rampage101

Why?

Saw this GaryV video where he was saying how he told a caller to 'eat shit' for the next 3 years, and he was proud of his advice to the caller.

A woman called in saying she was working three jobs where one was her main income, and she had 2 side opportunities. Her basic question was which one to pick. He told her 'eat shit' for the next couple years and take no vacations, just completely grind out her existence and nothing else.

The guy is seriously a maniac recommending this approach. He doesn't consider at all the risk of burnout, and how a real burnout can set you back so far. There's zero balance to his approach. I've also found it amusing there is no talk of what you should do when you retire or get the money you are aiming for.

That sounds accurate that most money making strategies are based off simple logic and observations. Seems people are blindly impressed by ML and convolutional neural networks, even if they do not yield any impressive results.

I built system to determine which fundamental or technical factors have the most influence over a stock price. It required a fair amount of manual tinkering and sample runs to eliminate variance. The system itself is not that complex but it works. When I have demo'd it in a interview usually the interviewers are not that impressed... they are expecting that the system must be very complicated to have any results.

Great article. The one that hit home for me "One lone engineer on a big project silo’ed away".

Was on a project where we had multiple applications. The team had a new employee code an entire system as a prototype but then it was decided to put it into production. Nobody ever reviewed this code, and that engineer told me himself that the code was crap. He left the project to get away from this code and I inherited a mess, with nobody to ask questions from.

To make matters worse, the entire company relied on this system and there were about 20 regular users of this system. I was responsible for handling all of their feature requests and support which was often. Many bugs I fixed were extremely challenging edge cases, and there was zero appreciation for the complexity of many of these.

My manager was telling others at the company the code was solid, and it's "just python code" which can be figured out.

I notified the company I was leaving and they begged me to stay. Even offered to "release" me and hire me at a higher salary under another manager. The only issue was I would be required to support this same project.

My manager refused to give me a release date so I had to call HR and tell them I needed to leave at any cost. Pretty sure it's a disaster there since I left.

Hi Eric, the idea sounds fascinating.

When will it be open for individual investors to make a deposit? Is there a list of companies which will be chosen for initial listing?

There are no simple hacks to get to the top. You need people to be searching for your name, find your link, and then spend time on the page. It helps a lot if you have posts that show up on Reddit, or other social networks.

Since there is no content at all on your site there's no way anybody will stay on your page.

Sad but true. I spent some time building a personal site mostly for fun, but also to get back into industry. Many companies view a blog as a liability... better off studying for a few months to get some extra certifications.

The problem is that SSN's are treated like a private key. If somebody has that private key, and some basic information about you, they can basically impersonate you electronically.

Meanwhile countries like Estonia use an electronic card reader with a PIN to verify digital identity, making it nearly impossible for somebody to impersonate you. Using this Estonian system, you can tell anybody your personal code ID.

The reason it's gone up so much recently is that they just scaled it to handle more transactions. As other pointed out you can send an arbitrary amount whether it's 40 cents or 40 million dollars and it transfers quickly.

There's no holidays for the blockchain like banks have so you can send 24 hours a day, every day.

It shows up as unconfirmed usually in a few seconds, meaning it's in the mempool and ready to be added to the blockchain. If you trust the sender it's enough... but on average you are right that it's about 10 minutes to get the transaction included in the block. With Ethereum they are mining blocks about every 10 or 20 seconds.

People have been saying since it was valued at $1 that it was overvalued, or nobody should pay $1 for a virtual coin. Same people are still arguing the same thing 5 years later...

The cover letter should have more direct language and be mostly about your skill-set.

You can also reach out to recruiters at those companies you like rather than going through the official website application.

Ethereum definitely looks like it is in bubble territory to me. There's been a 3000% runup in the past few months. Most of the applications as you mentioned are based off the promise of something amazing rather than delivering something useful today.

I think the biggest hurdle is size of the blockchain. I tried downloading the entire blockchain and it got stuck... like downloading one block every 10 seconds, when the blockchain is roughly growing by this size. Found out I had to run geth --fast which donwloads only the headers for the blocks.

I'm just wondering how the average user or investor who is not a programmer is going to get the blockchain and backup their coins properly. Likely most people will keep their ethers on an exchange which is not secure.

