skylark

I feel like the most obvious answer was missed: People use Medium because there's an audience there and it mostly "just works."

I don't personally care about organically building a brand for myself over the course of years. I don't want to write an article a week only to have it never see the light of day. All I want to do is jot down a few thoughts from time to time and have some people stumble upon it. Make the world a slightly better place.

Medium is perfect for that. The interface is beautiful, and it's far more likely that someone will stumble across my post on Medium than find my crappy blog.

I think you're massively overthinking it. The poster probably just copy pasted the headline directly from the blog when submitting the link. "All caps" is sorta the Uber aesthetic and looks totally normal in the context of the blog post itself.

Having used both SASS and LESS professionally, I'll say that it's easy to end up with an over-engineered mess that's difficult to maintain and reason about.

That said, the tooling around both preprocessors is great, so it shouldn't be a huge burden to set it up. Because they're supersets of standard CSS, I don't see a reason why you wouldn't use one. Use the features you like, ditch the ones you don't.

I came here to post The Inner Game of Tennis and was pleasantly surprised to see it in the top comment.

The book is only tangentially related to tennis - the real meat of the book is about how to adopt useful mentalities which will help you succeed at a variety of things. It's an extremely easy read and can be finished casually in a few days.

A great book which made me question some of my most deeply held beliefs about learning.

Did the founder of Expensify seriously pass off performance improvement plans (PIPs) as something cutting edge and original?

Poe's law is in full effect - I can't tell if this is honest or exquisitely written satire.

While money in politics is certainly an issue which should be fixed, I still think it's disingenuous to say that drugs are illegal simply because parties profit from it. Overall I'd argue that the current state of drug laws is the will of the American people and that corporate efforts to lobby politicians actually falls in line with popular opinion.

Again, I'm not necessarily supporting this point of view, I'm only trying to be reasonable.

I find it hard to believe that there's some sort of conspiracy to keep police, lawyers, and prisons funded via laws against selling drugs.

Have you considered that these laws are still in place simply because it's the status quo?

Politicians voting on laws and drafting new ones must ultimately answer to their constituents. While the vast majority of things fly under the radar, "pro-drug" support is enough of a charged issue that supporting drug legalization is guaranteed to be used against you the next time you're running for office.

Like it or not, logic be damned, drugs will continue to be illegal because the majority of Americans do not support drug legalization. The tides are starting to turn in some states on weed, but the average American outside of the most liberal states doesn't even support that. Good luck convincing them to legalize cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, or any "harder" drug.

What's your endgame?

If you want to use this as a tool to get a new job, I'd recommend leetcode above all others.

If you just want a fun way to learn a new language's syntax, I enjoy grinding the easier problems in CodeWars.

If you're looking to get into competitive programming, I've heard good things about Codeforces, CodeChef, and TopCoder.

I don't think this advice is "dickish" at all - it's really the only way forward. If anything, passive aggressively boxing your friend out of the business because you're afraid of tackling the situation head on is the dick move.

IQ has the highest genetic correlation out of any trait we've observed in Psychology - r ~ 0.7 if I recall correctly from my college days.

I currently work at a medium sized startup which processes ~100 million dollars / year. We offer both Stripe and PayPal.

The vast majority of our users prefer PayPal (80%+). For one particular product we had to roll out using Stripe only, the number one customer service request we had was to provide PayPal as an option. Subscription numbers rose by over 50% overnight when including it as a choice (literally tens of thousands of people signed up after the change).

Internationally, PayPal seems like the de facto choice for making online purchases. In addition, outside of the Bay Area tech bubble, I believe people in the states are simply more comfortable with using PayPal over Stripe.

While PayPal gets a lot of hate, I'd think long and hard before deciding not to offer it as a payment processor. It's possible that you're leaving a significant amount of money on the table.

At (unnamed-giant-bank) for our standups, our scrum master would open the Jira agile board, go through every single ticket in the entire sprint and have the assigned developer give an update. This included tickets still in the to-do category. The developer would literally have to say "no progress" on 20+ tickets every day.

The entire team including PMs, design, business dev, etc. would be present everyday for that absolutely excruciating 1 hour long meeting.

You passed the interview, so you're qualified. Full stop. Have a little more faith in yourself - if the job isn't working out after a few months, you can start a new job search, it's not the end of the world.

When I was a junior engineer, I was making 115k in SF. On average I'd put 2-2.5k/month into savings.

The contraction is definitely overstated. If you can nail the technical interview, doors will still open for you left right and center.

I've had coworkers who have been laid off and were snapped up within a week or two. There's still a huge need for software developers who have a few years of experience under their belts.

Hack Reactor grad here. I was 24 when I went through the program, and was the second youngest person. You'd feel right at home being 31.

I think the biggest problem with voice commands is that if the command doesn't work the first time, it would have been faster to simply input the command yourself. I'm not confident that "get me directions to <place>" will actually get me those directions. Because of that, I also use Siri exclusively to set alarms (which does work every time).

Reading the source of popular open source frameworks is a great way to get a sense of how to write maintainable, reusable CSS. Oftentimes it's not actually too confusing behind the scenes because CSS logic is relatively straightforward to begin with.

