Any advice on doing a PhD while working? I've been considering doing that in the back of my mind.
229 karma · joined October 30, 2019
When I was a kid I wanted to make an IRC chatbot. I didn't know much, but I read online you could use regular expressions to match text commands. I felt like I needed a book, saved up money, and got my mom to drive me to the next town. Our little library didn't have any computer books. I remember her paging through and asking if I really wanted this "technical manual".
Mastering Regular Expressions was the start to my programming career as well. Having references to a bunch of other languages spurred my curiosity to learn them. I eventually bought some of the O'Reilly Perl books as well.
Crusader Kings 3 looks polished and is easy to use. Leagues above CK2. I love the stackable tooltips that let you define terms in tooltips defining terms in menus.
For me most of that play time has been worth it. Games and wanting to make them are what got me interested in programming. Now I'm a software engineer. People worry about kids' screen time, but I spent most of my time as a kid in front of the computer, programming and gaming. Far beyond acceptable amounts of screen time for a kid, but without that I don't know what I would've been interested in. Certainly there were different kinds of games back then. No ads, short gameplay loops, or microtransactions. From games I learned how to find information online, not many wikis then. I got better at reading, typing, and socializing through online games and forums. I set my own goals and achieved them. I was able to gain more confidence about myself. Games gave me a safe, small microcosm of the world to be excited about.
I could ramble on, but I'd definitely be interested in reading your thoughts about games and play.
Pens are the only left-handed designed product I've ever found I really needed. Aside from scissors or computer mice maybe, but I grew up using my right hand for those activities.
My days were split up by small things to do like go pickup a vehicle from a coworker. Go to the test track to collect data. Help another engineer debug a vehicle. Review functionality of a prototype with a mechanic. Etc.
On paper all that sounds a bit annoying, and it was some days. After changing jobs and working fully remote with covid though, I do miss having a reason to get up.
As others have mentioned most USA manufacturers are moving to encrypted CAN buses now though.
Original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996684
I had the privilege of taking multiple AI classes taught by Professor Laird during my masters. He is a great person. I learned a lot from him, both intellectually and personally. Here's a recent video overview of Soar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUiWk-DqLaA
Are there any examples you have of projects or types of problems that benefit from Lisp?
I've been "learning" Lisp on and off for a while, but I always end up going back to more familiar languages.
He rarely told anyone his credentials. Most people thought he was just some old man. I watched parents and teachers be rude to him, but he'd always smile and be polite. Some of us used to help him from time to time. He was very kind and would always listen to our kid-sized problems while we worked.
Less instructions sounds great, but with CISC you do not know how long those instructions will take to execute. RISC has only a handful of instructions, that all take 1 clock cycle (with pipelining). This makes the hardware simple and easy optimize. The instructions you lose can just be implemented in software. That space on chip can be used for more registers and cache, for a huge speed up. Plus nowadays, shared libraries and compilers do a lot of work for us behind the scenes as well. Having tons of instructions on chip only is a benefit for a narrow group of users today.
We've found that for hardware it's better to reduce clock cycles per instruction, rather than reduce total number of instructions.
Where do you see Nx going in the future? I saw there's an MNIST example in the repo. Do you plan including higher-level features for neural networks, similar to Keras/PyTorch?
Being able to try and customize jQuery UI components was also what sold me back then. I think simple web-based demos in your docs go a long way in explaining what your product actually feels like to use. Even a demo that's a bit contrived is useful. People will even just mindlessly play with demos. They are very worth doing in my opinion.
At this point, our group is actively pushing back on SysML, at least for our roles. Each group's system(s) has a well defined interface to the whole, and everything else is decided within the team. We've found SysML mostly just duplicated work for us. Our software is already written in Simulink so we just build models of our system in that, too. We don't get much value from SysML, and whenever someone else tries to use SysML (like an architecture team) they don't know enough of the details our system.
I don't claim to know much about this stuff, but that's been our experience. The speed and flexibility of our engineers has vastly improved. We've started catching integration issues months in advance, when they are still easily fixable.
At first we just created some "Bill Of Models" to define systems and simulations. Slowly we've expanded the scope. Each BOM contains a system definition, components, subcomponents, interfaces, and some metadata. There's pointers to different repositories, parameter databases, and scripts to configure runtime environments. We have a small tool that reads BOMs and instantiates them as full simulations.
When someone wants to test a new system variant, they can usually just modify an existing BOM. If they have a new feature, BOMs give them an easy way to see and create every variant simulation to work with. We had to do a lot of standardization of our models, but that helped our efforts to move toward fully automated tests and CI/CD. We now have a web-based catalog of models and BOMs that are automatically generated, run, and tested. All of this has also helped get new people to use simulations for their work.
A bit different from your example, but a small group of us started a "Bill of Models" project for our department. We spent too much time failing to manage complexity with fancy tools. We ended up writing our own simple tool for reading custom BOMs to create and manage simulations.
Did you opt for any of the trailer assistance features? Trailer Backup Assist was something I worked a lot on, and I would be interested to hear your thoughts.
As for the "mental capacity" I felt the same about finally getting into Rust. Spending some time with Nim actually helped me bridge the gap from Python to Rust.