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epiphanitus

223 karma · joined March 27, 2019

--- My views are my own and do not reflect those of any of my employers, past or present.
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epiphanitus··on Where Johnny Cash came from
Take us on the road with you. What's it like?
epiphanitus··on Ask HN: How to learn math from zero for adults?
>> As horrendous languages go, mathematical notation is a profound achievement.

Are there any resources or strategies you would recommend to help with this?

epiphanitus··on Putin signs law to seize funds of officials that exceed declared income by $100
The original source was probably a front. This new source is better, but their source is Russian State TV. I would be interested in whether the law actually exists, and if so whether it is really applied consistently without exceptions for 'special' people.
epiphanitus··on Putin signs law to seize funds of officials that exceed declared income by $100
The source of this article seems kind of dodgy.

- I haven't found a credible source corroborating the claim made in this article.

- Their FB page has surprisingly little traffic for a news site and their twitter account was suspended recently.

https://www.facebook.com/then24dotcom/ https://twitter.com/then24dotcom

- Their contact email is...not one you would expect for a legitimate news site (celebsbabe @ $major_mail_provider).

Edit: formatting

epiphanitus··on The Next ‘Lab Leak’
Thanks for your comment, I appreciate your willingness to share a contrarian perspective.

Question, how would a virus that spreads primarily indoors and rarely spreads outdoors accumulate enough viral load over enough hosts to spill over into humans? It seems like this would be difficult in an open-air wet market.

epiphanitus··on Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You (2001)
One problem is, many if not most engineers work in corporate environments where they have to deal with expectations and deadlines. Mgmt may perceive reimagining a system to be a risky long-term bet and its tough to persuade them of the benefits. In their defense their hesitation may be justified. I hate crappy hacks but at the end of the day there's a reason why they get piled on so much.

So I guess the question is - what's the best way to scope and evangelize a 'moonshot' project? Or should you just shut your trap and go join a startup?

epiphanitus··on Ask HN: Do you create music? let's hear it
I love the mix of the ambience and the narrator. Those PSAs and old narrations really add an interesting dimension to it. Question, where do you find those voice samples?
epiphanitus··on Ask HN: Do you create music? let's hear it
I love your sound, very deep and melodic, almost an 80s feel. Just a Dream is my favorite, your aesthetic goes really well with a singer.
epiphanitus··on Chick Corea has died
If anybody is looking for something new to listen too, he made an album with John McLaughlin and 3 other jazz gods called Five Peace Band. One of my favorite albums of all time.
epiphanitus··on Self taught backend dev here. What's the best DIY way to get a CS background?
Thanks. Getting into this was purely accidental. I had an interest in machine learning that required more and more complex pipelines to feed it. I kept adding on layers of complexity until I was running a Kubernetes cluster and a database. Learning kubernetes meant learning about bash and containers, which were useful later.
epiphanitus··on Self taught backend dev here. What's the best DIY way to get a CS background?
I used a combination of linkedin and my github projects.
epiphanitus··on Self taught backend dev here. What's the best DIY way to get a CS background?
I'll check out Network Algorthmics, thank you for the recommendation.

>> But, ultimately, the best asset for somebody with a CS background is not so much having immediate knowledge, but knowing where to acquire knowledge as necessary. If you have a general idea that for a specific scenario, you can acquire X knowledge in Y resource as you go along

These days my goto resources are SO, Slack, Github issues, etc. Any recommendations beyond that? Or by 'where to acquire knowledge' do you mean 'how to categorize problems'?

epiphanitus··on Self taught backend dev here. What's the best DIY way to get a CS background?
I'll check out those MOOCs, thanks!
epiphanitus··on Autism and Invention Are Connected
Put more simply, there is a big difference between the capacity to care about other people's feelings, and the capacity to understand them.

Some understand but do not care, whereas some care but do not understand. It dovetails really well with creativity but it can introduce many challenges in life.

epiphanitus··on Veteran submariner on how sonar crews tirelessly hunt enemies they can't see
There's actually a former US Navy Sonarman who has a youtube channel called Sub Brief and it's amazing. He left the service in 90s (IIRC) but he shares all kinds of interesting knowledge on how torpedos and mines work, all the different kinds of accidents and mishaps that happen - he even analyzes different disasters like the Kursk and how they likely happened. I highly recommend it if you're into subs.

https://www.youtube.com/c/JiveTurkeyCrew/featured

epiphanitus··on KH-11 spysat design revealed by NRO’s telescope gift to NASA (2012)
What could anyone hope to see pointing a gamma ray telescope at earth?

I thought gamma rays were filtered out though the atmosphere.

epiphanitus··on As YouTube traffic soars, YouTubers say pay is plummeting
What is your perspective on the ROI of FB/google/targeted ads vs the traditional mediums? Is the targeting worth the premium?
epiphanitus··on I think Catalina 10.15.4 broke SSH
What’s the backstory to why apples bash has to be different than gnu bash?

