4,910 karma · joined April 18, 2008
I do not speak for my employer or my ex-employers.
Curious about many topics outside of programming.
http://twitter.com/strlen
As a native Russian speaker, but one who moved to the United States 20 years ago, I do find the Google translation of Russian to be really excellent, as well as vice-versa (but Russian is much more widely spoken, including of course, by a Google Executive, than Frisian.)
It's interesting to contrast this with a side-by-side translation of "normal" English with Frisian, where the similarity is much lower.
It is really quite a fascinating OS (I've had it running under a MicroVAX 4000/60 for fun -- and yes, I can truly say fun!) and feels quite modern even today.
There's no question that non-psychopaths are capable of terrible and even predatory behavior (and certainly multiple divorces and frivolous litigation), the difference is shame, and personally recognizing that there's something wrong with the behavior. This is different from being aware that society sees their behavior as wrong or hurtful and then acting in a way as not minimize harms inflicted by society's punishments (e.g., something akin to what was espoused by the Thrasymachus character in Plato's Republic or -- even more ominously and dangerously -- doctrine of legal positivism).
The latter leads to a very sad point that is relevant to those designing anti-abuse systems of various kinds: anti-abuse systems can also be misused as means of abuse by the sufficiently unscrupulous, Machiavellian, and especially psychopathic (and so can the reaction to this abuse...)
Headaches (the most frequent symptom my wife experiences, as do my friends), excessive sleepiness, exhaustion, shaking hands, etc...
It's possible, however, that I may have been slightly more tired, but beyond the threshold of noticing this; or slightly slower reaction times. This isn't a scientific study.
1) Dark roast coffee has less caffeine and is (in my subjective opinion) tastier. So if one wants the taste of coffee without less of the effects, consider an espresso or a Turkish coffee. The latter is just called "coffee" in much of Eastern Europe, one can pick up a beautiful cezve on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3D...
2) Yerba Mate is 75 mg of caffeine per serving: higher than tea, but less than coffee. Can be made in an French Press or a tea pot and served like conventional tea.
3) Caffeine gum: not particularly pleasant to chew, but comes in a more precise dose (100mg) and is "kicks in" faster.
Personally, I'd like to see more genetic studies on this: I am not particularly affected by caffeine: I've never experienced withdrawals (despite consuming caffeine heavily -- from coffee and energy drinks for a long period of time) nor do I see coffee raise itself in potency after a week or two of abstinence. This is different for others and I would really like to understand why.
Personally, I found his dissent in Gonzales v. Raich quite interesting and principled: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/03-1454.ZD1.html
Thomas' Concurrence in McDonald vs. Chicago is also very interesting, as it takes a very different approach to 14th amendment incorporation -- in a relatively unique situation where a judge had to incorporate a BoR amendment that has not been incorporated against the state/local government before -- from the approach that used in nearly all the major civil rights/liberties related decisions over the last 75 years:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-1521.ZC1.html
Personally, I find the cases where he disagrees with Scalia, or concurs with an Alito/Scalia majority opinion to be quite illuminating.
For example, since San Jose is much more car friendly, there are far more homeless people living in cars and RVs: many are employed, while the unemployed have often held working/middle-class jobs in the past. Some have been unemployed homeless since the collapse of the 2000 boom, others from the 2008 economic crisis and the real estate crisis (yes, a few had even home been home owners!).
San Jose was hard hit in the real estate crisis (though less so than some of California's exurbs), in that this is where people who long priced out of other areas (and most risk averse, for good reasons) bought at the very peak -- when it felt the "most safe" and the housing prices, while still high, were lower than those in other communities.
Note, however, that's why Bernie is careful to use multiple messages: a more equalitarian message for some, "we aren't getting just desserts, because the system is rigged" for others -- a statement that happens to resonate with Charles Koch (often a negative focal point of Bernie's campaign), https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-koch-this-is...
It does seem to work, as Sanders captures some voters that consider liberty as an important moral consideration (perhaps he's the straw that broke the back of Rand Paul's campaign?): http://righteousmind.com/presidentialprimaries/, surprisingly (or not so surprisingly, as most agree that his legislative program will fail, yet his views on other issues are more liberty-friendly than HRC's).
