I show up to meetings 15 minutes early if I can. Sometimes I catch other earlybirds doing this and we take the time to chat. Doesn't quite scratch the itch, but it's a good way to meet people.
2 karma · joined January 13, 2022
The ultimate takeaway from enlightenment I understand to be true is that if you can be enlightened, it is superior to abandon enlightenment for yourself in service of others to be come enlightened.
As someone with ok health and a decent education to provide me work throughout the pandemic, I feel like the minimally good life is just life itself. It is enough to survive, and retain the will that you must choose to live. I've been very fortunate and very lucky, but it all feels so flimsy and discriminatory. I think the only "better" life one can work towards, is one in service of making it better for all of us.
I'll stop here to state that I think any adherence to being overtly clever is my first and only red flag.
It's so pathetically obvious because the number of times I've done the exact same problem for multiple companies because it happens to be the 2nd or 3rd search result.
I once had someone disqualify my answer for using a DFA because it wasn't "real code".
To be honest, I think the technical interview actually IS important, and I've had numerous experiences enjoying it if only to showcase a lot of the more necessarily toxic behaviors of a company up front. Let's be honest with ourselves, is any employer going to necessarily have the best practices with respecting your time, money and effort? It's best to lay out those cards up front. Literally every red flag will demonstrate itself through the interviewer in most scenarios. Like any test, you get out of it what you give.
For example:
How many times do I feel this?
"We take an extra time-slot / day / email chain in what is already a hypercompetitive market just to suss you out. We wait until the last stage of the interview process to do this because we still don't totally trust you or understand anything you've done. We waste a lot of time creating elaborate puzzles that don't really matter. We're not going to pay you because our finances are already horribly mismanaged that it's complicated to contract you out for the day and also we feel like you should be gladly externalizing your labor costs for our shiny position if you really love us. Drink the kool-aid."
Sometimes the technical interview surprises me. I always use it as a motivating example of myself as a candidates to work through a problem, show grit and also demonstrate when to ask for help. Ego and pride on both sides of the equation come into play and that's always a worthwhile exercise before engaging it any longterm commitment. A good test accommodates and informs through failure. I learned this from administering the Putnam. Never got a decent score on it, but it was a worthwhile experience to fail. Interview tests are on the other hand, are not designed to teach anything except that you are unworthy.
My best roles have never asked for it. The company knew what they were looking for, were willing to trust me, were able to move along the interview process without losing me to a competitor and everyone was happy and they always pay competitively. Usually if there's a technical interview involved at all, they have no idea what I can actually do. If they're willing to waste time, effort and money on extra steps and are taking "necessary precautions" to subject you to what are essentially just litmus tests, then I'm sorry, that speaks to me a sense of your culture of mediocrity and dogmatic orthodoxy towards process.
Goodhart's law. When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. When I was in school, we had other students take a year off to study for the Google interview. These were all affluent white men. At the same time, I had recruiters complaining to me that there were no decent black/brown candidates in the pipeline. I remember hearing the same thing except as a child. Uhhh, there's been plenty of time to invest into the local community. Recruiters would do well do understand to the history of the SAT as systemic racism, or literacy tests as systemic racism, or like any actual statistics as systemic racism. Everything that reduces candidates to numbers and quizzes feels rife for abuse. Who has the privilege to study an extra game on top of performing in a society that is already stacked against them? That's not a question.
To wit, there's the issue with a large number of candidates with junk resumes. There's the outstanding issue of "authenticity" in professional acumen. There's the whole problem with the industries underlying predatory behavior with regards to labor externalization and laundering numerical metrics, be it the rate of inclusion and diversity or the amount of hours actually demanded by management. What is so fundamentally wrong with the technical interview is that it's just the cherry on top for what is already a miserable process. I'd so much rather just do free work for a potential client and just give it to them so it actually means something and is useful than waste any more time solving pointless puzzles, and this is from someone who specifically enjoyed studying hard pointless puzzles in school.
No, you can't just show side projects. You should not be showing your work portfolio to anyone who isn't paying you. If they were interested in open source, they'd already be paying you.
The technical interview is dead. Long live the technical interview.
Capitalizing the family name first is recommended here: https://www.languagemagazine.com/2020/01/23/japan-reverses-w...
I admit, it is confusing even for a Japanese speaker which one to me which is his family name or if I already need to flip the order.
The context is that too many people accidentally address him by his first name which is considered a bit embarrassing for polite society.
This thing loads faster than my actual copy of Civ VI.
It's obvious but I'm kind of humbled by the idea that you could just watch someone start their day and someone end their day at any given point of time or space on this Earth.
