mrburton

I honestly can't wait for AI to analyze the brain so we can truly understand the composition of it.

I always come back to this man and it ... no pun intended.. really blows my mind.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-...

I can relate to this and in my journey, I was able to maintain feeding my need to be useful to the world around me and do well money-wise. The latter was my desire to be there for my family so they can focus on their health.

The best part about HackerNews, is that you get a very good sense of the envious and jealous nature of people. A lot of the "hate" or "angry" comments, are basically people who hate their relationship with "work".

To the author, I think you'll continue that process of being useful, but you'll see that in this new world, you're usefulness now scales..

R.I.P Joe Armstrong - he was an amazing man, engineer, and human overall. :(

I don't recall when I first met Bob; I've known him for over 14 years. I've known him first virtually on IRC and then in person at around 2010. We share so many common friends, it's pretty crazy. I guess that's the open source world of nerds for you.

One thing I loved about Bob, is regardless of what he built, who he knew or worked with, you would never see him lean on that to express who he was..

Bob was just a real person with a passion for programming and helping people.

Looking back on my time knowing Bob, I do regret not taking him up on his offer to work with him. I could only imagine how I would have grown as a person by working closely with him.

I do want to say, Bob clearly had a consistency in his style of clothing. It didn't changed over the years.. lol

It all still seems unreal.

I personally don't have children and I didn't _really_ understand how difficult it is to have kids at home while working. When I moved back East, I did spend 3 days at my brothers.

He has two adorable little girls; 1.5 years old and 2 months.

His kids are pretty calm, by most standards.. but you can't let the older one out of sight for a few seconds.

I certainly feel your pain even though I don't have kids.

Question: Tell me how much you love going to the bathroom or getting washed now. It's the only time you have to yourself lol

Item #1 - 100% correct.

Item #4 - I fully disagree. Some choices are scary to actually make, but are healthy. For instance, my mom stayed with her abusive husband for many years because she had Stockholm syndrome. If you had asked her why didn't she leave during that time, she would say "I didn't have a choice". Ask her now, and she will tell you "Fear - fear of not knowing how things would work out."

Sometimes the hardest choices to make are the impossible choices.

I was in Austin last year and was shocked by the homeless there. I spoke to a few people and they had informed me that some laws changed recently which allows them to live under bridges and the lots of churches etc.

I was taken back because I never thought Austin would have such a problem.

You might want to kill me after I say this, certainly people on HN want to kill me just for fun ;), but I also drink coffee. I only drink sugar free Red Bull. What's strange is I can stop for months without any withdraw from caffeine. I often go from drinking Red Bull + Coffee for a few months to just water for multiple months.

Once I finish this case, I think it's time to go back to water and coffee for 6 months. :)

Life choices always have an impact. I'm not judging you, because trust me, expensive areas like New York City (I love living there) are great, but blow during a pandemic since you're unable to enjoy what the actual city has to offer.

When I relocated back east, I made it a point to a) not live in the city since it'll be overpriced and I won't be able to enjoy the surrounding area and b) Price per square footage wouldn't make sense if I'm at home 24/7. So I went across the river and pay less for _a lot more_.

I know a lot of people are moving to Austin TX. They get a LOT more for their money. I was lucky to be on a month by month lease when the pandemic hit.

I agree - dressing up was implied with "get washed/dressed". It's very important to get dressed for work.

I 100% agree. I moved from Mountain View CA to Jersey City, NJ. When I moved, I intentionally made sure I found a place with an extra bedroom. That being said, trust me, I know not everyone can afford it.

I grew up sleeping on the floor for 15 years because I couldn't afford a bed. I get it.

Personally, I'm not burnt out.

To void burn out, I did a few things which I feel are extremely helpful.

1. Have a room that is a dedicated office. When I leave this room, I leave the "office".

2. Establish communication throughout the day. This means having slack conversations (typed and video) that are casual. It's okay to vent on these calls.

3. Have a defined schedule - Awake at 6am, washed/dressed by 6:30am, Red Bull (or if you like food) and at my desk by 7am. I do work long hours, but I enjoy it because I'm accomplishing something.

4. Work on something that excites you or find joy in your work somehow.

5. Lastly, realize most of the mental stress can be managed with a little mindfulness, learning to accept that you still can grow and find joy even when at home and cut back on social media; or if you're like me, I cut out 99% of social media.

I hope everyone remains positive. Do something today, that makes you better tomorrow.

I just have to say this "magnets how do they work"? ;) Anyone get the reference?

We're allowed, but the vast majority of the time I'm inside. A typical day for me, pre-covid, was coffee shops, bookstores, that sort of activity. Now those options are not available so I am inside most of the time.

Lucky me, growing up my mom didn't make more than $8k a year - this would have been impossible for me to do lol. It was also impossible for me to eat properly and have new cloths...

Did I say lucky me? :/

Sadly my eyes are too small to actually track the pupils. I remember when I got my ID, the lady taking the picture said "Sir, please open your eyes". I looked at her and asked "They are open... you don't see that?" She laughed and asked if I had been smoking. :/

I'm not at all opposed to companies like Google, Facebook, etc asking Algorithms, Data Structure and Big O related questions. Why? It's very applicable to problems at their scale. That being said, not all engineers there work on such problems.

