wegs

Yeah. The code school route has a pretty hard glass ceiling.

I'm glad I took graduate coursework in advanced algorithms, signal processing, control systems, AI, etc. which followed on a course of differential equations, advanced linear algebra, probability, and so on.

There is a difference in computer science curricula, with more than a little bit of correlation with which tier school you go to. Without a solid theoretical background, you can become a decent engineer building a database-backed web application, but there's a world of possibilities closed off to you.

And those aren't skills you'll pick up on the job. If you're super-self-motivated, MOOCs and similar can do it, but I've found few adults able to invest the time to learn skills which don't have a pay-off for years. Differential equations or linear algebra aren't very helpful in isolation; it's the application which build on top of them which add value. That's a few semesters of study.

Precisely what you said: Power grid has security. Compromising 90% of connected devices with a mainstream OS would, at once:

(1) Tank the economy

(2) Likely, be doable with resources totaling in the single-digit million dollars

Modern wars are largely about industrial capacity.

But if it is equally easy to compromise the grid, why not do both?

This may sound like a movie plot, but so did the invasion of Poland at the beginning of WWII, the attack on Pearl Harbor, nuclear bombs on Japan, the rape of Nanjing, or many other actual events which Actually Did Happen.

We tend to underestimate the impact of rare events: our brains are conditioned to discount anything which happens once or less than once per lifetime. That's likely why humanity will kill itself at some point.

Or be an outlier.

It's not hard to be an outlier, if you set your mind to it. It's a lot easier than playing the game at a sufficient level to be admitted.

I was an outlier, and now I'm raising my kid to be an outlier.

But yeah, there is a culture of corruption spanning the upper tier.

If 5% of businesses are independently compromised every year, that's a painful but manageable drain on our economy.

If the [inter]national infrastructure goes down, with the firmware on every device on every internet-connected computer bricked at the same time due to a large-scale cyberattack (perhaps followed by a military attack a little while later), we're f-ed.

All this would take is:

- One zero-day each on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

- Nation-state level resources to create a bricking firmware update for all commonly-used devices.

- Nation-state level resources to create a spreading attack for all major routers and network devices.

- Nation-state level resources to deploy this rapidly enough that response systems can't respond.

With 200 nation-states, it's perhaps just a matter of time....

(And yes, there's a lot more i's to dot and t's to cross, but I think they're all doable, with nation-state level resources)

I think his point was that good tools are built with deep fundamentals.

* If you've mastered git commands, you haven't followed Carmack's advice.

* If you've used git as a domain to understand key-value stores, Merkle trees, hash functions, and network theory, you have followed Carmack's advice.

Or another example:

* If you've mastered using a gaming library to move characters around and memorized APIs, you haven't followed Carmack's advice

* If you've mastered a game library to understand 3d transformation matrices, GPGU, and simulations of physics, you have.

A tool can point you to an aligned, coherent set of fundamentals which also work together to make a package useful for employment.

And in banks, all your money can be frozen by a hostile government, for example.

Diversification.

I DO keep all my money in Western financial institutions, but that's laziness, not out of some misguided perception of stability. If I were optimizing, I'd have some in US institutions, some abroad, some in land, some in blockchain, some in gold, etc.

The US has had a nice 250-year run. Past performance doesn't always predict future performance, and more importantly, if I live 100 years, that means the US has been around for 2.5 of my lifetimes. I think that's a good indicator of the level of stability. There's perhaps a 1-in-2 chance of some major event within my lifetime, consider things like the American Revolution, Civil War, or Great Depression to be major events.

Not all of those would wipe out my assets, but I'd say about a 1:5 chance of my assets being neutered or neutralized within my life.

We tend to plan for the common, minor stuff (typo, guy loses $50k), and overlook big, rare events (like the current, entirely predictable pandemic).

I made an interesting transition a few years ago, and started using Unicode in my programs.

(1) I have an i18n mapping which provides native support for a lot of helpful characters. Both Mac and Linux use all the keys, so in addition to the half-dozen characters with accents, I have access to a lot more directly. Mac and Linux do remap the remaining keys differently, though.

