strongly disagree that studying openings is necessary to "do your best" at competitions. In my experience almost all games between players under 2000 (class players) are decided tactically. I'm expertish (2200+ bullet, 2200+ blitz, 1900+ USCF, win most local tournaments in my area etc) and I don't bother studying openings. Chess is 99.9% tactics at the class level. You won't reach GM without opening theory memorization but you wont reach GM anyway.
Also a reminder for anyone reading these comments that chess should be fun! Don't let psychological hangups like thinking u need a good memory, thinking you need to study openings, have a certain level of skill, or need to play a certain format (like avoiding blitz because it is "bad" for your game or thinking OTB is more important) stop you from playing chess! The only rules for how to play chess are the rules of the game; all the other stuff e.g advice about how to get good are just things people make up. Learn and play however you want and in whatever way brings you the most joy! Chess is a game and it is meant to be fun and not be taken seriously
"they aren't, plain and simple" is the made up bit I was calling out. There is literally not much more to the original comment to be calling made up.
"A lot of these humans" was me referring the humans I personally know mentioned in the prior paragraph. And I was speculating on the effect UBI would have on them.
Because anecdotally my experience is that hikikomori are a hotbed of creativity and that financial assistance with no strings attached has helped us increase contributions. However, it is very possible I have a skewed sample point because of course I would only know the hikikomori that are hotbeds of creativity -- I wouldn't ever encounter those silently scrolling and never building community online. That said, it feels intuitively correct to me that people with no irl connections would be pretty motivated to build connections some other way. I certainly was. But perhaps that is simply outlier behavior maybe it is more typical for hikikomori to spend their lives watching anime. We don't know.
The thesis of my comment is that we don't know enough about the demographic of hikikomori to state absolutes about them -- to do so is to spread bullshit. I said "There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study." Which seems to also be the thesis of your comment. I suspect from your comment history that you are just being deliberately argumentative so you can pass reading off as new insight.
Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about. There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study.
I personally know that some crucial open source work is maintained by people with schizoid-avoidant spectrum issues. I know a lot of them but I won't out them here. hikikomori are driven to be invisible because their extreme pathological avoidance of attention. You don't know them and their contributions because they don't want you to know that they still live at home, out of their car door dashing because no company ever hires them, are shut-in because of serious unhealed trauma, are still deeply in poverty in such a wealthy industry etc.
A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.
Many prominent pseudonymous devs have had hikikomori traits.
_why practically inspired a generation of Ruby devs. visualidiot (RIP) was a crucial driver behind a lot of web dev culture in the 2010s. Heck, I made significant contributions to Joomla and WP themes back in the day -- you have probably used sites with themes or plugins I made. Also I ran a blog a decade ago that used to rank prominently in google and receive dozens of emails a month from people struggling with mental illness -- many people crediting me with saving their lives. Surely that is something of value to society.
Don't go around spreading bullshit like it is facts about a group of people we know little about.
Scrolling through the comments and noticed that they are a pretty good autism simulator for working in tech with autism. The entire cast of typical characters is represented.
- guy that thinks everyone has the tism and the spectrum is everyone
- this guy has more trouble reading the room than anyone. but it is the lack of empathy and not autism
- guy that thinks everything is a microaggression towards his autism and ironically makes it harder for other autists
- guy with probable schizoid personality disorder that thinks struggling with people and social issues is just life because everyone is stupid and annoying
- guy who read Bad Therapy once and now thinks autism is a tiktok trend
- insufferable fedora guy that thinks psych is unscientific
- probably secretly has severe depression and is making it everyone else's problem by being a jerk. whenever called out 4 being jerk blames the autism he probably doesn't actually have
- guy who thinks the solution is just be yourself
- guy with trauma from being themselves landing them on a PIP
A primary problem in tech is how everyone is seriously lacking in social skills and empathy. This is exhausting for autists and everyone. The real autism simulator is just existing in tech.
I have pretty severe C-PTSD and structural dissociation and this has resulted in some moments... Usually this is just a tendency to have memory issues under stress. I have blanked on everything from the names of my own projects to names of companies I have worked for.
When I get triggered in an interview very "interesting" things can happen. Probably the most "legendary" is when I started uncontrollably crying and sobbing in an interview. They obviously wanted to bail and reschedule but I composed myself and was like "no keep going. I am fine". The irony was that they completely lost focus and did a terrible interviewing job but I did pretty good. Shockingly, I did not get that job.
A decade ago I was going to kill myself then what was essentially my suicide note went viral(ish) after I submitted it to HN (if u want to read the cringey post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5252054https://archive.fighttheurgetofade.com). This lead to a lot of support, connections, and friendships, which ultimately have helped keep me going for a decade.
