realtalk_sp

Linked from https://mse435.stanford.edu/materials.html

Would you mind posting the outcome of this? A person I love dearly is struggling with Long Covid/CFS. I’ve been doing something similar to what you describe, but I’m always looking for more angles that could help.

I explicitly caveated my statement with "Using a PhD as a gateway into applied ML" for a reason. The vast majority of people going into applied ML are not pioneering new methods. They're using ML as a tool to support business objectives. This is the group I'm talking about.

The phrase "bent of mind" roughly implies "the way someone thinks". Its usage is declining I suppose but there's nothing connotatively nefarious there.

Using a PhD as a gateway into applied ML is so horrifically misguided I hardly know where to even begin debunking it.

PhDs are one especially crappy way to prove you have the intellectual chops to engage with ML. There are far more direct, practical, and expedient alternative paths to get there.

Importantly, the number of people who were perfectly capable of doing a PhD but chose not to (because, frankly, it's a very bad deal) vastly dwarfs the number of people who stuck around in academia and obtained one. Additionally, my observation at several major tech companies is that PhDs have a bent of mind that is roughly orthogonal to the pursuit of real business value.

Accessibility is the sort of thing that has to be regulated into existence because the economic cost-benefit often cannot be justified. Similar to handicap parking, ramps, etc.

Really tiring of this clickbaity nonsense infecting science and math. This analogy is so tenuous you could snap it with a feather.

Hmm I think I wasn't clear enough with "Stoicism and tangential philosophies". I didn't mean to imply any one philosophy is necessarily a definitive prescription. Rather, they include various good ideas that should be borrowed and amalgamated into a composite that best fits the individual.

To be clear, the "efficiency with which a resource is used" in this case can be represented roughly by dollar per unit compute. As that value goes down, you would expect software "waste" to go up. That's how the Jevons Paradox applies here.

"In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.[1]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

It's almost like the problem is wanting to be special? Stoicism and tangential philosophies are more critically important than ever, in my opinion. I've also found a great deal of benefit from not participating in social media.

EDIT: There's a related and quite important concept in the contemporary well-being discourse often referred to as 'the dispassionate pursuit of passion [or success]'. I think many of the people who show up on HN would benefit from understanding it. Choosing to not desire being special is not the same thing as being inert. There is a balancing point. Here's a resource (albeit maybe a bit too self-helpy) that talks about this: https://www.happinessacademy.eu/blog-en/the-6th-happiness-si....

Do you worry that you're taking money at a valuation that's predicated on artificially and transiently elevated demand? It doesn't sound like you have a business compatible with the VC hyper-growth model, outside of the present extraordinary circumstances.

It also feels intuitively like many person counting use cases are satisfactorily addressed by far simpler and lower cost heuristics such as, for example, Google lining up device 'throughput' with lat/long and business records. In fact, I just used their estimate to time my visit to the DMV and it worked perfectly.

Admittedly, it may just be that I'm not creative enough to envision sustainable, valuable use cases for this. But if you've been around 6 (?) years and just took $51M in Series C without being significantly diluted, KP is presumably assigning you at least a $250M valuation and possibly a lot higher. After accounting for terms like e.g. liquidation preference, the economic picture of Density could easily be a house of cards.

I suspect many developers would find software a lot less appealing if it were closer to a traditional engineering discipline (slow, unforgiving, dramatically reduced expressive power and creative potential, etc).

I'm somewhat ADD and get bored easily, so not only do I need to do something more like software but I also have to stay as broad and high-level as possible within the discipline, to stave off ennui. NOTE: very much not arguing this is a good way to go through life.

What's considered aesthetically pleasing continually evolves over time. There are underlying trends in physical beauty that resemble what we see in fashion, art, music, etc. Humans also have a quite a lot of control over much of their appearance with hair styling, makeup, and (increasingly) cosmetic surgery. This, combined with the ageism inherent to modeling, adds up to fairly sustained demand.

This really goes a long way towards explaining the current state of macOS.

You're well behind the cutting edge of hair loss science [1]. It's quite clear from your comment that you haven't read anything about the most recent developments.

If you want a good example of what's now possible with anti-aging, look at Tom Ford. He's 58 and could easily pass for a 30 year old. The techniques he's using to look that way will be further refined and become more widely accessible (economically) over the next 10-20 years.

You really have no idea what you're talking about and you're clearly not someone who's actually read any related research or studied these subjects in any kind of depth. The irony is that you first pointed out the tremendous economic incentive to solve hair and skin degradation and then engaged in incoherent contortions in order to argue that these problems have somehow magically remained unperturbed by profit-maximizing agents. A mind-boggling cognitive dissonance.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/07/hair-for-...

Hair loss is on the precipice of being effectively solved (infinite transplants via stem cells) and the price will likely go down over the next 5 to 10 years as the technology to produce hair follicles and perform robotic transplantations matures.