Feels distinctly Buddhist in some way.
Note: I know this is generated by Sphinx. I'm commenting more on the actual content and their overall work towards presentation. Again, I should be providing more concrete examples to highlight my points.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_map
Cellular automata and reaction-diffusion is well observed in biology as morphogenesis.
I'm curious, is there a color-specific advantage to monochromatic patterns that can be explained by theory?
Who is responsible for OpenAI's UI/UX design? It is immaculate and should be the standard for the community. I'm always dazzled by the impeccable standards of OpenAI with regards to tone, presentation, accessibility.
The documentation is both familiar but distinct, an impressive achievement!
I have my own personal qualms on OpenAI's ethics and virtues but am nevertheless impressed by their aesthetics and regard for their publicity. It's always delightful to look at their work.
OpenAI has in my opinion, the most appropriate presentation for their ideas with marketing and branding. It feels exquisitely simple to grasp what goes on here.
I feel comfortable saying that the biggest obstacle in progress for AI is UI but projects such as this give me hope.
For anyone unfamiliar, cicadas spawn in years of 17 or 19 to avoid overlap with predator cycles which tend to occur in years of 2 or 3.
There's South Bay, East Bay, North Bay and the Peninsula.
They're all very different, but lumping in the Peninsula with the South Bay feels hamhanded given that most of the South Bay IS NOT like the Peninsula.
It's kind of an in-joke that nobody actually knows where Silicon Valley is.
Well, I'm currently in between roles but I'll give you a basic summary of my resume. It's a lot of weird director roles mostly in eCommerce and design. I explain this a lot as well, math is the same everywhere. Jumping has its risk but overtime it's stabilized decent growth in my salary and I'm constantly picking up new skills.
I have a BS in Math. I think my minor was in applied? Not sure. I was lucky enough to take grad classes for all the requirements for quantitative finance MS under my scholarship but wasn't eligible to graduate because my scholarship didn't cover that school technically. I could've figured it out but honestly nobody even asks if I have a degree or not. Basic lesson I learned is that the easiest opportunities out of applied math all involve learning some Python. I find R in the wild less unless its for research, but I still use it.
Out of school I did two things, I worked at a number of teaching opportunities which paid okay sometimes and I slowly began the process of building out a data science startup.
I definitely entered tutoring and teaching with a sense of humility, I was not going to be making much money anytime soon. These kids needed my help, not my attitude. Traditional roles for math are far and few. But there's a lot of really nice tutoring and substitute teacher roles if you know the right people. I suggest starting out at an agency which contracts you out to build out a client network. At least in the Bay, this is a good way to meet a lot of smart rich people. I don't know if I'd recommend this role now with COVID. I prefer at least pen/paper/chalkboard one-on-one sessions for teaching and find it cumbersome to do online. Programming is better online since you have to deal with different environments and hardware anyways, good practice.
For the data science startup, I knew immediately that my biggest flaws out of school was that I did not network enough, did not pursue research more seriously and overall sucked at socializing. It was an incredibly awkward and humiliating period of my life. Being smart means absolutely nothing if you're not a stable, professional and confident person that people are comfortable working with you. Especially if you are handling sensitive, complex information. So I spent the next 5 years working on that.
I did some questionable practices, such as cold starting my professional network by setting up an AngelList browser script which applied to like 22,000+ jobs and left a little personalized message for them to contact me directly. Not a very cool thing to do, but I was desperate and scrappy. Being somewhat familiar with Python, I found a lot of lowhanging fruit from modernizing Python 2 repos for data science and machine learning into Python 3 which involved adding parentheses here and there basically. That encouraged me to be more confident that I can actually contribute to research and develop my own projects. Last, I purposely seek out more directorial and managerial roles that involve more face-time and meetings than actual programming. Socializing does not come naturally to me and I have to practice it every day or I fall out of my rhythm. I'd have to say, I do not spend as much time doing or studying math as I'd like to in any role, but the benefit of what I know comes handy almost all the time because I'm at least aware of a solution or technique that applies to almost any given situation. Anyways the moral of this story is that, as a student of mathematics, you cannot reasonably apply the rules of normality or societal expectations to naturally shape your career. By and large, most of us do very poorly in making a decent living, and it behooves you to be pragmatic about your thinking and work towards decisive changes.
