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slimetreeon Myers-Briggs types for developers compared to US population

On the validity of MBTI, the main use I've found is to use the eight functions as part of my vocabulary. It's a pretty handy approximation to be able to say to someone in conversation "wow, Stephen Fry has a really developed Fe" and have them know what you mean. There an approximation is all you need, and in exchange you get neat symbols to hang entire categories of ideas onto.

On the flip side, it's all too easy to move symbols around in your head without investigating whether the model you've built corresponds to reality...

slimetreeon Poll: what are the primary languages in use at your company / in your team?

Common Lisp.

slimetreeon Mouse-Friendly Keyboard

The Happy Hacking Professional keyboard solves this in an interesting way: just kill off all the keys you don't need and use Emacs-style modes.

http://elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=pfu_keyboards,hhk...

(It's expensive, though.)

slimetreeon Things Every Kid Should Master

This is an excellent thought experiment I genuinely wish were reality. That said, the root problem with standardized tests is that they're inherently hackable. Standardized tests are like desktop software: you write once and ship everywhere, and once you do people start reverse engineering it.

Any sufficiently hackable test will appear to work in the short-term if you just place it in front of admission to prestige, because of the large subset of high-achieving people whose lives' missions are to game any test placed in front of them, which drastically skews how well the test appears to predict achievement.

The things mentioned in the article are excellent things to test, but if you start measuring e.g. the number and type of of questions a kid asks within x minutes, cram schools will just adapt, and in a few years you'll hit the end of another cycle.

slimetreeon Ask HN: Review my startup, www.getmustapp.com

"Must is a free lifestyle photo recommendation app for discovering, capturing and sharing new experiences across the world."

"DISCOVER. EXPERIENCE. CAPTURE. SHARE."

I'm having a hard time understanding what this app does. The prose is too long and hairy for me to parse. Does it take pictures? Show them in a feed?

What am I going to do with this app? Where will I be? Why will I be doing it? Why will I want to, and what is the increment of improvement over my current technology this will provide? Put that as concisely as possible in the first two pages I scroll through. If it's hard to do in words, make a video or take some screenshots of someone using the app the way I would use it.

This is some solid advice from pg I like:

"Better to start with an overly narrow description of your project than try to describe it in its full generality and lose the audience completely. If there's a simple one-sentence description of what you're doing that only conveys half your potential, that's actually pretty good. You're halfway to your destination in just the first sentence."

slimetreeon Ask HN: How to find first good client?

I've just been using oDesk. I get referrals from these, but bad clients generally aren't friends with good clients.

Last year I did a cute thing on HN where I offered to build prototypes for $2,345. That was much better, but I can't consistently rely on stunts like that.

Re: my site, I have a private portfolio page I show clients I'm trying to court. My reasoning is that people who hire by googling e.g. "web developer" probably aren't good clients.

slimetreeon Show HN: A workshop on how to use Vim plugins

Am I the only one who prefers to use Vim bare and just have a terminal open in another tab/window? For some reason having all these plugins weighs me down in a spiritual way, where the benefits of being able to edit a bit of text or open the right file more quickly get drowned out by these extra objects on my desk I have to keep track of.

slimetreeon There are too many shiny objects and it is killing me

Wait, ack. I used that phrase wrong. I have nothing to say for myself.

slimetreeon There are too many shiny objects and it is killing me

Steve Jobs said something I think about a lot: "focus is about saying no." He was talking about what to work on in a company, but it extends without loss of generality to individuals. The world is presumably always going to be a fascinating one with an infinite supply of different ideas. Make a conscious effort to take what matters and go.

slimetreeon Yik Yak Systematically Downvotes Mentions of Competitors

Still, that just means the long tail is worse, which necessarily happens when anonymity is granted. The best comments-- i.e. the ones that make using the app fun for users-- are also uniquely possible on Yik Yak (or services like it).

slimetreeon Yik Yak Systematically Downvotes Mentions of Competitors

Those are the long tail of comments. If VCs judged all user-content services by the long tail of submissions, most wouldn't raise any money.

(I realize that might be a good thing, but I presume then that you have the same complaint against Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

slimetreeon Yik Yak Systematically Downvotes Mentions of Competitors

While their response is pretty roundabout, my experience with moderating/owning several community sites is that advertisements for competitors really are one of the largest categories of spam, and I wouldn't default to reading an attempt to mute them as a "shady tactic."

Think about the point of view of a founder-developer. You have a list of bugs to fix, a bunch of people to meet with, etc., all while manning a pool of servers to make sure they stay up. Someone says to you, "hey, we're getting a lot of spam from/about this company called Fade." I'd bet a lot of programmers would just write "if 'fade' in message" before getting back to work on other things.

slimetreeon Show HN: I made a website recorder webapp you can use to create screencasts

Oh? Could you please elaborate more on this insight?

slimetreeon Replace CoffeeScript with ES6

What CoffeeScript did was lodge the idea in people's heads that JavaScript can be treated as an assembly language to compile higher-level languages into. I'll bet many programmers' attitudes toward ES6 are: someone will write a compiler for my language, and I'll just use that.

It seems better to treat JavaScript as admittedly not being the most powerful language in the world, and to treat the standard as a kind of RFC that only compiler writers have to think about. For most programmers it works to just use CoffeeScript (or Lisp or anything) without worrying about standards, just as JavaScript programmers don't need to worry about how their processor works.

slimetreeon Predominantly

Couldn't you have omitted the last two sentences, which amount to a polite version of "we've already made this and theirs only looks nicer because they spent more time?"

slimetreeon The Best Entrepreneur I Know

This made me smile, but it would've been nice to read more about what he and Dennis actually talked about.

slimetreeon HTTPS Watch

For someone who doesn't get it, why do you need https on websites that just show you some text?