samangan · HackerTrans

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

I think the general problem with "No code" as you describe it is that if you want to only offer the lego building blocks then you can't support corner cases. If you want to eliminate all of the corner cases you often times end up creating something as complicated as code but without the nice tooling or information density.

samangan

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

To shine a different light here in these comments, I think the recent resurgence of jazz is interesting and very special. A lot of different forces combined to make this happen, the most obvious being the trend of popular music towards hip hop and people discovering their roots. But I think the resurrection of vinyl had a large role to play here as well. Vinyl has blown up in the past few years and many young people are quickly realizing that some of the best recorded/mastered LPs were classic Jazz and Soul albums from the past century. This is a gateway drug into modern Jazz and also blends nicely with music nerds interested in obscure samples from their favorite modern artists. Also, I dont see the point in being pedantic about genre labels, but hey, its hacker news.

samangan

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

The actual recordings are the most valuable data for modeling purposes so I actually assume they try to store it to improve the system

samangan

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Did you read the about page of the website? "Despite these amazing gains, women still only receive 2-6% of venture capital funding"

I feel like that makes it pretty clear why this website is normal and why "iFundMen" would be odd. This stuff is really not as complex as people are making it out to be. Also, ifundwomen != ionlyfundwomen.

samangan

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Infinite setup time: In the vacuum of space, as t -> infinity, eventually random quantum fluctuations will spontaneously create a 747 full of ping pong balls.

samangan

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Almost all the ivy leagues have in person interviews... Also are people supposed to fake their names?

samangan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

The origins of Silicon Valley being a technological hub go back all the way to WWII and the economy of the early computer industry. So, I feel the USA being an economic and military superpower is a pretty easy explanation for why 'Silicon Valley' exists in the bay area today and not somewhere else. Obviously, there have been many years and many technological revolutions since those early days but there are pretty clear trails of people, and money leading all the way back.

As far as trying to answer why so many other countries consistently beat America in math and technology I think a small answer can be gleaned from your statement: "we were encouraged to pursue whatever we wanted to pursue." That is not all that common in many countries and cultures in the world. I think a lot of it has to do with economic or political desperation. I have worked with people who learned how to code because they didn't even have running water in their village in India and programming was a way out. Or more relevant to this story, they lived in a Russian town and got a PhD in engineering so they could come to America and be an engineer. These types of stories are very, very common in the Bay Area. Looking at the education systems is helpful, but I think you need a real driving force to get most people motivated to learn difficult things.

samangan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

I don't follow TDD strictly, but I still think testing is important. I mostly see tests as help for future programmers (which includes the original authors), kind of like documentation. It's a rigid description of how the system should operate and therefore is usually helpful for refactoring or extending old code. I also don't doubt that many people go years without seeing utility in writing lots of tests. From my experience there's a lot of factors that go into how many tests you write before getting diminishing returns. Some off the top of my head: static v dynamically compiled lang, functional v procedural lang, age of project, etc.

samangan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Sadly, ever since Java 8 added default methods to interfaces this distinction is even murkier. I'll add the reasons why I prefer interfaces though.

1. Interfaces can be used by any class no matter where they live in their class hierarchy. You can only extend a single (abstract) class in Java because the language designers saw the special rules and overrides other OOP languages like C++ used to avoid the 'diamond problem' and decided against it entirely. Note that in pre-Java 8 implementing multiple interfaces cannot lead to the diamond problem because if more than one interface exposes the same method signature then the compiler doesn't care because it doesnt have actual functionality that could be conflicting. So, because you are limited to only extending one superclass it is easier to bundle functionality in multiple smaller interfaces that can be implemented no matter where your implementing class lies in the class hierarchy.

2. Interfaces provide only a contract of functionality which in practice means they are easier to reason about and use. If you are implementing an interface you dont have to worry about calling a super constructor or any other garbage. Just implement the method signature. Of course you could ask "What if you only had abstract methods with no implementation in an abstract class", in which case I would refer you to point 1. A class that already has some existing superclass could not extend that abstract class.

I hope that clears some stuff up. Just in case you read that and thought the Java language designers were stupid for adding default methods in Java8 they had really good reasons to (mostly to support backwards compatibility with a large change called Lambdas). But having some functionality in interfaces could be argued for as well. In practice there are companion classes in the Java API that are just there to provide some base functionality that they could not do because of the previous limitations of interfaces. Also, the Java8 rules for fixing 'the diamond problem' with conflicting default methods in interfaces is pretty straightforward and rarely encountered.

samangan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

How do you account for low end pizza delivery chains? I assume the pizza hut and dominoes market would overlap heavily with a McDonald's ordering market.

samangan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Exactly. I would go one farther and say that if there is no competition for 'an old idea' you are most likely in a lot of trouble. It's a common trope that engineers google ideas and then give up because there is already competition, while the business folk see $$$. The fact that there is competition usually means there are customers.

samangan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

How can we combat woo-woo of this type on a local level? When I moved out to the bay area from Arkansas, I thought I would be escaping this type of garbage but it is still rampant out here. It just comes in a different form. Here the neighborhood health food stores have entire sections devoted to homepathic "medicines", and I see anti-vaxxer bumper stickers plastered all over town. Events like the "March for Science" that just happened are all good, but I worry that standing up for Science and "reason" is too general and abstract. How can local groups educate people to counteract these movements that have actual damaging effects on our communities? Are there organizations we can donate to that have this type of education as a primary goal?

samangan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Just so people don't get confused. Hashicorp is the company behind Vagrant, but they are not affiliated with Docker.

samangan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

And this guy drinks cyanide: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bWNpO5vvhpk

My point is that being able to drink one glass of the stuff doesn't really tell me much.

samangan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Honestly there is not enough information given for us to give a lot of useful advice.

Here is some information we would need to give more helpful information:

  - What type of positions / companies are you applying to? This is important, because I can imagine applying for dev jobs at small rails shops would be difficult because they are looking for people who can hit the ground running on day 0 (Ie: They are looking for rails at your last job).

  - My parents do not live anywhere near tech jobs. Are you located near a good number of tech jobs where you can cast a wide net?

samangan

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

You are your 'current' feelings and your past memories. The reason for the downvotes is that from your logic mabbo is every person who has ever existed in the history of the human species. Since every person has their own current feelings and past memories, saying mabbo would have been that person instead is a little meaningless.