(2) My code got a lot more readable. Δx is easier to read and more concise than delta_x.

(3) I have a lot more characters to pick from.

A lot of the issues you raise with regexp are due to limits of ASCII.

For more esoteric characters, I do Google and either enter alt codes or cut-and-paste, which might sound like , but remember that you write code once, and read it many times. And editors are increasingly good.

Beyond Unicode, one does have text formats with support for colors, bold, and whatnot, either embedded (escape codes in text) or as syntax highlighting (editor parses).

The CS-level reg exps seem like a good idea. The implementation -- where they're encoded as bizarre ASCII escape sequences -- could use a good revamp.

Oddly enough, I think this is my first HN post where I went beyond ASCII....

Edit: And HN filtered out a bunch of Unicode. It kept only the delta.

I think your analogy makes the wrong point. There are many reasons you might have something to hide, and to start with the simplistic ones your friends are presenting, among them is:

1. You did something wrong.

2. Someone else wants to do something wrong to you.

The first is in your control. I think I've acted with sufficient integrity for my life that I have nothing to hide which might land me in trouble.

The second is out of your control. There are unreasonable people in this world. If you have a stalker, you don't want them to know where you are. If your spouse cheats on you and leaves you, you might have a custody battle on the line. If your government goes the way of Germany or Russia circa 1940, you might want to hide your ethnicity or political beliefs. A police officer is investigating a crime, when someone you didn't like was killed; you didn't do it, but time, place, and motive are all there. None of these are particularly likely, but they do come up.

I have one person in my life, and to protect myself from them, I have a limited online presence. I use fake names, and my LinkedIn stopped updating a few years back which limits career prospects, but it's a sacrifice worth making. I let out a lot of information before that, which was a mistake. I went through some legal disagreements at one point, where another party acted unethically and decided to extort me. These things aren't in your control.

When I was young, I had nothing to hide. When I was older, I learned information is power, and information asymmetry can help you or hurt you. With that wisdom, I now have a lot to hide, and I advise younger folks to be mindful of their privacy.

I intentionally listed a lot of different things in my post, with fault lying in different places or nowhere at all, to give an idea of the variety of reasons one might want to hide something.

My respect for privacy went up when I went through my first litigation. I then saw a few other people go through litigation, and learned more about the legal system.

It turned out that when people are trying to cast doubt on you, frame you, or otherwise are in a fight with you, knowledge IS power.

There's a misconception that you need to do something wrong to be punished:

* In a civil suit, a judge determines who is more likely to be right, and that can be based on gut feelings, circumstantial evidence, or fabricated stuff.

* Criminal law suits have a higher bar, but at the end of the day, the policeman and prosecutor get evaluated based on whether they threw someone in jail, not whether they threw the right person in jail. To do that, they need to convince a jury.

* Even if you're not throw in jail, a 2-year criminal investigation which costs you $200k in legal fees and eats up all of your mental cycles can leave you financially and emotionally debilitated. All that takes is some government employee having enough to be convinced there's something worth investigating.

* Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion. Our legal code is long enough we ALL break laws we don't know about. If a prosecutor or policeman believe you deserve to be in prison, they'll work really hard to do that.

An email where you misphrase yourself, a record of where you were on some date, or otherwise can all come back to haunt you, even when you've done nothing wrong. It's better to keep that stuff private.

Disclaimer: I've never personally been through a criminal investigation or prosecution. I've been through a couple civil cases. I was threatened with a criminal prosecution once unless I ceded ground in a business transaction. I didn't do what the other party threatened to accuse me of (and they knew it), but:

1. Evidence was enough messy evidence that I think they could have gotten a criminal investigation going.

2. Threatening criminal prosecution as leverage is extortion. I didn't know how far the other party would go. Would they fabricate evidence?

I spoke to a very good lawyer. Their opinion was that this would never make it to court -- even with if the other party faked evidence -- but that the time and cost of handling a criminal investigation would far outweigh any upsides. They advised me to fold. I folded. In retrospect, I'm glad I did.

