> I've also found that interviews don't tell you much about reality.
Always ask to see code and talk to engineers about what their days look like. I believe there are very few legitimate reasons they won't show you their code, but more likely if they're refusing, it's because they're hiding something. When talking to an engineer, ask them how their code goes from idea to production and have it explained in detail. This will tell you what type of management they have, what testing/review/deployment practices, etc.. As a bonus, I also like to ask my future peers what they don't like about their job or what they'd like to change.
I agree most jobs are some form of shite, but there are good ones. Being more picky during the interview phase should hopefully allow you to find some of those while weeding out the bad quicker.
* yes, there were some democrats who voted in her favour, but there were republicans too who voted against her. Overall though, the overwhelming majority democrats did vote against her. Far from "unanimous support" like you claim.
Here's my usual playbook for onboarding engineers:
Start by giving the person a high level overview of your systems and them let them go setup "company things" for the rest of the day. This gives the brain a rest from the technical stuff with menial work.
The next day, and throughout the first week, give them deeper dives into individual systems. Every time you do this start from the overview again, so they're reminded. Always keep it a conversation, go back to different parts when the engineer asks questions that show they haven't understood something you've gone over before. This is normal as you're unloading a lot of knowledge you've built over time. Make sure you keep focused on the mission of sharing knowledge and do not let yourself get lost into too many side chats about how your pet peeves are never prioritised to be fixed and how you hate technical debt - this is not the time.
Once they've setup their company emails and whatever your HR demands, start by giving them a simple task and leave them on their own with the expectation that they will reach out once blocked. Check if they're blocked yourself multiple times during the day. A new dev might be reluctant to reach out for fear of being perceived as too junior. Let them know this is not a concern, the concern is to ramp them up as soon as possible and questions are the best way to do it.
Remember to ask them about the pace, how they're feeling, what they're struggling with or if they're eager for more. Some people will prefer a few more days reading docs, others prefer to jump in to the work straight away. I've seen both approaches work and try to adjust myself to the way the person likes to work best.
Increasingly give them more complex tasks, have them pair with other engineers. Remember that not only you're onboarding them on the systems, you're onboarding them to the people. Make sure their work is throughly reviewed, take your time to explain why things are done in certain ways, take all oportunities to give further back context.
As time goes on, apply a similar playbook to give them extra duties, complex issues to solve, more permissions, etc.
PS: Grove's book is great, definitely recommend it
This is about (common) swifts. I know some things about them.
Because a very long time ago I raised one, which was very difficult, but also enjoyable.
On the way home from last day of school before summer holidays I saw some bird chick on the ground, next to a closed wall of bricks, on the walkway, between one-way street with heavy traffic and a steep hill on the other side. I didn't know what to do, except not to blindly grab it and take it home, because sometimes the parents come and feed them. So I stood back about a dozen meters and waited for half an hour. No bird parents came, traffic on the street roared on and on. Couldn't make sense of where it would have fallen off, couldn't put it back where it came from beacause blank wall of bricks 4 to 5 meters high to some backyard was closed to the street. No doors/gates or something like that. Walked around the block to find entry, unsuccessfully. Walked back to where the chick still was, sitting miserably on the ground, almost no feathers, just some dark gray fluff, pink skin shining through.
Stood there and thought: Should I, shouldn't I?
What will Mommy say?
Knelt down to see if it had anything icky on it, which it hadn't and put it into the left cheat pocket of my shirt.
Didn't even struggle. Just looked around with its tiny dark eyes.
Some twenty minutes later, at home, unexpectedly no storm of rage because bringing back strange animals. Instead phoning around for some veterinary who does birds.
I somehow had the feeling that timing was essential here, so I grabbed my street bicycle without having lunch and speeded to the veterinarian. Again with the chick in my left shirt pocket, was afraid it would try to get out, but it seemed content to just look out from there.
The veterinarian examined it under a light and looking glass and found a hand full of tiny mites. Eeek! I haven't seen them! Strangely there were none in my shirt pocket.
Anyways, vet couldn't make out what it was exactly, because too young, settled for mostly some sort of swift and told me what to expect, and that it was a stupid thing to do, because if swift this would never be my bird, because they are wild things, almost always in the air, and nobody ever successfully raised one so far.
I answered that I know it's no Budgie or Canary, that I waited for the parents to show up, which they didn't, couldn't locate where it came from to put it back there, so certain death by car, cat, starvation was imminent.
So I got some tubes with different gels in it, which I had to give the chick with the food. Which was a mix of living mealworms to be obtained from fishing ponds where people use them as bait, deep frozen crickets from pet food stores, raw minced meat with egg white and yolk mixed in, and any living insects I managed to shoot down with the rubber rings from preserving jars :-)
Every two hours, at least! 24/7! For two months! Ugh!
