vinayms

As an experiment I created a framework called JEEP. You might find it interesting. https://github.com/vinayms2017/JEEP2018

Your problem seems that you are relying on someone else to employ you. Why not create products by yourself and become a potential employer? Unless the society itself crashes due to large scale wars or natural catastrophes, people will always want and use useful software, and that includes time wasting entertainment ones. There are so many things that need to be done, so as long as what you create is not yet another tool that does the same old thing that twenty others already do with no differentiating aspect to it, its worth pursuing this path.

Software engineering is the most equalizing field in modern society. I mean, anyone with interest and reasonable intelligence can get good at it; they just need a used laptop and a decent internet connection. Add a good amount of CS understanding, and general creativity, one stands to make it big in this field. Compare that with trying to build the next generation automobile by self studying mechanical engineering, or creating a drug to cure your least favorite disease by learning bio chemistry through a MOOC.

Software engineering is the new humanities, albeit a lucrative one, in that you need just a bit of push in the beginning after which it is all up to you to explore and get good at.

This might be against the grain here but I prefer simply to practice remembering things well, like humans did before writing was invented. Its hard but worth attempting. I usually engage in the thought for a while, thoroughly milk it by letting the mind wander wherever it pleases, and it typically stays etched. This has worked for a long time now.

I am someone who despises the modern human reliance on technology for just about everything, which IMO is weakening our abilities, be it innate or cultured, and I have been on an extended detox. Given that writing is one of the most pervasive technology ever invented, I am shunning it as well as much as possible. Now, in modern society, writing as a means of knowledge transfer, and thus reading, is inevitable, but it need not consume us and make us its slave is what I am saying. For instance, I do all the private software architecture design in my head and rarely use the large whiteboard on my home study wall. But that technology is so ingrained that I, like most people, involuntarily visualize written things even when just using my mind to engage in ideas. I just can't imagine how it would have been had humans never invented writing. I mean not just related to tech, which probably wouldn't have existed as we know it, but in general.

All that said, the only problem for me is wrt music. Quite frequently I generate beautiful melodies in my mind that I engage by humming, but quite often I lose them after half an hour of other activity. So I preemptively use my cell phone to record the melodies to work on them later. I kid you not, when I browse the list occasionally, there are many in my list from years ago that I don't at all remember had occurred to me. And even after listening multiple times, apart form a few melodies, I forget most of what I hear. It has baffled me no end. I will crack this case one of these days.

Tangential.

I have always been a very imaginative and creative person, even as far back as my single digit years. Over the years many of the ideas that I mused privately have become reality a few years after. In my late teens I was convinced that I was leaking idea into the universe and someone else was capturing them, until I had a ceramic throne thought that asked me what if all the ideas I ever had were leaking from someone else.

Thanks for the wishes, and I hope you do it soon as well :)

I am one of those people who don't trust people easily. And given the increasing amount of white collared crimes being exposed, I am completely disillusioned with these professionals. Of course, I will have to avail the services of these people but I want to make myself bulletproof against their well established work ethics. Not only do I not want to get swindled, I also don't want to be led astray. I want to conduct business honorably.

Not quite book, but I would like to read all laws and regulations related to business, finance and taxation such as the Companies Act etc as applicable to India. I will be transitioning to becoming a businessman in 2019 and its pertinent that I make myself at home with these topics so that I am not swindled by lawyers and auditors, or even the government for that matter.

To trust the doctor and never do private research on internet before or after the diagnosis, and don't take the before research too seriously. Also don't compare conditions with others who had been through similar thing. Related to that, never research the contents and side effects of medications as every single one of them seems to have everything from nausea to death.

In 2015 my father had an unfortunate series of events and was hospitalized four times, including a botched surgery and its repair. I did all the mentioned things the first time and was constantly apprehensive about everything. It suddenly occurred to me one night that I was being a wise ass layman and its better to stop it. In 2018 my mother had two hernia repair surgeries. I have been to hospital quite a lot recently and the enlightenment made life easy for the rest of the visits. The unfortunate mistake I did, in hindsight, was that I did all the things with my younger sister, and have taught her so well that I am unable to get her to quit it. I lecture her at every possible occasion and the progress has been geological.

Probability.

meta: what is the meaning of this post getting 2724 points (as of this writing)? just a mechanism to bring it to first page?

