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tomkat0789

870 karma · joined June 10, 2015

PhD Engineer!
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tomkat0789··on How I spend less time on YouTube
Just implemented this! Thanks for posting! For those who don't click, he suggests some uBlock Origin filters to remove the suggestion lists from YouTube. For example, currently I'm watching a video and all I see is THE VIDEO - no list of suggestions off to the side.

I guess we can say YouTube's suggestions are "too good"! I might just apply this to my work computer. I'll probably keep them around for my casual viewing on personal machines since I find some new stuff with them.

It'll be interesting to see how this changes my browsing!

tomkat0789··on Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi? (2007)
That was always my intro to vi: I was (for example) doing a merge or something from git bash, then suddenly it dropped me into vi. I've made a few tries to learn vi, but I just don't edit text frequently enough to remember everything about it. I typically have to use Google to figure out how to exit it whenever some tool has it as the default and randomly drops me into it.

I remember a non-Linux friend of mine having a really poor introduction to Unix/Linux because he got bogged down in learning vi in addition to Unix's other foibles!

tomkat0789··on Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags
I'm not an expert on Faraday cages, would the effects stack if you wrapped your phone in aluminum foil, then put it in a cookie tin?
tomkat0789··on Ask HN: Are Indeed, LinkedIn the go-to places for exploring new jobs?
You should be OK since you have experience. Just make sure your interviewing skills are dusted off, review the STAR method, etc.

My anecdata as a PhD engineer: my first job out of college came from putting my info into a faceless corporate careers website. I also got a competing offer through LinkedIn. My current job at a little <100 employee company was obtained through a recruiter on LinkedIn. When looking a few months ago I got another offer from a corporate careers website.

I felt pretty useless fresh out of college, but once I got my first job, I started getting messages from recruiters on LinkedIn fairly regularly. I'd be interested in how people do their due diligence in checking the authenticity of LinkedIn recruiters!

As for indeed, when I used it 5 years ago to get my first job out of school, it didn't impress me. I didn't get any leads from it. Zip Recruiter I think is an actual scam.

tomkat0789··on Americans' Trust in Media Dips to Second Lowest on Record
I really turned a corner when I read Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" and Zinn's "People's History of the United States".
tomkat0789··on Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”
I think that's another dimension of the control. It'd be controversial to make a law saying "we're restricting how you repair your air condition", but if you instead said, "for your safety, you need to have a signed and stamped form B-6 to repair your air condition" you can achieve the same effect by creating layers of bumbling bureaucracy. Everybody is hostage to insane rules that obfuscate your control.
tomkat0789··on Home Price to Income Ratio
Me too! I think the average American thinks "increase supply" means skyscrapers with apartments, rather than lower impact multiunit, mixed-use apartments/street shops that are more common in Europe.

Another issue with increasing supply/density: where is every household going to park its 2-3 cars?!

(Disclaimer: I've been watching tons of City Beautiful and Not Just Bikes on Youtube)

tomkat0789··on If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a job?
Slashdot had a post about this topic a few years ago that I thought was colorful enough to save for posterity: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/18/03/14/1428242/deman...

The top comment seemed to capture the problem best:

"What is in extremely high demand is programmers with 20 years of experience in a technology that has been around for 5, no older than 19 and working for 20k a year.

And that demand will be high, forever.

Pay more and you get more. Pay this and what you get is code monkeys that couldn't find a better employer"

tomkat0789··on Abandoned Motorola Headquarters (2020)
Even stranger is the abandoned Motorola complex built way out among the farmlands in Harvard, Illinois.

Motorola has fallen far! When I started a job at a big company in a Chicago suburb, they actually asked for a show of hands "who's from Motorola" and like 17/20 people raised their hands!

tomkat0789··on As the Pandemic Recedes, Millions of Workers Are Saying 'I Quit'
Possible reason from my own anecdata: I joined a new company in a new industry in the middle of the pandemic. I definitely prefer working remotely (I'm just past 30), but as a new hire I felt some disadvantages.

Mainly: my co-workers who have been at the company longer than I weren't very helpful with onboarding me! We're a little company, so documentation of a bunch of our software is non-existent and the specialized hardware setup we have has a lot of quirks I had to slowly teach myself the last year. I'd hit lots of problems that'd take 5 seconds of their time to diagnose and fix and I'd end up stuck for over an hour while waiting for them to answer a Slack message - or they'd randomly drop offline.

So there I am, working in my bedroom in a new job wondering if I'm a needy little snowflake not digging hard enough or whether the people I work with are just unhelpful because... reasons (still haven't met them in-person since my pre-pandemic interview). After a year I think it really is the latter, but it made me grumpy my early months here.

That could be a possible source of resentment from newer, younger employees. Set us up for success!

I still prefer working from home, but I did commute to the office for a happy hour recently. It was nice to randomly get coffee with the CTO in the morning and hang out with new friends in the evening - none of the "unhelpful" people showed up! :P

tomkat0789··on Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
+1. I sometimes regret subscribing to Financial Times, but their bias is pretty easy to identify and accept/reject once you understand it. I counterbalance it with Jacobian (far-left/communist - choose your adjective - news).