If I'm asked to do a BFS/DFS, Tree traversal, etc for a small company.. I tend to share high level how I'll solve it then basically not actually code it up and say something like "This is pretty tricky...". Why? It's my way to exit the interview quickly because I question the ability of the company to hire talented engineers. Especially when I test your product out and see all sorts of inconsistencies.

Okay, so when do Data Structures matter to a company?

Are you building a product that needs to perform very efficiently at scale and the system is doing something outside the "norms" of what a data store can provide. Examples: Facebook's TAO system and their type ahead search.

Read the design paper for TAO and you'll see how they use very primitive data structured related to Graphs. Their typeahead system also makes use of some very basic data structures and some probabilistic data structures as well.

When do Algorithms matter to a company?

For most traditional companies, you're not going to do a BFS/DFS search, traverse a tree or a Dynamic Programming solution like Levenshtein distance. So unless these algorithms have a practical use case in your company, you're just creating a sort of monoculture.

Once again, Google and Facebook do apply these algorithms so I respect their interview process.

Big O has its place in such large companies. I think most people fail to understand the purpose of Big O; identify upfront if a solution will be sufficient from a time or space perspective as the data grows. Most people speak about Big O on interviews AFTER they code up the solution. You should do that before you code it up.

e.g, So the data for this problem is <100 items then this quadratic solution would work, but if we scale the data set up to say 10,000 items then it won't work. Then you can look at data structures or sorting algorithms for instance that'll help you get it down to say O(n) or O(n log n) etc

Look, I get the frustration a lot of people feel about this sort of interviewing process. I have a very non-traditional background and it could be very scary when you first start learning about this. My advice? Learn it for your own good. It'll make your a better programmer and it'll help you become more aware of so many things you weren't aware of before!

The moment when you realize why using an array for a Min Heap or why a Min Heap must be a complete tree... you'll step back and go "Now that's sexy!" Or when you realize even stupid stuff like "A balanced binary Tree has this weird reality that the leaf nodes account for 50% of all nodes in the tree" It's just fun if you see it in a positive way.

Let's call technical interviews that ask such questions when it doesn't represent the company "interviewer imposter syndrome". When a company tries to act and look like Google early on.. Google has a million+ candidates a year interviewing with them. They MUST allow good candidates slip through their process.

I use to live in NYC; in Battery Park City. I was looking to move back, currently in Mountain View, then COVID-19 hit.

How is live in NY? I was there in Dec before this whole thing broke out and returned to CA in mid-Jan 2020; mini vacation.

For me - Cooking and furniture refurbishing

Making homemade bread, Italian food, various other meals from different cultures etc.

I agree - we have a lot more time to development new skills and improve ourselves.

When HN becomes Twitter. People are so serious and sensitive these days. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This proves humans are not animals. We're not that smart ;)

I totally misread this as "Julian Assange in a Lambo". Dyslexia for the win :)

Okay, I expected to see such answers on social media and not on Hacker News. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thanks for your thoughtful answer.

Why would this be a good thing? Why not leave the docs up to help further educate people, but put a banner on top of the site to show respect like Hacker News does?

You can call attention more so by reserving a nice area of at the top of the page and logo while still encouraging people to come and learn. Now people will just go there and leave. I can't see how this would get people to care or care more?

Just my opinion.

What is the biggest challenge you've experience and what's the biggest gap in interactions/communication you're noticing?

A lot of people know she didn't raise traditional money. I hear a lot of people, who are dishonest, speaking about how they should be able to raise money because "it's so easy look at Holmes?" I hear this at a local coffee shop and it makes me cringe.

I avoid resort fees in NY by staying in Jersey City. Basically a Resort fee is how Hotels make extra money by giving you bullshit "perks" that, if you're like me, you'll never use.

I'm too good to have narcissism!

Honestly, I think the best way to deal with that is knowing you're not prefect, you're not the opinions of others and you don't need to be the best. You just need to be a better version of you. Learn to love yourself and this all becomes a lot easier.

That's just my personal opinion.

> Christian icon

The Santa Claus hat isn't a Christian icon. Santa Claus isn't a Christian figure. That being said, cancel culture is bullshit and not free markets. It's bullying. Free market is "Don't like the Santa Hat? Don't use VSCode."

> It may irritate you, but international corporations always bend over backwards to avoid offending their massive variety of customers.

It doesn't offend me that they added/removed the Santa Claus hat; I don't care. What's offensive is the last part of your statement.

> to avoid offending their massive variety of customers.

What about the people it offended because someone "didn't like the icon"?

Cancel Culture is trying to censor a comedian like David Chappelle because they found his jokes offensive. Now if you can't see the issue with this, that's fine and we won't agree on the subject. That being said - your post is very offensive to people sharing opinions and I think we should take it down. It's offending a variety of readers.. And take down my comment because it offended a variety of readers.. better yet, let's take down hacker news because there's so many offensive things on here lol

Free market - just don't use VS Code and use Atom.