vinayms

I studied Mechanical Engineering but gradually ended up as a full fledged software engineer from one who wrote ME related programs. So I have sort of always been in the midst of mid level maths and physics, but, as it happens, I lost it all except for some fundamental concepts. I had a similar epiphany as yours in my early thirties and this is what I did and it helped me greatly.

First of all, you have to realize that you are learning these stuff only for the sake of learning, as an intellectual challenge, rather than making a career out of it. So, you need not follow a pattern that is made for late teen students attending university. That includes not needing to religiously solve problems in textbooks, especially the numerical ones. If you have to, solve the conceptual ones. Further, you wouldn't even need textbooks.

What you do need, however, is a perspective. Unlike university students whose primary aim is to pass the exams that matter, graduate and get a job, for which they learn by rote, what you need is to understand the reason why learning certain topics is essential. You need to learn about the topics first in order to appreciate whatever you will encounter later. For this purpose, well regarded popular science books should be your first choice. Any worthy textbook will also give a bit of perspective in the preface, early chapters or the appendix, but it can never compete with popsci books which are designed for the purpose of elucidating academically complex stuff to an otherwise educated public. Good popsci books provide enough stimulation to your mind. They prime you for further, formal exploration of the topic.

Often times what happens is that highly technical topics such as those you mentioned look attractive from the outside but get painfully dry, boring and difficult once you pick up a text book and start studying from it. What I realized is that for many topics what I really crave is a deep understanding as an educated person as opposed to deep academic knowledge. For such topics popsci books regarded as 'hard' are better than proper textbooks. These days, with the availability of opencoursewares, you can simply watch a few lectures before deciding if its worth your time delving deep into the topics with a textbook. The textbooks are often listed in the course content, and we all know where we can find the appropriate pdf versions.

These books worked for me. They are in my home library and I try to flip through some of them once a year.

For maths, books like Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire, e The story of a Number by Eli Moar, Number by Tobias Dantzig, The Unknown Quantity by John Derbyshire provide good orientation for number theory, analysis & calculus and algebra. The second book might be tough to finish as its really really deep for a thin book. You might also look at books like God Created the Integers by Hawking, The Calculus Gallery by William Dunham that curate interesting and historically important results, where original works are often reproduced.

For physics, my goto book (which I have never finished) would be The Road To Reality by Roger Penrose. This self contained 1000+ page monster builds up to advanced physics in a methodical fashion from scratch. The first half deals with all the necessary maths from elementary to advanced and the second half covers physics. It has chapters with names such as calculus on manifolds, hypercomplex numbers, the entangled quantum world, gravity's role in quantum state reduction etc which sound pretty deep and complex for a recreational learner. Beyond that, you can also read books such as The Evolution of Physics by Einstein himself, Thirty Years that Shook Physics by George Gamow to get a historical perspective on the development of advanced physics. For a midway academic treatment, you can read Feynman's lecture on Physics volumes.

For discrete maths, books like The Algorithm Design by Skiena and Algorithm Design by Kleinberg and Tardos should serve you well. They don't push you into a maze of mathematics like Knuth books do, or a maze of source code like CLRS or Sedgewick books do, but show you the practical side of things with limited code and pseudocode. That said, Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming 4A Combinatorial Algorithms Part 1 will just blow your mind.

I have no recommendations but I want to make a point. I am not sure if by 'communication' you mean speech or writing, but IMO writing is superior to speaking when you have to communicate ideas that result from analyses and critical thinking.

Such results often tend to be elaborate (or long winded depending on who is listening) and need the listener to participate actively. Unless you are an invited speaker tasked with dissecting a topic, no one is going to have patience, and courtesy, to allow you to finish what you have to say. If you are going to be doing that at company meetings, the interruptions will be worse. The person in the chair might even cut you short by asking you to get to the point in a passive aggressive way. One could argue that developing good speaking skill is all about conveying ideas succinctly, to avoid this very situation, but I differ. Your speech is only as effective as your audience allows it to be.