There's an adage in math modeling/statistics: all models are wrong, but some are useful.

Here, all newspapers are biased, but some are useful.

tomkat0789··on There are no results for tank man
Here's an article about it: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man

Makes me wonder what other pitfalls there are to using DDG.

tomkat0789··on Ask HN: Anybody Started a Research Institute?
Scrolling around the comments, I'm not seeing much discussion about funding. Are billionaire friends a requirement to set up an independent research organization?

Asking as an engineering PhD doing what feels like gopher work for big companies. I have armchair dreams and ideas for doing research again, but I've never been clear on how one would get that first grant.

Also, as an alternative to a purely academic route, is it practical to create an institute focused on more worldly things like patents or consulting?

I imagine a professional network would be key no matter what path you take!

tomkat0789··on HIV mRNA Vaccines-Progress and Future Paths
What are the areas of research that need CS people and how would a grumpy CS/engineering MS/PhD make the switch? Um, asking for a friend!

As an undergraduate I actually first got into computing through a biology-computational project! My current work pays the bills, but my armchair dream switch to research - in biology or another science.

tomkat0789··on A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
Reading this reminded me of a humorous Onion video titled "Report: 95% Of Grandfathers Got Job By Walking Right Up And Just Asking" [0].

Scrolling around the comments, I'm not seeing any stories newer than the 90's. Given the layers of HR rules, proprietary software shenanigans, and corporate management, I expect similar stories are rare today.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV_6RYVbNaw

tomkat0789··on FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder
You're not wrong. There was a legendary librarian named Jeffrey Beall who cataloged a whole little industry of predatory scientific publishing. Here's a quick article that mentions his work: https://publons.com/blog/bealls-list-gone-but-not-lost/

It'll be a long time before the traditional journals lose influence, but lots of the newer journals that arose were scams or ways for professors to publish what they wanted. It's a mess.

tomkat0789··on A Connecticut inn has hosted sea chantey singalongs for half a century
I think you're right. At American universities I've been around, lots of alumni with grey hair seem to remember a bunch of fun sounding singalong songs for football games, including (in Louisiana) some weird Cajun? lyrics. It'd be awesome to gob down beers and belt out toons. I think my voice is beautiful after I have a few.
tomkat0789··on Zoomable lens without any moving parts
Bah, Caltech can top that. Why bother with a lens? How about an optical phased array? :)

https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/ultra-thin-camera-creates...

tomkat0789··on Loneliness: The Toll of Remote Work
I switched to a new company during the pandemic. I must admit that I haven't made any new friends at my new company - nobody that'd I'd "have a beer with"! Luckily I've had my wife to keep me company. I might feel differently if I spent the last year alone. I've heard of some people moving to a new city by themselves and starting a new job!

I still prefer working from home. I think after the pandemic I'll try to get more involved in the community around the place I live - going to the local gym, other festivities for example - and meet people who live around me. At my old office, the people I worked with tended to be sprawled all over the big city I live in (30+ minutes of driving away!) which put a damper on socializing. That could be a nice shift: instead of making "friends" at work that you never see outside of work, people use the hour+ that used to be commuting to socialize in their neighborhood.

tomkat0789··on Hitachi to buy GlobalLogic for $9.6B
Some nice responses to this, but I'd be interested in hearing about the trade off between a big company spinning its own IT department vs hiring an IBM et al.

Attached to articles about ERP and government contracts failing and going over budget I often see comments like, this isn't rocket science I could code something for them. Obviously not the right fit for everybody, but is it right for some?

tomkat0789··on Show HN: Find people to play tabletop roleplaying games with
Just made a little page for my campaign! Thanks for this! This reminds me of Obsidian Portal that a DM I briefly followed used: https://www.obsidianportal.com/

Some thoughts:

-Looking at Obsidian Portal for the first time in years, I found a bunch of campaigns near me... last updated 5+ years ago. "Undead" games will probably be an issue for your service as well. Perhaps you could add an additional filter field for recently active/updated games.

-Following the last point, some groups might be "passively open": meeting regularly IRL, but not active on Roleplayful if there's nothing to update.

-I live in Chicago. It might be useful to have something that'd allow people to put in location tags for, say, the north side and nearby suburbs. Somebody in the city using public transit could take an hour or more to go to the other side of the city.

-It might also be cool if I could list more than one system if you're open to different options, but I can think of some arguments against this.

Thanks again! The best group I ever had (spanning ~4 years) was started with a notecard thumbtacked to a bulletin board in the back of the game shop. I try to keep an eye out for newer digital options!

tomkat0789··on AI skills are worth less than you think (2019)
Regular old engineering - modeling, controls, signal processing. My background in AI and ML helped me develop some great transferable skills (technical programming, mainly Python) and added some very attractive buzzwords to my resume! 4 years out of graduate school and I don't regret studying AI/ML. It was fun and made me more ambitious about my research and career than something more traditional would have.
tomkat0789··on AI skills are worth less than you think (2019)
+1 to this from someone who learned the math behind ML in a PhD and was looking forward to being a gatekeeper :)

My favorite academic paper ever [0] was a comparison against a bunch of dimensionality reduction algorithms and 100 year old PCA was tough to beat!

