atroyn

Oh hey I've been following your book so far, pretty neat!

That's Camus right?

I actually found it a lot easier when I was full-time employed because my schedule was automatically so structured. Morning standup, weekly meetings, ship dates.

Well the very first one was literally just 'make your bed as soon as you get up'. I read that idea somewhere else as a way to get a small win right away which I really needed because my startup wasn't doing so great - so I tried it and it worked. This had surprisingly large benefits. I didn't get up and start scrolling through my social media right away. I had a nice neat bed to get into at the end of the day. I couldn't just pile mess on top of the bed and leave it like that.

So the next thing was 'drink a glass of water after you've made the bed'. I read somewhere that lethargy after waking up was to do with dehydration overnight, so I drank the glass of water. I don't know if it made me less lethargic or not, but it did make me wander out of my room and into the kitchen to get the glass, and made me feel like I'd started my day.

So then it was 'ten pushups'. Then after a little while it was 'another ten pushups before bed'. Then it was 'run 5k every 3rd day' then every 2nd, then 10k if it was a weekend day. At some point I'd also added in going to the gym, because I noticed I'd been jogging past one on my route, so now I just ran to the gym. Routines to build on routines. I never set myself a goal like 'lose 10kg' or 'Squat 100kg' but in the end I did. It was hard to get over not really wanting to run, but when I kind of internalized that it didn't matter whether I wanted to or not, I just got to doing stuff. And of course it's kind of hard to feel bad about going running after you've done it, so it made sense to just keep doing it.

For work stuff, the first thing I did was 'before going to bed, write on an index card every task you need to get done tomorrow'. So I did that. Small thing, big improvements - first thing was that now I had an index card on my desk first thing that I had to deal with, so I had to read it before opening up my PC and just surfing around. Next thing was because I had the card there on my desk, I glanced at it every now and then and asked myself 'well did I do any of that in the last hour?'. And finally when I wrote the next index card, I had a little list of the tiny wins I'd made that day. Plus the index cards stack up over time so there's this physical reminder on the corner of my desk that I've done all this stuff, and the next day is just a tiny part of that. Now as a bonus I'm mindful about my work. I didn't set out to 'have 8 productive hours a day', I just made the little index cards over and over. But I get a productive 8 hour day most days.

Well I had the index cards now, so I have a record of what I've been up to, so I might as well do summaries - and that's how I started journaling regularly. When the stack gets x high, review the stack, write down what your thoughts are, repeat.

Now I look at stuff in terms of the systems I'd have to adopt to do it, and figure out how I can fit them in. I'd love to learn the guitar and work on a bunch of personal projects, and by figuring out the daily stuff I have to do I can see whether it makes sense to do it now or some other time, because it kind of naturally squares with priorities.

I've lost some of those habits since I moved for grad school, but I'm working on reestablishing them in the same methodical way. I'm still working on making my systems a little more resilient to that kind of disruption. One thing I did add to my system though is 'Saturday is a personal day, always, no email, no phone, unless it's a hair-on-fire thing in which case Sunday is a personal day'.

YMMV but the point to evolve this stuff organically.

I realized a while ago that inspiration isn't very helpful for getting you through adversity. Inspiration gets you going, but grit and discipline ultimately help you push through.

I'm going to go against the grain of most of what's being said in this thread and say that the best way to get through adversity is to discard a goal-based mentality entirely, in favor of a system-based mentality. Figure out the stuff you have to do every day. Get disciplined about doing that stuff. The 'small wins' you get from just executing the loop over and over again build up a lot of momentum over time.

I started with making my bed as soon as I got up every day, and just built on that. When there's something new I want to do, I set up a system for it. When the system isn't working, I change the system. Rather than deciding whether I wanted to do something or not before doing it, I'd just do it, then reflect afterward if that made things better or worse.

This approach got me through some really really bad times, helped me get fit, got me through tough, stressful workloads, calmed me down in times of chaos and helped me make the right long-term choices. I'm overall happier.

Here's some resources:

- http://www.slideshare.net/Scottadams925/goals-are-for-losers... - https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/14555091...

edit: oh and one other thing I got out of this approach. People absolutely can change, it just takes a lot longer than people usually put on. I'm a different person from who I was ~4 years ago, mostly in a positive way.

I understand this criticism from experienced C programmers, and yes Zed doesn't always give a strict-standard accurate account. But for a total novice, the approach of broken thing, figure out why it's broken, fix it, is very powerful. After all, this is the bulk of dev work.

Additionally, Zed pays special attention to defensive programming, an often forgotten art and good practice.

Zed Shaw's "Learn C the Hard Way" is a rather good intro to C for systems programming.

Berliners are in general not fans of big corporate developments. The city's fabric revolves around local holes-in-the-wall and mixed residential neighbourhoods.

But the problem here is that software engineers are not hired only for the quality of their final product - the evaluation is necessarily more complex and probably can't be done 'blind' since interpersonal interaction is so important.

