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Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

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Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#241

Post by ColinWright »

chillfox wrote: post #233
ColinWright wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are different, and I like to learn about other people's methods and the potential benefits thereof. So let me ask ... when you're listening to podcasts, do you ever take anything away from them that is actionable? Do you take notes? Do you summarise? How do you ensure that the lessons in the podcast don't get lost? Do you "Listen with attention" or are they mostly just background? I find that podcasts are ther…

Kinda depends upon if it is educational, informational or entertainment. I never use podcasts to just fill out the background, I generally use heavy metal music for that. I tend to either remember how/where to find the information again or the actual thing. So with podcasts I will either remind myself that I can't easily reference it and therefore remember the lesson, or sometimes I will write it down later in the da…

I've been using a ZK-like thing since the mid-90s, so it's very much a "roll your own" solution. Over the past 12 months or so I've started to try to de-couple it from the specifics of my setup so I can share it, but it's proving difficult.

It's essentially a wiki, but it's how I use it that makes the difference. A true ZK requires a conversation. You take notes, but then you spend time inter-weaving them into the ZK. Most people use note-taking systems as, well, note-taking systems, and never return to make the connections between the notes. Hence they get lost.

Here are my thoughts about that "conversation":

https://www.solipsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/DiscDAG.py?DiscussionID=Z...

There's a link in there to take you out of "Neighbourhood Mode" if you want to see the whole thing at once.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#242

Post by Swizec »

Scarblac wrote: post #236
Swizec wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not vague guesswork at all. If you can’t measure the success of your project, why are you doing it? It’s okay, even expected, if the answer is probabilistic. What’s not okay is doing stuff for no reason. Bonus points if you’re able to tell a story like: We did X to achieve Y, but it didn’t work because Z. So we tried ...

The success of the project as a whole is measured, of course. But it's 20 people working on it, from design to sales to ops to customers relations to devs. How could you possibly pin 20% of the profit (not even the turnover, but the profit ) on one guy? Even if he improved the SQL queries and that immediately led to more sales, making the choice to work on that over other things was probably not his.

Nobody is asking to pin all that on exactly one person. That’s a silly overly engineery way of looking at it.

It’s a team effort. Being part of the team who did X is enough. You can then talk about your specific individual contribution when appropriate.

Just like everyone in an NBA team “wins the championship” and gets to put “winner” on their resume. Or how hockey players say “I won the Stanley cup”, even though they did it as a team.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#243

Post by breakfastduck »

ColinWright wrote: post #227
chillfox wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every format is for everyone. I personally listen to podcasts or audio books every day when driving and in my lunch break.

People are different, and I like to learn about other people's methods and the potential benefits thereof. So let me ask ... when you're listening to podcasts, do you ever take anything away from them that is actionable? Do you take notes? Do you summarise? How do you ensure that the lessons in the podcast don't get lost? Do you "Listen with attention" or are they mostly just background? I find that podcasts are ther…

Not all podcasts are for work / learning.

May be just listening for entertainment

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#244

Post by apercu »

theshrike79 wrote: post #99
AlexC04 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a funny coincidence is that I've been thinking about almost exactly this for a little while. Just in the last two weeks I decided to create a podcast where I interview the exact types of developers who optimize SQL inside business apps. In fact, literally just last night I recorded and uploaded (to YouTube and the various podcast platforms) episode zero. Not an actual interview yet, but a statement of purpose…

Please don't start another podcast. Or if you absolutely must, please provide a text version of the content. Podcasts aren't searchable, they aren't skimmable and their content isn't indexed in search engines. Text is.

Better yet, feed your podcast to an AI for transcription. And host the transcriptions in a wordpress blog. The cost is minimal.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#245

Post by Chris2048 »

corytheboyd wrote: post #177
simias wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't downvote but I think "please don't do X" is really a poor way to frame this opinion. I also don't care much for podcasts and prefer a textual format, but if you think you'd prefer making it a podcast then just make it and theshrike79 and I will find other content to consume. Or maybe it'll be so good and interesting that we'll just listen to it anyway! Deciding to start on such a project is really cool IMO,…

I agree with this 100%, and just want the parent commenter to see that at least one other person cares enough to say so to offset the toxic dismissal. It’s easy to shit on work, but hard to create it. You created something, that’s awesome and I wish you luck! Don’t try to make all the naysayers happy, especially in this community, or you’ll go insane lol.

Given a HN post if just some persons opinion, and a podcast is just some persons opinion, aren't you failing your own logic by calling that post "toxic"?

i.e. If you don't like opinion framed this way, find other posts to consume.. Instead you're naysaying a HN comment..