> Too many doctors have resigned that they have nothing to add in a world of advanced technology. They thoughtlessly order tests and thoughtlessly obey the results.

Thoughtlessly obeying is undoubtedly a sign of incompetence; a doctor must always use judgement based on patient's condition and not rely on a bunch of numbers, a doctor told me in my teens. However, ordering tech based tests is not thoughtless all the time, at least not with competent doctors. I mean, in this age of self diagnosing based on googling, a doctor not ordering such tests would be seen as incompetent, and even ignorant. Would a doctor risk his reputation, and possibly livelihood, just to prove a point, even when his spidey senses tells him there is nothing severe about the patient's condition when the patient insists on it, directly or indirectly? Only a House would do so. The writer is too eager to generalize for some reason.

Even if the technology is perfected and proven superior on several counts, the adoption has to overcome the psychological barrier. The places that don't have a culture of wooden buildings, especially the floor, will need some convincing.

As an Indian, I don't encounter wooden floor often. Modern buildings are all brick and reinforced concrete, and old temples are stone mostly. Any wooden floor one might come across are just wood panels installed on concrete floor. Nearly two decades back, the city library (Seshadri library, Bengaluru) was renovated, and as a part of it the shelves were raised and a wooden corridor was installed to enable access to higher shelves; its a tall building with a dome and a large hall under it, your typical library. Needless to say, I was quite apprehensive to walk on it, so were most people there. Apart from that, the only experience I have is standing on my desk to change the bulb. The desk is quite sturdy - the bulkier carpenter stood on it to demonstrate - but I just can't trust it the same way I trust concrete floor. When on a wooden surface, I step softly, hoping to make myself lighter, just in case, though I know its nonsense.

The idealism of a bunch of engineers won't make the slightest difference, except may be appease their own sense of morality, as long as there are enough engineers willing to be tech-whores. In this regard, the supply exceeds the demand.

Technology is the proverbial knife which can cut a fruit to feed and can also cut a throat to terrorize. Take the current darling of tech, AI/ML. If you are working on this, at a megacorp especially, you should realize that sooner or later it will be used for nefarious activities. But should that stop you from contributing to the field? Would database engineers rue the fact that their products are used to store child porn?

My point is, unless something as explicit as the ones depicted in the article happens, its highly unlikely to know what the tech you are developing is going to be adapted for besides the one it was designed and built for. The google employee notes it themselves. Having ethical concerns is always advisable, but constantly wanting to know if the tech will be used by evil doers (which is not same as wanting to know more about a specific requirement that looks questionable) just makes one come across as a dick because no one except the powers that be would know that.

I hope engineers don't go from being sheep to full on hippies, but choose the rational middle path instead.

I was looking for y combinator, of the lambda calculus, and google showed me a link to this site and I clicked. In google's defense, I hadn't used the words "lambda" or "calculus".

To become a manager, or at least a tech leader with a juicy title like Principal Systems Architect.

I am not sure if you are Indian or person of Indian heritage, and if you are working in India or abroad, but within Indian context, being a developer at 30+ is not seen favorably. I tried changing jobs at 34 in 2014 with 12 years experience, and was constantly offered a "leadership" position when all I wanted was to be a lead developer with freedom, basically same as my last job. I didn't take any of the offers, also because I wanted to start my own company. Things didn't workout and now I am looking for a job again, at 38. This time I have wised up and won't insist on engineering position. I am a realist, and have made my peace with it. I am preparing myself mentally to do something that I have always despised - filling excel sheets with colored cells.

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Further, personally, because I will indeed start my company once my financial condition improves, and I can do all the engineering I ever want with all the freedom I always wanted, I don't much care for the nature of the task I do as an employee elsewhere. I have no intentions of making a career working for someone else.

That said, I have an inkling that I might have it harder this time since I was unemployed chasing a dream for four years, and I am not sure how Indian companies (well, Indian outposts of Amerieuro companies) consider it. The weak link is of course the mind set of Indians who do the interviews, who would be mostly my age, and I don't know if the hype around startups has made them "open minded" or created further loathing of people treading that path because, let's face it, most Indian startups are copycats and hardly innovative, and its quite challenging to appreciate efforts of people who whip out yet another clone and pose as if they are innovators of cutting edge technology, and its quite likely that startup attempters will be prejudged negatively.

