poletopole

Do you still have to go through application process.

Happy Birthday :)

I’ll send you whatever, if you want.

Nope, I come and leave when I want, even break time. Three years together, what a brilliant hack. Choose wisely.

Welcome to the club. They know when I get off work and wake up now.

Imagination.

If only, there were a crypto constitution ;)

Mission accepted. I will be on that inspiration list. I never thought I would have to use my hamburger backpack again...

The hard answer is most do not learn CS related skills on their own, I sure didn't, but I was lucky perhaps. Ha, my first "benefactor" would have to remotely tunnel into my computer to literally force me to watch him run commands or remotely debug my code.

The reason everything is so hard is because technology we use today is inherited from decades of prior artwork and can be at times intolerable even to "pros". My benefactor went on and on about the meaning behind what makes a "hacker" exceptional compared myself. This is hard to communicate or understand but can be realized, after thousands of hours of struggle.

(My second benefactor told me something recently) I had a hard time realizing, in regard to returning to university, after a decade in the industry. He said, You have to interact, books aren't enough. Since he was a polymath professor, I could not argue, simply because my strategy thus far in this regard, objectively wasn't working out, irregardless if I was capable or not. I feel as though this is true because it's hard to rival yourself, you must see others (such as on HN) do better and take that as a challenge.

Trust me, if you have potential, simply make yourself known wherever you wish to be. Keep making mistakes.

That makes sense. I’m used to write almost compulsively (but just for my eyes).

I see the value in having a blog in that it does no harm to contribute something likely no one will find.

Some of the best essays I have written started out as letters, after all.

Thanks for sharing. I know the answer for the following question may differ for the individual, but how long (or how many posts) did it take to find your “stride” so to speak?

I also share the sentiment that the path of the self-guided math student is a hard one, especially when there is an end goal desired, such as learning ML. The single most important lesson here (I learned) was identifying what textbooks were ideal. In general, I would say the unusual textbook preface that omits the usual prerequisites (that most others demand of a student) are safe bets. For example, I was surprised that Complex Analysis: A First Course with Applications, 3e (Zill Shanahan) actually delivered on its promises from its preface (I didn't even have to understand real analysis!).

The quagmire of breadth vs depth is an almost impossible one when it comes to mathematics. A long time ago I came across The Princeton Companion To Mathematics and bought it first when I began teaching myself mathematics. Easily the best decision I ever made in regard to shedding light on this mystery.

I should write an article about how to select textbooks since it's nepotism all the way down. In reality, there is almost always a "sweet spot" that applies to any student irregardless of prior experience or knowledge and of the given subject (not just mathematics). For example, C Programming: A Modern Approach, 2e (King) was by and far not the obvious canonical text on C (to this fact, the author concedes it's K&R) but having read K&R I found beauty, but its genius wasn't intended entirely (if at all) as a student textbook.

The fact that the textbook industry makes it near damn impossible to simply get a decent preview or general idea of a textbook before purchase, coupled with the fact that Amazon is complicit in that they profit each time you buy a unfit textbook, is truly a tragedy. This engenders the impression to a student (of any age) a certain learned helplessness they may carry for the remainder of their life. One must be prepared to toss their coin along with their book in the trash.

This problem can be solved, but for now all I can recommend as a heuristic is just write a script to crawl for PDFs that are at least 1mb in size (which I actually may do today, ha) along for other obvious meta data such as ISBN, Title, Author, etc. But this is simply to just decide on whether to buy the actual book (if possible); not many realize this, but the art of textbook publication is a parity to film production, it's expensive, exhausting, and time consuming. I personally can't tolerate a poorly digitized textbook anyways.

In my experience, one need not wander too far away from the major publishers for undergraduate textbooks and for upper division or graduate textbooks there simply is a canonical text or none at all (worthwhile). This is because, for example, almost all students are going to have to find a youtube video to demystify the Epsilon-Delta definition of a limit. Thankfully we now live in a day an age where this process only takes about five minutes. In regard to taking online courses (Udemy, Coursera, etc), all I've learned so far is that they are as hit and miss as textbooks are, if not more so.

Love and Respect,

I got my first job simply by saying I don’t know.

It's not because I'm calling BS, just the timing of it, because it's not just domains and not just T-mobile. I got a random text message from an HN user I don't know personally, a few weeks back, but took a screenshot of the account's only comment several days BEFORE I received the text, because it was odd (the account is now deleted). I didn't even take the screenshot with my phone. It does grow more absurd, but I signed up for this so to speak. Well, three years of data down the drain...