It's not clear if the author directly addresses Bernie's (and Charles Koch's point): corporate welfare does exist and not everyone amongst the wealthiest is technical entrepreneur; individual hard work won't end subsidies for energy-extraction and farming industries, nor will it improve the criminal justice system. The author focuses on how the "rigging" affected by existing wealth is something one can outcome (yet, a male protestant could overcome a non-noble birth in 18th century England: it doesn't automatically follow that there was no merit in newly formed US abolishing titles of nobility at independence.) A more fruitful approach would be to make the case that Bernie's policies would A) significantly increase regulatory capture B) relative to other candidates, fail to improve ability of the audience (and who is the audience for the article?) to get ahead by virtue of hard work, thrift, and through existing products thereof.
On the other hand, there's something to be said about T.S. Elliot's observation that if were indeed to have [what most believed to be] a meritocracy, the the well off would have much less "noblesse privilege", attributing others misfortunes to personal moral failure. Yet people aren't blank slates: presently the markets tend to reward personality traits such as intelligence, conscientiousness, empathy, and (at least outside of our own field!) extraversion; while none of those traits are wholly innate and immutable, one usually isn't at liberty to make themselves as arbitrarily smart/personable/hard-working (yet, I suspect this knowledge wouldn't alter people's existing views in regards to whether or not a theoretical meritocracy would be fair or desirable..)
(For the record, I am not a fan of many of Sander's policy proposals -- despite being less repelled by him than by other candidates likely to make it to the general election -- for reasons that are pointless to go in to here, but if I didn't already hold that opinion, the article wouldn't change change my mind.)
Some interesting asides, though:
1) re: "United States of Europe" (turns it, that would actually happen!) wasn't just the dream of idealistic liberal youths of that time; it was also quite popular with many Nazis (see Speer's memoirs) and Vichyists.
2) There's also one character -- the brilliant intellectual experimenting with every intellectual idea and mixing in his own. He would seem at home in Mussolini's Italy/Petain's France. In many ways, he seems to resemble Vilfredo Paretto. I'd wager 'L' and he are the most dangerous archetypes: while Nazis would certainly "purge" both in the end, they would be instrumental in their rise to power, and would seem like the biggest "surprises" to many.
Personal note: the German emigre archetype is really interesting; I'm a former-USSR Jewish emigre to the US, now a naturalized citizen -- yet I "knew" in a sense, that the US fit my temperament and psyche long before walking off the plane and through customs. Free Utopia/Dystopia novel idea: a union of polities where each individual is free to take a specially crafted a personality test and then is allowed (by choice) to emigrate (free of any charge/transaction costs fully covered, etc...) to another polity that matched their personality (in addition to other routes of of immigration -- legal, but not unconditional or cost-free -- to avoid breeding a pure monoculture.)
The general big fear was being burgled and tortured for money you were presumed to have had but actually didn't. I suspect this was the intent of the burglars: most any rational person would prefer to give up their money rather than being tortured with a soldering iron -- and these were heavy soldering irons used for repairing 220v home circuits (culture shock coming to the US: people didn't fix simple things like an outlet/switch failing to work, but I digress...) -- but the stories of those who didn't have money but were tortured and murdered anyway, made those who had the money (and might decide to volunteer only a portion of it) realize that the threats weren't kidding.
However, that's not the full story. I really do wonder how much the soldering iron added over simply barging into a home, demanding the money. I suspect there is also huge element of, as Orwell said in 1984, torture for the sake of torture itself (sadistic personalities amongst the criminals, rather than pure rational calculation as means to making money).
Re, TV: the soldering iron thing _did_ make it into some Russian/late Soviet movie I watched back in the 90s, not in a graphical scene, but the threat: the militisia agent -- it was stilled called that back then -- was refusing to take the reported threat seriously and was simply cracking jokes about it.... A graphical scene (albeit comedic) with a clothes iron did make into one the more famous movies of that era, ironically as something that happens in US (ah, projection!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Is_Good_on_Deribasovsk... )
That said, growing up in former USSR (Belarus, specifically), I was also surrounded by plenty of stories of partisans (anti-Nazi resistance fighters) saying nothing when questioned by the Gestapo, as well as tactics the partisans used: assume anyone can be captured or be a traitor, make any one piece of information useless by itself, and so forth. This couldn't be propaganda, as the French resistance stories I was exposed to in the US were also quite similar. I suspect resistance to giving useful information under torture when 1) one has a lot more at stake than money 2) the organization one is a part of has a choice about how to distribute the information.
