_448

Shhh...don't say that loudly in the UK :)

I remember reading an article long time ago, written by an engineer in India. He became famous in India(or at least in my city, Pune, where he lived) for reverse engineering Windows NT. He along with his friends later on wrote the book "Undocumented Windows NT". He was promptly hired by Microsoft, and moved to the US. He later wrote an article on his experience working for Microsoft. One thing I vividly remember from that article was his experience the very first day at work. He observed that every engineer had a separate room. He was not used to this luxury. He was awed. During the day, he had a question on some aspect of the project he was assigned, and he immediately went to the next room where one of his colleagues was working. His colleague instead frowned and asked him to first send a meeting request, and then he will alot him a time. This surprised the new employee. He was not used to this way of "team work". He went back and sent a formal request and later there was a meeting to resolve the project issue.

Afterwards, he enquired why engineers were kept separate in their own rooms? And why does one have to be so formal in requesting a meeting even to discuss project issues? It takes lot of time to resolve issues. Why this inefficiency? And the reply he got was, engineers when they are working, they get into a zone. It is very difficult to get into a zone, but very easy to get out of it even with a slightest distraction or interruption. Hence Microsoft provides separate rooms for engineers and meetings are available only when the engineer is free.

SEEKING TECH CO-FOUNDER | EdTech(eXtended Reality) | Engineering | Worldwide | Pre-Seed

An online multi-user platform to deliver educational XR content(3D simulations with emphasis on Space science) to students across the world.

Email is in my HN profile.

> some intersections between Hinduism and Buddhism.

Instead of intersection, it is derivation of a specific strand of Hinduism, the adwait philosophy. It was extended further by Buddhism and more literature was added.

> In the same vein, even though Buddhism doesn't have a pantheon like mainstream Hinduism, it still retains lists of named Buddhas

But this is very different from the concept of "God". The list maintains names of people who were enlightened rather than "God" as envisioned in Dwaita.

> I also fail to see what the various Hindu religions' views on god or duality/non-duality have to do with Buddhism.

Because Buddhism is derived from the Vedic text on adwaita.

Reading posts like these I think my family is right and I am wrong. Every time my family business faces financial turbulence, I question why does the business not take equity funding. And every time I get an emphatic No as an answer. The reason being that this not only loses control of the business and hence freedom, but it also increases stress. It is better to grow slow and steady. There will be bumps in the road, but at least it will not add unnecessary stress to the already stressful task of running a business.

BTW, just a nitpick; this does not represent the philosophy of Buddhism. Buddhism is derived from the "adwaita" philosophy of Hinduism. Hinduism has two philosophical strands, "dwaita" i.e. dualism, (which is what Christianity, Islam and Judaism follow too), and "adwaita" i.e. non-dualism (which is what Buddhism and some section of Hinduism follow).

Dwaita stipulates that God is out there, separate from humans. Where as adwaita stipulates that there is no external "God"; instead of searching for God elsewhere one should look within oneself to attain Moksha(in Hinduism) or Nirvana(in Buddhism).

So it is odd that the Tibetan monks in the movie will print names of "God".

The philosophy of dwaita and adwaita originates from the Hindu Vedic text.

Anyone who does Yoga and chants OM(AUM_, to be precise) during meditation is actually practising the adwaita philosophy to attain Moksha/Nirvana.

> what's the title?

Renegades of the Empire

Ultimate++ :)

I once worked for a startup co-founded by people who created DirectX at Microsoft. There is a book written on how DirectX was created and what went on inside the team during those initial days of DirectX. Hence this book was available in the library of the startup where I worked. These is a very interesting statement in that book on the topic of what a manager's responsibility should be in a team. And this is what it said:

"A manager's responsibility is to remove any roadblocks from the path of an engineer. If an engineer is coming down a hallway and there is a chair in the path blocking that engineer, then it is the manager's responsibility to remove the chair from the path so that the engineer is not troubled." :)

> Oil has the Petrodollar

China is pushing to break that link. With Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia and Venezuela on its side it may very well succeed in that.

> what’s the currency for the semiconductors

I see a multi-currency world. For semiconductor it won't be currency but access to raw material, supply chain and technology. Two examples of this are the blockage of supply of rare earths metal to Japan by China a few years ago during a diplomatic crisis, and very recently refusal by ASML, due to pressure from the US, to supply semiconductor equipments to China.

