jdowner

So, would it be illegal to buy a large number of these thermometers and put them in a water bath at 105 degrees?

I think you have hit the nail on the head.

Maybe it is only paranoia, but over the course of my career I have seen an increased treatment of the employee like chattel. The rights of employees have eroded, almost by choice, through social media, smart phones, monitoring technology.

I, personally, had had enough. I decided to remove myself from that environment. I believed that it was dehumanizing and degrading. I started working remotely on contracts. That worked pretty well for a while. But I started working for one company where slowly they wanted me to become more and more like one of their employees and less of an independent contractor. In addition to the work covered by the contract, I was asked to help on other projects or with interviewing. Initially I didn't mind because I wanted to help. After a while I realized what was happening and that is what prompted me to create my own company to work through and to be paid for the end result rather than the time spent on the result.

With respect to the article, there are some things that I think you have to accept as an employee. You probably have signed away the rights to the IP you create at your place of employment. After all, you probably did it on company time with company equipment. But ultimately that is the agreement you entered into so you cannot turn around after the fact and complain.

However, my sympathy lies with the person that automates their work rather than the employer. I think that the ethical problem is interesting. Recently I watched the Crash Course on "meta ethics" and the problem they considered was a burglar who intended to steal from a little, old lady but inadvertently saved her life instead. And the question is, 'was the burglar good or bad?' I think there is a parallel to the issue of automating your job. I am no philosopher, but I think this is an interesting question.

I once mixed tabs and spaces.

I have always wanted gitlab to become a viable alternative to github, but every time I have used their product I have come away disappointed. Currently trying to import a repo from github to try out their hosting ... 3hrs in and the import is still in progress.

Do no evil*

*conditions apply

"The existential pleasures of engineering" by Samuel Florman.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1203186.The_Existential_...

Google may be the first to release a system like this but it won't take long until there are equivalent services, which may not warn that it is an AI. How long until those fun calls to automated systems start with a captcha?

sidenote: how long until the Butlerian Jihad?

Maybe you have to be a rockstar yogi who is killing it at downward facing dawg ;)

I wouldn't say this is a bait and switch, but it is a betrayal. It sounds like a lot of people joined the company because of the work environment. An environment that placed importance of the people in it, and making it somewhere that they wanted to be and where they felt comfortable being who they were. To now turn around and imply that those same values are bad is a betrayal.

The slide deck is not surprising or positive to me either. For me, it is an example of the corporate neofeudalism that currently dominates the US workplace. Not only are you are cog in the machine, but you have to be passionate and optimistic cog too! It is not ok to simply do your job, you have to be outside your comfort zone!

From my perspective, it is dehumanizing. People have value beyond their economic potential.

Good idea!

Sorry, couldn't resist :)

Something similar to https://www.kialo.com/tour/ for instance?

When I see job descriptions like this, I think one of two things: (1) either they don't know who they want, or (2) they don't know what they are making. Part of me wonders if they are trying to convey how smart and relevant they are. Of, perhaps, this is what happens when you write content with SEO in mind.

My personal red flag is the 'development certification'. Most of the certifications I have seen are more about the appearance of expertise than having actual expertise. This is something that you almost exclusively see in large bureaucracies, which leads me to believe that (1) -- they don't know who they want -- is the case and they are using a scatter-shot approach.

Agreed! As a mathematician/software engineer I have been looking for environment/ecological projects to work on, but it is really hard to find opportunities.

Does anyone know of good places to find opportunities to work on projects like this one?

I have had the same experience. The environment was toxic, I was actively interviewing, and the company knew I was not happy. I was preparing the give my resignation the next day, as it turned out, but they pulled the trigger first. Regardless, like you, I wanted to leave on my own terms.

But keep things in perspective. Put shame to the side because that's not going to help. If you are a frontend developer, there is no shortage of job opportunities for you. Keep going with the interviewing process, and move on.

Best of luck!

Mathematics and puzzles/games. Take sudoku for example. It helps you to practice deductive reasoning. But the important step (I think) is when you start trying to solve harder problems and turn to math to formalize the collection of techniques you have accumulate during practice, resulting in concepts like 'pre-emptive sets'. When you transition from a collection of techniques to a theoretical foundation, you know have a much deeper understanding of the problem and how to reason about it.

You could call it 'deep learning'.

But you shouldn't ;)

I have used and like Dell XPS, ThinkPads, and System76.

Maybe it is a stupid name, but the prefix 'crypto' and its usage are not the exclusive domain of cryptographers. Perhaps thinking of crypto-currencies as mimics of real currencies is appropriate ;)

I try (and struggle) to be calmer/kinder. There are a lot of good suggestions here, and I have tried most of them. They work but I have found it hard to stick with them.