> Meanwhile other people are working on getting to orbit, so as to provide infinite room
In addition to orbit, there's Antartica (it's certainly not colder than Mars, with more plentiful water ice and oxygen), oceans (desalinization + sea based habitats), not to mention very sparsely populated parts of the US just a few hours drive away from Bay Area.
By all means, let's go to orbit, explore colonize the solar system, and at the very least send probes[] to the stars.
One other side effect of tremendous growth in energy production: we can use that energy to do things we've never thought powerful, such as accelerate a probe to ~5% of c, allowing a probe to reach the Alpha Centauri system within the lifetime of someone born today...
> "In the year 200 AD, there were approximately 180million human beings on the planet Earth. And at that time a Christian philosopher called Tertullian argued: ‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… already nature does not sustain us.’"
Imagine if the population did stay at ~200mm through the time period. _What_ tremendous advances would we have missed out on had the extra billions of people not been born?
Re: movies. Charles Stross ('cstross' on here) mentioned how television has effectively replaced the short story as commercial medium -- so youtube shorts could effectively have the same impact short stories (e.g., Flowers for Algernon -- the original story about enhancement) once had.
tl;dr Please write a modernized "Flowers for Algernon", perhaps as a film short.
Here is one example, in this case type-checking a ternary operator (from http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/checkers/tyarith/cor...):
| TmIf(fi,t1,t2,t3) ->
if (=) (typeof t1) TyBool then
let tyT2 = typeof t2 in
if (=) tyT2 (typeof t3) then tyT2
else error fi "arms of conditional have different types"
else error fi "guard of conditional not a boolean"
A great deal of this also seems to be convention/pragmatism: e.g., pfff and Hack are in OCaml -- and predate the use of Haskell at FB -- hence FbInfer is as well. Coq, which is often used for proofs of correctness of type systems, is in OCaml so someone who already uses/hacks on Coq might as well use OCaml for implementation work.
What is controversial is the Kochs' tactic of backing republican politicians who are themselves pro-war and opposed to personal liberty (along side candidates who oppose wars and support personal liberty, of course): sometimes the "lesser" of two evils is still... evil; even worse, one may be mistaken about what is lesser. This wasn't always this way: Kochs once supported the Libertarian Party and represented its more liberal (in the conventional sense) wing, oddly enough in opposition to its more radical wing led by Ron Paul.
None of this is a defense of libertarian ideas per-se, my own views have evolved on this. Of course that's besides the point of TFA: civil liberties are a core point of classical liberalism, the foundation conservatism, liberalism, and libertarians; this isn't a matter of arguing whether or not healthcare should be socialized (or not), one would hope Rand Paul would be speaking for the majority of senate (across both parties) and not as a maverick.
Most of the Gunn students' parents aren't on HN, nor are they entrepreneurs (nor are most people on HN entrepreneurs). For the record, suburban Palo Alto is also very different from SOMA in SF. I know that this seems like a very _minor_ distinction to outsiders, but it matters: the kids (and their parents) aren't usually exposed to folks living with roommates, those who are "getting by" with freelance jobs while building more valuable career skills, and so on...
> Also, I'd like to point out that most of the greatest scientific minds of our era did get mediocre grades in school (I'm not talking about the Gates or Jobs college dropout fairytale).
A mediocre grade, by definition is a C. While I'm willing to concede that one doesn't need straight A's to be a scientist, it's hard to see how one could make any contribution to a relevant STEM field with C-graded understanding of basic algebra and proofs (without, e.g., making up for it elsewhere such as via community college courses taken on the side or re-taking those courses in a university).
I'll say without hesitation that "take hard courses, don't worry about dragging down your GPA by a few points" is _great_ advice, but that's not the same as "all else being equal, mediocre grades have no consequences."
