Hacker News Reader

vcsilvaon Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence

Hey OP, really nice tool! I've been looking for something like this for quite some time now. As some other people suggested, I think it would be nice to be able to add custom investment types for different countries other than US.

vcsilvaon Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire

CS50 is a really well-crafted course, and Malan is an amazing educator. Taking this class online is one of the reasons that got me interested in CS and programming.

I think that this course in particular really highlights the impact of a good teacher. In college I've had multiple professors who quickly made my dislike subjects that otherwise I would have really liked.

vcsilvaon Ask HN: How to take notes?

I've been using Foam for VSCode for taking notes for some time now. After trying a bunch of different apps this one really struck a chord with me. Just a simple way to take notes easily with plain markdown files and links.

- It's helpful to quickly get something out of your brain

- You can easily link related files together or use VScode search to find something. No need for a bunch of categories and nested folders.

[0]: https://foambubble.github.io/foam/

vcsilvaon Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

The author claims that high-resolution displays are a commodity now. That may be true, but those can be really expensive depending on where you live. In Brazil, most laptops are still (sadly) sold with 1366x768 displays. 1080p displays are that much more expensive, let alone 4K.

vcsilvaon Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

There's this extension called Intention which, I think, handles these edges cases pretty well.

It doesn't really block websites, it just pops up in the middle of the screen warning you about how much time you've spent on that particular distracting page today. But you can mark a checkbox telling it that you will be using the site productively (watching a lecture at YouTube, for instance) and assign a period of time for it.

I've tried a lot of websites blockers that didn't stick but I'm really digging the approach of this one.

vcsilvaon Show HN: Intro to Python and Programming for non-CS majors

That's a really cool project! I will probably be recommending this to beginner Python programmers I know.

As a side note, I think sharing lessons as Jupyter notebooks is a really great idea for programming education. I would like to see more of this style of course for other programming languages as well.