otras

What was your process for starting the book club and gathering the first group of people to gather?

Distributed Services with Go is a great learn-by-building book for distributed systems: https://pragprog.com/titles/tjgo/distributed-services-with-g...

> This book walks the reader through building a real-world software project (a self-contained, persistent event-stream service) from start to finish. There isn’t a book that walks through building a complete system like this in any language. This book introduces distributed systems practically, explaining the pieces that make up a distributed system and showing how they fit together.

> The newly discovered corpus was acquired by the Mexican government from a local family that wants to remain anonymous, but which were not collectors but rather traditional stewards of the cultural legacy of Culhuacan and Iztapalapa

It’s fascinating to imagine the journey of these books throughout the years. Kept in a basement somewhere? Passed down from generation to generation for safekeeping?

Reminds me of the Sarajevo Haggadah, surviving from the 1300s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarajevo_Haggadah

My usual recommendation is to be deliberate about time you’re setting aside for focusing. Like others said, a combination of blocked time on your calendar, closing Slack and email, a Pomodoro timer, and music (or white noise) through noise canceling headphones.

> Going offline on slack is probably not an option.

Out of curiosity, what makes you say this? What would happen if you were to close slack for an hour?

Presumably the source code for the gold master - “Gold Master Source Code” was written on the disk itself. The Imgur link is no more, but you can still see a preview image of it in the original Reddit post. Judging from the comments, it also sounds like the OP may have looked through the contents on a live stream and confirmed it was source code.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamecollecting/comments/640iem/foun...

I’m reminded of the time when a Reddit user bought a random box of Blizzard things on eBay and ended up finding a StarCraft gold master source code CD. Many people suggested sharing the code, but Blizzard lawyers reached out. Blizzard eventually gave them a bunch of swag after they returned it.

Would have been so interesting to see.

https://mashable.com/article/starcraft-source-disc

My top recommendations for understanding and improving how you learn are the Coursera course Learning how to Learn and the accompanying book, A Mind for Numbers. Absolute game changers for me, and many years later I continue to practice and leverage what I learned from them.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Mind_for_Numbers.html...

The Digit extraction methods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximations_of_%CF%80#Digit...) section still amazes me, that we can calculate the Nth digit without needing to calculate the digits before it.

Not weird at all — really glad it helped!

For many reasons, I recommend creating a brag doc like Julia Evans mentions here: https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/

It can help you keep track of what you've worked on. Got an interview coming up? Take a few minutes to review your brag doc and look at the largest/most complex/coolest sounding projects to refresh your memory. Combine that with the practice that other commenters have mentioned.

As another comment mentioned, there are a number of college courses that are available on line for free. Pick a subject area, then see if you can find the course websites for a few different universities' versions of the class. As a rough heuristic, just pick the top N CS schools in some ranking and google "<school> <topic>". If they don't have the videos, try the course site from previous years too (2020 is a good one for lectures being on Youtube).

For example, "cmu databases" leads to CMU's Intro to Database Systems, which has all lectures online: https://15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2022/ . "cmu advanced databases" leads to https://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2023/

> We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_de_Landa

I like the idea of setting aside time for yourself.

I don't like the idea of _everything_ being centered around career and money. I wonder if we'll see a shift away from this idea that everything needs to be hustle-optimized. That content probably doesn't do as well, though.

Side note, I find this LinkedIn style of one-or-two-sentences-per-paragraph grating.

I think the author could effectively use some of their two hour writing time to remove a few line breaks.

Also a great prop for your video call background.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/nyregion/power-broker-tv....

When I was trying to transition into tech and find my first Real Developer job, I found a job posting for a local startup in a Who is hiring? thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14242143) and reached out. They ended up taking a chance on me as a junior developer. It helped to kickstart the rest of my career in tech, and it absolutely changed my life.

Perfect example of the role luck can play. Glad I checked that thread that day.

I'm not familiar with Jekyll, but if I recall correctly it's very, very similar. I just happened to pick Hugo at the start and haven't revisited the decision since, as it's tangential to the actual writing.

For the combination of Hugo and GitHub Pages, images are pretty effortless as well. For example, for a post with a path of `content/posts/post-title.md`:

1. Add the image at `content/posts/post-title/image-name.png`

2. Add markdown that references it, like ``

3. Build and push to main, and then the image is available in minutes at `https://<host>/posts/post-title/image-name.png`

Part of the reason I use Hugo is because it's so low friction — the hard part is the writing (and writing consistently), and keeping everything else easy is key.

What are your goals for writing? You say both that you don't want to beat a platform algorithm, but you mention consistency being rewarded and wanting to reach a wider audience.

You can absolutely make up for infrequency with consistently high quality posts. The best example there is Bartosz Ciechanowski's blog: https://ciechanow.ski/archives

All of the above, but I'd say that in addition to those points, it's important to mention both luck and privilege. You don't really see self-taught stories describe these as often, especially if they're presenting a "the pull yourself up from the bootstraps and anyone can make it" narrative.

Realistically, both are involved. Being able to get by working a job (or two) that still allows you to have enough time and energy to study and learn outside of work. Lucking out with the job openings when you're searching — you can increase your luck surface area, but you still need fortunate timing. Networking with alums from your school. Even having been to college at all. Already living in an area with tech jobs. Knowing _anyone_ in the industry already.