I think its fruitful to view philosophy as something that evolves rather than progresses.

At its core, philosophy is nothing more than a disciplined approach to acquire knowledge about anything that the human mind is curious. The approach is usually through systematic questioning and applying logic* to the received answers, and iterating till satisfied.

What happened was things changed. When "philosophy" first burst onto the scene, everything that man was curious about was ripe for exploration - life, universe, creation, numbers, sexuality, morals, shapes, thoughts, politics - everything. A cursory look at the kinds of topics that were discussed by ancient philosophers (not just the Greeks) should show the same. In time, all these pieces of knowledge got specialized and got separated into their own fields. Now, physics deals with the universe, maths deals with numbers and so on. Knowledge is not a Pangea anymore.

All the low hanging fruits have been picked, eaten, digested and turned into manure. That is how the specialization happened. The deep and meaningful questions in each of these fields can only be asked if one is well versed in them. Human knowledge has outgrown the human capacity to be Renaissance men. Thus, we can't expect an outsider like Berkeley take down calculus anymore (but I guess they still do), and such tasks must be left to the experts with a philosophical bent.

This leaves "philosophy" with very little to tackle. To me it seems only the question of existence and the meta question about nature of knowledge are left untouched by other fields, but I suppose theology often trespasses. I think this is why most people feel philosophy is boring and useless - the questions are either too abstract or they produce nothing but never ending debates and flamewars with no results that improve the knowledge.

Philosophy has evolved. Philosophers must evolve too. I honestly have no idea what philosophers do (probably graduate and teach, and the cycle continues?) but they are left with two things to do to make themselves relevant again (not sure if they feel irrelevant) - pick a field of interest, learn it deeply and ponder over it, or infuse philosophical outlook to the students of various fields who would be better equipped to do the pondering.

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* For sake on convenience, I consider logic as a tool that already exists. To me logic is philosophy in its own right, and it bootstraps philosophy.

I haven't achieved mastery, but was able to play songs on the guitar by ear fairly well, though slowly, both songs that I heard and the ones that I composed in my head. I am rusty now.

Its a simple process with two parts to it.

1. identifying the notes in the song.

2. playing the notes on the instrument of your choice, including your own voice.

The second part is all about knowing your instrument inside out - which key, which fret etc map to which note. The hard one is the first part. Loosely, the second is akin to coding and the first akin to developing the algorithm/design. The only way around it is to develop an ear(mind?) for the notes by abstracting songs - listen to a song as a sequence of notes rather than a "song". Its easier said than done.

For this task, learning theory is not useful. Surely, it can help identify the key with only a few notes which lets you fill out the rest of the notes, but, more often than not, real world songs, unless specifically designed to train students, don't follow the key bookishly and will always have an exception here and there, which means identifying the notes by the ear is still the key(ha!).

As a speaker of Kannada, a Dravidian language, grammatically, I find Indo European languages strange in general, with all kinds of rules, and all kinds of exceptions to those rules. Eg: verb conjugation and noun genders. I have dabbled with German and Spanish - I really like these two for some reason - and a bit of Russian. Of this family, Sanskrit seems simpler; not sure if that's because it was explicitly systematized (refactored) millennia back, and hence objectively so, or its just subjective since every Indian is made to learn it at a young age. I find Semitic languages, of which I know some Arabic, quite attractive. I love how concisely are ideas encoded in these languages because Dravidian languages are somewhat concise similarly, though not to that extent.

I hypothesize that its one or a combination of these three things.

1. these people have run out of research ideas.

2. they want a series on the Discovery network.

3. they are scamming gullible billionaires into funding the "research".

The fact that Tyson has something insightful to say makes point 2 a strong possibility, I say better than 50-50. I am disappointed to not see Kaku pitch in.

> Sans Forgetica is more difficult to read than most typefaces – and that’s by design. The 'desirable difficulty' you experience when reading information formatted in Sans Forgetica prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing

Based on this logic - harder the process better the processing - its obviously a mistake that schools are increasingly using technology to teach, like visualizing geometric shapes on screen in 3D instead of painstakingly drawing on the board and letting students see it in their heads.

I am new here but from what I understand the top stories are top because they were up voted by the members. This means the "problem" is not with the act of posting itself but with the act of up voting, which is reflective of the people active. That's democracy at work. The only way to fix it is the wrong way - discriminate and override, whatever those mean in this context.

