I'd say a lot depends on both the quality of the schooling and maybe even more depends on the person's natural inclinations. He wouldn't have had time for all the reading he did as a teenager if he weren't home schooled, but he'd probably still have been in theater and still have been very open and curious life-long learner as an adult.

Devs voluntarily choose to publish apps on the App Store and doing so gets them both another discovery channel and a low-friction sales channel. Stores being robbed by shoplifters don't voluntarily enter that arrangement and they get no benefit from it.

Location: Taipei, Taiwan (US citizen, open work permission)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No, but I can shift my work hours up to four hours in either direction.

Technologies and tools: Elixir, JS, Ruby, Python, Golang, Rust, Tailwind CSS, PostgreSQL, Docker, AWS, Digital Ocean, AI (learning)

Resume/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J5FlE_Yj_x3gZmA5IRZcAywz...

Email: (in resume)

Hi there! I'm Mark and I've worked alternately as an engineer and entrepreneur for fifteen years, in Beijing, in the SF Bay Area and remotely. Most of my work has been with smaller startup teams, but I've worked at a large scaleup as well. Experience building tech for education, real estate, automated trading, e-commerce and gig platforms. I also have some experience rescuing outsourced projects

I generally work in spurts 1-4 year spurts (either a single role or a series of contracts) and then take an extended break to learn new skills. Now looking for a contractor role at a 5-20 person startup. I prioritize learning and impact.

Languages: English (native), Mandarin (years of use professionally), Japanese (previously a ~B2 level, now limited)

They’re probably blocking based on geolocation or something similar. I’m on an iPhone, using Safari and no VPN.

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Worse still, the quality of Stripe’s own docs have really degraded this decade for anyone not using a language they have an SDK for. Most of their newer docs assume m have a drop-down toggle for on backend language with a few popular languages and no option for “other”. Example: https://docs.stripe.com/billing/quickstart

None of this is a fault of anyone working on Elixir or Phoenix but it definitely has an effect of discouraging some of the fledgling entrepreneur types who Elixir would otherwise be a near perfect fit for, as Rails was in the late aughts.

The names of the systems related to this registry are slightly different in Chinese, Japanese and Korean but you can see links to Wikipedia entries for each of them from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%88%B6%E7%B1%8D

More importantly, you generally don't need an external queue service, in-memory KV store, task scheduler or many of the other things that JS/Ruby/Python stacks need. By consolidating just about everything but the DB in a single, well designed system, it's possible for a very small team to take on relatively large challenges on a smaller budget.

There is no long-term gain from storing "hair" and "emit" under the same entry in your database. Storing 髮 and 發 separately, along with 发 as the simplification of both is a small effort now that will constrain you a lot less in the future. I've literally seen this pitfall happen with about 40 different Chinese learning apps over the last 15 years. Only a few (like Du Chinese and Pleco) got it right early on.

If I were to go back and learn Japanese again, (which I may do since I haven't spoken it in 20 years), I'd use Anki for the following:

- drilling the sounds, single syllables, 2-3 syllables, and identifying pitch accents in sentences

- relearning hiragana and katakana

After that initial phase, I'd probably make the core of my practice listening to podcasts for foreign learners while reading the transcripts at home and then re-listening to those same podcasts later while outside for practice. It's way easier and more helpful to recall words in a context you already understand.

I'd also use Anki for learning kanji if I hadn't spent years reading traditional Chinese. Since I have that background and Japanese character simplifications were so modest, I think I'd just read some audio books while listening to the audio and see if I could figure out all the kanji from context. TV series are also great once you can access them because they tend to use similar vocabulary and revisit similar throughout a season arc.

Related comment on another app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43769831

Some of the problem is due to the specificity of the training effect. I.e., if you mostly practice something through flash cards then you’re going to be training your ability to work with that on flash cards.

With language, there’s an additional challenge—many if not most words have different meanings in different contexts.