protomok

SaaS could be a good transition, there are quite a few SaaS shops using C++ for example. Or possibly backend if you're willing to do some cloud based side projects.

Embedded is a lot of fun but IMHO there is more opportunity and compensation up the stack.

So true. I recall early in my career an older engineer telling me the closer you are to the money the more money you make.

> I realised that the HR head, who has few relevant skills and can viably be replaced by a mollusc, makes more than I do.

=)

  "One benefit of working together in person, many
  executives said, is the potential for spontaneous 
  interactions. 
  ...
  She noticed that she was soon having conversations 
  with peers that wouldn’t have happened in a remote 
  set up—a discussion sparked by a passing question 
  in the hall"

I can relate to this. I miss the impromptu conversation about idea -> whiteboarding session -> JIRAs -> new features, new design, etc.

WFH was great for the first month or so but at this point I find myself missing going into the office. Once the vaccine arrives I plan to switch to around 4 days on site / 1 day WFH.

On a related note there's a pretty entertaining NPR video breaking down whether or not you can power your house with a bike - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbUxt2x4InE (spoiler alert - you can't :))

I worked it out and even if I pedal 8 hours / day and somehow convince the wife to join we're only producing 2kWh / day. Our house's power usage is ~11 kWh/day in the winter (worse in summer due to AC)...it's hopeless.

That’s incredible! I have a hard cut off around 6.5-7 hours of sleep, anything less and I have noticeable performance decrease - inability to concentrate , needing to re read lines of code multiple times, etc.

You should reach out to the sleep researchers, a drug to temporarily not need sleep without massive burn out after would be pretty cool!

Has anyone tried the Tresanti standing desk which is sold at Costco? It seemed pretty sturdy and reasonably priced at $400 CAD ($300 USD)

EDIT: link - https://www.costco.ca/Tresanti-Adjustable-Desk.product.10042...

My two cents - keep the books/papers/resources on the shelf and go out and build an embedded project. Sure, you could read about interrupts, registers maps, chip datasheets, etc. but the rate of learning will be much greater if you learn by building.

For example, why not build a home automation system?

Start with a Raspberry pi and start hooking up peripherals...light switchtes, timers, sensors, etc. You'll stumble across buses like I2C/SPI, you'll learn about networking. You'll figure out what registers are and learn what interrupts are and what they mean.

You'll get lazy rewriting communication code and stumble across messaging frameworks like MQTT to communicate with devices on your network. You'll run out of money using Raspberry Pis for each new device you build, and you'll find cheaper ways of doing things like desiging devices using MSP430 or ESP8266s.

You'll make mistakes, and you will learn. Best of luck on this new adventure!

My favorite for 2018 - "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder" by Nassim Taleb. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of asymmetry and the implications for investing but also for systems in general.

Another +1 from Deep Work. The main takeaway for me was the following quote:

"We spend much of our day on autopilot, not giving much thought to what we are doing with our time. This, is a problem. It's difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don't face without flinching your current balance between deep and shallow work"

I tried his pretty extreme recommendation to schedule every minute of every day (see chapter 'Rule #4' or 6:30:30 in the audiobook), my summary below:

   -> I use a 4"x6" lined post-it note pad and block out 30 minute/block blocks throughout the day
   -> Interruptions are scheduled for future blocks (although occasional mandatory interruptions
      of course occur from time to time), and I edit the post-it note throughout the day
   -> At the end of the week I do a post-mortem and review which tasks slipped to the next week and recap what happened

I've found a surprising amount of distractions lurking throughout my day that I've been able to eliminate. Scheduling your day is also really compatible with Agile development as you can easily answer why your JIRAs slipped into the next sprint, what your blockers were, etc.

I'm curious what the impact will be for GM tech workers. IIRC they hired a bunch of software devs in Markham and Oshawa over the last few years

Same problem here - deviated septum is such an annoyance. I find I often have to breathe out of my mouth as breathing out of my nose is sometimes not possible as one or both nostrils are frequently unusable.

Curious how others work around this ? I understand there is a surgery that can correct a deviated septum , but surgery is always a last resort in my view.

I frequently hear teenagers and young adults say things like 'Cannabis is harmless', 'not as bad as alcohol', etc.

The issue here is the initial research consistently shows us the opposite - frequent cannabis use appears to cause developmental delay and may cause _irreversible_ mental illness in adolescents that is in at least one case worse than alcohol.

Let's take Schizophrenia as an example:

  Increased Risk of Schizophrenia from Alcohol and drugs:

  Cannabis: 5.2 times
  Alcohol: 3.4 times
  Hallucinogenic drugs: 1.9 times
  Sedatives: 1.7 times
  Amphetamines: 1.24 times
  Other substances: 2.8 times 

source: http://schizophrenia.com/?p=793

Direct link to study - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici...

Since the brain doesn't fully develop until 25 I don't disagree that alcohol and other legal substances are dangerous for adolescents but from the initial research we are seeing Cannabis is in some cases more damaging than alcohol and requires further study.