> “A cloud-based brain-to-brain interface server could direct information transmission between any set of devices on the brain-to-brain interface network and make it globally operable through the Internet, thereby allowing cloud-based interactions between brains on a global scale,” Stocco and his colleagues say.

I bet they struggled to keep a straight face saying that.

I guess this is an English only tool. Does it account for non native speakers, like an Indian and Ukranian corresponding in English? Either way, while I can see that developing tools like this is fun and engaging, I won't trust the results.

Build something useful with it, if not remarkable, and show that. Take the top down approach. Don't leave it to the readers to figure out a use case because not only it shows the technology in bad light, since it appears that it was created without any purpose in mind, most people are also too busy/lazy to do it themselves.

> On point 2, I think it's very possible to write clever, readable code.

Of course its possible. People can shift gears in manual transmission without clutch by revv matching, but its not for everyday use.

> You're reading way too much into a domain-specific term. "Training" is just when you have a regimented exercise schedule and routine to improve your body.

On the same lines, one can rationalize the empty words such as "synergy" that corporate marketers use routinely that are taken apart brutally routinely.

1. Don't blindly follow advice of "experts" you read.

2. Don't write clever code, write readable code. Participate in code golf or obfuscation contests to scratch the itch if you have one, but keep it out of production code, even if its a private project that you will never share with anyone; it will save you from yourself.

I really like the spirit of the article, and I sympathize with it.

One visible example of this phenomenon is wrt fitness. We often hear gym goers doing "training" rather than "exercising". That usage in itself shows a sense of vanity, may be a result of general identity crisis, because most of these don't compete in anything sports-y, leave alone "strength games"; they train to train more it seems. I am not saying they ought to compete, that would be against the spirit of the article which I like, but I am just saying that even when they don't commit to such achievement oriented pursuit in action, they do it with words. Most are into fitness to improve their aesthetics but here too they set unreasonable goals. The level of obsession is unbelievable. They do the most difficult lifts with the heaviest weights and constantly monitor the "gains", because anything less is for the sissies. They are the real world Dom Mazzettis.

I tried to guess the meaning of the curves in your medium article, and I failed with all. Either I am more stupid than I know or the graphs need to be augmented with word descriptions to help the interpretation. If its the latter, why need graphs?

If this is just about capturing duration, won't an annotated bar be better than a curve of arbitrary slope and shape?

I liked the article. Many things mentioned there are inconvenient truths.

Claiming that a particular high level language must be learnt in order to understand how computers work is somewhat paradoxical - a hll is meant to abstract details, so if it helps understand the internals then it can't be a hll.

Also, the purpose of a programming language is not to teach how computer works; its purpose is to make computers do what we want. Its the steering wheel, gear stick and pedals of a car. If you want to know how a car works, you have to get out and look under the hood or slide underneath. Driving a manual transmission doesn't necessarily give any insight into workings of a car, except may be knowing that something like a clutch exists that is needed to be used to shift gears. Its your curiosity that makes you learn.

This seems to be a bit of oversell, similar to how a gifted musician might declare that music can cure all diseases, including cancer.

We must take care to ensure that AI doesn't end up atrophying intelligence of humans, and make us its slave, like how technology seems to be doing. I mean, look at how people have lost capacity to do basic maths mentally, or follow a route based on landmarks only. Technology is useful as long as its our slave, like the slide rule or the compass. Same goes for AI.

The combinatorial example about chemical compounds is poor because, if anything, it only reflects the imperfect methodology adopted rather than something inherently insurmountable. May be they need more insight to help prune the irrelevant combinations, and actually act like scientists instead of tinkering inventors. If scientists rely on technology or AI to solve these sort of problems, either through brute force or clever algorithms, instead of engaging their intelligence, it would begin the deterioration of humanity as a whole. Though most of the significant scientific discoveries have been accidental, our progress has been due to application of our minds to understanding and harnessing them. Same goes for evolution of society due to philosophy. AI induced atrophied intelligence will push us back to the dark ages, only this time the god would be the AI, the oracles would be the software, and the heretics would be those propounding reliance on innate human intelligence.

Its ironic that a bunch of brilliant scientists creating a brilliant system, on par with human mind, risks destroying the collective brilliance of humans. We must tread carefully.