Takeaways: In order to succeed in math, I had to drop my attitude that anything about math mattered at all. I don't even bring it up these days. It's kind of a liability, because it reeks of "esotericism". It bears unfaithfulness unfortunately, but there's nothing you can do to change people's stereotypes. Most of my success these days comes from learning how to function as a human being and not a coffee algorithm machine. Take on whatever work you can find, it will invariably lead to a better recommendation even if you're just cleaning up Excel spreadsheets or teaching kids. People in math are generally very good at being lost for a long time and it helps to keep up with where they're going, sometimes they introduce you to things that are once-in-a-lifetime.
From a more practical standpoint. Here are some things you can do to build out a professional presence, that in my opinion are a good idea even if you're not focusing on getting a PhD.
Start a math blog. Wordpress, GitHub pages, doesn't matter. As long as it supports basic LaTeX and Markdown, you should be good. Find something you're interested in to write about. Learn how to market your ideas. If you need help setting one up, I'm more than happy to help you find something you like.
Treat research as a lifestyle, not a career. Find preprints you like. Experiment with repo's that are cool. Build projects for yourself. Share your ideas on Twitter, talk about papers, meetup with interesting people in your field or industry. You're already on Hacker News, that's great! Contribute to open source, publish tutorials. Golden rule, if you are generous with your time and space, the universe will kindly return the favor to you.
If you're deadset on FAANG or prestige startups, that's actually a fairly attainable goal. Learn the ins and outs of an interview process. If you've taken basic algorithms courses, understand data structures, and are generally good at problem solving theory or metaheuristic approaches, you're in good shape. Generally I have found that the higher bidders tend to appreciate people who understand numbers a lot more since they have a generally higher incentive to focus on endeavors that actively make money. Polya has been incredibly helpful to me in this regard.
My most successful roles have been almost always completely made up. Standing at frontier of research or science opens up a tremendous number of opportunities, simply because you can see them. The best jobs don't exist yet. If you want a place in this world, there's a lot less competition when nobody does what you do, and you get more credit for doing it because you're the first to do it. Treat the world like you would treat yourself.
To conclude, be open. You are a mathematician. What you do is incredibly noble, demands creativity and its essence is freedom. The vast, vast majority of people will never have the opportunity to study what we have, and that gives us a tremendous advantage even in tech and computer science. I have been hired for roles for reasons that had nothing to do with being smart or writing good code but mostly because I was interested in ethics and taking on hard choices and problems. Your career will invariably be nonlinear, like almost all money is. Focus on maintaining a discipline in yourself outside of school. Learn to specialize, learn to generalize, learn to do balance both while practicing moderation in moderation. Keep doing math for yourself and only for yourself.
I guess we've officially thrown our hat into the ring for digital sovereignty and cyberpopulism. I wanted some decentralization but not like this.
I'm just upset that China gets Great Firewall and Russia gets Digital Iron Curtain and we get... Clean Network.
Is it too much to ask that we at least have better marketing for our authoritarianism?
Also, seems like a dated understanding. What happens when the Internet reaches comparable availability via satellite? No wonder they want to test shooting missiles in orbit.
With EARN-IT, the H1-B ban, Clean Network, etc., I fear we're setting back our scientific and intellectual advantage several generations. The lessons of the Crypto Wars feel distinctly appropriate.
I'm certainly starting to feel the wind blow a certain direction. Only the paranoid survive.
It's essentially a grid-based parallel computer.
No need to apologize.
Wish you well.
I understand that your situation mandates a bit of pragmatism in order to survive.
If that is the case, why are you painting a target on your back?
Do you seriously think nobody at Facebook reads this?
You just admitted, with your REAL NAME, that you basically lied to Facebook about information that actively poses a liability to them and took their money.
I am seriously baffled as to why you think this comment was a good idea.
I am not trying to antagonize you, but highlighting the fact that you are vulnerable while publicizing information that exacerbates the situation does not align here.
In good spirit, I would like to challenge your argument that protests are just a tool for minority opinions. I wholeheartedly disagree. Nonviolence collective action is one of the most powerful things about democracy. It is by no means a tactic. It may not have a cohesive strategy, but these movements can and do work the numbers games. For me at least, protests can define entire generations of politics well beyond the scope of elected representatives careers or laws that are passed. Anyways, the real meat of my argument: These events define our social contract. They are what define the timeline, not election dates and not term limits. Because ultimately what protests do is either refute or legitimize the value of a single vote. How many modern democracies were formed from rebelling against colonial or imperial rule?
I agree with you there that political success can be derived from persuading neutral parties or neutralizing opponents. However, I would not say ultimately, as you know that neither you nor I can predict chaos. We take polls, we make bets, and then everything's on the table because people don't make rational decisions.
