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Empathy can play a significant role in seeking the resources you need, getting others to help you and perhaps even allowing higher management entrusting responsibility on your shoulders.

Over the long-term though I found grit to be a more useful skill to cultivate. Patience and perseverance sound like cliche, but in the end whether in relationships or life, those count the most.

rdudekulon CS 281B: Statistical Learning Theory (2014)

Here's one from CMU (Spring 2016): Statistical Machine Learning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcMnu-3wkWo&list=PLTB9VQq8Wi...

rdudekulon Universal basic income: A nonprofit is about to test it in a big way

In India I have tested this in my own small way, by giving money to some known poor people. My experience has been that typically women utilize the money far more effectively than men. May be India is a bit peculiar in terms of feelings of entitlement being higher among men.

Looking forward to the results of this test.

rdudekulon John Carmack on Idea Generation

"Failure events must end up making our system stronger. Meaning when an idea fails it needs to make the overall system better."

"As soon as you get an idea you try to defeat it. You’ll be able to generate more ideas because you freed up mental space."

These are good ideas, both from coding as well as entrepreneurial perspectives. Every failure you encounter, if taken as a learning lesson, will make you or your ideas stronger.

rdudekulon Finding Product Market Fit

I disagree with the statement that it was pure luck that they got so many upvotes/stars based on timing. Many other posts of startups got more upvotes and failed. Segment is providing a very useful service of translating and routing analytics data to other services. There is a lot of value in the service (in terms of time/resources it saves). High value services, sooner or later get discovered and more importantly, people/companies start paying for such services.

Great article though, some thing that each technical founder should read.

rdudekulon List of failed and over-budget custom software projects

I was trying to look for patterns in these projects. Looks like most of them were outsourced and most of them were US/UK Government projects. It would be interesting to see patterns in very successful US/UK Government projects.

My personal experience has been that it almost always boils down to upper management/leadership issues, that result in hiring weak project managers which in turn leads to talent drain on the implementation side.

rdudekulon Sketch-n-sketch: Programmatic + direct manipulation + SVG

The 2 minute primer and motivation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rskUgwq5N2A

Yes, it does remind me of Bret Victor's work. Seamlessly moving between coding and manual modes is really cool. I think it requires learning a new LISP like programming language called little.

rdudekulon Indian Women Seeking Jobs Confront Taboos and Threats

That statistic may not be accurate, as more and more women have been entering workforce for the past 2 decades in India. However most such jobs, such as working as a maid or cook at some one else's house, may not be documented and hence probably doesn't figure into the statistic.

rdudekulon The fault in our startups – on India's startup scene

A well thought out article on Indian startups. India has a large number of ambitious, intelligent and hard working wanna-be entrepreneurs. However at some levels cloning is preferred over creativity and fundamental thinking. So you will see multiple startups (not unlike here in the US) competing in the same space, mostly copying each other's features. The competition is intense as labor (at least junior programmers) is cheap while the capital from angel investors and VCs looks abundant.

rdudekulon Nanodegree Plus: Get hired within six months of graduating, or tuition refund

It was JavaScript Design Patterns. Its not that the courses are difficult. Its just that they take time and good amount of effort to complete

rdudekulon Nanodegree Plus: Get hired within six months of graduating, or tuition refund

For $299/month, Udacity does a lot of work. I took a couple of their courses (could not complete) and those courses take substantial effort to complete. If someone is motivated enough to go through their (in my view) rigorous program, I could see how potential employers would be interested. More over there seems to be a shortage of solid Android/iOS developers. Solid training with Udacity's Nanodegree would be a definite plus.

rdudekulon Valuing time over money is associated with greater happiness

Are people’s general orientations to prioritize time over money are associated with greater happiness?

Would you choose a higher paying career that demands longer hours versus making less money and having more free time?

From the downloaded text/pdf of the article: "thinking about money leads people to value productivity and independence, thinking about time leads people to prioritize social connections"

It looks like high quality social connections lead to happiness: http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good_...

Dry read but great paper.

rdudekulon Netflix comes to India

May be the link to this page needs to change...

Its high time Netflix be open to India, as there is dire need for such a service there. Recently I was in India for a few months and I missed Netflix there a lot.

rdudekulon Manu Prakash’s Foldscope Revolution: A cheap, portable microscope

Here is his TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/manu_prakash_a_50_cent_microscope_...

rdudekulon The sky is not falling – about the supposed end of dynamic languages

I love Ruby, Python and JavaScript. I believe I am more productive with dynamic languages than say static languages like C# or Java. The abstractions in dynamic languages (at least for me) allow me to write less code with less confusion and less classes to remember.

With so many libraries supporting my development, I usually tend to write much less code using a dynamic language. Also most of the code tends to be isolated with clear interfaces exposed to other parts of the code. Writing tests is simpler too, compared to writing them in dynamic languages.