Anyways, I did it, went to a museum of natural history to speak with an ornithologist there. Drove there by subway with it in my shirtpocket again :-)
Ornithologist confirmed bias of vet towards common swift, and lend me some books, plus a list of more titles from the library for learning the swarming patterns, to which I should release it when they appear in the sky.
So my summer holidays were effectively gone by having to care for it around the clock, without pauses longer than two hours. I didn't really mind, and chick neither. It grew into
something very streamlined, very dark brown and shiny feathers. It was primed to me and not afraid. I could put it onto my shoulder and it stayed there.
I worried a little about it being so lazy, so I trained it by putting it into my hands while standing, and then going down fast with my hands, to let its instincts kick in. Which they did, by spreading its wings.
Later, when it made strange rattling sounds by rhythmically spreading its wings to get the feathers out of their growing
sheets and I found it on top of the curtains when coming back into the room, I knew it was time to get it to fly.
Which I did by having it sit on my shoulder while bicycling around at 40 to 60 km/h in the forest on excellently paved ways.
At first it didn't let go of my shirt, just spread its wings
and lifting it a little, or beating its wings and tickling the side of my head that way. But it wouldn't let go!
I had to go to about 40km/h with the bird in one hand and only one hand on the handlebar, then throwing it UP!
Screech! Screech! Back to my shoulders. Hrrmpf.
I repeated that I don't know how often anymore until I had it flying after me for some minutes without immediately going back to my shoulders.
I extended these "lessons" to places where I knew there were
many insects in the air, like standing ponds, fields with cows on them, and it worked, it just got its flies from the air!
Seeing it doing that really took a burden from my mind.
Took it ontop the tower of some castle ruin, over bridges over rivers, onto watch towers in the forest, tried to show it all it could be confronted with in its life within my means, which meant from my shoulder while racing my bicycle.
It really liked me going downhill from the forest back home at anywhere between 65km/h to 85km/h tops for maybe 20 seconds.
It also liked sitting squat on my chest while I laid on my back, wings half spread, eyes closed, me very lightly stroking its head with one finger... cheelp, cheelp
If it were a cat it would have purred.
Also it never shat on me. Neither into the nest which I've built for it into the corner of the room, onto a halfheight cabinet out of some towels. Always nicely outside, onto the old newspapers which I put under and around it. Clean bird!
Then the time came to throw it up into the swarms, like I intended from the beginning. Took me about ten times until I could see it fly towards the swarm without coming back.
Instincts kicking in, Mission Accomplished! Proud and sad at the same time.
Called the vet which wouldn't believe at first, and then told her what I did, how, in which sequence and so on.
Moved away from there shortly after, so I don't know if it came back some time, hope it didn't get caught in the nets which some people in the south raise to catch them for food.
Anyways, about 30 years later I came back home to see a bird on the ground of the long hallway. It was a common swift, somehow got caught in there, with no way out. I tried to slowly grab it, but it panicked, tried to fly away, bumped into the glass, against the wall, so I stopped trying to grab it.
Thought a little, went for a towel to throw that over it, came back, havn't even spread the towl yet, it fluttered again, spread my arms wide to stop it, then it bumped into my belly and clawed into my windjacket there.
I slowly lowered my arms and stood very still for a minute, then tiptoed the long floor, down the stairs, away from the house, stood very still again, looked at it. It looked back.
After a minute or so I asked "don't you want to be back with your swarm?"
And it let itself fall down backwards over one wing, and going up to the swarm which was there at the time.
A few days later, me on the balcony, seeing and hearing the swarm again I thought to myself: why not putting back on the very yellow wind jacket I wore when I rescued that swift?
I did so, and one little fellow came down to do some aerobatics a few meters from my face, loudly cheeping
and chirrping.
They do remember and recognize you. I'm sure of that!
The really strange thing is it looked exactly like pictures of common swifts, except of the white. What is white on them was something like bronze/copper on mine, depending on the light.
For years, my trick for finding interesting content was to go to, say, the 7th page of Google results, and start there. This doesn't work anymore -- it's SEO-optimised listicle blog posts all the way down.
My trick now is to use Twitter to discover interesting people, and follow them there. Granted, it's not a search engine, but it's at least given me the ability to discover weird things again.
It tells you when to go outside and look up to see the satellites as they pass over your house. It's a cool sight to see because there are up to 60 of them crossing the sky at the same time in a line.
The lead programmer at my very first coding job taught me to put a string of at least three hash marks in a comment, to denote “this is a thing which is okay during development but absolutely must be changed/fixed before shipping this product”.
The more essential the change/fix, the more hashes. Made it really easy to do a global search for them, and you could easily filter the results to only show the most important ones by searching for longer strings of hashes.
Twenty years later and I’m still doing that in my personal projects.
About three years ago I read someone on here recommend the book, “Learned Optimism”. They said it was life changing.