No. You, as a point of fact, don't know what I'm doing in the bathroom.

* I might be picking a big booger with my pointer finger.

* I might be cleaning my butt in ways which are offensive in your culture, whether using my right hand in the India, without TP in the US, or in a hundred other ways.

* I might be managing a really nasty fungal growth somewhere you can't see.

* I might be pleasing myself.

* I might not be washing my hands after I pee.

* I might be inspecting a polyp for cancer.

* I might be writing "For a good time, call" graffiti, leaving the phone number of your mother/sister/daughter/wife.

* I might be dealing with my period.

... and so on.

For big companies, you need one whistleblower. You hire one employee over. They say "Oh gosh. We were doing the same thing." It's hard to keep that sort of thing secret.

Warrants are granted to law enforcement, not in civil suits between corporations. The word is subpoena, and if you knew even the basics of what you're talking about, you'd use correct terminology.

Legal discovery usually doesn't have a "very high burden of proof," because there are very reasonable ways to compartmentalize information. Legal discovery usually leads to a ton of transparency, at least to the legal teams on both sides (and a firewall, so that can't go over to the engineers).

MOST executives are diligent about responding to subpoenas. Judges have broad discretion for contempt-of-court, up to and including prison. If you're the CEO of BioCorp, and you can:

1) Respond promptly, completely, and accurately. Risk: You might wipe $200 million off of your books and cost each investor $2

OR

2) Stonewall the court or lie. Risk: You might get thrown in prison.

Which do you do? Most executives pick responding promptly. Not all, but most.

Most companies are super-careful not to infringe patents that they know about, because it's not fun. Unless it's a case of mutually-assured destruction. There are whole industries where everyone infringes, and no one sues anyone.

The bigger problem I have is building rapport.

I work with a lot of near-native speakers, where we can understand each other, but we never get to that lively back-and-forth that comes in an L1 (or a fully fluent L2).

It's not a question of relationships -- you can do that well with VERY little verbal. It's a question of nuanced, technical, back-and-forth. I can understand on a mile-high level that they used Python to build an ML system which can recognize whether something is or is not a hotdog, but we never get to the point of discussing finer points of algorithms, nuances of business models, or similar in-depth discussions.

Some of these folks have lived in an English-native country for years, but it's just not quite there yet.

Which is an abuse of the intent of the patent system.

The deal with patents was transparency in return for a short-term monopoly.

If we get one and not the other, it's a bum deal.

... I'm not so sure about that. I suspect you might have liked the way the speaker changed the sound, but you could have gotten the same effect (with greater control) with the headphones and digital preprocessing.

The headphones will give a more faithful reproduction of the original recording.

Making a nearly-perfect class D amp isn't hard (which is not to say a lot of people haven't messed it up; there are a lot of pretty bad amps out there).

The hard part is the speaker itself. The mechanicals of moving a lot of air accurately are hard. You need a physically large woofer which moves over a long distance. If you do that, your woofer and tweater won't be in the same place, so your phase response will be wonky. You don't want the air cavity acting as a spring overpowering your driver, so you need a large box. Etc. By the end of it, it's super-complex. Headphones are super-easy in comparison.

At any sane price point, headphones blow away speakers.

It's hard and expensive to move a lot of air precisely, and speakers are influenced by room acoustics. $5 headphones beat $50 speakers. $80 headphones beat $200 speakers. And $200 headphones beat $400 speakers.

I can't afford to find out beyond that, but I suspect things get more nuanced on the ultra-high-end.

For me, for music, I'm happy with something like a Sony MDRV6 studio monitor, which sells for under $100. I don't know of speakers I like under $200.

Headphones are also nice for teleconferencing, where speakers aren't.

Hey, this is cheap by high-income Apple fanboi prices. It's cheaper than a simple monitor stand:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWUG2LL/A/pro-stand

A monitor stand ... holds up a monitor.

This has noise cancellation, wireless connectivity, rare earth magnets, and a ton of precision manufacturing.

I'd definitely take the Apple headphones over a monitor stand. At at 45% lower price, they seem like a bargain in comparison.