However, that advice implies getting to a university in the first place, and that's the problem students in Palo Alto are facing: even ten years ago (when I was graduating HS/entering college -- note I graduated from Monta Vista HS, a school that's somewhat similar to Gunn, but ahem -- farther from Stanford and Caltrain) the perception (which isn't the entire story, but still has a strong basis in reality) was that 1) one can't get into a good (UC Berkeley, UCLA, or another equivalent public or private university; Stanford or MIT are a different matter altogether...) university without a (I'm using the older SAT scale...) 1400+ SAT score and 3.8+ GPA 2) without attending and graduating from a good university, one may still have a decent career, but one will be less secure (whether financially or in terms of career mobility, job satisfaction, or even selection of romantic partners) in other ways. I don't think the situation got any better since then, if anything it intensified greatly after the 2008 crisis (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_is_Over).
(Note: there are definite advantages to attending a name-brand university, but it isn't -- at least, yet -- the absolute requirement, without which one will never be admitted to the a rewarding and successful career.)
- Depending on what kind of problems you enjoy solving, you're going to be miserable even if you are able to do this.
I love working on my own at times (exploring new concepts and ideas, new languages, or even "toy projects" with no real-world applications), but in the end, I find working on bigger problems, with a team of great people to be a lot more fulfilling.
- Constraints are useful in that they force you to rely on something other than pure will power. This can go both ways: _if_ you are going without a regular source of income (as opposed to retiring after winning the [startup] lottery), you'll need to sacrifice time for money. On the other hand, a full time job provides a good deal of constraints as well (both for what you do _at_ work and what you do outside of work hours).
Gene Wolfe[2] kept a full time job and wrote an hour each day. That had two constraints: he didn't need to rush or alter his work in order to sell (his books are fulfilling and rewarding but not a "easy, fun read" that brings in great royalties right away) and since he only had an hour each day to write, he knew he had to make the best of it (one thing said about him, is that he doesn't waste words: he's got a whole CNC machine milling Chekhov's guns...)
- Burnout is an entirely different matter, one shouldn't generalize from "this helps deal with being burnt out" to "drop everything, do this, and you'll never be burnt out."
- Finally, it isn't a feasible option for most:
First, one can't insure against economic catastrophe, savings and a low burn rate are great, but ultimately the _only_ financial insurance one is there ability to earn an income[1].
That ability is predicated on ability to contribute and the amount of people willing to pay for your contributions. In other words, if you're a great developer and you live (or can relocate to) a fluid job market, your risks are lower than those of an average developer (note: assuming a normal probability distribution, 50% of developers are _below_ average, and most fall within a standard deviation of average...) in a less fluid job market.
Areas with fluid job markets tend to have higher costs of living. Unless one is extremely talented (and in many cases, even if that is the case), one doesn't become a great cut above average overnight. One generally starts off with a job in an area with a fluid job market (hence greater expenses!) and over the time develops ties to the area (friends, family, pets, etc...) and can't easily drop everything to move to a cheaper area for their "leisure time" and then -- if something goes wrong -- easily return to the area to take advantage of the fluid job market.
All else being equal, a developer of equal skill, in an equally fluid area, that did not "take a year off" will hired over one that has, _unless_ they've done something extra-ordinary with this time. Best prediction of being able to do something extra-ordinary is... having done something extra-ordinary. So at the least, do something extra-ordinary on a smaller scale first before going full-time on it. Zuck and billg didn't drop out of Harvard with a blank emacs window (in billg's case, perhaps it was a TECO window, not sure if TECO EMACS was around in his days...).
- In a capitalist system, money does one thing well: if you have more money than you have a use for, you can give it to someone who has the time to make the most of it. Marginally, a dollar spent donating to someone _very good_ working on a project I care about (a programming language, infrastructure for open source projects, a social cause, etc...) goes _much further_ than a dollar "spent" by foregoing income to work on most of those projects full-time. As for the exceptions to this, I can usually incorporate them into full-time jobs.
Conversely, I'd suggest this heuristic:
1) Can you afford it without putting people who rely on you into jeopardy? (Are you going to demand that your wife end a rewarding career to move to a cheaper area with you? Are you going to make your kids move to an area in inferior schools? If either is true, stop right there and then...)
