jstrebel

I am always amazed at how well-received Paul Graham's blog entries are here on Hacker News, despite their thinly veilled underlying message: "Start a company, work hard, get rich". All of his writings center around this topic in one way or another and glorify it in various way.

I always take his writings with a big grain of salt, because I know that his sweet message might not be right for me.

IntelliJ and Docker are nice productivity tools, but I am not sure they are the best tools from an educational standpoint. If I had to learn Java (and probably J2EE or Spring), I would start from the bottom: - bare-bone, locally installed JDK - lightweight IDE - central build server - central deployment server configured for multiple projects.

Why do you need docker locally?

Talking about a mismatch between technical interviewing practices and academia on the one hand and the real-life experience on the other...

Of course, this piece is a satire, I am just a bit sad that the author did not show his real day in the life of a professional software engineer as a contrast.

Hmm, see this: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/actearly/milestones/milestones-5y... At 6 years old, I was learning to read and write, to count and calculate. I started playing the flute. I also had my first exposure to TV.

Your plans to make him code seems a bit overambitious to me...

Coming from a Big Data (Hadoop / AWS) background, I would say that SQL is a good choice for analyzing data once it is in the data warehouse, but it is not needed to get the data there. Most of the ETL code in this environment is based on Apache Spark 2.x and either Scala or Python as programming language. On a Hortonworks HDP cluster, you would use PySpark directly; on AWS, you would use AWS Glue which allows you to set up and schedule the PySpark code. Although PySpark does not stop you from using SQL, there is a preference to write the transformations in terms of native Spark functions. So, to answer the question: no, SQL is not a primary tool of choice for implementing ETL pipelines in 2019 - PySpark is.

I frequently scan Quora for interesting perspectives on life. I really like to learn from the personal stories of individuals. Of course, you have to take everything with a grain of salt, as Quora is not peer-reviewed or scholarly supported, but exactly this raw and unfiltered content makes it attractive.

You can learn best from the mistakes of others. It's a kind of wisdom of the crowds-approach.

(I don't work for Quora, nor do I participate in their partner program)

I bought the toy robot Cozmo from Anki and now I am trying to make him see using openCV.

I learned about S. Pinker's book "The blank slate" here on HN. It altered the way I think about humans.

We tried to set up a small startup of 3 people with the goal of offering a service for social bot detection, reporting and (eventually) removal. The assumption was that they are an annoyance and might be a danger to the public opinion and to brand reputation. We started on Twitter for our MVP. We failed to generate interest in it and it turned out that social bots are actually mostly marketing tools by ad agencies to promote their customer's product. Their goal is to make a topic trending, so that real people start noticing it. There is a strong business case for social bots. We should have created some Social bot toolkits, that would have probably worked much better...

Please do not use LaTeX. If your textbook is supposed to have special layout needs, you will have a hard time with LaTeX. Tables are a real nuisance in LaTeX as well - normally you have your data in some other tool like Excel or some Jupyter notebook or CSV. Turning the data into a nicely looking and well-placed LaTeX table is not straightforward. Sure, there are specialized LaTeX extension packages for a lot of functionalities, but you will need time to get familiar with them. I would just start with MS Office or LibreOffice - both offer sufficient functionality and if you need more specialized tools, then those tools usually have an import function for DOCX /ODT files.

MS OneNote as it features a nice integration with MS Outlook. You can create tasks directly in OneNote and have them automatically show up in Outlook. As my employer uses the enterprise version, I am not worried about the Cloud.

Most real-life situations are not like that. The contingency assumes that your underlying process is random with a normal distribution. In everyday life, especially when working in teams or projects, processes are not of that kind. Other people are neither random, nor is their behaviour normally-distributed. The relative effectiveness of praising and scolding is unclear in such situations. So it seems unwise to transfer this anecdote to other contexts.

Great interview with a bit of plugging from Prof. Stonebreaker

I would like to better understand the Qlikview Object Extension mechanism and the associated Javascript API. These extensions are highly useful for coupling Qlikview with the existing visualization frameworks like D3 etc.