One idea you may want to consider is to do something pro-active to create calm, rather than using a retro-active approach. One place I have found that useful is when driving. I live in Boston. Drivers are a little aggressive. It is easy to get into a cycle of aggression and frustration. But I found that by trying to be more generous and accommodating (allowing space in front for people to merge, always slowing down when someone indicates they want to merge), it was easier to shrug off the actions of others when they were inconsiderate.

I would also hold the image of a duck in my mind. Odd, yes. It comes from the expression, 'like water off a ducks back.' It describes someone who does not let some issue become a burden that weighs on them. Rather, they 'let it go'... which is a phrase that I would say to myself to reset and imagine the weight sliding off my back like water on a duck. And then the movie 'frozen' came out and now when I say 'let it go...' I mentally start singing the song of the same name. Singing is not a bad solution either :)

Just wanted to say that I think this is a interesting idea, and that labs often have 'signing parties' where they do the counter signing.

Then make sure to tell her that she's making a difference. My kids LOVE her robots, and it makes the idea of making and playing with robots a whole lot of fun.

Why do you believe that? It has a section on shell completion for different shells so I don't think that is the intention,

https://github.com/jarun/nnn#shell-completion

Agreed. I am using opera at the moment with javascript turned off by default. But there are some sites I want to use that are simply non-functional without javascript enabled. I add those sites to a list of exceptions. However, as a result of having javascript off by default, I will sometimes find a site that I cannot view and it makes me ask the question -- do I really want to see this content? is this a site that I want to add to my list of exceptions? I find it useful to ask those questions and step back from browsing to reflecting on whether that is the best use of my time right then. ymmv.

Agreed. This is tragic. These are the kinds of problems that I would have expected a military organization to have a pragmatic and robust solution to. I doubt you can rely upon a solid wifi connection in a field situation, so I bet they have some pretty solid procedures in place so that a human reliably find what they need without the need to google it.

Sure.

https://gist.github.com/25facbfd1aa3816457ba9c5d2040cd3c

I find it astonishing how much of my laptops resources are occupied by a web browser. But I came to believe that it was not necessarily a problem with the web browsers per se but that each website would have a variety of javascript constantly running, and most of that code is not providing any information that I want. So I have turned off javascript in the browser. It breaks many sites, but, especially for news sites, it makes for a quieter experience.

I also like to archive many of the articles that I read, but I don't like keeping bookmarks. So I wrote a small utility to convert html to text by combining 'readability' (python) and lynx (text-base web browser), which does a nice job of formatting the content and storing the hyperlinks as footnotes. This archive is also nice and easy to index if you are so inclined.

If it is reasonable for you to continue with postgraduate studies, I would recommend that you do that. The more math you can do or know the better. And it is going to be harder to gain those skills once you leave university.

You haven't mentioned any software skills. I would recommend develop whatever skills you have in that area. The ability to program is becoming as important as literacy and numeracy. Even more so for a mathematician.

My bias is that I have a PhD in math and have been a software engineer for the last 10+ years. I have worked in a lot of different areas and that has largely been because of the combination of math and software (and luck).

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man below says: "Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees W. longitude."

"You must be an engineer," says the balloonist.

"I am," replies the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost.

"The man below says, "You must be a manager."

"I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are, or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."

--

This is the sentiment that I see in the article.

It reads like someone who is not a software engineer criticizing software engineers because they don't do what he wants. Sure there is a reference to culture and that. But, ultimately, he wants software engineers to care about business and market issues over software issues. He sees the software engineer as an impediment to the problems he is trying to solve rather than someone who tries to contribute through his domain of expertise. This situation is not going to change by using the amateur psychology of not rejecting an engineers ideas when they are starting out. That is insulting and, frankly, the heart of the problem -- that he sees software engineers as children to be led rather than peers who you can collaborate with.

To provide an answer to my own question: I have found that a combination of pythons 'readability-lxml' package and 'lnyx' works pretty well. For example,

python -m readability.readability -u file:///foo.html | lynx -dump -stdin

produces a pretty nice text format.

If you're not hiring, this probably isn't the right place to advertise.

  Location: Boston, MA
  Remote: Yes (contract)
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: python, C/C++, git
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuadowner/
  Email: echo 0:6a6f736875612e646f776e657240676d61696c2e636f6d0a | xxd -r -c 30

I am interested in working on computational modeling and simulation. Please see my linkedin profile for my experience as a software engineer and researcher.

Sorry, it's unclear to me, is this a paid position?