Disclaimer: I'm not an Apple Fanboi, so I'll spend my $550 somewhere else. But I don't think this is that far beyond the pale.

IANAL either, but I think, if someone were to take it to court, it would:

1) Travis achieved a market-dominant position in part thanks to widespread use by open source projects.

2) Open source projects invested significant resources into integrating with Travis based on their promise.

3) Moving to something else would take significant resources. The exact loses are probably exactly how much it would cost to pay to continue to use Travis (and collecting some of that money is precisely why Travis stopped offering a free service). If it wasn't significant, Travis wouldn't have made the change.

That doesn't mean it's worth anyone's time to litigate.

As a footnote, the traditional way to handle something like this is to continue to provide a free service, but to make it worse and worse and worse. Travis could satisfice the promise by keeping an insecure Raspberry Pi under someone's desk running old code as the "server farm" for open source. Courts don't necessarily consider satisificing to be following through on a promise, but costs of litigation go way up when there are open legal questions like that. At that point, it's usually almost definitely not worth anyone's time to litigate.

This is exactly the case.

I've got enough potential liability piled up there that I think some of these stories will only come out once I'm good and dead. Not just legal liability -- although I did sign an NDA/non-disparage -- bringing up dirt from past businesses is like mudwrestling with a pig: everyone ends up looking dirty.

In this case, I'm glad to say I acted with complete integrity at every point, but knowing the parties involved, we'd end up in a cesspool of rumors and falsehoods, and no one would come out looking clean.

Live. Learn. Move onto the next business. Give advice in generics. Some people will believe you, and others won't.

Part of the reason to make promises is that they are legally enforceable:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/promissory_estoppel.asp

When I started an organization which was taken over in a rather hostile way, I was very careful to make a bunch of legally-binding promises before the takeover happened, to help prevent it from becoming too evil.

From an argument perspective, consider the contradiction between "Many people live hundreds and hundreds of miles from the nearest DMV" in your first comment and "That's the thing about the country: nobody lives there. If they can disenfranchise millions of urban people then they will happily accept also disenfranchising a handful of rural people."

When you have that kind of obvious cognitive dissonance, it should be an obvious sign you believe something false.

On a mile-high level, two things to consider:

1) Your base are your core, key supporters. They're the people who are 100% committed to voting for you, go to rallies, make small donations money, volunteer, and man phone lines. You can't run an effective campaign without a base.

Trump's base is rural America and displaced predominantly white workers in decaying manufacturing cities. Fox News swings between playing clips of democratic elites calling them "privileged whites" and "racist redneck trash."

2) On a national level, in turns of number of votes, it doesn't matter much how many people live in smaller states. Whether it's one person or a half-million people, they get three electoral votes. Appealing to that base is a good tactic.

Ummm.... I hate to point this out, but Trump's base is rural America. "Many people live hundreds and hundreds of miles from the nearest DMV" describes the Republican base perfectly.

I mean, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with some of the big-picture conclusions, but the logic along the way is a long bit... off.

The multimillion dollar audits for $100k of corruption makes perfect sense to me.

The goal isn't financial but cultural. You don't want a corrupt culture. At the time you've hit billions of dollars of corruption, it's like termites hollowing out your house structure or COVID19 shutting down your country for 9 months. If killing those first few termites costs THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS or you were spending A MILLION DOLLARS for each COVID19 case coming into your country to definitely get it under control, it's a bargain.

As someone with more money than time, if I buy an e smartphone, will it Just Work and be usable?

https://esolutions.shop/

Or am I setting myself up for a world of hurt?

They're not expensive either! I figured I'd be paying an arm and a leg.

With millions of videos on Youtube, it's sometimes hard to find the top 99.99th percentile, but it's there. I've posted references in other posts.

Well, let's consider these one at a time:

> - "Connections" used a substantial amount of acted historical scenes. Creating them in such a quality (and not some sketchy animation or a re-cut of existing work) is still a challenge today. You need half-decent actors.