One issue with systems like Stack Overflow is the points systems rewards people joined the service early.

For example, somebody asking how does binary search work in 2009 has thousands of points from the post. While somebody asking the same question in 2017 gets flagged for asking a duplicate.

The crypto-currency Ripple is meant to replace the SWIFT banking system. Right now, transfers between banks are relatively expensive, think for example about a $25 Wire transfer fee.

Ripple would make it so these transactions between banks costs only a few cents, and can be verified easier. That being said, I am not a fan of investing in Ripple because they have no private wallets, and they have stolen from customers because of KYC/AML (Know your customer/Anti-Money Laundering).

I recently tried putting Google ads on one of my websites. Over the course of 10,000 page views Google shows there were only 7 click throughs.

It does not even make sense because it means there was basically zero mis-clicks. I don't know how they count a click-through but it seems to be more than just someone clicking on the ad.

Also I'm pretty tired of hearing how Google are the good guys and 'do no evil'. It's obvious through their latest YouTube scandals and AdSense they are literally stealing billions of dollars from individuals around the world.

Same thing for me. I think I have 2 or 3 accounts (by accident) that I created over the years. When I login I never know what files to expect... that being said I don't use DropBox that much, but occasionally someone shares something via DropBox and I almost inevitably have a login issue.

People use Python for finance and time series because of how easy it to read in the data. There is a library called pandas which allows you to read in a txt, csv, or excel file easily and do any type of array manipulation you want. The pandas library is written in C++, so it's basically a python wrapper.

Conversely I don't think C++ has this same type of library for reading in data in a single line.

While C++ is faster than Python overall, for most financial simulations Python is definitely fast enough.

It takes 10 seconds to read a resume? So you just throw out the resume if you don't immediately see "similar stacks"?

I wrote "thoroughly" meaning reading the whole thing, and possibly looking at their links, or doing some small research about something on their resume.

I don't get why referral is counted for so much especially when there are referral bonuses which would encourage employees to refer basically anybody they know.

With all these companies having massive HR departments, I also don't understand how a resume goes unread or un-responded to when it takes maybe 10 minutes max to go through a resume thoroughly.

Why are they dropping shows? Does it save them money somehow?

Just curious why someone would open source a project like this?

If it works, it should be making money consistenly, but giving away the system will make the arbitrage opportunity non-existant if enough people use it.

I helped my parents rent an AirBNB where the people owning the house were still living there but it said nothing about this in the ad. After the owner gave us the keys, a few hours later somebody opened the door, and I seriously thought it might be a robber or something. Turns out it was the son of the owner who was living there, and basically my parents were renting a single room inside of their house. It was very uncomfortable for everyone.

The vast majority of programmers are not competing for magic internet points. It was a few years ago there was this massive craze to create good looking Stack Overflow and GitHub profiles. Most people are not giving away their time for free... if they are contributing to open source it usually benefits their company or hobby project somehow.

Another issue is what happens to GitHub if they are not successful as a company. There was a story a few months ago here about how the company itself is losing money. How much will your profile be worth if GitHub goes out of business?

Whenever I hear a programmer talk badly about algorithms it leaves a poor impression with me. It means they have not taken the time to do basic research about their field and shows their aversion to researching new topics.

If you look at the current AI, machine learning, and deep learning fields it's an absolute must that you have some experience with algorithms.

The media is not needed anymore to tell us what to think. We are able to research anything now with the internet, so it's much harder for the media to spread falsehoods now.

Fair point about producing something. But why is wrong to say somebody is a great programmer?

Seems most of these articles about programming is a no skill profession are usually coming from somebody promoting a 3-month boot camp.

Great post. It seems a lot of difficulty from judging quality of work is we have no metric to define what quality software is in the first place. People talk of this code code is 'elegant', or it is readable/efficient, but these are just opinions of other developers, and not easily measured.

Programming is a skill that takes time to be developed. I do not get why there people are against the idea of a 'rockstar' or 'ninja' programmer?

In most professions excellence is recognized. Like in basketball there is Michael Jordan, or in investing there is Warrent Buffet. You would not say that basketball and investing do not require talent or passion. Unfortunately some programmers think so badly of themselves they could reach the conclusion that they do not have skills.

I read his point as praise of comment actually.