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#246

Post by Chris2048 »

yongjik wrote: post #132
Swizec wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstand the thrust of that argument. It’s not the nameless company that’s the problem, it’s the business result of your work. What looks better on a resume? 1. I optimized SQL queries for Nameless Corp to improve admin interface load times by 20% 2. I optimized SQL queries for Nameless Corp to increase profits 20% If possible, always work on some version of option 2.

Counterpoint: when every developer is urged to build something with "measurable impact", you end up like Google, where people launch something visible, get promoted, and move on, leaving the service to wither away.

The fact that goog is well known for starting projects then killing them, suggests to me they don't really appreciate the measurable impact of their work.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#247

Post by prewett »

jspash wrote: post #109
theshrike79 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't start another podcast. Or if you absolutely must, please provide a text version of the content. Podcasts aren't searchable, they aren't skimmable and their content isn't indexed in search engines. Text is.

Naively I would think that there must be a service out there that auto-generates transcriptions from podcasts. Youtube already do this for (some) videos. The output isn't perfect, but it gets about 99% of the words correct. So my suggestion to OP wouldn't be "don't do the podcast". Instead I would say "do the podcast, but consider that it might not be searchable without a bit of extra effort".

IBM Watson, Google, Azure, and AWS all have speech-to-text APIs. IBM's claims to distinguish between different voices, although when I used it a couple of years ago for Japanese it was a little lackluster. It's pretty inexpensive: IBM gives you 500 minutes free per month and is a few cents / minute thereafter; Google you gives 60 minutes free, and it's 4c/min thereafter. It's an API rather than a service, so you'd have to write a client to use it. IBM's API (and maybe the others) allows you to request time stamps on the output, so you could let people click on your transcription and seek directly to the part of the video they are interested in.

I suppose you could always do it on your own machine with Sphinx, too, although I don't know how they compare to the others in accuracy.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#248

Post by corytheboyd »

Chris2048 wrote: post #245
corytheboyd wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this 100%, and just want the parent commenter to see that at least one other person cares enough to say so to offset the toxic dismissal. It’s easy to shit on work, but hard to create it. You created something, that’s awesome and I wish you luck! Don’t try to make all the naysayers happy, especially in this community, or you’ll go insane lol.

Given a HN post if just some persons opinion, and a podcast is just some persons opinion, aren't you failing your own logic by calling that post "toxic"? i.e. If you don't like opinion framed this way, find other posts to consume.. Instead you're naysaying a HN comment..

I stand by what I said. The difference in my mind is that someone invested real creative energy into something, and someone else came along and said “please stop making this”.

Yes, I went out of my way to say something here. Put yourself in the shoes of the person making the podcast here. They excitedly shared their work early because it seemed like a great time and place to do it. And one of the first comments is “you should not have made this”. What people say online actually matters, I don’t speak for this person of course, but I know I would be disheartened by such dismissal of my work. I just hate seeing this maybe happening to others and sometimes try to offset the negativity I think I see.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#249

Post by mepiethree »

nicbou wrote: post #215
vbtemp wrote: post #171

I mean, what the hell is with all this 60-90 hours per week stuff going on? Am I an incredibly defective human being or something - I cannot even fathom working anything even CLOSE to that (in software/tech, maybe if you're in med school or work an an ER I can see it). There is no way in hell I could ever even be close to productive for that period of time for more than, say, one week a year or something (and even th…

I'm young, single and without children, and even 40 hours a week feels like a tad much, even when I realistically worked 5-6 hours a day. I can't imagine a life of 60-90 hour weeks be worth whatever carrot they dangle in front of those poor sods.

We aren't "poor sods" or carrot-led horses. We're just motivated by different things than you. In my case, fully mission driven

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#250

Post by jgwil2 »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #230
theshrike79 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only listen to podcasts that are well-produced and edited. Very few actually are. There are way too many people who think podcasting is just turning on a microphone and babbling away with a friend or guest for however long they can do it. I only have a few hours a day I can spend on podcasts and I'm not going to waste it listening to some inane meandering chitchat. "Put it on the background then" ...yea, that's whe…

At the risk of pedantically zooming in on your choice of words: > I only listen to podcasts that are well-produced and edited. Very few actually are. I disagree. Good production is a nice extra, but it's secondary. I'd rather listen to Miles Davis on vinyl, than a mediocre musician on high-bitrate FLAC. Some examples: I recently discovered the Happy Path Programming podcast. It's a good listen as the hosts are knowle…

I think high production value is probably decently correlated to content; after all, people usually won't invest in something they believe to be low-quality. So in that sense it may be good enough a filter for a world awash in crud.
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