Edit: I wasn't pointing fingers at the user in particular, but be wise HN, that's all.

Sorry for your loss. I learned Rust back in 2020, but decided to take a 2 year break from the industry, so haven’t used it yet.

I agree with your view, but I have not studied warfare conventionally.

Logistics is mostly common sense in practice, I feel, but understanding dynamical chaos helps. You live off the land.

Amazon is simply the best at recruitment, their sticker logistics have gone overlooked it seems.

I measure intelligence by the degree of how fooled I was on the nth encounter in respect to the (n + 1)th. By "fooled" I don't mean anything connotative in nature, just how wrong I was in any respect that mattered, given I wasn't an idiot at the moment.

For example, an older man used to serve me my sub every day, at a fast food joint, and on our last encounter he handed me his book; it turns out he was a millionaire--he simply enjoyed hospitality and writing (makes sense ;).

However, one should aim to improve their ability to measure intelligence. This is done by being silent--by this I mean, stop your internal dialog (don't talk to yourself).

This is accomplished when you acknowledge you simply are not that important, however, this will socially isolate you in unexpected ways. A practical way to measure your progress is how defeated you are by someone less smart than you; when this is no longer true, then find a smarter person, and so forth.

If you manage this feat, you will notice you were merely taking inventory of your own world and no other one, your entire life (not learning from others). Here, I'm suggesting, that you must find truly intelligent humans, they rarely approach you, unless you are also smart.

PHP is still used today because it needed good docs. Who's laughing now?

This may sound half-baked, but I personally plan on exploring how far I can take the ideal and form of a "book" oriented UX/UI, in a least one future project--but is a subject I've written about almost too much.

If this sounds silly for software, then what exactly is the UX/UI of a spreadsheet application, and why is it so universally useful? At first, I thought this was by virtue of its tabular UI/UX, but books are nothing but rows and columns of text, are they not? At least Awk thinks so. What is the difference between a cell and a sheet in a relational sense? I see no difference, or that is, its design is isomorphic.

A book is a collection of sheets, where a sheet consists of other sheets or views, where a view is any given selection and dimension of text. Sheets can be stacked, ordered, sorted, and indexed into new books, just as words can--and as linguists say, into an infinite set of sentences (views). This design cannot be reduced in a hyper-grammatical sense.

This is to suggest that a "book" UX/UI would require a new way on how we approach language not only within the context of software but language--it's a direct spit in the face of Chomsky himself (although he would have more to say about this than I), but hasn't this been a long ways in coming? It seems as if textual communication is the long term trend, but comes at no surprise to any of us, here whom work remotely. So really when I say "book" based UX/UI, I mean just that, but really--it is augmented natural grammar--a subject beyond the scope of this discussion.

All good UX solves a problem, so what is the problem here? It's increasing the transmission capacity of information over text, or that is, expanding what and how we can express as information with language, without monumental standards. But no language is without communication and therefore the crux of the problem lies in the future of higher level network protocols (if you believe in such a thing).

Excellent advice. You ultimately can’t argue with a machine after all. I feel I should tell HN the circumstance under my termination for posterity. I was assigned a bug to fix on a new system that was designed in isolation by my coworker. After about a day, I realized that the bug didn’t exist. The bug was actually a large feature my coworker never implemented, but no one noticed, because it was on the back end. My coworker was severely autistic but could function if he didn’t need to communicate with others and often had fits. Because he was the first employee, my boss didn’t realize this fully until I was hired. Some months prior, my boss had told me the coworker was slated for termination, as he was bringing more developers onboard, but this was supposed to be down the road. Knowing my disabled coworker would be fired if I told the truth, I did what I thought was the responsible thing, and quietly worked on implementing it at night. However, after a week, my new manager was irate with me on why the bug wasn’t fixed. I was forced to tell the truth but was sleep deprived and lost my temper for the first time in my career. As a result apparently my manager didn’t understand what I told him, and because he was the younger brother of my boss, I was terminated instead. Maybe it was for the best, but sadly I heard that my coworker was fired about three months into lockdown, I was terminated the very day lockdown began. He will never find another job, but I will. Not long after that I heard my manger quit for a better paying job. Am I the asshole? At any rate, I think you’re right, but how hard is it to break into embedded programming? I actually started learning OS design not long ago and finished learning C and Rust, but never considered it an option career wise.

Social media manager. My friend does it professionally and overall it seems perfect for someone suffering from ADHD. Why that would be I think is because it’s literally your job as a social media practitioner to be hyper active and divided in attention on no single task for very long.