While my mental health has continued to improve over the decade (through lots of therapy and work) I have never managed to get out of the poverty hole I was stuck in a decade ago. At times I have come close, but I never seem to get my life on track long enough to maintain it. It has been exhausting. Unfortunately I have started to accumulate health issues (like bad teeth) that is making escaping poverty even more daunting than it was before. I am hoping some wealthy members of HN might feel generous and want to give me an extra bit of help.
You are right that my method differed slightly so I did things again. It took me one try to find a sequence of moves that "breaks" what is claimed. You just have to make odd patterns of moves and it clearly has no understanding of the position.
Here is the convo:
me: You are a chess grandmaster playing as black and your goal is to win in as few moves as possible. I will give you the move sequence, and you will return your next move. No explanation needed
ChatGPT: Alright, I'm ready to play! Please give me the move sequence.
me: 1. e3 Nf6 2. f4 d6 3. e4
ChatGPT: My next move as black would be 3... e5
Completely ignoring the hanging pawn.This is not the play of a 1400 elo player. It is the play of something predicting patterns.
I ran a bunch of experiments in the past where I played normal moves and ChatGPT does respond extraordinarily well. With the right prompts and sequences you can get it to play like a strong grandmaster. But it is a "trick" you are getting it to perform by choosing good data and prompts. It is impressive but it is not doing what is claimed by the article.
This is so easy to disprove it makes it look like the author didn't even try.
Here is the convo I just had:
me: You are a chess grandmaster playing as black and your goal is to win in as few moves as possible. I will give you the move sequence, and you will return your next move. No explanation needed
ChatGPT: Sure, I'd be happy to help! Please provide the move sequence and I'll give you my response.
me: 1. e3
ChatGPT: 1... e5
me: 2. ne2
ChatGPT: 2... d6
me: 3. g4
ChatGPT: 3... h5
me: 4. g5
ChatGPT: 4... Ne4
Ne4 is illegal. Also you'd be hard pressed to find any human player that would miss the hanging pawns much less a 1400 elo player. GPT has been trained on chess games and is predicting patterns, this has been known since the GPT-2 days. The daily hype articles where someone coerces a statistical model into "demonstrating" an emergent capability sure are getting old. Claiming emergent capabilities (like having learned chess) are an extraordinary claim (LLMs most likely cant learn things) and I really wish people would put more effort when they make these claims. But the AI hype problem is as old as AI research itself...
I had a similarish vision/idea about 7ish years ago https://github.com/Hactar-js/hactar I was way too early though and it didn't work well. I have recoded it probably half a dozen times since then and the latest prototype attempt used GPT as the core tech.
The biggest hurdle I found was that it just wasn't deterministic enough. You can work around this with mixing and matching custom compilers into the workflow but then you run into a "only works with a limited set of components and frameworks" problem; and at that point it is basically a boilerplate tool with extra steps.
I found a workflow with prompts + some Emacs wizardy to make them runnable with a few keystrokes got me 99% of the same feature set without any of the headaches of trying to fully automate it so I stopped work on it. A prompt library and an editor extension is hard to find a userbase for though so I have yet to open source or launch anything.
I'm still not sure if these sort of tools are too early or the exact right time to be built. They won't work well yet, but maybe the issues can be worked out when LLMs tooling matures, maybe not, hard to say. Watching closely to see what happens in the space!
This is a tip for everyone struggling to find someone to hire; look in a different pool of candidates and be willing to accommodate them. For example, you can find a lot of very skilled developers that are disabled.
I know a lot of people that have been coding professionally for 10+ years, have popularish open source projects, been lead devs at startups etc; yet feel stuck in their current jobs or even struggle to get hired. They would instantly job jump to something better or would love to switch from contract work to something with good health insurance/benefits. You just have to be a company willing to accommodate them. And accommodating their needs requires far less investment than paying FAANG level salaries to attract the same Sr engineers everyone else is competing for.
Technologies: React, JS, Ruby, Rails, Clojure, ClojureScript, GraphQL, Redux, MEAN Stack, VueJS, basically all the modern web stuff buzzwords, and of course I have 5-7 years experience with React Hooks
I'm a full-stack dev with extensive experience in modern JS stacks and Ruby. Constantly learning and I have dabbled in everything from C++ game dev to Haskell. Could easily learn a new stack or an de-rust an old one (PHP hate is silly). I have built my own frameworks https://github.com/eldr-rb/eldr, written books https://getgood.at/build-your-own/sinatra, and created tools that make developers lives easier https://github.com/Hactar-js/hactar. Would love to work on developer tools or tools for designers!
