agomez314

Jeez it’s kind of amazing to hear the kind of treatment you get if you’re lucky enough to be an AI researcher. Being in the right industry in the right place seems to trump everything else.

I’d be happy just being a cog in the machine, work 9-5, and get to have an upper middle class lifestyle with my family the rest of the time. That’s probs better than what 95% of people (in the US) get to experience.

Hasn't it been proved as well that writing things out by hand is the most effective way to memorize things? Wouldn't all schools want to teach this valuable tool to students?

This looks very similar to the structure of Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective.

Great documentary!!

This so much.

If you want to write professional python code, read python books and courses. Take algorithms and data structures courses. Take compiler courses if you so choose. Work hard to be the best you can at your work. If you are doing all this, feel free to glance over the first chapter or two of SICP, it's Calculus concepts and esoteric explanations will probably turn you off. If you're foolish enough to continue, don't, it will take over your precious time and learnings you could invest in the newest frameworks and LLMs, which make you into a more productive programmer anyway. If the first chapter of SICP is still echoing in your mind about "procedures as general method" and you daydream about opening and closing parenthesis, then it'll open up your mind to pleasures of programming you never new existed and stay with you forever. Your code could probably improve too, but in a tangential sort of way. SICP is the best programming book i've ever read, and one of the best of any kind.

good recommendations and observations! I would also like to add Will Durant's Life of Greece - I found immensely entertaining as well as informative about all things Ancient Greece.

imagine when they bring business people to write workflows cause "it's just plain english" and the look on their faces when things don't "quite" work the way they expect it to and have no clue how to debug. Then they have to create an IT support ticket to figure out how to write a SQL statement.

It did not. Learning git in-depth beats any amount of proof-solving skills you might have in traditional, day-to-day software engineering. Doing proofs makes you a better thinker _in general_, but doing it in isolation (i.e without communication skills or team skills) can actually be detrimental.

"Behind every shit-talking, shade-throwing, sauna-enjoying DTS cast member is a small army of engineers agonizing over the literal nuts and bolts of the cars they pilot."

I'm increasingly seeing these kinds of solutions for similar tasks. I wonder if we are seeing the discovery of new abstractions from using LLMs.

How does this book compare to SICP?

I subscribe to The Neuron which keeps me reasonably informed in a short time amount of time: https://www.theneurondaily.com

Could you elaborate a bit more on what you got out of the program? I never heard about it before but i'm intrigued. Did you find a particular course memorable?

Really liked the reading at first, but was surprised it ended on the note it did. I would imagine at least some of husbands must have loved their wives? Are there any inscriptions on those or all cuneiform tablets just woman-bashing?

Found my wife and got married during the pandemic, have a 4-month old now and working from home 3x a week gives me the chance to see her grow. I would not be as happy if I had to commute everyday to work, even though i'm more of an extrovert and like to hang out with others. Being at home more also means I get to do more house chores. But the joy of seeing my baby grow is incredible!

Yes, if you are at the office 24 hours a day like Elon it's likely you'll do incredible things, but to me it's worth sacrificing some of that success in exchange for a family life.

How is he only getting this award now?

Love the recommendations people are giving out here, not an exaggeration to say that HN gave me a better CS education than my M.S.

Is smartphone/digital screen attributable to some degree to teenager's late-night habits, and therefore a need for later school times?

Until the failure causes political embarrassment or change. It required the meltdown of healthcare.gov to kickstart the use of modern tooling and methodology in gov't IT.

Microservices solve many problems to those that understand the virtues and deficiencies of it - everyone else is just cargo-culting and committing themselves too much to something they don't understand (see Kubernetes).

It's nice to see the author spent a great deal of time and effort to share with others his learnings. However it's important to note his intention at writing this book: "I’ve chosen to focus on topics and concepts that I’ve encountered in my programming career – things that I know are important." Thus it's not an overview of Computer Science per se (which in my opinion is a fuzzy subject without clear boundaries) but subjects the author frequently encountered and perhaps heard as important things in the field.

I would also caution in how the book presents its chosen subjects as "Computer Science." Like the adage goes, "Computer Science is not so much about computers like petri dishes are about biology, or telescopes are about astronomy." There's so much beauty and variety in the field that it's really hard to just pin down in a curriculum. See "A Mathematician's Lament" [1]

I also challenge the notion that some of these subjects logically proceed from the other (some, not all).

I've got no problem with anyone reading the book, they'll be certainly much more informed about the field of computers in general. I especially appreciated the Further Reading sections to let the reader expand his learning. Thanks for sharing this post!

[1] https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....

Original paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9

Re-reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It's a yearly ritual.

The comparison between a hammer and math doesn't make sense, math is much more than a tool. Personally, I'm able to learn best when I understand the context and the "why" questions that people had which led them to the answer. I know other people learn differently so to each its own. Also, I agree with you in that the traditionally-taught history is awful because it lacks relevance. It's now about "how is this useful for me" or even "why should I care" but rather "why did they decide to act that way?"

I find that the practice of "software engineering" has a fuzzy distinction to "computer science." I highly recommend the following books that helped me out on that journey:

- Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and Dave Farley

- The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

- A History of Modern Computing by Paul E. Ceruzzi

- Version Control with Git by Prem Ponuthorai and Jon Loeliger

- and SICP. Understanding it is like accessing a new dimension of power.

I would suggest you look up a bit on the history of the conflict, which is long and very bloody. Most of the time its regular citizens and army personnel that are kidnapped (it's a business in human trafficking) - i knew some of them and the experiences are horrific.

Colombia's had some of the most creative spec ops tactics anywhere. They rescued 15 hostages by posing as NGOS with no bullets shot [1]. Many other examples exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Jaque)

Was born and grew up in Colombia so can answer a few Qs about culture if you'd like.

Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34192647