Skin is also a largely solved problem: use moisturizer/sunscreen/Vitamin C/Retin A, avoid the sun as much as possible, wear sunglasses, drink lots of water, eat healthy + high antioxidants, sleep well, get minor amounts of Botox occasionally for some parts of the face, microneedling occasionally, maybe a face lift (these days a more or less perfected procedure with low risk) somewhere in your 40s/50s. That plan will basically take you into your 60s looking really good. Even if you can't stick to that plan, the various restorative dermatological options will still give you a fantastic result. But most people are some combination of too apathetic, too lazy, too financially-constrained, or too afraid of more invasive techniques.

I can assure you that Musk has at no point intimated that Tesla is not a worthy investment and that he's not interested in profit maximization. He has only ever hinted at this peripherally, as described.

If you're at a really early stage and still evaluating an idea, I would highly recommend Running Lean. Concrete, detailed step-by-step manual for figuring out if an idea is worth pursuing.

They don't have any significant monopolistic advantage and they're operating in a highly price-sensitive, competitive market.

My personal theory is that Musk knows this and his real objective is to provoke car manufacturers into competing on electric. From Musk's point of view, the win is likely not Tesla making any significant amount of money for shareholders but instead it driving the whole market towards electric, thereby achieving the "real" objective of lowering emissions.

Many of his behaviors over the years suggest this could be the case: publishing a 'master plan', releasing Tesla's patents, noting the stock price was "too high", and sinking all of his PayPal money into SpaceX, Tesla, and Solar City (and then borrowing to pay his rent).

There shouldn't be a debate at all since both sides are technically correct. Here's the definition from Google:

> dec·i·mate /ˈdesəˌmāt/ verb 1. kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of. "the project would decimate the fragile wetland wilderness" 2. HISTORICAL kill one in every ten of (a group of soldiers or others) as a punishment for the whole group.

There are many words and phrases that have changed in meaning over time through popular (mis)use.

> Yet its strategy misfires and communication blunders have left its African developers in a lurch, underscoring how difficult blending capitalism and social good can be. Stung by the experience, some developers informally refer to the company as “The Plantation.”

It seems like it's about the optics in the present BLM-heavy climate.

But you're absolutely right that the market sets rates. And did no one wonder why the hell Andela would exist and be so valuable if there wasn't significant arbitrage to be had? They're a business not a charity.

I'm reminded of a story about child laborers and Nike. In an almost Kafkaeque twist, locales where this was happening ended up experiencing significant economic setbacks when Nike decided to close up certain offending factories.

This is just another classic case of people reacting emotionally, biasing towards their own set of experiences and points of view.

It wasn't clear to me in reading this article whether or not this is actually cost competitive with existing hydrogen peroxide production methods. Or is it more about it being an environmentally-friendly play?

Pretty fantastic case study in the perils of complex systems. Is there any place where these types of post-mortems are collected? Could be a very valuable resource for systems engineers.

Something I find odd is this presumption that most software engineering roles necessitate practice in the form of side projects. That hasn't been my experience.

Modern-day software seems to take the form of mostly being fairly repetitive (CRUD, front-end framework, RDBMS, AMQ, in-memory cache, object modeling, testing, CI/CD, etc) and only quite rarely involving unique knowledge specific to the task at hand. Once you've dealt with the fundamentals enough times, there are rapidly diminishing marginal returns to hours spent coding, for most practical software engineering roles.

At that point, a person's time would be much better spent developing other tangential faculties like communication, project management, and critical thinking or simply on personal wellbeing (happy workers are more productive workers).

So, in my opinion, unless you're trying to do something quite innovative, you're making a mistake by selecting for coders who burn the candle at both ends. You should instead select for smart people who can get the job done well without having to spend an excessive amount of time on side projects and who optimize their lives outside of work in a way that leaves them happy and energized when they come to work.

Yea it's not useful. This could be the result of positive forces such as more kids going to university instead of entering the work force (improvement in educational attainment) and/or people able and choosing to retire earlier OR of very negative forces, as they seem to imply.

Rolling the statistics up to the population level is not the best way to look at this. They should have broken out the trends by age bracket. Pretty shoddy journalism.

When there's more capital available (and there's been an abundance of it in the last decade plus), the time it takes to make a new market/industry competitive enough to shred margins goes down a by lot. In recent history, this has happened before such companies can float shares in the public equities market. Great examples are ridesharing, online food delivery, and meal kits.

In an environment flush with capital chasing returns, any company without a true monopolistic moat will ultimately be forced to operate at or below cost, yielding no meaningful profit. Many of these tech unicorns thought they would be monopolistic but ended up looking more like airlines.

I would challenge the idea that you must continuously learn. It's entirely possible to have become a Java/Spring specialist and continue to remain employed into 2020 and likely well beyond.

The churn you're alluding to happens mostly at the very thin frontier of innovation and applies largely to engineers who want to retain high compensation.

What makes you think creditors would keep helping Bain "load up [companies] with debt" if doing so yielded an intolerably high risk of default? It seems obvious that they'd run out of patsies, sooner or later.

I've been pretty ecstatic with the combination of TypeORM and TypeGraphQL if anyone is looking for an alternative.