But is this core to the value? I find a lot of the animated versions, Ken Burns, and stock footage on Youtube to be way more than good enough. It's exactly as you said: It's about the content.

> Just because paper and ink got much cheaper since the 16th century, we didn't suddenly produce a Shakespeare every 2 years.

We kinda did, actually. He's hidden among a massive pile of stuff, but he's there. Brilliant books come out far more frequently than I can read. I'd place many well above Shakespeare, not in fame, but in quality.

> So far, I haven't seen any historical documentation on YouTube which even compares to the depth and width of "Connections".

My favorites are Extra History (history) and 3Blue1Brown (math). I think both have at least the same depth and width, albeit in a different direction.

I see a lot of similar stuff on Youtube these days.

A recent Economics Explained walked through wealth inequality in some Scandinavian countries (TL;DR: it's high). This is different from income inequality, which is quite low. It walked through the wealth of Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken, who has a net worth of $13B, by virtue of having inherited Heineken. Her family bought (not founded) Heineken 200 years ago, and the family fortune dates back a half-millennium.

There are really neat documentary channels like that. I'm not downplaying Burke, who was brilliant, but two bits of progress:

- In 1978, he didn't have the Internet. Research is much easier today.

- In 2020, anyone can produce high-quality documentaries. In 1978, you needed a massive investment.

I'm not trying to imply it's easy, but we've gone from where you need a video editing studies, reels of film, and a research team, to where you just need to spend a few years as a super-nerd to pick up the requisite skills, and drop perhaps $2000 on cameras and microphones. Indeed, if you're scrappy, you can do pro-quality with just a better cell phone and computer, with a lot more work.

I'd guess a lot of channels were inspired by Connections.

I know Mechanical Universe inspired a lot of (now better) Youtube channels, like 3Blue1Brown. So these early documentaries were pivotal, but we've also come a long ways from there.

Nit: git is simple AND powerful.

Simple isn't the same as easy.

git is simple in the same way Lisp is simple, or Go is simple. git was hacked together in a couple weekends precisely because it's so incredibly simple. There are a few guides where you can write a git in a weekend (e.g. https://wyag.thb.lt/).

Really understanding git is really difficult, though.

A few years after you build a git, you'll get git. I've met only a handful of developers who really grok git, deeply, but it's a journey well worth taking.

The good news is that the surface understanding of git, from having built one, is enough to safely work with the complex commands that trip up most programmers. That's worth a weekend in itself.

I was comparing specific lines of drives -- mainstream lines from a major vendor (WD/Sandisk).

SSDs also go way up in size, but prices spike after you hit a corner.

Yes, it is. If I sell you quack medicines for thousands of dollars, but you BELIEVE they work, am I ripping you off?

Just because someone believes a con job doesn't make it less of a con job.

It's an excuse to buy an SSD.

And it's precisely what's responsible for falling HDD volumes and rising SDD volumes.

Which, in turn, is precisely what's responsible for stagnant HDD and falling SSD prices.

I can get a big-enough 480GB Sandisk SSD for $55 right now, and a 2TB SSD for $190, manufacturer direct. Looking at their WD_BLACK HDD, that's actually a buck cheaper than their 500GB HDD. For 2TB, I'd be looking at $99 instead of $190; at less than 2x the price difference, the SSD is a far better option for most people.

Of course, the HDD goes all the way up to 10TB (at $320), at which point, so it still comes out ahead for bulk storage. SSDs hit a breakpoint at 2TB, where price and complexity go up astronomically. I can either drop a few grand on a specialized product, or around $1000 on several drives and build a RAID. So there's still a market. Just not a particularly big one.

Prices are based on first sensible link on their web page (presumably, most popular product). You can go up or down in price if you click around, go off-brand, but the qualitative picture doesn't change. HDDs require a lot of infrastructure, and the market is evaporating.

I suspect the upper end will disappear soon enough.

I do still want some kind of bulk storage. I want to back up my photos somewhere reliable, but there seems little left. Tape is thousands of dollars for the hardware, while optical is now tiny. Nothing seems to compete with the volumes, economies-of-scale, or R&D budget of integrated circuits.