noud

I don't understand all the negative comments. Because it seems indeed to be the case that Polar bears are not doing that bad over the last 20 years [1]. Is climate warming a problem for Polar bears? Yes, definitely! But much less than we think. By far the biggest cause of the decline of Polar bears in the last century has been hunting. Only when Polar bears were put on the endangered list, and hunting was reduced, the Population have been increasing again. [3] Now that Polar bears are not hunted anymore, the melting ice becomes their prime problem. But Polar bears have survived warming climates in the past [4]. They are smart animals that have adapted to many different climates in the past and one could, arguably, assume that they could survive this one as well [5]. I'm not saying that it doesn't matter if the North pole melts. But it seems not to be as big of a treat for Polar bears as we believe it is.

[1] - https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-the-polar-bear-popula...

[2] - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Annual-estimates-of-the-...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_bear#Hunting

[4] - https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528754-600-hardy-po...

[5] - https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1210506109

"Surely you're joking mr Feynman" and "What do you think that other people think" from Richard Feynman.

The last book is more serious than the first. Both are still good. The best about these books is that they explain how one of the best physicists of the 20th century (i.m.o. the best after Einstein, and arguably the best teacher who have ever lived) thinks and how he copes with the world around him. His life story is a sad one, he helped developing the atomic bomb in the Manhattan project (which he regrets later on in his life) and lost his first wife from tuberculosis on a young age, and died from a rare type of cancer at age 69. Still, these books are one of the funniest books I've ever read.

> So, what books did you read more than once and are worth keep reading?

I reread most of the books that I enjoyed reading the first time. Reading is my hobby, I only read what I like reading. Likewise, if I don't like a book after reading the first 50 pages, I stop reading. The earlier I admit my mistake, the better.

FYI, the essay that proposes to read good books multiple times is from Rolf Dobelli: https://www.dobelli.com/en/essays/how-to-read-books/

With challenging you probably mean mathematically challenging, right? There are many jobs that are challenging with respect to soft skills (project managing, team leads, directors, ...).

It's hard to find a job that's mathematically more challenging than an academic job. But I believe that there are enough jobs that give you the opportunity to make them mathematically challenging. But you need to take the initiative. Good soft skills and presentation skills help. For example, at my company one of our product lines has over 10 million products per year. These 10 million products can be grouped in 50k "unique" items. It makes no sense that there are so many "unique" items. This is like going to the supermarket for milk and you have to choose between 50k different brands of milk. Without explicit requests from management, I designed a distance metric between these "unique" items (using domain knowledge), which allowed me to apply several manifold learning techniques (in particular, t-SNE and UMAP). (Re)Learning several mathematical techniques along the way. In this way I have an easy to understand 2d picture that can explain in detail which "unique" items are actually unique and which ones are "pretty similar". These "pretty similar" products can be reduced to one unique item. Next to just-doing-my-job tasks, taking these type of mathematical challenging initiatives have always worked out for me and are appreciated by my company.

Summarized, in industry, you should look for a job that gives you the freedom to make it challenging. When you found a challenging task, start applying all the mathematical techniques you know, and try to learn new techniques along the way.

Professional mathematician (but in business, not academia). I hold a PhD in mathematical physics. Below the list of books that taught me the most. However, these books are often not directly related to my current work. Also, I don't think they will be useful for everyone, as some of them are strong specialized books. These books mostly taught me to think like a mathematician. One of the strongest skills I learned as a mathematician is to dive deep into a topic and learn almost everything that you can learn about it (going from 80% of knowledge to 99.9%). I "read" these books completely several times in my career.

* Atiyah, Macdonald - Introduction to Commutative Algebra.

* Bourbaki (in French).

* Gasper, Rahman - Basic Hypergeometric Functions.

* Hasti et al - Elements Of Statistical Learning.

* Rudin - Real & Complex Analysis.

* Thomas, Thomas - Elements of Information Theory.

> I want to have independent though, and not be bound to anyone's view of the world without forming my own.

Okay, maybe a strange comment. But you always have to option not to have an opinion or view about something. What's the best solution to global warming? How to solve the Ukraine/Russian war? How to solve poverty? When will the next financial crash take place? How should my colleagues and friends behave? All very hard questions, which may of may not have an answer. You always have to option not to have an opinion about something. Being opinionless is not a sign of intellectual weakness, it's a sign of critical thinking.

I bid 6793.75 euros for my new bathroom as my final offer a couple of years ago. You should have seen the confused face of the sales person.

...he accepted my offer. :)

Can you name 10 founders of companies from more than 1,000 years ago? I cannot. Additionally, there are only a handful of companies left that were founded more than 1,000 years ago [1]. Therefore, it's unlikely that any founder or company will be remembered in 1,000 years.