Semiconductor is the new Oil. In the future expect the supply, demand and prices to be controlled by whoever controls the raw materials, manufacturing, supply chain and IP. The war bugle was already blown after the pandemic, and the war has started with the west blocking China's access to ASML's technology. And recently Japan's Prime Minister proposed a joint semiconductor development strategy with India, and China and Russia declared their own own strategy.

Hope to see more Oil like use of semiconductor technology for strategic geopolitical purposes. So the supply problem is not going to end, but rather fluctuate, just like oil.

> Lisp has been making a comeback since the 60s

That is very true, except in the form of other languages.

It is often said about Lisp (and also about Erlang) that other languages sometime in their lifetime implement some features of Lisp, but in an inferior way :)

Start here:

https://www.csunplugged.org/en

https://www.barefootcomputing.org

https://www.bootstrapworld.org

https://www.nand2tetris.org

In an ideal situation I would like to see, what I call, a "ladder strategy" of teaching a subject i.e. as with a ladder, a curriculum should have two vertical support, one for "theoretical" part of the subject and the other the "applied" part of the subject. And as with the ladder these two supports should be connected with strong links at each level, from basics to advance, so that the students can climb up the ladder of that subject with confidence.

This is like the C++ Concepts idea except for the control statements.

The C++ Concepts work with the same idea except it is at compile-time and applies to the whole function or a type/class.

> Furthermore, after looking at the WT documentation it seems horrific to construct frontends in...

The front-end is jQuery and plain CSS or Bootstrap; and if JavaScript is not available then it falls back to complete server-side rendering, else it is hybrid server-client rendering.

> maybe not so bad for APIs though.

According to the creators of Wt, though you can write APIs, it is not yet architecturally optimised for REST API development.

What, no mention of tux games? :)

Btw, be careful about TuxMaths. When I introduced this game to my nephew he was horrified that the penguins are killed if he is unable to solve the equations :)

Yes, I have gone back to C and C++ :) Using Wt[0], FoundationDB[1] and gRPC C++[2] for my side project. One thing to rule them all :)

[0] https://webtoolkit.eu

[1] https://www.foundationdb.org

[2] https://grpc.io

Giving money to charities is a challenging thing. Charities, in most countries, have to deal with local corrupt officials. Giving money to charities unwittingly promotes corruption. I remember few years back there was a sentiment expressed by lots of African NGOs that the west should not send money to the continent as "charity" because that increases corruption; instead they should help stop the root cause of the problem i.e. stop exploitation of resources, stop funding and supplying arms or puppet governments.

I personally have not given any money directly to charities. As I work in tech, my salary was better than others in the family, and I use to give all my salary to my parents. So I was asked just twice(once by my aDad and once by my Uncle) if I would mind if some money was given to charity work. And this was very specificrequests. One was for a blind students school which was run by my Dad's friend and the other was for restoration of a guest house of a very ancient templein Goa(recently I saw a video on YouTube of the work that temple committe has done and was very happy with what they have achieved since I last visited them). My sister on the other hand gives regularly to charities. But she gives very specific things to very specific charities. She first visited those charities multiple times before deciding on supporting them. And she has avoided giving money, instead she gives every month 5kg rice each to an orphanage and a blind students school. She also occasionallyo kids from these two charities for events at a theme park which we own. I once asked her why she does not give money to these two charities and she said that she will not know where this money will go. With specific help, she knows that the real needs are being served.

So my advice to anyone thinking of giving to charity is to actually visit the place multiple times; if possible, volunteer there for sometime and then give very specific help and avoid giving cash.

Tech is a very broad term, it encompasses many domains e.g medicine, food, robotics, civil engineering etc. Not every website will cover everything. And even the technologists don't know what will be the next hit that will have profound impact on lives and when. One way to understand what could be on the horizon is to go through the company portfolios of major venture capital firms, read about research done by major universities, and follow few websites like Tech Crunch, The Register and Hacker News.

> My wife was just asking me how we should prepare for old age and what we should watch out for.

> One of my suggestions was making sure that we keep up with technology.

That is a good idea, but tech is a moving target. It will be difficult to keep track of it regularly.

What I would do, if I was in your place, is stop worrying about tech and instead think of what maximum places on this planet I could visit and start preparing for that. If you are in a western country, then I would urge you to visit those places that usually get bad press in the west, like countries in Asia, south America, middle-east, culturally vibrant countries like China and Iran, and countries in the Eurasian region. Just my 2cents :)

I remembered a very funny incident sometime ago when I saw Jim Blinn's name in the title.