I love having the Linux kernel with a nice UI but there are some useful commands that are missing.

There are ways to get them set up but in any case it’s kind of a pain

epiphanitus··on How to burn the most money with a single click in Azure
SRE here. I feel for your situation. Here's some advice. One simple thing you could do is set up AWS billing alarms and have them delivered to a notification app like PagerDuty.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori....

If you don't want to pay for PD, you can patch together any number of ways to get your phone to scream and holler when it gets an email from ohshit@amazonasws.com. It's also good to have clear expectations as to whose responsibility it is to deal with problem x between the hours of y and z and exactly what they are supposed to do.

Keep the alerts restricted to the really important stuff, because if your team becomes overloaded with useless alerts they will 1) dislike you and 2) be more prone to accidentally mistaking a five alarm fire for a burnt casserole.

There are more complex systems you could build, but that's a start.

epiphanitus··on Officials: Dozens at WA nursing facility show possible coronavirus symptoms
That's crazy, my mom who lives in the Seattle area got sicker than she's ever gotten with that bug. I knew it was going around, but I had no idea it was THAT rampant.
epiphanitus··on How to brainstorm great business ideas
But how would you define luck, anyway? I think it was Oprah who said something along the lines of "luck is when preparation meets opportunity".
epiphanitus··on Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for?
It’s a fun challenge depending on the company, but before taking a job like that ask about on-call schedules so you know what you’re getting into.
epiphanitus··on Ask HN: Have you ever felt your life is going nowhere?
Lots of good suggestions here but one I’ll add is that maybe you should find a job working for a cause greater than yourself. There are a ton on nonprofits out there that are in desperate need of technical people to help them. My advice if you want to go this route is to stick to orgs that do concrete things for people, like find people housing, or teach English, or provide assistance with addiction, etc. I’ve done some non technical work pro bono and it was some of the most fun working I’ve ever had. You will have to accept a lower salary but if you’re looking for meaning out of work there’s nothing like it.
epiphanitus··on DigitalOcean is laying off staff
>> Unfortunately, this won't last forever. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. quickly. Eventually, development will move to cheaper labor countries like so many other industries. What is frustrating though is that if the U.S. actually focused on developing its talent, we could maintain the lead for another decade or two longer than if we just sit on our hands. With that extra lead time, we could come up with the next major industry (AI-training? quantum computer programming?), but as it stands now, many other countries will be equally poised to jump on the next opportunity and we'll squander our lead forever.

Agreed. I have several (very smart) coworkers in other countries. And our political system is an atrocious thing to watch these days. Whatever happened to compromise?

I don't think anybody really knows for sure what the future holds. The thing is with cloud computing and with the spread of technology into the developing world they will likely be needing engineers too.

Of course that may not happen if the software world is so carved up that all of the business goes to a handful of companies that are employing a fixed number of people and concentrating the gains.

And if Elon Musk has a breakthrough with neuralink, then maybe we'll all be out of a job. Why write code when you can think print('hello world')?

On the other hand, big players can get disrupted, technology can change, and its not like every human being has the capacity/stomach for the abstract problem solving we do day to day.

epiphanitus··on DigitalOcean is laying off staff
I was in a similar position not too long ago. I had nothing but a liberal arts degree, a miserable first career and a yawning resume gap. I just stumbled into coding and I was completely addicted. After many months cobbling together a frankenstinean tangle of Kubernetes clusters, db instances and even an AI that could write bad limericks, I got a job as a backend engineer. You have to work your tail off in this job but its a life changing opportunity in a field where you get to make things for a living and there's always something new to learn.

Thank you thank you thank you cloud providers for making compute power so cheap. I realize you do it because you know you will eventually make the money back 10000x over when we persuade our bosses to lock in to your ecosystem, but I don't care. (Capitalism is not perfect, but hey, sometimes it can be okay)

DO tutorials are amazing, by the way. I learned so many things from your docs, it shows a lot of hard work by some very talented people.

epiphanitus··on Laptop OEMs – make a proper high-end AMD laptop
Out of curiousity, what would stop someone from just buying an AMD chipset, a 13 inch screen, and all of the rest of the components, 3d printing the chasis, and then assembling it all yourself?
epiphanitus··on How to be successful (at your career, Twitter edition)
+1. Maybe this is more important at a big company that at a startup where your business model and your tech is either good enough or it isn't. But even then you still have backers, etc.

Some people understand this stuff, and some people don't, and I don't see a lot of ways for someone who doesn't get it to become someone who gets it.

epiphanitus··on Gitlab's Director of Risk and Global Compliance Resigns
How do we know her resignation is about hiring devs based in Russia/China and not about something else?
epiphanitus··on Hubble Observes First Confirmed Interstellar Comet
Anybody else remember when Halley's comet and Hale-Bopp were in the sky at the same time? It was one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen...
epiphanitus··on Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database
Impractical thought experiment: Leaving the capital expenditures for the data centers aside, what would it take to build an OS clone of AWS?
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