hasbroslasher

It is funny that people say "we should be paid hourly" but any job I've ever had with hourly pay I did as little as I possibly could. Possibly because I was a stoned teenager in food service. But even as a salaried employee, I don't often feel like I'm here because they need me every hour from 9 to 5 - I feel like I'm here because I can do some things and if I weren't here at all they'd be in trouble.

Anyway, I was also a stoned teenager in food service when I got a job at a pizza shop delivering pies. No hourly pay, just $20 a day plus a $2/$5/$10 delivery fee depending on how far you were from the shop. I kept all the tips and payday was 11:30 or so every night. I've never worked harder or felt better about work than I did coming home with my pockets full of money at the end of the day - it was clear that my showing up and busting my ass made me my paycheck. Ironically, this is called "getting paid under the table" and it's illegal.

Presumably because the amount of Carbon-14 in the sample passes below the error in the measurement equipment

Methodology question: why is there no mention of radiocarbon dating? It's one of our most reliable methods, it works on bones, and it doesn't have the same feel as "they used this other random technique and magically got 300,000 years old so lets go with that".

Some people have moral frameworks that always make seeking profits immoral. I'm not sure if that's what OP is saying, or merely that showing the driver and the passenger different rates and subtracting the difference (this is an approximation, not exactly what the post said) is shady and bad.

If robots can design websites in 5 years, it won't be much longer til they can devise statistical ML schemes. Also, if you don't have a background in math, you'll just be finishing your studies of math/CS after 5 years, for reference.

Projects like TPOT and DataRobot are already showing a huge amount of promise for automating the tedious/time consuming parts of ML. But this doesn't mean they'll get good at the hard part any time soon.

I'd say your time/energy is better spent lobbying governments for socialist reform than learning ML at this point so we can avoid the worst case scenario(s).

That last paragraph is funny as hell, and I get what you're saying. I guess I'm just more pessimistic about anyone solving the problems of the language barrier and remote work soon - as with ML, once we truly have global, language-agnostic communication and physicality is irrelevant the world will be a very different place.

I guess my overarching point here is that global economics is one of the more dizzyingly complex things you can choose to worry about so I tend not to.

Overseas competition? I'm not sure what you're on about now - it's currently the hardest[1] time in history to get an H1-B with Cheeto man in the White House. Also I think that USA-born and educated developers are still significantly more sought after because of language barriers. If you've tried to get a job in tech recently you'll notice that... it's pretty damn easy.

Honestly it sounds like you're paranoid about your job security and externalizing it. "It's ML, no it's foreigners, no it's the aliens!" I'm a programmer, not a psychologist, though, so don't take my word for it. You can have a look at the sklearn docs though, good place to start on your ML quest.

http://scikit-learn.org/stable/

[1] Not intended to be a factual claim, just a point about the current political climate

I'm a person (software engineer) who knows some ML and I tell this to my coworkers when they express similar sentiments: If you're worried about ML taking your job then you're not thinking straight. If the world has automated to the degree where programmers are non longer needed in 3 or 10 years then you will definitely have other things to worry about. Truckers, farmers, taxis, cops, and construction crews will likely all be automated before programmers are, and when that happens it will cause a huge global crisis and leave millions unemployed. Programmers will be sometime later when we figure out general AI.

Alternative scenario: loss of jobs to automation and inadequate social safety net cause social unrest and communist revolution. We've seen this kind of thing before.

In short: if you're looking at Hacker News then doing ML is likely irrelevant.

I really like that you just went off on a huge tangent about this, no sarcasm. I really agree with your last line too, Kevin Shields is another example of this. By perfecting a unique playing style (holding the pitch bar while strumming) he was able to come up with a sound so unique that it spawned a subgenre

You're right that it's a staggering amount of arcane knowledge. But starting out I always recommend experimentation over getting too deep into the theory. It does help to have some baseline understanding of:

1. Frequency 2. Harmonics 3. Oscillators/Waveforms 4. Envelopes 5. Filters

The only problem with the last part of your request is that even if you are to watch people design sounds for a couple of hours you might find that when you try to replicate that somewhere else it doesn't sound right. This is partially because every synth/softsynth is different and will produce different sounds and have different parameters. It can be infuriating to get a tutorial on how to produce that perfect "Bladerunner Blues" synth and come out with something that sounds totally flat and bad.