Other than that, the hard knock school of life is my primary instructor. There's no "Code Complete" for your stylesheets (at least not one that I've found).

As someone who was pretty "good" at math and CS algorithms, I'll let you in on a little secret: None of this is comes naturally to me. I struggle when encountering new ideas that I've never seen before. I've bombed easy technical interview questions because I couldn't make the right logical leap.

I still got good grades back in the day because I worked hard. I ground problems until things made sense. Every problem you do adds to your problem solving toolbelt. As your toolbelt grows, you start noticing patterns and you can apply those tools to these new problems. I rarely have to derive things from first principles because I've seen so many different problems at this point.

Some people think that I'm unusually smart or have a natural aptitude for these things. That can't be further from the truth - I don't think this comes naturally to most people. You just work at it until you get good at it.

The best textbook I've found for Algorithms is the one used at Princeton: Sedgewick's "Algorithms." It's extremely practical and doesn't go into too much of the math/proofs behind the algorithms themselves. From there, just grind problems until it makes sense.

Let's turn it around. If you invest 120 dollars into your retirement fund every year for the next 40 years, you'll end up with 33.5k. Instead, you spent 4.8k. The person who listened to a few commercials is up 40k on you at retirement.

This is an extreme example (after all, you're not going to spend 10 dollars on Spotify for the rest of your life), but the principle of the matter stands: Money saved now will be worth more later thanks to compounding interest. In a sense, the dollars you earn today are the most valuable dollars you'll ever earn.

It's up to you to make the judgment call on a case by case basis whether you'd like to live in the moment, or whether you'd prefer to save. Everybody draws the line somewhere (I personally have a Spotify subscription), but to call it irrational is... a bit irrational.

LinkedIn isn't for networking with new people, it's for retaining professional contacts. Think of it like a professional rolodex where people keep up to date resumes.

I personally know plenty of past coworkers who I respect and would gladly recommend in a heartbeat. LinkedIn is the perfect way for them to see that I work at the company they want to work at, and gives them a frictionless way to send me a message despite us not being actual friends.

If you don't find enough value in that, then maybe LinkedIn isn't for you.

There's no contradiction here. I'd argue that the correlation noted is because knowledge workers as a whole tend to have college degrees, and Google employs a lot of knowledge workers. The number does not imply that Google actively selects against people without college degrees at a 6:1 ratio.

The bad news: If you don't have a degree, your resume has a much higher chance of being weeded out before even getting to a phone screen.

The good news: This prescreening step is the only one where your degree matters - by the time you're actually talking to a person, your degree almost doesn't matter at all.

Getting your first job will be tougher than you might like, but there are plenty of companies that don't filter candidates based on education. After you get that first job, your goal should be to expand your network - an internal referral can oftentimes guarantee a technical screen, at which point you're right where you want to be.

For logic based classes the effectiveness of note taking is greatly diminished because the majority of learning happens at home while grinding problems.

However in memorization based classes, skipping notes is entirely suboptimal. When you're expected to keep esoteric information in your head for months at a time, you need every edge you can get. And in my experience, the most powerful edge is knowing exactly what was said in class.

At the end of the day it comes down to picking the right tool for the job. Back in college, I took handwritten notes for my technical courses so I could draw in figures. For courses like Biology, I took transcript-style notes on my laptop, and they were extremely effective.

I suspect the confounding factor in this study is that students who bring laptops are far more distracted on average than note takers, not that typed notes in and of themselves produce worse outcomes than hand written notes. Unfortunately, people see headlines like this and immediately jump to conclusions, which is a shame. Computers are powerful tools if used properly.

Good debugging is a lot like good science. You start with a firm understanding of the system, form a hypothesis about what could be wrong with it, test your hypothesis, and then repeat. The stronger your initial understanding of the system, the faster you can debug things.

As a Python/JS developer a few print/console.log statements are usually all it takes for me to figure out what's wrong with something. For more thorny situations there's always PDB/chrome dev tools.

At the end of the day, the people who are the best at debugging things aren't that way because of the tools they use. They're the best because they can clearly visualize the system, how data is flowing through it, and where potential problems might arise. Intuition from dealing with other similar problems also helps.

I feel like video game music is perfect for coding - it's not designed to draw too much attention to itself and provides a nice vibe. Rainwave.cc is a great (free) stream for that.

Other than that, jazz/classical when I want to relax, electronic music when I'm in the zone.

What a coincidence, I also have an Embody at home + use the Steelcase Leap at work. I can confirm that both are outstanding (and better than the Aeron).

Setting alarms and timers is fantastic with Siri.

Nap alarm: "Wake me up in X minutes/hours"

Normal alarm: "Wake me up at X AM/PM"

Timer: "Set a 45 minute timer"

Other than that, I don't use Siri. I find that if Siri gets my query wrong even once, it would have been faster for me to look the thing up manually.

Oh, also as a party gag you can ask Siri what 0/0 is. Stone cold.

Todoist is fantastic. Once you get the hang of their natural language date parser, entering both one-off and repeated tasks becomes extremely fast.

The idea of commitment contracts is not new.

If you prefer donating to a charity (or anti-charity) on slip-ups: stickk.com

I personally like beeminder.com for its graphs.