131–140 of 157 posts
Your work situation can be remedied. Lots of companies require good engineers who're willing to learn stuff rather than pre-know stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine you are going for surgery and the doctor tells you 'yeah, I have no idea what I'm doing, really'. You'd be very interested in knowing whether it's 'I just graduated from med school, I'm barely competent', or 'I've been doing this 30 years, the more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know'. Those are not the same. Insecurity is there for a reason - to let you know you should tread carefully and…
I know you used surgery/medicine as a parable, but I would argue that competency is probably a little easier to objectively gauge in those fields than in Computer Science, for instance.
I think that the structure of the commenting system here at HN might contribute to this feeling. Usernames are de-emphasized and there is no indication of karma/reputation. A trick of perception can lead one to read this forum as if the same handful of broadly knowledgeable people are participating in every discussion. The reality is, I believe, quite the opposite. There are hundreds of us here, and we all have depth…
Regarding the numbers here, I'd say there are multiple thousands, possibly 5 figures. The top article about Apple refusing to publicly backdoor the iPhone (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11116274) got 5667 points. And sometimes my comments will attract a reply chain but not get upvoted, which shows that some proportion of people doesn't upvote here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I do a deeper hour-long review of lower priority content at least once a week, but my email is an effectively infinite backlog of interesting-possibly-relevant information. As a zero-inbox kind of person this is terrifying. It's already enough effort to keep up with the new journal articles every day. I use my morning commute to do that and my evening commute to unwind and read the more interesting stuff.
I don't think you understand, my inbox is almost always at zero :) This folders and rules was my strategy for balancing the need to be hyper-informed, well-organized, and not-overwhelmed... only uncategorized content shows up in my inbox. My "High Priority" folder has subfolders for friends, family, bills, and other things that have to be kept at 0. The "Low Low Priority" folder has folders for online store emails th…
After 200-400 suspended tabs open and a browser chewing molasses, I tend to export all URLs to a list for One Day In The Magical Future™, kill my session and restart.
So yeah, I'm very interested to find out what rule system you use - is this bespoke, or using standard email client features?
Also, what email client do you use? I've been trying to find a medium between "old computer becomes unusable after >10 tabs are open" and "fast, native information-presentation applications (like terminals) are text-only and don't support images" for 15+ years.
I use Gmail's basic HTML mode 99% of the time. It... I can't say I like it. I want something that doesn't use Qt and GTK+, because I perceive more lag with applications that use these toolkits than I did with lightweight WinAPI apps I ran on Win98/Win2K machines with half the hardware capability.
Attempting to be as accomplished/skilled as the union of people you read on the Internet is a fool's errand. You have to accept you'll never know everything and that, for almost all things, there will be someone -- or a lot of someones -- much better than you. Pretend you were working at a company with a hundred engineers. Do you understand how easy it is for every single one of them to simultaneously feel like you d…
Impostor Syndrome. Have you written more about it elsewhere?
It's been crippling at times. That said, I was recently very surprised to learn of a couple folks who I consider way better than me at $FOO to also regularly deal with impostor syndrome as well. I was floored.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hardly. You still need: 1. An in depth understanding of Physics, History, Literature, and Philosophy. You can just make up whatever you want in Economics, Sociology, and Bitcoins as fits your political leanings. 2. Learn to resist weapons grade grammar analysis. 3. Learn to recognize sarcasm in short, written text.
> 3. Learn to recognize sarcasm in short, written text. No need. This is HN. Someone's bound to have used machine learning to crack this already.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hardly. You still need: 1. An in depth understanding of Physics, History, Literature, and Philosophy. You can just make up whatever you want in Economics, Sociology, and Bitcoins as fits your political leanings. 2. Learn to resist weapons grade grammar analysis. 3. Learn to recognize sarcasm in short, written text.
> 3. Learn to recognize sarcasm in short, written text. No need. This is HN. Someone's bound to have used machine learning to crack this already.
Just have a look at: http://n-gate.com/hackernews/ :)