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shime

172 karma · joined August 16, 2013

https://shime.sh
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shime··on Ask HN: What are your favorite Essays/Longform blogposts
I find older essays much better than contemporary ones, which is why I currently read Chesterton, Emerson and Montaigne the most. Thanks for this, I'll explore other writers from your list.
shime··on Ask HN: What are your favorite Essays/Longform blogposts
Yes, this is also possible with Matter. No need to jailbreak.
shime··on Ask HN: Books recommendations on developing critical thinking?
I don't think so. Bad books, like "The Secret" or "Think and Grow Rich" should be avoided if you want to develop your critical thinking.
shime··on Ask HN: Replacement for Stack Overflow jobs section?
I second this, at least when compared with StackOverflow, Angel List and WeWorkRemotely.
shime··on Gains I'm seeing from my second brain tool
> So you write it out and realize 90% isn't not worth saying to anyone.

Probably one of the biggest advantages of keeping a journal. I don't have to bore anyone else with my shit.

shime··on Gains I'm seeing from my second brain tool
For what it's worth, Roam team has just recently added end-to-end encryption option for graphs.

I'm a Roam user, although I've tried Obsidian, Bear, Zettlr and vimwiki. I keep coming back to Roam because I find thinking in blocks suits me better than thinking in documents.

shime··on Prime Video Uses WebAssembly
Do they even employ UI/UX designers? AWS dashboard doesn't look designed to me.
shime··on I’m busy wasting my time
Great advice. Just walking every day does wonders for my mood.
shime··on Ask HN: Share your experience of pay raise
If it's less than 10% a year, I start looking for a new client. My highest pay raises have always come from switching to a new client.
shime··on Ask HN: How do you get out of a rut?
I know exactly what you are talking about. After following Ultraworking Lights [1] for a couple of months, everything started feeling mechanical for me. So, I've stopped doing it and instead started doing anything I just feel like doing each day. Which comes with its own set of problems.

[1]: https://www.ultraworking.com/lights

shime··on Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web?
I think this is the effect of various companies trying to capture as much of our attention as possible because it makes sense for their bottom line. We are all victims of recency bias, so it makes sense for companies to prioritize more recent content. If it wasn't the case, the various social media apps wouldn't be as addictive as they are.

I am not aware of a social media app feed that puts quality above recency (not counting the plugins that enable that, like Twemex [1]). Instead they keep us in what David Perell calls "Never-Ending Now" [2]. We endlessly consume temporary, short-lived content and we are mostly blind to the past.

Google search is not social media, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google ranked more recent content higher, given how they have changed the Youtube algorithm.

1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twemex-sidebar-for...

2: https://perell.com/essay/never-ending-now/

shime··on Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web?
Some essays stand the test of time, though. Not everything is irrelevant, but I'd say 99% is. The bar for publishing is very very low.
shime··on Ask HN: If not Medium, then what?
I think the biggest problem with Medium is the fact that nothing was paywalled and then they introduced the paywall, which caused frustration. Substack, on the other hand, is much more pleasurable because there is an expectation from the start that some of the articles are going to be paywalled.
shime··on Ask HN: If not Medium, then what?
I also hate visiting Medium, but enjoy visiting Substack. They both have paywalls on some of the content, but Substack is much more enjoyable, even when you don't get to see the full article.
shime··on Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?
I think software quality is always decreasing because of multiple factors.

1) The tension between leadership that usually only prioritizes shipping new features and engineering that wants to write sustainable code. There is usually no incentive for engineering to decrease technical debt or increase sustainability, as these changes are usually not tangible to leadership. The only short-term beneficiaries of one engineer's code quality improvements are other engineers, which often don't care that much, as they are busy shipping new features as quickly as possible.

2) Speaking of short-term, not all leadership thinks long-term. Sustainable code makes sense if you're thinking long-term, but not if leadership is chasing lucrative exits in a couple of months. If a project survives for 20 years, chances are it survived multiple leadership changes, which all thought short-term.

3) In software, the only constant is change. As project gets older, it has to deal with all the changes that aging entails. Aging means increased exposure to reality and all the "surprising amount of detail"[1] it contains. This increases complexity, introduces bugs, adds edge cases to deal with, etc.