To make matters worse, there are apparently 0 good tutorials on the subject - I just googled for 15 minutes to no avail. The two below cover some of it but I personally can't bear listening to the people who make these videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvQVQuV-Kys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJVlWdzoZ0w

Profession: Software "Engineer"

[07:35] First alarm goes off but sometimes I wake up at 6:30 a.m. randomly because traffic noise.

[07:45] Wake up, drink coffee and brush teeth. Never eat breakfast. Maybe work on some music for 20 mins before work.

[08:15] Get on bike and go to work.

[08:35] Arrive at work. Sometimes fetch breakfast, usually eat potato chips.

[09:00] By now I'm usually working unless i'm still on HN.

[10:00] Irritating that daily standup happens in the middle of the morning but whatever.

[12:30] Return from lunch, now work "really" starts. Usually code a whole bunch while listening to Boards of Canada

[17:00] By now I'm either mentally or physically absent from work, as is everyone around me. Get on the bike and ride home.

[17:30] Now it's beer and food time. After that, music or biking or maybe just arguing about Ancient Greece with my friends.

[22:00] Shower and drink a Nalgene of water.

[22:30] Either I'm still feverishly working on music or falling asleep to something on https://www.nfb.ca/

Hmm. I'll need to think about this one. I can see what you're saying... It's probably true but it definitely messes with my (and everyone's) tendency to see history as a series of monolithic happenings.

I'd like to think that in time someone will solve this too by some kind of clever obfuscation, but it's not going to be BoA doing it. It's going to be someone who wants to fuck with their status as a state-sponsored usurer. Or at least I hope.

Also consider Bitcoin as a "cashless society" alternative to the financial panopticon - no one's looking over your shoulder there and it's definitely not "cash".

Generally people think something's "broken" when they commission an app like Slack - whether it's UX, speed, price point, poor efficiency broadly... I mean, hell, what new inventions aren't done in the name of efficiency? It's a motivating factor for almost everything people in business do. As such, this seems like splitting hairs to me.

The example of your son's school is fine, but imagine that your son lives in another country. Cash has other problems beside being slow. It's insecure - a person could steal your $20 bill from your mailbox or his, or from the Post Office. It's untraceable - if your son's school says "We never got your payment" but your son swears he gave them the cash, you're stuck in a situation where either your son or the school is ripping you off (I'm sure your son would never do that). And last, it takes both time and money to convert cash to another currency. Taking the cash to somewhere where a person can convert it to the preferred currency is bad enough, and then it costs you money on top of it.

I really like this point. It's easy to say that "Slack solves the problem of centralized team communication" or "eBay and Etsy help everyday people collect money off their trinkets, crafts, or useless old clothes". But bigger inventions don't solve a small, narrowly-defined problem: they totally change the game. You can't sum up the impact of the automobile, antiseptic or the internet in a sentence, because these inventions caused a cascade of other inventions that solve other problems.

Cars weren't released out of the blue by a well-funded startup as a half-baked MVP, they were built off of advances in industrial metallurgy, the invention of the engine, engineering used in trains and boats. Similarly, the internet didn't just happen - people first figured out electrical engineering, circuit boards, GUI's, COBOL and C++ and a myriad of other languages that made it possible to invent the internet.

I'm not saying that this online bank thingie is on that level yet. But for me, these kind of inventions are indicative of the death of institutional finance. The first step in destroying global finance as an institution is to whittle away at where the banks can make profit. Apps like Robin Hood have already helped to decentralize knowledge and participation in the stock market. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have shown at least a proof of concept that you don't need central banks to have currency. Money transfer apps like TransferWise eliminate currency conversion profiteering. Now what happens when you make a front-end that can wire all of these ideas together? A cashless society? Maybe.

SV?

A great many thinkpieces will be written about this, but let me beat someone to the punch:

Foucault's Panopticism is the obvious tie-in. Usually when we talk about the Panopticon in the modern era, we're talking about mass surveillance or the performative act of social media. When we act in a certain (digital) way, posting this link, for example, we signal our values to the community. "You shall be known by your works". However, this kind of technology makes for an even more interesting and more troubling application of the Panopticon.

Foucault says that the group eventually becomes its own control system without the need for the central observers, that we are all at the center of our own panopticons. We watch others unfailingly, assessing their actions and putting them back in line when they stray. As we are socialized, we become more entrenched in our system of values: wear makeup, don't get fat, don't smell like cigs, don't wear stripes and plaid, and for god's sake: don't look like you're trying to hard to conform to all of this. We are both observer and observed, traversing endless nets of social expectations.