Just a quick warning for those considering Melatonin before a flight or for adjusting to jet lag:

About a week before a long flight I decided to test Melatonin and took a single 3mg tablet (smallest dosage I could find at my local pharmacy) before I went to bed. My sleep quality seemed unchanged but right after breakfast the next day I had gastro issues.

I tried a 3 mg tablet again a few days later and had the same symptoms.

I gave up on Melatonin deciding it was better to be wide awake over the Pacific than stuck in a tiny airplane bathroom :)

YMMV but other folks online have had similar side effects. It seems a small % of people have gastro issues but if you're considering Melatonin I suggest a small dosage first (maybe 0.3mg as recommended by the article) and a test _before_ travelling!

I have a build using a Ryzen5 1600X + MSI X370 Gaming Plus + Nvidia 1070 GPU with Ubuntu 16.04 installed.

I get lockups once every 2-3 days. I was convinced the lockups were caused by a Logitech wireless keyboard, but the lockups persisted even after trying several different keyboards.

I got my Ryzen 5 soon after release. I really want to love this chip but the lockups are killing me and so painful to debug. I will try disabling C6 and see if this helps!

I can definitely resonate with this line: "Once people start coupling up, the challenges only increase. Making friends with other couples “is like matchmaking for two,” said Kara Baskin, a journalist who works in Boston."

From experience, finding new couple friends appears to be impossible. The difficulty is even quantifiable. For example, to make a friend person A must like person B, and vice versa, or expressed as a permutation: P(2,2)=2 units of difficulty.

But to make a couple friend the difficulty increases to P(4,2)=12...a 6x increase :(

Has anyone had success finding couple friends?

~ Books => I have most in digital and physical copies ~

- The C Programming Language (2nd edition) - Brian Kerningham / Denis Ritchie

- The C++ Programming Language (4th edition which discuss C++11) - Stroustrup

- Design Patterns Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software - GoF

- Effective C++, Effective Modern C++ - Scott Meyers

~ Specifications ~

- C99 draft spec, C++11 draft spec (too cheap to buy official copies!)

Thank you for the detailed reply!

Thanks, great links! I bought the 'Fixing My Gaze' audiobook and I am researching vision therapy as a potential surgery alternative.

You mention you had amblyopia, I'm curious how you got rid of it?

I've had strabismus (i.e. diplopia / double vision) for as long as I can remember. It's pretty minor and I didn't even wear glasses until my 20s but it's such a PITA having to wear 2 different pairs of glasses.

I understand there's a surgery that corrects strabismus where they adjust the eye muscles, just wondering if you or any other HN folks have tried the surgery. The idea of eye surgery is slightly terrifying but would make coding (especially late at night) a lot more comfortable.

I would argue mining is much lower risk but has much lower potential for reward.

After paying off the card (<=4 months of mining) all earnings from mining can be converted to USD for example on a monthly basis. The odds of even 1/10th of major coins switching to PoS in the near future is very low.

I completely agree that just owning coins has way more upside and I suspect you'll do very well! But I prefer the asymetrical mining returns - I have lots of upside and almost zero downside versus extreme upside and extreme downside (crash in coin prices, hacks, regulation, etc.) from owning coins. But to each their own!

I’ve also been learning about crypto currencies lately. One thing I found helpful was implementing the popular proof of work algorithms. I did a sha256 python implementation , it was quite fun.

I’m hoping to keep learning more about parallel computing and Deep Learning both from day job and some side projects. Planning to take a stab at a crypto currency algo implementation like Equihash as a fun side project.

Very cool! Ahhh this could have been a nice Christmas break side project but it seems it's not available until Dec.31st :(

Great summary of recent Computer Vision. Over 203 references!

One exciting topic I did not see mentioned (maybe I missed it) is image denoising. Excellent paper here - https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03981. The CNN proposed in the paper is really compute intensive but the denoised images are really amazing.

Bill Gates has also given a lot to charity, from the article - 'Gates, 62, who has a net worth of $86.8 billion according to the Bloomberg index, would be worth more than $150 billion if he hadn’t given away almost 700 million Microsoft Corp. shares and $2.9 billion of cash and other assets to charity, according to an analysis of his publicly disclosed giving since 1996.'

Yes it's nice to see this is now fixed. In my case I need to support Python 2.7 though, and for Python 2.7 the only workaround I know of is shipping two binaries (2 byte and 4 byte encoding) then loading the correct module at runtime.

I've been evaluating Cython for both code obfuscation and for using C based extensions to improve performance. Cython is pretty nice, but shipping binary only Python extensions can be such a pain, especially dealing with 2-byte vs 4-byte unicode representation issues.

I need to try Go one of these days !

I'm curious if FB/Microsoft considered Khronos Neural Network Exchange Format (NNEF) - https://www.khronos.org/nnef?

You might be interested in SqueezeNet - https://github.com/DeepScale/SqueezeNet, I imagine this would run quite fast even on the Raspberry Pi.

Nice, I would probably use it the same way.

Would you know if Robinhood supports pre-authorized purchase plans? For example the ability to buy x shares of VOO on the first day of each month automatically? I didn't see anything on the FAQ but maybe I missed it. Pre-authorized purchase plans + no commissions could be interesting.