2) Marginal value of dollar spent metric above: if someone can do a better job with the same resources, help provide the resources for them. Concrete example: since my username doesn't begin with a 'p' and end with a 'g', money I contributed to Clojure project (when it was in dire financial straits) probably had more impact in creating a Lisp-1 with a good macro-system than if I were to quit my job and work full-time on a Lisp-1 (likewise, while pg can afford to literally work on anything he wants to, he chooses to invest[3] in teams capable of building things he careers deeply about, but isn't quite good at building himself).
Otherwise, try to make the "leisure" activity part of your day-to-day job as well.
3) Otherwise, if you can do something awesome with your time -- you probably don't need someone named after a function that may never return in a memory-unsafe language's standard library to tell you that :-)
[1] Investments under-writing "early retirement" may collapse. "Social insurance" such as universal healthcare, pensions, unemployment benefits, etc... can be voted or sued out of existence.
[2] If you're an SFF fan, pick up Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun tetralogy sometime, but be warned that once you start, your dreams of doing anything else with your time will be over.
[3] Investing is not the same thing as donations, but I don't believe any angel/seed investor invests purely for the money.
One can write object oriented code (with clear modules and interfaces) in plain-old-C (see "C Interfaces and Implementations"), just as one can write Fortran in Ruby (and I don't mean by creating a DSL sensitive to positions of characters in a line).
> And in the truest sense of "most people" I would bet that "most people take whatever work they can get, and sometimes something sticks" is probably more accurate.
I am glad you've brought up this point, but in some ways this "first world problems" narrative is itself elitist: people who are less wealthy, people who live in poor and authoritarian countries (both are sets my parents and I once belonged to) _still_ have concerns about fulfilling work, about balancing professional and/or academic success with family obligations, and suffer from rejection, feelings of inadequacy, failure to live up to expectations of others, and the like.
Even more-so, many of the tradeoffs described play into choices people have to make in regards to joining "the elite". For some, a decision to be happy/fulfilled might mean forsaking the "elite"/"privileged" status. I still remember the waning days of the dot-com boom, when my family's immigration lawyer was horrified that I chose to study CS: "but all the jobs will be outsourced", "computers will program themselves". Programming (or "tech") wasn't held in high esteem when sama and I entered college: class sizes were all times low, (for those who are in Silicon Valley) 237 was the "dot com graveyard", and $1300 for a 2-bedroom within Cupertino school district was considered outrageously high.
Nonetheless, There is an important caveat I would add to what sama says -- and I think you've been hinting it in your post -- "liking what you do for work" isn't the same as "following your passion". Factors such as skill and aptitude for the given work, opportunities for finding such work, etc... all contribute to "liking what you do". I don't know if I am misreading sama or if this is an omission in sama's essay (somehow, I believe it's the former!), but often time liking what one does, also requires building some aptitude in things one (thinks) they don't like: e.g., "I hate maths!" (extrapolated from "I dislike continuous maths the way it was taught in (US) high school, so I never approached discrete maths, linear algebra, etc...") had stopped far too many people from building an enjoyable career in a maths-heavy (but not in any way exclusively mathematical, especially as far as industry work goes) fields. Likewise, "fulfilling" isn't the same as "fun". To paraphrase a person much smarter than me that I worked for -- twice -- eating a good meal is fun, going hiking is fun, watching a movie is fun; building software (or, writing a cookbook, exploring/charting a nature preserve to create safe and sustainable hiking trails, writing a screenplay or acting in a movie, watching a movie critically for a review, etc...) is, on the other hand, fulfilling and deeply enjoyable but not necessarily "fun" (even if I'll call it "fun", as I usually do) in the exact same way.
They did indeed ditch their custom hardware: the appliances were excellent, but not really a competitive proposition compared to "buy a cluster of commodity hardware and if one JVM instance goes for a coffee break, treat it as any other transient failure and route requests to another host."
Google and Facebook have offices in New York (in the case of Facebook, there's a team available for most any engineering role in the NY office; I can't speak for Google, but I believe Spanner is out of the NY office), so for folks who really want a city lifestyle, this is always an option.