Now, instead of your peer group enforcing social expectations, we have got machines in on it! The result is something blatantly dystopian - a system that will correct you in your home before you dare venture out looking like that and embarrass yourself in front of the others. As it learns, it will learn even more that we value large breasts (but also modesty), pale skin, sleek clothes on slim waists, bodies with bulbous lips and thighs and pastel face paints. It will advise those without a perfect body to get one, and it sure as hell will provide the means by which to do so: consumption. New makeup, new tights, new corsets that you can clamp so tight it'll squeeze you into a form the camera will approve, new ways to take selfies every day to show your followers that you care enough to buy this piece of surveillance equipment so that you can "look good" without those pricey fashion magazines and stupid blogs!

"The plural of anecdote is not data"

This makes two big assumptions that can't be overlooked:

1. People can't self-manage (to some degree) 2. Performance is the end goal of management

I think both of these are wrong, or at least unfounded. I work in a more-or-less self-managed environment, and performance is actually pretty good. I get to pursue about 50% of my work independently and the other half is either collaborative and in line with a coworker's needs, or is one of those "must-dos". I don't see a possible world where I'd get more work done over the average day if there were artificial metrics like "time spent at desk", "lines of code written" or "number of tasks completed" dangled over my head - I'd probably just fuck off more and come up with clever schemes to break the game. This problem can be seen in academia as well - give a bunch of smart people a matrix of rules and yell "GO!". Watch them optimize.

I'd also argue that if it's only performance you're looking for, you're both ethically and intellectually off base. Good managers do increase performance/productivity - bad managers do not. But to assume that, as with teachers, academics, or software engineers, you can measure and reward behaviors without causing adverse affects on your workplace then you're dreaming. My manager is good because he backs off when needed, leaving me and a coworker to argue about an implementation design. My manager is good because he sets up an area of focus and says "ideas, go!". My manager is good because he will let people take a week or month to pursue a new solution that he personally doesn't understand, but trusts them to solve it aptly. My manager is not good because his team excels in certain metrics - his team excels in certain metrics because he is good. And last, my manager is good because productivity is not the end goal - employee happiness is. Happy employees do good work, and more importantly, they're happy for their own sake, which is much better than being surrounded by burnt out metric junkies.

So maybe my takeaway is that if we're going to do any kind of metric gathering it should probably be sub-perceptible and not be treated as a golden calf. If my CEO wants to devise a clever way of using me as a science experiment in pursuit of better management practices then I encourage that. But to tell people "here's what we're tracking now go off and do good work instead of that" is really fraught with problems.

There's an (underrepresented) idea when looking at the history of tech called a Kondratiev_wave[0] that says global economic changes happen in a series of predictable peaks and valleys. If the recent trends of computing really took off in the late 1990's, we should expect the wave to stagnate between 2015 and 2030, and recede into stagnation and negative growth around 2030-2050.

I don't think this is foolproof, but it _is_ a tool and a perspective for analyzing history, and one that runs counter to the most common narrative of increasing acceleration in technological development. The physics way of saying this is that velocity is always positive (we're always going up or near-neutral) but the rate of acceleration isn't spectacularly greater than the new ones. If we really are talking about the rate of change of economic/tech growth (the rate of change of market size/capability), then we're talking about acceleration!

Anyway, this was a whole rant, but my personal take is that we tend to underestimate the amount of turbulence in history, leading us to believe that the past was a stable, peaceful and simpler time, while the present day is going nuts. This kind of thinking has fueled messianism, apocalyptic cults, futurism, dreams and nightmares for centuries, and will continue to if we don't blow ourselves up. We forget that even in places like Ancient Rome the rate of change in tech and human growth was still positive and rapid, that during the Dark Ages science and technology were still exploding in the Middle East, that the differences between 1650 and 1750 were vast in terms of human thought, that between 1850 and 1950 they were seemingly greater. There was no time of mythological stasis before the present day, and it's unlikely that there ever will be as long as we're still human.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave

Don't quit necessarily, but quit if you feel it's the right thing to do. I've never thought highly of Uber, so having it on your resume is similar to having military experience or working at Amazon to me, it immediately sounds the "probably not a good culture fit" alarm in my head.

I'd personally give a thumbs up to any qualified engineer interviewed with me and mentioned that a big part of the reason he or she left Uber was because of their lack of morals. That takes balls, and so does leaving before the "standard" two year mark, so people who do that are either stupid and ballsy or principled and ballsy - the latter type of person is almost always a great person to work with as long as their principles make sense. There's nothing worse than a principled, ballsy Machiavellian.