May be large projects with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, could benefit from statically typed languages. But for majority of the projects (80-20 rule) dynamic languages offer cleaner syntax, simpler coding experience and faster time to market (my opinion).

rdudekulon The Gig Economy

Flexibility of choosing the type & the time of work seems like a win, in the gig (freelance) economy. However commoditization of such jobs could force the income down for many. This may result in the increase in the number of hours people work and that could result in health issues. With no health insurance & other benefits, overall quality of life could decrease for many. However Gig economy is here to stay.

In these conditions how can workers, government & businesses collaborate to provide better working conditions for those involved?

rdudekulon College Is Much More Than a Means to a Higher Salary

Author is making biased observations, probably based on his experience. Parental pressure, peer pressure, shame are all wrong reasons for going to college to get a degree. The lectures I watched on Khan Academy, Coursera or EdX beat almost all lectures I attended at college. For me there isn't a "big difference between watching a video online and actually being there". Many times I learned more from watching Youtube videos than attending lectures at universities/colleges. Hands-on learning courses on codecademy or codeschool are much better than in-person corporate trainings I attended, that companies I worked with spent thousands of dollars on.

rdudekulon The Fallen of World War II – An Interactive, Data-Driven Documentary

Well done visualizations of the number of military & civilian deaths occurred during second world war. The video version was a bit long, yet rich in details. The interactive vis. in the middle of the video was useful.

Though most of the video deals with the number of deaths, towards the last 10% of the video, the focus is on the PEACE we are enjoying today. The comparison between how bad the world was in the past to how good it is now, is staggering.

One nice twist was, towards the end of the video (17:30 mins), the time line zooms in based on your computer's local time.

rdudekulon Scrape: A simple, higher level interface for Go web scraping

To me goquery seems more intuitive than scrape, may be because I am more familiar with jquery selectors syntax.

Any reason why yhat guys (ericchiang) created Scrape (and not use say goquery)?

Can you make the matcher function in main.go go away with a simpler (more intuitive) interface/api/dsl?

rdudekulon Show HN: Visa Explorer – Salaries, lawyers, companies of all H-1B in the USA

Looks like salar.ly has that info:

http://www.salar.ly/salaries/?title=senior+software+engineer...

rdudekulon A Simple Guide to Meditation

I practice a form of meditation called Passage Meditation. Though simple, Passage Meditation is definitely not easy. However the results I have seen from myself and others, makes it an extremely beneficial practice.

Here is a free online course for those interested in it.

http://www.easwaran.org/introductory-passage-meditation-cour...

rdudekulon Be Kind

How to be kind?

http://www.wikihow.com/Be-Kind

rdudekulon An Overview of Ramanujan's Notebooks [pdf]

It is unfortunate that Ramanujan passed away at a young age. Had he been alive a few more years, perhaps with the help of Hardy, we may have seen some new mathematical foundations, that enabled him to create between 3000 & 4000 equations that mathematicians even today are struggling to find proofs for.

rdudekulon New machine could one day replace anesthesiologists

The technology that goes into a self driving car is possibly far more sophisticated than this new machine. Anesthesiologists must have lobbied hard to stop this machine from a more wide spread usage. However the writing on the wall is clear. Machines in many cases are better than Doctors and they will continue to become better more rapidly than say Doctors with their experience. I wish US FDA gives a chance to these innovations and slowly tackle the rising healthcare costs.

rdudekulon The abundance of JavaScript libraries

Couple of learnings got crystallized for me from reading the post:

1) Learn to focus on the actual ideas and patterns behind languages, libraries, methodologies & concepts, instead of implementations

2) Observe how libraries, languages, methodologies & concepts get adopted & perhaps later rejected

rdudekulon Online Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Course

I meditate daily. I use Passage Meditation and it has made my life a lot better.

For those interested in exploring, here is a link to the free online course: http://www.easwaran.org/introductory-passage-meditation-cour...

rdudekulon The days are long but the decades are short

> Whether or not money can buy happiness, it can buy freedom, and that’s a big deal.

For me freedom was more important than absolute wealth. I found that freedom need not be very expensive. The idea is to convert your savings into income overtime. First become a software development consultant, then keep building your reputation and rates consequently by delivering results. Then invest your savings in income generating assets.

There are a few things I experimented with that yielded some results:

a) Buy economical/smaller commercial real estate and rent it out to companies

b) Lend money on interest to people you trust. Initially give them small amounts and depending on their ability to consistently pay interest, you may lend them more money on some kind of securities (their real estate properties etc).

c) Research annuities and invest in various annuities. I am yet to explore this option fully.

Overall I am happy with my progress so far, that afforded me to take a year off in India (living relatively well in a 4000 sq.ft villa).