I read it, did the work, and it is life changing. People with a pessimistic outlook are much less happy than people with an optimistic outlook. The book teaches you how each type thinks (for example, optimists think everything good that happens to them is personal and permanent and every bad thing that happens is impersonal and temporary. Pessimists are the opposite). The book then teaches you essentially a cognitive behavioral therapy technique to retrain your brain to think more like an optimist. It’s work but so worth it especially if you ever experience anxiety.
A side effect of a stagnant economy and population shrinkage is that Bulgarian property is really cheap. You can purchase a modern flat starting around $15,000 (or rent for really cheap) in a ski community with a very strong remote worker presence (Bansko).
If you do this right, you can also become a resident and benefit from a flat 10% income tax which is lowest in the EU. No affiliation; I just find this type of arbitrage fascinating (and am currently doing something similar on the Black Sea coast of a different non-eu country).
Levine's article "Arbitrage Discovered" might be my all-time favorite econ essay. It's about an investment product that let you trade on past stock prices in the present. Levine is usually pretty calm and wonkish, but this arrangement was so breathtakingly self-destructive that he spends the piece writing things like "It's not actually an arbitrage. EXCEPT NO HOLY GOD IT IS THIS IS AMAZING."
It lists the 10 highest-rated stories each day. I added the RSS feed to my news reader so I can see the biggest items even if I don't happen to read HN that day.
I hear you and I'm mostly just using your comment to share my thoughts. I've learned not to treat the statistics because that doesn't work at the human level.
Fear, anxiety, apprehension, are legitimate human conditions regardless of how irrational they are. And regardless of what the numbers say, there's an effective treatment available: filter flights by plane type.
I personally don't care. But my wife does, and therefore I do care after all.
Took me too many years to learn this fact about coexisting with others: addressing how they feel is almost always easier than trying to convince them not to feel that way.
There was a homeless person who was well known in my home town (not a town that you'd typically find homeless people living in. In fact I think in the couple of decades I lived there, he was the only one I ever saw). He never seemed to beg, always politely refused any aid. He was so well known, people had offered him beds for the night, but no. He liked being outside in the fresh air.
Eventually he passed, and of course it was mentioned in the local newspaper, along with the revelation that he was, in fact, wealthy. He just chose to live that way.
I know what you mean. It took me a while to find the original version of Napoleon Hill's "How to Think and Grow Rich" because everyone and their mother's posted $0.99 versions.
That's why I like Standard Ebooks. It's a website where volunteers transcribe public domain books into high-quality books for various eReaders. A lot of ebooks tends to suffer from poor formatting and grammar issues, but all the books on Standard Ebooks go through a rigorous proofreading process.
Also worth reading is the excellent (and pretty extensive) article by Michael Nielsen[1] showcasing how he used Anki to create an in-depth knowledge about AlphaGo.
Personally, I've used Anki to keep remembering/revisiting the concepts that I use for a while and then move onto something else. Common APIs of programming languages and their standard libraries is one such area. I've found that while it's not really difficult to learn and get into the flow of using a programming language (or history, mathematics, physics for that matter), it's more difficult to try using the same knowledge after a break of few months.
My main language at work is C# and Web Development, but I keep trying to learn other languages and domains in my free time. If I do not use the knowledge for a few months, I forget everything. But with Anki I have to just open the app for around 10 minutes a day and it helps me to recall such concepts in a timely fashion.
I would suggest everyone who has the time and faces similar issues should give it a shot.
This describes research published in 2012 by Arjen Lenstra et al. (https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/064.pdf), which relied on a scalable n-way GCD algorithm that Lenstra's team thought best not to explain to readers (in the hope that the attack wouldn't be quickly replicated for malicious purposes). Coincidentally, another team (Nadia Heninger et al., https://factorable.net/) published extremely similar research in a similar timeframe, without withholding details of that team's GCD calculation approach.
The Heninger et al. paper explains quite a lot about where the underlying problems came from, most often inadequately seeded PRNGs in embedded devices. As the linked article mentions, other subsequent papers have also analyzed variants of this technique and so there's not much secret left about it.
If people are interested in learning about the impact of common factors on the security of RSA, I created a puzzle based on this which you can try out, which also includes an explanation of the issue for programmers who are less familiar with the mathematical context: http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/rsa/
Notably, my puzzle uses a small set of keys so you can do "easy" pairwise GCD calculations rather than needing an efficient n-way algorithm as described here (which becomes increasingly relevant as the number of keys in question grows).
You just have to have some product sense, some engineering chops, and the ability to take 6 months off (not everyone can afford this, and that sucks) to build the thing and see if you can get people to look at it and buy it.
You'll learn all the other stuff along the way (taxes, marketing, and eventually: hiring). Just give it a shot. If you run out of savings and have to go back to work, in interviews you'll get to say you "did a startup."
