. Thus, when you feel frustrated you are more likely to objectively notice the emotion which somehow makes it unravel.

As for the gratitude I don't know how mindfulness meditation helps with that but experientially (n=1) I can tell you that it does.

>Stop being disingenuous just so you can feed your persecution complex with strangers on the internet.

Hey mate, please remember the guidelines[0] when you comment.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

But to your point about Patrick Moore, he really isn't a credible authority on this matter at all. The positive effects of carbon dioxide are true for the most part. However, this does nothing to invalidate the mountain of negative effects that destabilising the climate currently has and will continue to worsen.

The lack of openness is transparency is precisely what causes "the masses" to distrust experts about these issues. In my opinion, just saying that 'this is the effect that we found, the current consensus is that the effect is minor but more research is needed' is a more honest and a more effective way of getting "the masses" on the side of truth.

Obsidian is just too great. They really focused on what matters deeply to the PKM crowd and found an elegant way to serve that need