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raldu

2,385 karma · joined August 16, 2012

digital artist.
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raldu··on Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)
This is a critique of the VC ecosystem based on a dichotomy of "inflated" versus "fundamental" value, with a CTA to hackers to "do something about it."

Here's one that better suits the title:

"Pricing Money: A beginner's guide to money, bonds, futures and swaps" (866 points)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36358754

raldu··on Being poor vs. being broke
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

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

It's one of the classic subjects in sociology,

https://oyc.yale.edu/sociology/socy-151/lecture-16

raldu··on Needy Programs
I miss the very calming, cold, solid, metal feeling of desktop software.

Log back in after a vacation, and everything's still there.

A window with "maybe" resizable panels and a menu, and that's it.

The Web used to be the "documents."

For a technology that's been built for documents, all the navigation, footer, and header of any modern app feel like a "hack" compared to elegance of what desktop used to be.

In an old-fashioned desktop application, anything that gets "synchronized" is by choice, and rather feels like magic.

In a web app, even the UI is not a given.

We are forced to stay logged to an "Massively Online Revenue Platform Generation" games, and it keeps getting disconnected, and is laggy.

So "Let's replace the Cloud with self-hosted alternatives," right? -- Good luck with added effort and complexity of config, maintenance, network, db, bugs, updates, and the pain of "admin accounts" in first setup.

We used to have the client and server functionality baked together in any major desktop software that used to connect to FTP, IRC, P2P, Mail, and to each other.

Today it's accounts... Accounts. It's accounts all the way "up."

We used to own the data, and the software.

Now it's full-scale surveillance and dispossession.

raldu··on Why Can't A.I. Manage My Emails?
> "Chatbots can pass the Turing test—but they can’t yet handle an office worker’s inbox."
raldu··on Becoming a compiler engineer
Interesting how titles alone has been getting the front page recently.
raldu··on Why is Zig so cool?
Titles get the headlines.
raldu··on The 512KB Club
So, “Let’s build carbon-titanium-foldable bicycles instead of bloated modern cars, and still get from A to B?”

How many mainstream online platform users care about the difference in KB in their experience, anyway?

The sites in the list are hobbyist clubs with a technical point of view, which wouldn’t make sense for a mass media outlet with millions of daily traffic, and real interdepartmental complexity and compliance issues to deal with.

raldu··on VIM Master
Back from when those screencasts were a thing,

http://vimcasts.org/episodes/

raldu··on I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file
I have came to the understanding that the things that we'd like to keep track of as "todos" are more like "issues," than specific and physical actions.

The "tasks" are only meant for the day, maybe drafted daily and be disposed of and forgotten in a post-it notes fashion.

The issues, then are more like a backlog of requirements, a call to duty, like "briefs on the mission."

The "issues" are the question; and neither todos, nor tasks are the answer.

It is robotic to compile and keep track of a set of "actions to be done" several days into the future, but those todo.txt's as a database can be treated as valuable asset, as a "documentation of scope," for a team-of-one, or many.

Hence the treatment of those not as "todos" as issues, with their shifting nature of requirements and many ways of resolution.

Such a database deserves reinventing because nothing else can be as tailored and as diamond-cut as the one that's been built by you.

raldu··on Sell yourself, sell your work
I’ve been expecting the article to be along the lines of “DON’T sell yourself, sell the WORK instead.”

But, no. It’s the good old “20 content, 80 delivery” advice.

> “But you still have to sell!”

No, We don’t.

Can we stop putting everything “on sale,” please? — Especially selling your … “self?”

raldu··on Beej's Guide to C Programming [pdf]
Help me understand what is so “great” about a writing style that reads like a couple of tech bros cracking jokes next to a water cooler, please?

That, “You” language spread all over the text to the point that I’ll almost take programming too personally!

The only missing overabundance in the text is that of memes and emojis in it’s style.

Is it oh-so-very “accessible?”

Is it a “very conversational” style?

Is it so-very “TLDR” over “RTFM?”

Is it a late-night talk show?

Is it the M&M’s of technical writing for distracted kids?

raldu··on Curl with Partial Files
Pausing and resuming downloads, and fetching bytes in splits would turn curl into a download manager like aria2.
raldu··on Yadm: Yet Another Dotfiles Manager
Can’t we stop naming things with “Yet Another,” yet?
raldu··on Launch HN: Journey (YC W21) – a better tool for selling software
> Think of it like a website that is specifically designed for a specific individual to take a specific action, which answers any questions or objections they may have.

