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verletx64

175 karma · joined October 11, 2016

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verletx64··on Get started with technical writing
Technical writing is a difficult skill to be proficient at, so I think dedicated technical writers are needed in many companies. I’ve also not really seen writers be “blown off”. More often I see an absence entirely of writers, but that’s usually more to do with budgeting more than anything else. Where I’ve had writers working with me, we’re generally thankful to have someone proficient at it handling things.

With that said, I don’t really see the English major idea panning out well, just as bootstrapping a project with a bunch of CS grads probably wouldn’t. The study and analysis of literature is tangentially connected with technical writing for commercial purposes.

They can, of course, become good technical writers over time, but a huge component of what writers bring is an understanding of the audience. It goes beyond being able to write well, and academic writing is different from commercial writing.

verletx64··on NilAway: Practical nil panic detection for Go
I think that it’s not just about something being possible with a tool, but people actually using it.

Go, for whatever reasons, has gotten people using it.

verletx64··on Show HN: YouTube banned adblockers so I built an extension to skip their ads
Even small non-profits have operating costs to cover.

When we’re talking about consistently serving video at the scale they are, those costs won’t be minute.

Obviously they’re looking to turn a profit (if not profiting already), but I don’t think the situation changes dramatically either way.

verletx64··on Amazon Fresh Opens in London
Local thing. Fruit and Veg is a common colloquialism around the UK.
verletx64··on Filling the Void of a Physical Whiteboard
Yes!

I have an iPad as well, and love going down this route if I'm presenting. However, my desire for perfect lines gets stronger and I'm not always the best at drawing...

verletx64··on Themed days, Timeboxing and why you should use them
This doesn't particularly make sense.
verletx64··on Stripe refunds: fees from the original charge are not returned
You can’t create an entirely new sandbox, no, but you can, quite easily test most scenarios. Including weird stuff like falling into delinquency - it takes a little bit more thought, but it’s fine.
verletx64··on Stripe refunds: fees from the original charge are not returned
But then does the developer now need to track this list of production test cards and make sure the application doesn’t enact some other logic based on the test purchase?

I mean really, you can get 99.9% of the way there with the test cards in the sandbox, and then give the thing a smoke test in production when you’re ready.

verletx64··on How to take smart notes with Org mode
I would say it's primarily a web application for note taking (there's some auxiliary capabilities around kanban boards, etc, but most people I know who use it, use it as a rich text editor).

I think where Notion differs from others, and where it has similarity to Org-Mode is it's ability to create 'blocks' with more dynamic behaviours (calendars, kanban blocks, tables) as well as how easy it is to create linkages between pages.

verletx64··on How to take smart notes with Org mode
They have good platform too.
verletx64··on Building Firefox's Picture-in-Picture Support
> I'd imagine it's probably people with less than a few weeks of coding experience

In the end everybody eventually needs to learn from written content; not only for the viewers efficiency, but also because it's more efficient for content creators to produce written content over video content.

You can even guess your 'reckon' from looking at the kind of video content that is out there - again, this seems mostly to be a consequence of creator efficiency.

With that said, who cares?

Hell, I sometimes hit up streams - for instance, Antirez has been streaming himself building out parts of Redis 6, because it may introduce me to new techniques or minutae I didn't know. It's way, way, way more chill than reading source code, and it's a lot better than the blog post on it he probably won't write.

verletx64··on Ask HN: How to improve code quality while maintaining decent velocity?
This is like super simple. Every question should be asked, because others may have that question etc etc. The answerer should feel that they can defer the answer until afterwards or something.

I’ve always found its best to operate on the principle of “there are no dumb questions”.

verletx64··on Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?
Easier said than done even if you _do_ get the time to invest into it.
verletx64··on The 16-Inch MacBook Pro
I care about touch typing using the keys I frequently interact with in the editing experience. F-keys, as you say, may be used for adjusting brightness, or sound, but this is not in my editing experience. I’m not repeatedly adjusting sound or brightness unlike for instance the esc key in vim.

I would also say it’s worth saying a lot of developers don’t actually touch type, or have grown more used to GUI workflows. The idea of a hardcore developer building software with their mouse turned upside down is one that I find outdated.

verletx64··on Just did the Y Combinator interview: here are my notes
“Tell me about yourself” is lazy, unnatural conversation. “Tell me about <thing you did on your cv>” is way better, especially if it hints at some other interests.
verletx64··on Is GraphQL Still Relevant in an HTTP2 World?
GraphQL is not a substitute for communication. You should be communicating your query patterns because all fields are not equal.
verletx64··on Former Twitter Employees Charged with Spying for Saudi Arabia
Twitter has a lot of staff. Even 1% is a relatively large amount of people.
verletx64··on Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing
Seriously though, in Europe the Algorithmic style interview is not the norm, by and large
verletx64··on Apple Card can be damaged by wallets and jeans
I agree that damage is going overboard language wise, however, that’s what happens when the card itself is supposed to be designed to be distinctive. Anecdotally I’ve had people express interest in it because it looks nice.
verletx64··on Using TypeScript with React
Would be true if Typescript significantly differed, but as it is, it’s basically JS with a few type annotations. The only learning curve is typing these dynamic constructs properly, rather than wrapping your teams head around other concepts, constructs and patterns.
verletx64··on Using TypeScript with React
I’d recommend using ‘unknown’ over ‘any’, it’s truer to the code you’d probably end up writing if it was vanilla JS; fairly defensive stuff.

On top of that don’t be hesitant to define ad hoc interfaces on your side of things; ultimately ‘any’ communicates zero information and provides zero defence.

The more I start to use other techniques the more I feel that ‘any’ really should be the last escape hatch deployed.

verletx64··on In Defence of the Technical Interview
Worth saying, sometimes there’s nothing to google, or googling wouldn’t yield a significant answer - perhaps the issue lies in some module of fairly home grown code.
verletx64··on Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics
Looks pretty good for building a first pass of more atomic Anki notes. I've found that over time, I need to make multiple editing passes on Anki Cards, to try to boil them down into something actually recallable. How has your experience been?
verletx64··on Ask HN: How to optimize Electron apps?
I understand that you feel that Electron isn’t worth optimising, and your answer offers up a good alternative to Electron.

However, this is an interesting question in and of itself, and I think it’s worth hearing out the answers. Could be some interesting techniques to pick up and reapply elsewhere.

verletx64··on Chrome Developer Tools – Easy Web Debugging You Need to Know
Chrome’s ability to dig into frames when debugging web-sockets is something I haven’t seen in Firefox mind you.
verletx64··on Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)
Unplugging a laptop from the mains is definitely a thing still.
verletx64··on Goboy: Multi-Platform Nintendo Game Boy Color Emulator Written in Go
It’s the drawing bit that I don’t have much experience of haha
verletx64··on Goboy: Multi-Platform Nintendo Game Boy Color Emulator Written in Go
As somebody not versed at all in the front end part of an emulator, what’s a good resource for learning how to put together something that will actually render frames? No preference on technologies here.
verletx64··on AWS now supports U2F/Yubikeys
What's the latest with EKS? What's missing still?
verletx64··on Ask HN: Plenty of large sites down; Reddit.com, GNU.org, Discord, coincidence?
I think you can concede that if we're talking a five nines foot race, you're unlikely to beat out AWS etc.
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