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Dan

27 Nov, 8 tweets, 2 min read

whoever came up with the KISS principle was horny

https://twitter.com/asdfdelta/status/1464648744587214852

it always surprises me when some term in programming turns out to be US military slang. like, i get *why* historically but in all other ways its connection to computing feels so foreign and unnatural

https://twitter.com/asdfdelta/status/1464648744587214852

i don’t mean this as a bad thing but i don’t mean this as a good thing either

it might be in the spirit of KISS to drop the last S as unnecessary (and also kinda rude). but maybe it’s the mnemonic memorability itself that keeps it simple? it’s almost as if defining “simple” objectively depends on the point you’re trying to make

my favorite genre of HN comments are the ones referencing the Simple vs Easy talk where Simple is the thing they’re familiar with and Easy is the thing they’re above learning

anyway. the rule itself is good. it’s a reminder not to get carried away and that it’s okay for the proposal to not have many moving parts. it’s good and worthwhile to simplify things

it’s funny that despite working on react for half a decade i haven’t meaningfully contributed to the design except one instance where i realized a bit earlier than others that 60% of a proposal was unnecessary and suggested to remove it (we did). honestly still proud of that cont

recruiter: so you made react

me: oh no i didn’t. and i didn’t make any APIs. but there was this one time that i stopped my team from shipping an API that

recruiter: you stopped your team from shipping?..

me: correct

recruiter:

me:

me: are u familiar with US military sayings

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More from @dan_abramov

Dan

@dan_abramov

28 Nov

if you designed a one-year CURRICULUM. assume students start after highschool, have infinite curiosity and good aptitude. assume no specialization. what would you put there? what courses, works, schools of thought would you unmissable? what are educations’s best hits & deep cuts?

i’m biased but i obviously think theory of relativity has to be there. not in some deep way where you sit down to calculate some tensor shit but in a funny way, where people gain an intuition about how trains get all weird and quirky when they run close to the speed of light

i would want some tldr of philosophy. meme versions of every big philosophical movement. at the exam students will make memes roasting other memes through the prism of the meta-contextual discourse and then post them on twitter

Read 6 tweets

Dan

@dan_abramov

28 Nov

the thing nobody tells you if you’re learning mathematics alone is that it’s okay to spend ten minutes reading and thinking about a skngle sentence. it’s not just okay but encouraged. densely packed ideas are the norm there

the approach that’s working out for me so far is doing two reads. one where i skip over at any minor inconvenience and another where i don’t proceed until I understand 100%

the first time i read Tao’s Analysis i did it in two days. but i’ve been doing a close re-read for over two months now and i’m still on page 67 out of 300. (now i’m doing *all* exercises.)

Read 5 tweets

Dan

@dan_abramov

28 Nov

what is a good intuition for why a Cartesian product of no sets is not an empty set?

i’m thinking it’s probably similar to there being one empty function (“only one way to map nothing to nothing”) but i wonder if there are other more obvious ways to think about it

maybe one way to think is

let product = []
let tuple = []

for each choice_strategy
for each set in input_sets
let choice = choice_strategy(set)
tuple.push(choice)
product.push(tuple)

there’s always a choice_strategy even if there are no input_sets

Read 4 tweets

Dan

@dan_abramov

25 Nov

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1463822670131351555

he’s right on this one. although being that dog is tempting… i wonder if there’s a twist on the dog where it’s clear the dog is referring to a higher level of abstraction. that even as you master the mechanics, there’s always a layer where you’re really just “trying things out”

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1463822670131351555

i’m not a brat but when daddy says you can’t be the dog, i find it hard to resist thinking, oh yes, i can absolutely be the dog. just out of spite, a dog with absolutely no ideas, the doggiest copy paste dog. woof

ok more nuanced take: you can be ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING as a professional identity including a copy paste dog. we are beautiful and we contain MULTITUDES. the dog and the wizard(ess) live in us and life is too short to shy away from letting them both shine on twitter dot com

Read 4 tweets

Dan

@dan_abramov

25 Nov

How do open source maintainers pick which contributors to “invest” in (time, effort, mentorship, etc)? I don’t know about others but for me the main thing isn’t coding skill. The main thing I’m looking for in a contributor is good judgement. This concept may sound fuzzy… 🧵

First, what good judgement is NOT. It has nothing to do with where you’re from, how you present yourself, how old you are, or even how many years of professional experience you have.

Good judgement also has nothing to do with the “clout” or being known. There are people with 5 followers whose judgment I would trust more than well-known characters with latge audiences.

Read 27 tweets