There was an absolute _ton_ of hard work involved for my journey through, but there was luck and privilege involved as well. I think these aspects are important to include.

I’d recommend So You Want to Learn Physics… by Susan Rigetti: https://www.susanrigetti.com/physics

There was a great exchange on Twitter the other day. Someone had generated anime style images of “Yann LeCun at Bell Labs working on convolutional neural networks." Yann LeCun responded with a comment that Totoro was next, then Meta AI replied with joke action items to generate storyboards with AI and set up a meeting with the studio.

Studio Ghibli responded with a picture of the wolf from Princess Mononoke, displeased.

https://twitter.com/JP_GHIBLI/status/1573584657668444161?cxt...

I’d recommend these two pair programming videos of Andrew Gerrand and Brad Fitzpatrick working on Go related projects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rZ-JorHJEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG-UaBJXZ80

My mistake, left over from the ShareLaTeX -> Overleaf transition. Updated.

A LaTeX template for this style (from the last time this was posted): https://www.overleaf.com/read/cqscsqsqmskm

Ah OK, that makes more sense. I think my main confusion there is that getting twice as effective at spaced repetition doesn't seem to directly translate into learning more — as another comment mentioned, you're still learning the same number of flash cards in the second week, right? What really is the y-axis in the graphs?

> The post is arguing that you should do that AND spend a little bit of time doing spaced repetition, not to only do spaced repetition and nothing else.

From my perspective as a reader, I'm not sure I see either post discussing working through problems and applying your knowledge, but I do think the inclusion of that would make them both much stronger, especially since it seems like you've clearly thought about them from your comments! I do see the mention of reading + spaced repetition and the mention of memory helping math problems in the other post, but I'm not sure I see where you've explored what that active use and problem solving looks like (or how spaced repetition helps).

Again, I think this a great idea, and I don't mean to be negative for the sake of negative — you were asking for feedback on your post, and I figured I'd offer some :)

I'm glad this post looks at how we can get better at learning — it's an interesting area, and I think that meta "how does my brain work" is important to understand as part of the process.

I did want to give some feedback, though. I think this post suffers from too much hand-waving, which is what plagues most other posts about learning and spaced repetition (excluding probably just Gwern). For example, it compares flash cards and reading to just reading, citing the results of the study as a negative:

> This is however a very slow process. One study implies that in the best case it takes adults 10 years of reading 1 hour a day to get twice as effective at reading. Even if this is technically learning exponentially, the improvement rate is so slow that the process is indistinguishable from a linear one.

...

> We said in the best case it takes adults 10 years to get twice as effective reading. With spaced repetition it takes only days for your time to get twice as effective. These growth rates are completely different.

Maybe the rate of change of effectiveness of the reading is slow, but does that matter if you're accumulating knowledge from all of that reading, especially as it builds off of prior knowledge? I also don't think it's a 1:1 comparison to contrast these. It only takes days to get twice as effective at reading with spaced repetition? Or at learning? If it's the latter, I don't think that's what the earlier study measured?

The other thing that jumped out at me is the huge focus on spaced repetition and memory for learning, which are absolutely helpful, but there seems to be a lack of what constitutes memorizing versus understanding (and I'm not sure I see that in the Learning is Remembering post either). I think about other ways to build your understanding, like working through problems and applying the knowledge, that are key to learning. Much of learning physics is getting your hands dirty in the equations, and there's a big difference between knowing a formula and really understanding it in action.

I actually cheated and used the built-in recorder with an external mouse (I somehow had a USB->Lightning adapter on hand). You can then, in the Accessibility settings, enable an always visible cursor under Pointer Control, though Pointer Control is only visible _after_ you have the mouse plugged in. Ironic to have such iOS struggles for a post about iOS struggles...

Wow, this is great! I've been hoping for eInk with good refresh for years, and seeing it in action in your demo is very cool.

> The screen can refresh up to 30 times per second, this will degrade the eInk display rapidly. Do not use with fast changing content like videos.

Have you noticed the degraded display in your Kobo? I imagine it's not uniform across all pixels, since editing would mostly be localized to your cursor area (though scrolling and other actions would be wider). I'd also be interested in hearing what the timeline looked like for the quality drop, since it sounds like it's a function of the total number refreshes for each pixel.

I’m surprised by your tone and assumptions, and I think you may be misinterpreting what I wrote. If the author had gone through that process and included it, it would be a much more honest and accurate article. As it stands, the lack of any mention of the process makes the article shallow and overly “anyone can _easily_ do it”. I think an important part of representing switching into software is being realistic about the hard parts as well, and I found that lacking in the author’s story.

Source: I switched into CS and applied for jobs for 4 hours a day and went through all the coding challenges and interviews and rejections

The most important part is missing from the article: how they found and got accepted for the first job. The hardest part of switching isn’t attending the bootcamp, it’s finding a company that is willing to take a chance on your lack of experience and future growth potential. Doubly so for switching into the industry during Q3 of 2020 and fully remote. Did they get extremely lucky? Did they go to school with the hiring manager? Was it something in between?

Articles like this are appealing because they paint a rosy picture of easily jumping into it, but in reality, it’s usually much harder. Those details matter.