You're right to be cynical. Everything we say and do either gains or loses votes for each side. Protests do need to be aware of the fact that issues are measured in salience, candidates based on congruence. There's this statistical idea of the "median voter", that frames the argument persuasively for me. Success comes from actually winning. And sometimes you have to remind people to stop being losers. We do not need a moment the opposition can then use to galvanize and consolidate their power, which they've already tried to artificially justify anyways.
Note: I have a distinctly American bias on what is appropriate for campaign strategy here that may seem obvious but I have tried my best to generalize my understanding of how election mechanisms work internationally as well.
Philosophically I would argue yes, all organisms are capable of swarming. I do not think any species has been able to sufficiently adapt or evolve unless in copious and sufficient populations which requires some kind of implicit understanding of sheer numbers. Swarming only requires computation at the local level. Which is to say, swarming is an emergent behavior from being able to self-organize. I would imagine most organisms have some kind of drive for attraction and repulsion, whether its mates or predators. Those two instincts can drive the computation for swarming. I'm kind of applying some semantic flourish here but avoidance is kind of vaguely high-level concept for computational behavior. It's definitely not as cut and dry as what I said but you can certainly program it that way if you have a high-level language. I'm not saying it's difficult to understand by the way, I'm saying it's hard to write out predict complex behavior from simple rules because it's hard to simulate those systems. Self-organization falls into like, computational reality theories that are way above my head but a good place to start is cellular automata's theories of complexities.
Shorter answer: almost everything living on this planet is still here because it exploits some kind of metaheuristic that increases its advantage from there being more of it. To massage your statement, I think almost everything exhibits some kind of swarm intelligence. I think it's philosophically simpler to argue the following procession of ideas that swarm intelligence is a metaheuristic algorithm, all life is capable of computing these algorithms, but then ask the question what the hell is life exactly?
I'm being handwavy here because I don't have a rigorous definition for life and therefore can't answer you directly. Some kind of computational substrate that mutates and replicates? That's von Neumann's definition I think. You could probably do without mutation! Death and radiation already provide those conditions for you. Again, I'm curious as to how we self-organize in the first place. The hard part isn't how do we know how to fit ourselves into a larger system, but how do we reduce ourselves to a single unit? What makes an individual organism at a higher-level of abstraction one cohesive thing when it's actually made of layers and layers of processes?
Do viruses swarm? If you follow what I just said, that's if viruses compute the algorithm. But do they compute at all if they're technically just data? Is information itself a computer? What are we but games within games within games?
Nature really is the best computer science teacher if you want to be brutally effective at being inefficient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metaphor-based_metaheu...
If you really want to get into it, attrition models here model rates for both factions. You can simulate it yourself with a cellular automata model for a visual representation. Appropriate considering they are literally using phalanxes.
http://chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/modelling-warfare
Here's the interesting thing to me. What allows swarm behavior in humans isn't the advent of Internet technology or fancy math. Sure, social media makes it easier to coordinate immediate responses and allocate ourselves. But the only reason any of this happening is that we find ourselves having a lot of free time to actually understand each other, decide to agree on something and then organize a time and place to do it.
Aside: Dear Hacker News, if you really want to make a difference on the ground, consider offering tech stations where people can charge batteries or get service. Maybe take the time to teach people about surveillance cameras and adversarial fashion. Or you know, just tell people how to set up Signal. You might think this is low hanging fruit, but your average citizen is intimidated by it or completely isolated from the stuff that we get bored about. I know at least a good deal of us are frustrated that the average consumer is not more savvy or protective of their digital rights. What's beautiful about computer technology to me is how we help each other by teaching people to help themselves. Not everyone needs to know DevOps, but getting a community to switch from unencrypted messaging is fun and simple if you show them how easy it is.
Back to business: It's kind of a coding rite of passage to cook up the physics for a flocking system. Reynold's boids model is a masterful demonstration in how to intuitively understand class behavior.
My boss once asked me if we would ever be able to compute the complex behavior of bird swarms. I immediately flipped around and said yes, one day in the distant future of 1986. A bit snarky. I regretted it immediately. He just expressed disappointment by how simple it ended up being. I explained that its just a model of understanding and elegant for it, real life behavior is a lot more chaotic and nuanced than this toy. In 2D it runs pretty well, and it's a decent stress test on GPUs if you can also generalize the structure to take advantage of 3D engines.
Here's a link to Daniel Shiffman's excellent write up and code examples illustrating the phenomena: https://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-6-autonomous-agents/
Another interesting take on swarming behavior is the study of convexity in the generalized raptor problem. The discrete version of this problem is a kind of flavor of the N-Queens problem. Basically you're solving for an ODE so the police on all sides can't get you.