OK that’s quite a philosophical description for a platform to conveniently share sales pitches.

raldu··on A URL Lengthener
And wouldn’t that be actually a feature!
raldu··on 96% of US users opt out of app tracking in iOS 14.5, analytics find
HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27075180
raldu··on For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off from All Human Contact (2013)
> ... , and though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had set foot on the moon, he adapted swiftly to the idea of satellites. The Lykovs had noticed them as early as the 1950s, when “the stars began to go quickly across the sky,” and Karp himself conceived a theory to explain this: “People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars.”
raldu··on The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
The best use case that I have found for an iPad for is that of a “personal computer,” that is, a computer that is entirely personal without any business.

Use the “Pro” laptop only for professional work and coding, and use the iPad only for anything else that falls into that “personal” categories of newsletters, mail, shopping, gaming, entertainment.

As a traveling remoter, that radical separation of two contexts has brought a great peace of mind.

You can surely sit back comfortably with your iPad for personal stuff, while work asks for you sitting seriously on a desk with your laptop: no blurry lines.

So in my opinion, that “curious” category that falls in-between “mobile” and “laptop” is nothing more than “personal computing” itself!

Isn’t it what that “revolution” has been all about, anyway?

raldu··on Generating a Java program with 90% less code
The infamous "FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition" relevant to the topic,

https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

raldu··on Run an Internet Speed Test from the Command Line
Run speed test with ssh and pv:

  $ yes | pv | ssh your_server "cat > /dev/null"
raldu··on Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning
Link to all game replays: https://deepmind.com/research/open-source/alphastar-resource...
raldu··on PySnooper: Never use print for debugging again
Check out byebug:

https://github.com/deivid-rodriguez/byebug

raldu··on Shane Parrish has become an unlikely guru for Wall Street
Same here. At first it was the unique "angle" that draw me. Then progressively it became repetitive.
raldu··on International Obfuscated C Code Contest – 2018 Winning Entries
Goals: http://www.ioccc.org/2018/rules.txt

Who Won?: http://www.ioccc.org/2018/whowon.html

Guidelines: http://www.ioccc.org/2018/guidelines.txt

raldu··on Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful x86 assembly code?
Check out these rather old examples for inspiration,

http://www.win32assembly.programminghorizon.com/source.html

raldu··on Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance
Exactly!

The social media platforms have effectively "devoured" and "engulfed" the very idea behind RSS in order to exploit the political economy of content publication, for monopoly.

When Google Reader has been shut down in 2013, it had left millions of loyal fans behind who had loved and used the platform over the years. There had been a strong disappointment, especially in communities like Reddit, HN and Slashdot. Reader platform still seems to have been missed even today [2].

Judging by the range of Google products that had got shut down along with the Reader [2] that time, it seems that it had been a strategic move to preserve their interests in rising social media and mobile market.

Google had failed to "build products that people love," by betraying what people loved.

With Google killing the Reader, Twitter shutting down support for RSS, AI having had started deciding what is most relevant for you, and feeds having buried behind giant walls of API interfaces,

Legacy of Aaron Swartz had been turned into "social media," the new television!

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/897hr1/i_made_mocku...

2: https://googleblog.blogspot.com.tr/2013/03/a-second-spring-o...

raldu··on Be likeable or get fired
I am surprised that most of the comments here are actually advocating for navigating Dilbert-style office politics as an effective way of "getting along."

There is clearly too much conformism and flawed communication flow in this organization, which is a failure of leadership, and not of somebody who is "actually doing what [he] was paid to do."

The team "criticisms" are to the person who is actually doing his job, instead of the ideas this person expresses, falling at the very bottom of "Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement."

If there is too much conformism, necessary conflict will be avoided and could not be utilized in a healthy way, leading to too much consensus resulting in "one-year old pull requests without review."

In such situation, leadership should have had created a secure context for the team to consider their gaps in process that produce results with reduced quality.

If a competent but "less socially aware" guy moves "too fast," why the team prefers to effectively mob this guy out of the organization, instead of just telling him to slow down?

No such context for constructive feedback, maybe?

This organization is just shooting itself from the foot.

Organizations that need to move fast cannot afford such conformism and dysfunctional communication.

raldu··on Flow chart of cognitive biases
Also check out:

http://coglode.com

raldu··on How I learned to program
Come up with the worst, most ridiculous and outrageous approaches possible for solving the problem and turn those "bad" ideas into "good" ones.

Beyond the straightforward approaches of chunking the problem to sub-problems or what have you, which you will apply anyway, sometimes a little brainstorming can surprisingly help you with that "spark."

raldu··on How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly (2006)
The same approach works in presentations as well.

By framing your speech as a series of key questions to be answered, your presentation feels more like a real "conversation," rather than just dumping some encyclopedic information in a textbook-like order.

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