[1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

shime··on Ask HN: Getting started with my technical blog. What to write? How to start?
Thank you. It's using Jekyll for generating HTML and Tailwind for styling.
shime··on Direct file transfer via browser with no server involvement
As an alternative, you could use: https://wormhole.app/
shime··on Ask HN: What metrics do you pay attention to?
The only metric I currently pay attention to is the readiness score from my Oura ring.

It's interesting to see how much alcohol, eating just before sleeping or stress affects this score. And it's also nice to get the confirmation on how well I'm feeling from a tool that measures it.

shime··on Ask HN: Getting started with my technical blog. What to write? How to start?
Write about whatever interests you. What article would the past you like to read? Some suggestions:

- you could write a low-effort "today I learned" posts, where you would share tips and tricks about something that you've learned during your day job (e.g. https://shime.sh/til/)

- you could write a high-effort "deep dive" posts, where you would explore how a certain library works under the hood (e.g. https://shime.sh/deep-dive/)

Although deep dive posts take more effort, it's worth it, since you'll learn a lot about something just by explaining how it works.

shime··on Ask HN: Where do you find meaningful part-time tech jobs?
I have a meaningful (which is subjective) part-time job and I've been mostly freelancing for the last 10 years (out of which the last 4 years I've been mostly freelancing part-time).

Although I've started with UpWork, I don't recommend it for job search anymore, because the quality of clients was low from my experience. A lot of job postings ended up being a race to the bottom with rates. I think WeWorkRemotely is a better option for search, while HN hiring threads are even better.

shime··on On autoloading
There are not a lot of things from JavaScript that I would love to see ported to Ruby, but ES6 imports is one of them.
shime··on How many of us are working on our own project/product?
I'm working part-time in order to have more time for side projects. Nothing profitable yet. Baby steps.
shime··on People who have unusual, or non-existent, inner voices
> People are hearing actual voices inside their heads?

Yes. It's my voice, unless it's something written by a person whose voice I'm familiar with.

> Can you all hear things like music and other sounds too?

I can hear music sometimes. Especially just a moment before waking up.

shime··on Ask HN: How do you tackle your own negativity?
I think pessimism is a professional deformation of programmers. We have to be pessimists in order to build good software. We have to think of the edge cases and everything that might go wrong with the implementation. And this pessimism spills over to personal life.

I'm not sure of the best way to fix this, as I'm working on it myself, but one of the things that helped is realizing that negative thinking comes from a voice in my head that interprets everything in a negative way. Just noticing and registering that negative voice has helped me be more positive.

shime··on Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)
1. Building a time tracker that encourages deep work [1]. It's an interesting experience and I'm fascinated by the amount of complexity that is hidden behind building a "simple" time tracker. Reminds me of "Reality has a surprising amount of detail"[2].

2. Writing more, but publishing less. In the past I've been publishing one article per week, but I've later realized that this doesn't improve my writing skills, but just builds my writing habit. These articles end up being low-quality pieces that are easily forgettable. So, now I've changed my approach and I'm investing more time into each article.

[1]: https://ciklus.app/

[2]: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

shime··on Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)
+1, this is a great idea!
shime··on The strange path of accepting how your brain works
Sönke Ahrens has a good point on forgetting in "How To Take Smart Notes". We view it as a negative thing, but if we remembered everything we would be drowned in details and we wouldn't be able to distinguish signal from the noise. He argues that forgetting makes us able to learn.
shime··on Ask HN: Did preparing for LeetCode type of interviews improve your skills?
There's also curated list here: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
shime··on The art of reading non-fiction non-linearly
I'm confused why they used "unsophisticated" and "sophisticated" instead of simply linear/non-linear. It's also weird that the author suggests that everyone starts sophisticated and should become unsophisticated.

Good article otherwise. Loved the remark that we shouldn't strive for hitting the yearly quota and instead just enjoy reading.

shime··on Second-guessing the modern web (2020)
Using Rails means having a boring tech stack, but this is a competitive advantage when everyone else is chasing the latest fad.
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