If I have to make a wild guess what will be remembered in 1,000 years, I would guess that SI units with its derived units will still be in place. [2] These (derived) units are named after some inventors, James Watt, Gustav Hertz, Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla, Lord Kelvin. Maybe some of them will be remembered in 1,000 years. But keep in mind, 1,000 years is a very very long time. A lot can be forgotten in that time span.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units

Sure! I connected them with a usb adapter with external power source. The power source of the Raspberry Pi alone is not enough to run four disks at the same time (at least not for me). For the hard drives I bought a couple of 2.5" disks that I connected to the usb adapter together with my Raspberry Pi. The board runs Debian, and I've setup a RAID 5 system. Then, each of the logical volumes are encrypted with (as?) LUKS. Quite some fun to setup the system, but don't expect any miracles. During a good day I get a read and write speed of roughly 30 mb/s over the home network. Enough for me as a backup system for home usage.

I use my Raspberry Pi 3 as my home RAID system (with 4 x 8 TB hdd). Not very fast, but definitely cheap with a low energy usage.

I actually do it to relax... Sometimes life and work can be boring, and I need some intellectual challenges to "relax" after a boring day of hard work. I work on several small open-source projects where I focus on challenging things I want to learn.

15%

Maybe interesting to know: You can use your left hand palm to press Ctrl and Meta.

Also see: https://mihaiolteanu.me/emacs-palm-press-the-ctrl-keys and http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/swap_CapsLock_Ctrl.html

We have 4 chickens: 3 hens, 1 rooster. We bought them as 4 "female" chicks. Unfortunately, one turned out the be a rooster. To keep the rooster from making noise during the early morning we keep them in an isolated chicken coop with an automated door that doesn't open before 8:00.

They are funny creatures. They are basically little dinosaurs, with different behavior than other home animals. They are super efficient, rarely get food poisoning, and can eat almost everything. They are interesting creatures just to look at. I would always recommend taking chickens, but please keep in mind the following:

* They do make noise. The rooster is loud. But the hens make many funny sounds as well. When they laid an egg they make (loud) cackling noises. I don't mind this, but make sure your neighbors don't mind as well.

* Roosters don't like each other. They will kill each other if they have the chance! If you buy them as chicks, be prepared that you have to get rid of the roosters if you have more than one.

* Roosters also don't like me. I usually get attacked by my rooster when I enter the chicken area. I don't mind (I'm steeling his eggs, so I understand), but some people might get scared by this behavior.

* Chickens are social animals. Always keep at least two chickens together.

* Chicken feces smell. You must clean the area often.

* Hens don't always lay eggs. They get broody now and then. During the broody they only want to sit on the eggs, and don't have much interest in anything else.

* Hens and roosters have a hate/love relation. Roosters want to fertilize the hens all day long (which they don't like). But they also take care of the hens. A rooster will take care the hens stay together, he makes sure the hens eat first, he supports the broody hens, gather all hens together during nighttime.

* In the first two years they lay eggs almost every day. But when they get older they lay fewer eggs. After a year or five they stop laying eggs.

* I suggest to buy a food-o-matic (or similar) device for feeding. These devices make sure that rats and mice cannot get to the feed.

I use vim for almost all my development. I'm using vim ranging from small projects (<10k lines) to very large projects (>10M lines). I never experienced vim to hinder me understanding large projects, nor does it slow me down. There are no features in VSCode (or equivalent) that I'm missing in vim. Actually it's the opposite: the learning curve is steep, but when I was comfortable enough with all the vim key bindings and features, development actually got faster and better using vim compared to using VSCode equivalents. It forces me to think more before I start coding.

I do need to code in VSCode sometimes when it's work related though.

A hair clipper that I bought 10 years ago. Cost me 25 euros. But a hair cut costs 20 euros. I need one every month (because I'm partially bald). So 20 * 12 * 10 = 2400 euro savings. That's a 9600% return on investment!

I should have bought more hair clippers...

Second this!

I can sleep around 8 hours during these long flights. Some tips (if you want them):

- I prefer a place next to a window. I can put my head on the wall.

- I try not to drink too much. Definitely no coffee or alcohol. Not having to pee will make me sleep longer. Going to a toilet in a plane is difficult.

- Before I go to sleep I read for 1 to 2 hours. I try to avoid something that is exiting to do (playing video games, doing intense difficult programming, ...)

- I take somewhere between 0.5 and 3 mg of melatonine one hour before I want to go to sleep. This helps me getting tired in areas where you have a lot of light.

- I wear earplugs during sleeping.

- I cover myself with as many blankets as possible. It can be cold in airplanes, and getting too cold will wake me up.

Good luck!

> In your opinion what's your best use of time on a long flight?

Sleeping, the more, the better.

I use the keyboard 99% of the time. Practicing short keys, until they become muscle memory, is a good skill to have. I use vim short keys. But learning emacs would be fine as well. I think it won't hurt to learn both short key bindings.

Some tips for using vim shortkeys:

* You can install the hardmode plugin of vim, https://vimawesome.com/plugin/hardmode. This will disable the arrow keys, page up/down, and hjkl. This way you can only use the "advanced" vim short keys.

* Vimium is a plugin for firefox and chrome which allows you to browse on the internet using (some of) the vim short keys.