So, to reiterate - quit if it really aligns with your principles as a person and you're ready to explain that, stay otherwise. It could also be that in 6 months staying at Uber will be against your principles, making that a great time to jump ship. I think the advantage you have is that since a lot people know Uber is toxic they won't fault you for wanting to get out.

Didn't Samsung already patent this feature?

Love that xkcd, but I found the Maclaurin "trick" to be extremely common-sensical... If you're already finding the area of infinitely many small boxes under a curve then Taylor series don't seem that weird. Once you are convinced that Taylor series are O.K. then this proof is really cool. I also think it's weird to show high-schoolers this, as about 1% of high school seniors have the mathematical knowledge needed to grok this level of math.

Anyways - people have differing levels of magic tolerance, and some people don't have a lot of background in calc, so I don't blame them for looking for other explanations.

I agree, the suggestion that anyone could/would be able to just throw out everything they know about arithmetic is sketchy at best, and even it's sketchier to make it seem as though a result like Euler's formula could purely be derived from geometric intuition. Sure, it "makes sense" in the video, but I don't think it's possible to truly grok and appreciate the result without having done any calculus. The real joy of math isn't in knowing, it's in proving.

Anyway: as for proof methods, I like the Maclaurin series trick with this one. Too bad the internet hasn't come up with a universal/nice way of writing math notation in a readable format yet, I'd like to sketch that proof here...

> Assuming the noise or smell was somehow contained, what's wrong with living next to a concert venue or Sriracha factory

Pretty big assumption, my friend. Generally they're not, or they're not contained well enough, or people are just old and grouchy so they go form homeowners associations and ban Sriracha factories. That said, I do agree with your overall outlook here, I'm just afraid that a lot of (particularly older, more traditional people) don't, so it's unrealistic to expect change. People don't like change, and they sure as hell don't like changing the way things change.

Well obviously they're still "allowed" to do whatever they want - (usually) no one's forcing you to sell the quaint victorian and move into the new Gulag of an Apartment complex.

Everyone essentially agrees with you. The problem is that when ONE of these people wants to build the next Trump Tower on top of grandma's old cottage, the "live and let live" ethos goes out the window - everyone's at city council decrying mixed zoning or whatever else they think is "ruining" their neighborhood! There's a reason the term NIMBY exists, there's a reason we don't like living next to Sriracha factories or concert venues and don't just let people turn their houses into one of them at will.

We live in a society and the law is a reflection of it, especially in cities where a lot of people with different needs and desires have to get along. If you want to literally do whatever you want on your property, there's lots of places (in Alaska) that you can do that.

Hell, I actually agree with you, and that's why I'm eventually going to move somewhere where I don't get woke up by traffic every morning, where I don't get stuck in traffic, where I can play music as loud as I want, and celebrate Pagan holidays with massive bonfires until 7am. But until then, I won't live under any illusion of living in a libertarian paradise, because it's just not a viable outcome for city dwellers.

I totally agree. I don't agree, however, think that this is the only future of programming. The statistical UI morphing may work for UX, but when it comes to algorithms writing novel algorithms to solve mathematical equations without external stimuli... That's just another story entirely, one seemingly far beyond the reach of Super Excel.

I'm not saying "don't go learn ML because it's garbage", I'm criticizing Cuban's argument, particularly that the singularity is coming and it's going to replace programmers tomorrow. I gave good reasons. I also _know_ some things about ML, and that gives me insight. Cuban's lack of knowledge affects his arguments on the topic as well - not understanding Calculus and Linear Algebra is tantamount to not understanding deep learning. Not understanding what we are doing today does not prime one for knowing what will happen tomorrow.

It's patently ridiculous to say that we are currently living in the singularity, though, it defies the very meaning of the term.

Specifically, "what is it?" is a weird question. People have been answering it in increasing detail for a long time and it still frustrates us. First it's elements, then atoms, then a stew of protons and neutrons, which happen to made of sub-atomic particles themselves, until we reach the new "fundamental". Someday, a particularly crafty scientist will be able to solve the quark parity problem or manage to crush one into bits and then we'll have a whole new layer of stuff beneath quarks. Or maybe they won't, but we'll still wonder what a quark is and why God or nature made that the smallest unit, and we'll always want to split it into two.