My company is bootstrapped. It isn't growing fast enough to fit PG's definition of a startup, but it's 5 years old and makes 7 figures.
Realizing after a few months that I didn't have to do a "startup" really helped. Whew, no more putzing with decks, trying to figure out how to get into an incubator, trying to raise funds, trying to convince one of my friends to quit their job and be my cofounder, "hustling", committing myself to never sleeping again. I could just focus on building a great product.
And I think my company worked because I was product focused. In the early days I just thought a lot about what the /best possible/ solution to the problem I was solving would look like, built what I saw, put it in front of friends (and eventually strangers from the internet), and made tweaks based on their feedback (and things they didn't say but that I noticed about how they used it).
This is contrary to the "sell first" idea--when I tried to cold pitch friends on my product idea they all said "eh, I don't think I'd really use it over the existing solutions." Those same friends asked me to comp their accounts a couple years later.
It worked for me. "Sell first" might be more important if you're selling to businesses? But like, getting the "x first" part wrong for a few months probably isn't going to kill you. Just start doing stuff. Wiggle around in your space until things start to catch.
Because of the federal real estate capital gains exclusion of half a mil, 20% marginal long term cap gains tax rate, and the difference between historical real estate appreciation vs SP500 returns being maybe 2% at absolute most, an average rate of increase of about 5% on a house, the average transaction cost of obtaining a mortgage is maybe 2% (stock transactions are practically free in comparison), S+P return after inflation is about 7% the median duration of owning a house being about nine years, extremely sloppy back of envelope calculation for $200K would be (200e3 * 9 * 0.07 * 0.8) - (200e3 * .02) or 96K for owning more stock with a mortgage for $200K and a 200e3 mortgage at this time would cost 9 * 12 * 946 in payments (assuming no PMI) or 102K for owning less stock with no mortgage so in the big scheme of things "not having a mortgage" saves about $6K over nine years or $55/month. (Edited, sorry I had to mess with this ten times to get it right)
You gotta look out for people who argue real estate transactions are as cheap and frictionless as stock market transactions, or insist on weird date ranges in historically bubble economies or rapidly changing demographic economies, or insist tax policy does not exist. Not everything is fundamentally an income stream and you need a plan when a simplification to that fails and you take a massive capital hit. If the error bars on the numbers are large enough, the same number can be interpreted to prove anything. Finally look out for people who confuse average/median with "everyone". All of those are HUGE effects when making financial decisions.
I'm not OP, but I have no mortgage and its worth pointing out that my personal break-even income is obviously twelve times the monthly payment lower than someone with a mortgage, and given a realistic 1/3 of income going to mortgage for most folks, obviously my runway is 1/3 longer than everyone with a mortgage. Also immensely lower stress.
> Right now when I want something to look a particular way, I go into a CSS file, guess...
This is what I used to do, before I started really getting into web design. Then I discovered Sketch, which really changed the way I think about it.
When you design with CSS, you're also constantly struggling with responsiveness, HTML structure, and a bunch of little things that are sort of irrelevant to how it looks.
Sketch (and similar apps) let you focus just on the look, which is great. Need a div with a background color? Stick a rect right there. It really helped me get into the flow of "designing" instead of "building".
(Also, this design blog really helped me get started, coming from a web developer's perspective: http://learnui.design/blog/)
Why is any of that a good thing, though? I could already have a lot more screens than I currently do, but the two I have is just fine. What advantage do windows floating in space offer me over a physical monitor (that will make it worth strapping a headset on every time I sit down at my desk)?
Very interesting! I (female; 57 y.o.) have been doing an intermittent fast (2 days/week: typically Tue/Thu) for >2.5 years now. I picked those days as they don't interfere with social events, weekends, long weekends. I initially did 500 calories on those days, but for more than a year now I simply don't eat at all on those days (but I drink coffee, tea). I find that much easier, as the hunger pangs are largely absent. Benefits from this fasting include an epigenetic reprogramming (perhaps?) of some stem cells, as from the outset I've seen a few of the very few gray hairs that I have revert back to brown (white further out; brown more recently to root). That could be triggered (or entirely due to) e.g. by autophagy of the old, weakened cells and their replacement by rejuvenated cells. Interesting, nonetheless. Body weight is stabilized around the new metabolic set point (I record this daily in a tab-delimited file, that I can easily plot with a simple linux command (alias gp='echo "gnuplot -p /mnt/Vancouver/Programming/scripts/gnuplot/plot.gp')! On non-diet days I eat whatever I want (I ashould add, pretty sensible: mostly home-made food, meals), ad libitum. ;-)
- Using IEEE floating-point error for ML transfer functions http://tom7.org/grad/
- Using IEEE NaN and infinity to build logic gates and a whole CPU http://tom7.org/nand/