* All insert-mode short keys of vim also work in most terminals. Few people realize the equivalents: ctrl+m <-> enter, ctrl+h <-> backspace, ctrl+i <-> tab, ctrl+[ <-> escape. Control can easily be hit with your left palm. These two things combined saves a significant part of moving your hands. Since I program between 6 to 10 hours a day, these small changes are the difference between RSI and no RSI.

Good luck!

I realized several years ago that there is a difference between what's new and what's important. There is almost nothing new, that's also important. So don't bother about what's new. Instead, look for the things that withstood the time. It's a choice to be distracted with what's new.

Some tips:

* Replace your smartphone with an old fashion Nokia. If something is really important, people will call you. All the other messages are not important.

* Don't read the news. Especially not online news. News is what it's named after: it's new, but rarely important. Terminate your membership on any journal that you have.

* If something is free, it's probably mend to distract you. Always think twice when something is "given" to you for free. You're not the customer of Gmail, Youtube, or Google! You're not the customer of commercial tv broadcasters! You're not the customer of free news sites! The customers are the advertisers. If you want something, it's often better when you have to pay for it.

* Use a text based web browser (I like elinks). If a webpage cannot be showed correctly, it's probably not interesting to look at.

* Don't read books younger than 10 years old. The older the book the better. They stood the wheel of time. There are many books written to do one thing, and one thing only, make a lot of profit. Especially books on self improvement, if they would work, you would never buy a self improvement book again. Which means no profits anymore.

* Similar for technology, new technology doesn't mean that it's better. Try to only use technology that stood the wheel of time. E.g. I recently start replacing paper books with ebooks. I think that E-readers are around long enough now to be something that's worthwhile to start using.

* Don't care about current stocks and funds trends too much. Current trends are new, but not per definition important. If you put a fixed amount of money into a retirement fund every month, you'll likely have enough when you're 65 to retire.

* Don't care about the current house prices and projections too much. If you're going to live in your house for the next 50 years, the current house price nor the projected house price doesn't matter at all. As long as you don't have to sell your house, the house price has zero effect on your life.

Good luck!

I like vim.

But it has a steep learning curve. It might not be the thing you're looking for as it is very different (but not less) than VS code.

> if so, how to approach any topic and prepare?

What I usually do is to search for some people who I consider expert in that field and ask. Common questions I ask:

* Can you recommend a book, tutorial, course as an introduction of your field?

* What are the latest developments in your field? Can you point me to some papers on these topics?

* What do you recommend a newcomer to do in your field?

* (most important question) What are the biggest challenges in your field at this moment?

Third this. I think Wordpress has withstood the wheel of time (for now). Easy to install, easy to use, looks quite descend.

Agreed, I try to read books that are at least 10 years old.

I did not hear a single consultant telling me how great it is to be one, when a collective announcement by the director was made that due to financial problems not a single consultant contract would be extended this year. This would help the company to get into financial stability again, and would prevent to fire anyone in the company.

I'm happy I'm not a consultant. I value job security, and therefore a financially secure life, over any of the benefits this consultant has.

I have been working in tech for 10 years and I have a PhD in Mathematics.

> 1) What type of jobs (in tech) may be welcoming to someone with my skillset?

Data science, programming, statistics, logistics, optimization, basically everything that's related to research, development, or innovation. There are many field that are in need of mathematicians without you or them knowing. Having someone in the company that's smart, rational, and has a good scientific mindset (makes the least amount of assumptions) is very valuable. Don't forget that you can write open applications. My experience is that if you have a skill set not many people have (mathematics) you're invited often.

> 2) If there is generally more I should know before I can apply to most jobs?

Soft skills are more important than most mathematicians think: Managers can be a pain in the ass; Sometimes you have to explain your solutions to colleagues that don't even know how to basic arithmetic; You have to negotiate your salary; You have to do (office) politics, ...

When I hire new team members I select on more than only skill. I prefer to have a mediocre engineer who's good at explaining what he did and works well in the team, than hire a genius who refuses to collaborate and cannot explain his line of thought. Invest in soft skills, learn how to collaborate, how to teach, how to listen!

> 3) I have not yet applied to any jobs but I was wondering if I should click "new grad" or "professional" since I am neither.

As a graduated math student with intern experience I don't consider you junior anymore. Aim a little bit higher. Also keep in mind that often you can make promotion fast in a company if you're good and put effort in it.

> What technology do you use today that is far from mainstream?

Pen and paper. ;)

Also, I have been using an agenda with on the left side the week, and on the right side notes for the last 10 years. It has a special holder for a pen, contains some information on units, UTC differences, a world map, holidays, year overview, and much more. This is very useful. At work I only have to carry around my agenda. It contains all information that you need directly in meetings. And I can take notes on the right side that I can process (digitally) when I'm back at my desk.

I have a membership on the Science [1]. I read the Science once a week. The Science contains difficult articles, which are often worth reading as they are explaining something new without making any compromises or trying to simplify the results. Besides HN and Science that I try all other news. I think you're better off without news. [2]

[1] - https://www.science.org/

[2] - https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/2010-dobelli.pdf