I had traveled to the US to enable a SoC GPU for a client in California. In my home country, India, good computer science books were a luxury then. So when in the US, I took an opportunity to buy some computer graphics books. Jim Blinn's excellent books were on my list. One of the books was the "Dirty Pixels". During lunch time, I visited a local Barnes and Noble shop to see if I could get the books. I went to the help-desk at the book shop. At the counter there was a young girl, and I enquired about the book "Dirty Pixels". The girl without saying a word immediately went away. I thought she might have gone to check if they have the book in stock. But she returned back with a male colleague. And the guy looked at me in a suspicious way and asked, "Yes, how can we help?". I said, I am looking for a book titled "Dirty Pixels". He gave me a look, and turned to the computer on the desk, typed something and asked, "What is the author's name?". I said, Jim Blinn. He typed something on the computer, and said "There is no such author!" Again giving me a suspicious look. Now realising what might be happening, I said the book is of computer graphics; and the author's name is Jim Blinn with double 'n'. The guy typed in something on the computer again, then smiled and said, "Oh! Computer Graphics! We don't have that book in store." :)

It is sad how much of the knowledge was destroyed due to ideology and religious fanaticism. I have a book here next to me with the title "Vedic Mathematics". The book is based of ancient Indian text. Reading the preface of the book it is clear that what is written in the book is just a small portion of a very large volume of work that was lost. It is sad that so much advance knowledge was lost.

That is why humanities/liberal-arts courses are better that "specialisations".

Okay, this idea that women are not able to manage household by themselves is not true unless they are not themselves earning a living. Your mother is earning(though less) so she will manage the house alright on her own with the pension and some help from your side.

From what you have written, I think your main concern is your sister's future and that is really laudable. But never tell anyone what not to do, because that never works. If your sister wants to become a singer, there is nothing wrong in that. In fact making money out of your hobby is one of the best things in life But tell her that singing is a very competitive field. And it is also a very exploitative field. If she wants to excel at singing then she has to combine that with STEM subjects. For example, there are university courses that teach mathematical music theory. This will give her an advantage in not only understanding music, but also maths and computing. She can then use that knowledge to create her music and songs that will have an edge over others.

Do not force her to become a doctor. Think of the patients too. Here is something to brighten up your mood and explain why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh0-x1RFEOY

> What are you hoping to achieve by finding such a community?

Being around motivated people trying to create something in their spare time is a good thing.

> IndieHackers has a lot of people developing stuff on the side, but the clear focus there is to make money off it at some point in time.

Well, making money is not the motivation.

> I know trying to innovate in the public education sector is slow for obvious reasons but shouldn't the private sector be able to scale easier, or at least at a faster pace than it is now.

First we should stop repeating that the private education system is better than the public education system. This happens only where there is corruption and public education system is deliberately stunted to benefit the private education sector.

For what a good education system looks like, one should look at the Scandinavian countries, more specifically Finland. Few years ago I was watching a video on YouTube on Finland's education system. In that a teenage girl, who was preparing for 'teachers exam', was asked on how the exam is, and she replied that it is the toughest, most competitive and prestigious exam. And this is the difference between good public education system and other failed education systems. If the system does not recruit the best and then not provide them with the prestige in the society then the system erodes over time. There use to be a comedy series on TV in the UK where one of the sections of each episode was dedicated to some profession where a character, shown as representing that profession, use to make some funny comment. You know what they showed for a school teacher? They showed a worn down, energy less unshaven skinny guy who, standing in front of the camera, looking emotionless says "I tried to get job in all the other sectors, but I did not get any. So I became a teacher". And the audience laughed! Imagine this is the situation in a developed country, what will be the situation elsewhere.

This claim that AI won't cause unemployment baffles me. I understand the argument being made that new types of jobs will be created, but what the people making that argument miss is the massive level of up-skilling/re-skilling that is required of the population whose jobs are replaced. This has not worked out well. Just look at the communities in some poorer parts of the UK, who were relying on coal, mining and steam locomotive(yes, for that many generations the effects of job losses are felt). These communities have not yet recovered.

The challenge with AI is that it is going to touch every spectrum of the jobs, and the people required for the available jobs will be far less and require very niche skills.

> insane battery life

Is it just hardware that helps extend battery life or is it the combination of hardware and software? One advantage for Apple is that they are both the hardware and software designer hence they can optimise both to take advantage of each other.

Looking for https://val-lang.dev ?

So this is like mind reading?