My point wasn't to adopt any particular procedure, rather I meant that we ought to find similar experiments. This seems to be one of them.

As a self professed good software engineer, you know that debugging requires explicit and implicit assumptions to be reevaluated. Here are some you've made that may be introducing bugs into your thought process:

- when someone evaluates another person's skill, the person doing the evaluation is completely objective

- highly skilled individuals would enter a monoculture environment of people dissimilar to themselves

- no prejudice exists in software because you haven't personally ever experienced any

- women are uninterested in software engineering because they're biologically wired to dislike computing, rather than because every computing class and workplace is heavily male dominated

Some time ago, major European symphonic orchestras recognized that their hiring process was bugged, and began to hold blind auditions. The hiring rate for women jumped substantially everywhere this was done.

Orchestra musician is a technically and physically demanding job. Your arguments could have been applied there just the same, for the same result as we see in computing today, but they were wrong there. This suggests we ought to do the experiment to find out if something is wrong here, and that's what lever appears to be doing.

This reaction seems a little overwrought, but then again the frequency of this kind of drama generated by reddit really seems to be pathological.

What is it about a critical mass of people in one place on the web that causes these kinds of behaviors?

Not to mention the lengths companies go to to make sure your whole social life is with people you work with.

I urge you to look into the history of company towns.

What happens when they fire you and kick you out of company housing? What happens when unpaid overtime is the norm because you're not really 'at work' despite being in the same building?

Campuses like Facebook's already creep me out with the whole potemkin village vibe.

Data. A kaggle for self driving data would be fantastic.

As a computer vision researcher, getting my hands on data 'at scale' is a really tough problem.

Both good points. I'd also note that it would be very hard if not impossible to legislate for the 'right' kinds of risk arbitrage and against the 'wrong' ones.

This isn't necessarily so clear cut. Some percentage of market activity due to speculation helps to smooth capital flows over time. In an industry like fishing, profitable speculation can keep the industry afloat in tough times (e.g buying up fishing debt in a slump for pennies on the dollar because you know the fish are still there and this was just a bad season) or damp down an overheated and unsustainable market (e.g. shorting fishing futures).

There is a considerable ongoing research effort in formal verification of learned systems. Once an ML system has been trained, it becomes deterministic and can be tested.

How does he balance the skepticism that comes with an analytical mind, with the optimism necessary to pull off something new?

Put another way, how do you build something cool without succumbing to bullshit?

To whom are you referring ?

I think it's a mistake to see all social interaction through the lens of professions

I expect to have v0.1 out in October, will post a 'Show HN' then.

As a side project I'm building a computer vision framework and hardware sensor for mobile robots. The target users are people who want to build applications for vision based autonomy, but don't want to go through the hassle of building the full 'stack' themselves.

The sensor is designed to be plug-and-play, so like the Kinect it just works out of the box.

The basic building blocks are in place now, and I'm currently working on C++ and Python APIs, and considering a Swift API.

'The moment government got involved in the Internet' would be from its inception as a government project for a communications network that could withstand nuclear war.

Even if you mean the Web, that came out of CERN, another government project.

Government has always been a part of telecom, it's key national infrastructure.

Consumer level end to end crypto that can avoid government surveillance is a very new development.

What are your thoughts on Helion?

Most of the fusion companies I've seen founded lately are led by people who have been scientists in this field for decades.

To which companies of you refer?

You might be interested in Prof. Marc Pollefeys' work: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11827854

I would hardly say that deep learning has taken over - some of the best results in the last few years have come from 'classical' domains like nonlinear optimization.

For example, LSD-SLAM: http://vision.in.tum.de/research/vslam/lsdslam

Deep learning / ML approaches certainly have a place, and they're getting a lot of attention right now, but the computer vision domain is about a lot more than segmentation and classification.

Maybe in coming years we'll see some more breakthroughs from the ML side on encoding priors - for example, teaching a network about projective geometry is a lot worse than just structuring it in a way that it 'knows' what projective geometry is. This could result in a closer collaboration between the two fields.

I'm a big fan of idlewords's contrasting take on tech: http://idlewords.com/

Having lived in Germany for a few years now, most young Germans acknowledge the nazis as part of the history, and see them as a cautionary tale of how easily extremism can derail an otherwise advanced country.

Any extreme position is therefore regarded with a high degree of skepticism. I think that's pretty healthy.

"Are there known cities which confronted their past ?"

Yes, absolutely - Berlin is the canonical example. The site of the wall isn't paved over or hidden, it's a line of bricks that runs right through the city, with several museums and memorials along its length.

The site of the Fuhrerbunker is marked with a sign, despite now being a carpark.

The memorial to the murdered jews of Europe stands as a chilling, disorienting reminder.

There are brass plaques, the famous 'stumbling stones' in places where individual jews were persecuted, marking their names, dates of birth, death and eventual fate (if it was known).

In contrast, Russia's soviet history is often glossed over or lionized.