For those saying “Do anything you love!” is not good advice in general, even if you don’t suffer from ADHD. I suffer from treatment resistant depression, meaning I’m in the same boat as most ADHD patients. My advice is to experiment both in terms of psychiatric medications first and then experiment professionally by buying some textbooks on subjects you’re curious about.

The hard part is always how to find the perfect book, no matter who you are. The answer can’t be found with a simple google search. Many people think they aren’t smart or don’t have the attention others do, but in reality it’s google and amazon and affiliate blog spam, whom make more money recommending crappy ones so you end up buying more. In general, you really have to judge books by the publisher and over time you learn which ones are safe bets. When it comes to book recommendations, it’s nepotism all the way down.

I wonder what property makes that true of a yoga ball? I almost always find myself leaning forward on my desk as if I'm riding a bike. Perhaps it absorbs the stress more than a conventional chair or maybe it's because it's omnidirectional in terms of possible postures? I have one of those Ikea mechanical adjustable height desks (forget what it's called) and wouldn't trade it for the world. My boss used to work standing up, but neither did he program for 12+ hours a day.

I think I answered my own question by asking it. I think only the DDF would have to be ported. However, further discussion is welcome, since I'm still curious about Tokio's future with WASM.

My rule of thumb is make what you need in order to make what you needed.

The day my ex-boss said to me we didn’t need to test releases in safari anymore, I added some metrics to determine how many safari users would be affected.

As it turns out, not only were safari users not using our product, practically no one was. At the time I had no choice but to carry on, but now that Flutter supports desktop, I don’t see my self doing web apps, progressive or not, in the future.

I’ve been a web dev for well over a decade, but let’s face the writing on the wall—the web was never intended for apps. But HTTP will live on and that’s what matters.

Open protocols is and always was and will always be what makes the web, and I feel it’s time we as developers should be able to and focus on developing protocols once we are provided the tools to do so—but using open web standards like SPARQL and WASM to name two I have in mind—but still semantically HTTP. The best analogy I can think of was what docket did for dev ops.

I honestly feel like the web as we know it today is a lost cause. Not even Google can make sense of all the SEO collusion. It’s all so inhospitable and seedy now and just another marketing channel. But I’m confident something better is on the horizon and I bet many of us here are working on it.

Damn I knew it. A brilliant one at that.

Most people don’t know what cryptography is let alone RSA keys. Hints why I mentioned steganography. But I was mostly spit balling here, you aren’t wrong.

The paper didn't mention knot theory or dynamical topology because, like I mentioned, those are areas that my research bring into the picture, but was the result of (what I suspect) is the same end goal. I read through the author's blog and my jaw kind of dropped, it was uncanny how similar paths we went down. It's clear he's interested in a general theory of linguistics that can be described in the language of algebraic topology among other mathematical branches and theories, so information theory was obviously involved. However, he's way ahead of me in respect to the subject of the paper; most of my spare time has been dedicated to the greater evil, which is prime number theory, but that paper (although has proof of concept) is still far from polished but I know who's perfect now to review it when it's ready.

Representation theory by virtue I feel has more angles than most branches of mathematics, but your definition isn't off at all. I tend to focus in particular in terms of information theory which is where the combinatorial and symmetric groups, to name a few sides of representation theory, are of particular interest, but isn't the entire picture by a long shot.

I think I can answer what "?" means in simple terms, since I've been conjecturing very this for some time. Homology (abstract simplex algebra) sits in between representation theory (abstract linear algebra) and knot theory (fundamental topology).

Entropy enters the equation when you frame all three in terms of information theory, dynamical systems, and chaos theory. I can only put this into terms on my own conjectures, but the question for me was how can you represent, encode, and operate algebraically on information and state of a system? Or in other words, can you represent dynamical information (work) over time. More specifically, you want to know when the homological representational model becomes chaotic and to do that you need a way to measure its entropy.

My conjecture was along the lines, that higher ranking primality of the knot simplex of a dynamical model of some datum of the system implies less entropy, but only if state dictates the representation, then the operations that take the ambient isotopy (let's call it a "polymer") from state k to k' that doesn't result in any new topology (but doesn't violate it either) is the unknot and represents no new or "surprise" entropy, and there no new information. Or at least that's how far I was at as of the other day, but the question was always how to model this entropy in terms of homology to start.

The practical implications of this paper are profound, but probably won't see application in software and networking until a number of conjectures in prime number theory are answered. But still, this was long over due. HN is certainly more interesting at night, ha.