kernelbandwidth

We're an enterprise software shop, which necessarily means we do a lot of custom work, but we're careful to consider what we'll do. My mentor is an old hand that been through multiple exits, and in every meeting we have, he hammers this point. You're either a product shop, or a professional services shop, and if you don't know which one you are (or you believe wrongly) you die. Simple as that. The deeper you get into the consequences of knowing (or even forcing) which you are, the more implications it has for everything from product design to business strategy, and it's extraordinary how such a simple seeming thing effects such a vast amount of the company.

I did #2 for a time on the south side of Chicago while I was in graduate school. We founded a non-profit; begged, borrowed, and stole computers; and wrangled a lease for $1. Paid for internet and power out of my and my co-founders pockets.

It turns out the educational systems in areas like that are, ah, pretty bad. We ended up teaching more basic logical thinking and occasional math (arithmetic) than real programming. Still, we got the kids to make HTML/CSS websites, a few picked up some basic JavaScript, others made Arduino robots. We offered a safe, educational space for free or as close to free as we could.

It was very rewarding, but also one of the most brutal experiences of my life (earning <$30K and working as a graduate student didn't help, of course!). I'd do it again, but only if I had the cash to back me, preferably my own because grant funding is/was thin, the labor required is enormous, and volunteers are flaky.

I still keep in touch with one of our students, though. I like to think we really helped him, at least.

Oh this is very cool. Glad to see Bozhi's work getting some attention. A friend of mine is co-mentored by Bozhi and my graduate advisor, and was working on some very neat experiments using this technology to trigger specific responses in T-cells. Basically, the gold nanowires can be used to trigger a membrane voltage differential, and theoretically trigger a calcium flux and then a downstream immune response without an antigen. I know they had successes with nerve cells, and I'm hopeful the T-cell results will show similar success.

Edit: Properly reading the article, it looks like this is either slightly older work, or a different experiment from the one I'm familiar with, which did show success in nerve cells last time I saw the talk on it (and used gold, or gold-silicon, my memory is fuzzy now, nanowires).

As always, it depends.

For the use-case here, on a server, I think the answer is currently no. We're writing our back-end in Rust, but tried Swift first (fewer languages in the stack!), but there were just too many gotchas.

Personally, given the option, I prefer Rust over Swift. I've written a decent, if not huge, amount of both (notable, I wrote an Avro-to-Swift code generator in Rust), but written more Rust, so take this with a grain of salt.

I've found that Swift's generics have some edge cases that cause problems; there's some rough edges around build that are better in Rust; dependencies are much easier in Rust; and I like Rust's traits over Swift's protocols. That said, protocols in Swift are very cool and flexible, and I think Swift-the-language is very well designed. And of course, for macOS UI or iOS development, I'd go with Swift for the obvious reasons.

We actually decided on remote early on as a way to expand our potential talent pool, when it became a key part of getting our first hire on-board. We've recently made the decision to start doing our major work in Rust after it had a strong showing building an important internal tool and prototyping a small service in it, and our mounting frustration with the current stack (plus some other issues that made it a good time to decide if we wanted to switch). A remote hiring policy has been key to confidence in that decision; we've yet to fully put that into practice with actual Rust hires, but I'd be much more wary with a talent pool restricted to just the local area (Austin, in this case).

Maybe not the same source, but V.S. Ramachandran's book, Phantoms in the Brain, covers his use of a set-up like that to help patients recover from phantom limb syndrome. Shockingly effective for what is, essentially, just an illusionist's trick.

There's a lot of variation, both due to school and due to department. When I did my PhD, I found the Biosciences department to be rather brutal. Drinking and misery poker (and Magic the Gathering) were the standard pastimes, and long, tedious hours were the norm. On the other hand, the CS department was much more laid back, with much more time put into 'cerebral' work. It's not that the CS students were smarter, I knew a number of brilliant biologists, but the nature of subject matter and the culture. Biology experiments are inherently physical, and can fail or die if not attended to properly, putting a pretty tight time constraint on the experimenter. CS work is much more forgiving, and much more of it (proportionally) happens in the mind. Biology is also a much more grind-centered culture, perhaps in part because it lacks a strong history of internal tool building, while tedious work in CS tends to inspire attempts to build automation and higher level methods. I think some of this is the difficulty (tools in Biology are just harder to make), and some of this is purely culture. I would argue that the somewhat bizarre field of Biophysics is, historically speaking, the tooling culture of Biology that was severed off when Molecular Biology became a field in it's own right and the tools were commoditized, and it's partially this split that's responsible for the culture there.

All of which is to say, grad school is horrible. Sometimes. Sometimes it's awesome, and YMMV.

I bike to/from work (on a regular bicycle) over a few hills. I enjoy the exercise in general, but I would still like a electric bike for the summer; a sunny Texas day with 98+ Fahrenheit weather is rough.

Agreed.

There's a recurring theme with drugs that mixing X and alcohol is dangerous.

Don't get me wrong, I like good wine, craft beer, and liquor. But the common link is generally the "and alcohol" part. It seems pretty clear alcohol is a remarkably dangerous drug, just normalized by social use.

An anecdote from the other side: I trained in Mathematics before I ever did any serious programming, and have taken only a handful of proper CS courses from a theory-heavy institution in math-heavy areas (i.e. they were math classes first, and programming was mostly an afterthought). The result is that I actually find pseudo-code descriptions of algorithms far harder to work with than equations. Without a good overview, I just see a collection of vaguely related code-statements, and not a design until I've put a lot of effort in. On the other hand, I can usually grasp the point of something expressed as an equation much more rapidly, if only because my previous experience gives me more heuristics to rely on.

Same boat here. I've repeatedly thought about going to UU events, but they're still too New Age for me. I've long been somewhat envious of my Jewish friends for the strong community aspect of the culture, which requires too much religion in other, well, religions. Nothing else seems to really drive as much community though, as far as I've seen at least.

Wat.

I didn't realize Uber was the Tech Capital Kingmaker.