As for Bay Area, the big issue are schools: San Francisco schools operate on a lottery system (with the exception of a single "test school", Lowell), whereas South Bay has excellent public schools available to all those who live within their district boundaries (Cupertino School District, Los-Gatos/Saratoga School District, Los Altos SD, several schools in Fremont area, etc...). So for many, a South Bay location is actually a perk: commuting from South Bay to SF on Caltrain is a major hassle (that is assuming the offices of the company are located to close to Caltrain -- public transportation within SF proper is a nightmare unless you work and live close to BART station) and leaves no time to pick kids up from school/drop them off at school/curricular activities.
I should add that at least Google and Facebook run buses within suburban South Bay as well -- so the worst part of the commute (going North on 101 in the morning, South on 101 in the evening) can be avoided.
I should add there are also people living further in various bedroom communities in East Bay like Albany or Walnut Creek, or San Ramon (which also have good schools) and most of those folks either work for SF-based companies (keep in mind Google does have an SF office as well), or make use of company busses (Google runs busses to SF), or work from home some days a week.
This would also be a huge generalization, but one can also think of the Bay Area as the OSI stack: application/presentation in SF, mid-tier (databases at Oracle, distributed infrastructure at Google and FB) in Peninsula/Northern parts of South Bay, and physical layer (Apple, Cisco, Juniper, Intel, etc...) in Sunnyvale and further south. So for companies that do more systems-level development, there's both network effects (they're hiring people coming from other companies in the area), and the need to somewhat more experienced engineers (who are more likely to have families and to own vs. rent).
(background: lived in South Bay Area since I was 13, worked as an engineer in various South Bay Area software/Internet companies -- both in office parks as well as offices in more walkable downtown areas -- since late teens, including at Facebook in the Menlo Park campus).
Quite contrary, the opposite is true: the "1 out of every 10" companies you hear about are the companies where founders resisted opportunities to sell early, which grew to a size where millionaires continued to be minted even after the IPO.
Some VCs have even refused to permit early sales that would have made the founders comfortable (i.e., 1-5mm per founder): while top-tier VCs _won't_ do that (that would make founders who have their pick of VCs be reluctant about accepting their funding), it's probably not the best idea in the world to take substantial amount of VC funding without even considering the possibility of building a public company.
There's a lot that one can accuse pg of, but pushing founders to take long odds to make VCs rich is not one of them.
I know plenty of other folks with similar stories: they also joined a mid-sized, yet fast-growing (in terms of both company size and revenue) private companies, ended up doing well financially.
There's a catch, however: this isn't a "get rich quick" scheme, in fact neither myself nor any of the people I know made the decisions they did _for the sake of money_: my own choice had more to do with interesting work, great team, applying my skills at greater scale, and so forth. Lot of folks told me that joining said company was "just too late"; I also considered it as such (thinking of options -- if they were to become worth anything -- as a nice potential bonus, but not a life-changing event).
I don't like giving advice, but here are some heuristics (YMMV, none of this is universal):
1) Don't treat equity so cynically as to never take an offer that offers slightly lower title/salary/etc... vs. the others _especially_ if there are other great reasons to take the "lower title/base pay, but higher equity" offer.
2) On the other hand, don't over-optimize for equity such that one ends up with high percentage of equity but of little or overall negative value. This value can be financial (simply put, if a company is less generous with equity it means they think it's worth _something_), but more importantly it can be in terms of missed learning and growth opportunities. I hate to jump on the "too many SELECT ajax FROM php startups" bandwagon -- I happen to work for one that is _very far from that, and yes we're hiring! -- but there are plenty of startups that don't offer much technical depth, or (for non-technical-folks) don't do anything terribly interesting business-wise, either.
3) The two anti-patterns I've seen in Silicon Valley are folks _never_ working in smaller teams AND folks trying to get in "as early as possible" for the sake of... "getting in as early as possible" (treating all startups interchangeably, etc...). Good people and interesting work can be found in companies of _any_ size: don't pass up these opportunities just because the company seems to be too bi _or_ too small. In the end, the compensation (not just financial/equity, but also choice of projects/responsibilities) company N+1 will offer will depend on what you can bring to the table, which in turn depends on what you've learned at companies {0,..., N}