Full disclosure upfront: I'm on the autism spectrum and have struggled with interviews, take home assignments or trial runs are a necessity, no whiteboarding.
wow you must be fun at parties! (that is mostly just a pun on your username not meant to convey lots of snark)
anyways lol some of that is too real
jokes aside I think web development has come a long way and JS gets a bit of a bad rep. Full stack JS is insanely productive as a stack when you consider what you can build with it. It might be buggy and make you say "wat?" a lot but in exchange you can build insanely complex apps in timeframes that used to be the stuff of dreams. Granted many times what we build has no need to be so insanely complex, but when we really need it JS is there to make complicated things just magically easy to build.
It is more targeted towards people that know some JS but want to learn ES6 or are struggling with parts of ES6. It is a quick mini-book focused on ES6 with some refresher of more advanced-ish JS concepts like hoisting and closures. It says 7 days, but you could easily digest the content in a weekend :)
Thanks for the feedback! You are definitely right that there is a ton of material on this subject already out there. I intentionally chose a tiny subject I know a lot about that has mass appeal, so I could test the waters a bit. I have written more niche content on Crystal and also a few CS fundamentals focused articles. More niche content is planned as well as more mass appeal content until I get a feel for what the right focuses are.
My theory is that building an audience for a site like this is a mix of niche content and mass appeal content. I honestly have no idea what that mix is yet and what type of content to focus on, still figuring that out. Your feedback is massively appreciated! It will without a doubt influence the direction I take the site in!
As far as the value of this book over other resources, I would say the main separating factor is my writing style. If you like non-serious writing that leans much more towards helping you grok concepts than technical correctness then you will enjoy it. There is no stuff like "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" to be found within my writing. Also there are lots of references :)
2. A zero config JS dev tool, you can see the prototype for it on GitHub https://github.com/Hactar-js/hactar. Currently working on a major rewrite using Reason.
3. A JS bundler and ES7 compiler in Reason. Think webpack and babel but ridiculously fast (compile times measured in ms instead of seconds) and with a massively simplified developer experience.
1. You can do this and you are not alone! I look good enough on paper that I get a seemingly endless number of job leads. And I still cant make it through the hiring pipelines at seemingly anywhere. I know people way better than me that cant either. The creator of homebrew? Max Howell? Yep, that guy. He couldn't make it through the hiring pipeline at Google. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9695102 It isn't you, remind yourself that it is not you. Just keep going forward. You will get there. You will make it.
2. But is going to hurt. The hiring pipeline in this industry is broken, completely utterly broken. It will not be fun.
Until you make it, it will be rough. It is just the way it is. There wont be any saving grace or magical advice that will make it all better. It will be rough, it is that simple. Most people outside of the right stereotypes and demographics wont make it. If you don't fit the right demographic you will have to work 3x as hard and suffer 3x the stress and anxiety as others. But the good news is it can be done. You can do it.
First step; figure out what your weakness is and begin to work on it. You can pinpoint this by figuring out where in the pipeline you are continually failing.
Then work at getting a job the same way you worked at learning to program. Getting a job is a skill, don't let anyone or yourself convince you that just because you can code a job will happen. They don't just fall into your lap. You must tackle getting a job with the same motivation, and dedication to self-improvement that you have when learning a new framework or programming language.
If you cant get your foot in the door at companies, if you cant get them to respond to you, then your problem is you look crap on paper. Go and find people that look good on paper, look up the thought leaders, the people whose work you see constantly. Then copy what they are doing. Make open source projects, contribute to their projects, write articles. Eventually you will look good and the leads will start flowing in.
Now here is where it gets harder. If you are failing screens, you haven't learned to talk right. Practice learning how to talk about your work and answering questions (and asking them). Start asking after the screens for feedback. You will eventually learn what you are doing wrong and then you can work at getting better at it.
If you are failing the whiteboard challenge phase of hiring, then get good at them. Go to HackerRank and solve solve solve until things get easier. Recognize that they are puzzles, they are not programming. There is no shame you suck at them, you aren't trained as a puzzle solver, you trained as a programmer. But you have to practice the skills they are testing, and they will be testing you to see how fast you can reverse a singly linked list. Recognize it is silly and stupid, but get good at it anyway.
Also a reminder for anyone reading these comments that chess should be fun! Don't let psychological hangups like thinking u need a good memory, thinking you need to study openings, have a certain level of skill, or need to play a certain format (like avoiding blitz because it is "bad" for your game or thinking OTB is more important) stop you from playing chess! The only rules for how to play chess are the rules of the game; all the other stuff e.g advice about how to get good are just things people make up. Learn and play however you want and in whatever way brings you the most joy! Chess is a game and it is meant to be fun and not be taken seriously