Glad I was able to pivot my career out of AI and ML. My PhD wasn't at Stanford, MIT, et al so I couldn't find any jobs doing the "actual research" - if they existed at all outside academia.

EDIT to add another funny "frustration" paper more directly related to ML [1]. I consider DR is more of a data analysis thing.

[0]: van der Maaten, et al. Dimensionality Reduction: A Comparative Review https://members.loria.fr/moberger/Enseignement/AVR/Exposes/T...

[1]: Dacrema, et al. Are We Really Making Much Progress? A Worrying Analysis of Recent Neural Recommendation Approaches https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.06902.pdf

tomkat0789··on New model could explain old cholesterol mystery
I've personally be satisfied with what I'll call "informed" common sense. An example from health is the documentary "In Defense of Food" where the journalist uses a little science and history to create the heuristic: "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much." None of those insights are really surprising, the only exception maybe being the "mostly plants part".

A downside of depending on complicated theories from experts is that it makes a "priesthood" of people telling you what to think all the time. I think there are enough examples from health, environmental, and privacy policy making to demonstrate that the "priests" don't always have the public's best interests in mind.

tomkat0789··on Electric cars make up 54% of cars sold in Norway in 2020
Interesting link!

It adds up to much less than 100%. What are the missing brands?

tomkat0789··on A megacorp is not your dream job
In 2020 I managed to leave my megacorp job for a smaller situation (new and fun subsidiary of a megacorp that feels really small). My experiences agreed with most/all of the article. Pros and cons of the new situation:

Pros: I feel much less like a cog in a big machine at the smaller organization. My pay went up significantly because they actually wanted some of my unique skill set, and just before the end of the year I got a project of importance from the R&D director, with the VP of product development explaining the longer term importance of the project. My manager is pretty hands off, so I can totally get away with building my skills when he thinks I'm working on short term projects -WFH helps too ;)

Cons: more variation in people. The megacorp had more standard cooperative folks, but I think some people I work with now are trying to protect their fiefs at the expense of my work. I'm slowly learning to do their jobs though hehehe...

At the megacorp (a big name you've heard of), I was in a huge side office. They made some nice sounding efforts to train me, but my time was billed by the hour (standard in the industry), so every hour learning something was an hour i had to make up later. I was moved between random projects with vacancies, so when I did learn something I'd have to shelve it for months or years until the funding situation or other variables aligned. My own ideas: there was a way to get funding, but it wasn't much and nobody above the director level cared if my idea worked, even if it impressed the company's anointed experts. I was an experienced engineering hire, was there for a few years.

I'm pretty happy with my new job! The industry is renewable energy, which makes me feel better than my old corporate jobs on the oil/defense side of the moral spectrum. I got lucky! We'll see how this goes. At the old job people came and went a lot, so I have reason to believe I can go back if the new thing flames out.

My two cents.

tomkat0789··on Direct Air Capture Is a Public Good for Climate Era
If it isn't clear from the title: this is direct air capture of CO2.

This is begging for some number play! I'm imaging the production of bricks of dry ice and comparing it to regular clay bricks since I'm in a hurry. Is dry ice easier to create than clay bricks?

World brick production is 1,500 billion bricks (source = Google). 2.27 kg per brick, that's 3.4 trillon kgs of brick divided 907kg/ton = 3.5 gigatons of bricks. I wonder how difficult it'd be easy to make a comparable amount of dry ice. Power it with cheap solar/wind power. Maybe the dry ice can be rocketed to Mars or the Moon to begin terraforming an atmosphere?

OK, imagining over, I'll get back to my day job...

tomkat0789··on Chuck Yeager has died
> the air speed story

Found it! There's surely a better site out there, but this was the first I bumped into on Google.

https://247sports.com/college/north-carolina/Board/102717/Co...

tomkat0789··on WMF Board considering the removal of Jimmy Wales' trustee position
I'm just reading this before work, but it must warrant more follow up. Wales doesn't want to step down until Wikipedia is safe from "outside interests who do not understand our values". It's easy to imagine the sort of folks who'd want control of Wikipedia.

Was it earlier this year that we narrowly avoided the .org sale to a vague corporation? It'd be tragic to see Wikipedia meet that fate as well!

tomkat0789··on Justice Dept files suit against Facebook for discriminating against U.S. workers
It's nice that this is getting some attention, but I hope it results in good policy!

Other stories I've bumped into:

Trump's executive order - I guess this is now defunct: https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/29/h1b_visa_change/

US Senate moves to abolish per-country visa caps: https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/03/fairness_for_high_ski...

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