Writing, on the other hand, provides a better means to communicate such ideas. Firstly, your speech idiosyncrasies, like accent, pronunciation, voice etc, won't become an obstacle. Secondly, you don't demand the listener to be patient and attentive to what you say. The engagement mechanics are better. The reader can always reread a portion any number of times till they understand, or can take a break and revisit a portion if it gets a bit involved. Then, it provides a better means of recording exactly what your thoughts are, one that lasts for a time much longer than spoken words. This not only allows your thoughts to reach people farther down the timeline, it also serves as a snapshot of what your ideas and inclinations were at the time of writing. Retrospection (along with introspection) is a key factor in growing intellectually. Finally, it doesn't suffer from the Chinese Whispers Syndrome when disseminated.

Now, I don't mean you have to develop essay writing skills because not every argument needs an essay. While writing essays is a very good intellectual activity, a short and coherent paragraph or two suffices most times.

Critical thinking is very addictive. You might start off with something small, like why a club must have a player, or why a product design is not good, which might be communicated reasonably well via speech, but you will slowly get to bigger topics where what I wrote becomes applicable.

The most prudent way forward is to be the idea guy, even business developer, and partner up with an engineer to start a business.

Programming is more than typing code. Its about design and architecture, and these things take a lot of experience to get it right (for whatever right means). Beyond that, it needs good amount of CS. Those of us who didn't study CS at university had to pick it up on job, which was no doubt fun, but also quite challenging. You need a lot of dedication to become good at CS (I am not claiming I am) and devs with steady job sort of have an incentive to become good. On the other hand, people who look at success of devs from outside hoping to tread their path but possess little necessary background have no idea how hard it is to become even reasonably good at it. I mean, surely one can cobble together stuff with Ruby, Python etc that have libraries for all possible tasks, but to sustain, improve and convert it into something successful is a mighty difficult task. And with your ambition to "work on my ideas, start a business and help make world a better place", you would need to be an absolute genius to manage to pull that off.

Now, you might well be an absolute genius, but chances are you would get bored going through the learning curve and experimenting. More than that, you would get frustrated that the ideas keep growing in your head but you have a long way to go before realizing them into reality. You would despair sooner or later and it wouldn't be pretty or healthy. I know this because I have been through this sort of a thing a few years back. While not a programming complete novice like you, I did find myself needing to learn C# and .NET from scratch in my early 30s after being a C++ dev all my life. It was just too much work and felt like waste of time - I could be building working things instead of writing toy programs. I gave up because, thankfully, after more pondering, I realized I could manage with C++.

So, what I instead suggest is to work on ideas while still working at the call center. Try imagining how the idea would work as a product. Iterate. Design it functionally without bothering about the implementation details, which you can discuss with the engineer you might partner with at a later point. Learn enough about technology of your choice in a top down approach. Don't try to become an engineer or learn it like an engineer, but become someone who can understand what engineers speak and gain enough insight to be able to ask further questions.

In other words, become (or stay) Pinkman instead of Mr White.

I have a tangential question, and hope someone can help find an answer to it. I searched a bit but didn't find anything.

It seems this man was still in early twenties when he was freed after the civil war. Further, he was a new arrival and not descendant of generations of slaves who had been Americanized and had made the new place their home just as their owners had.

So my question is: why he and other new arrivals like him didn't try to return home? Wasn't there any support and means for new arrivals to return? FYI, I know about Liberia, and I specifically want to know about new arrivals like Cudjo.

Lately, I am reading about such product features a lot. I wonder if there is some kind of intelligence about class action suits in the making against tech sites like YouTube, Facebook etc for being addictive and dangerous to health, because I can't imagine these companies taking interest in these sort of things suo moto. Seems they are preempting a future legal hassle.

I only skimmed the article, but whenever I read such material I feel these techniques are suited for jobs banking on charisma instead of knowledge and skill based ones.

I am a software engineer. I haven't held too many jobs, and have attended very few interviews. As an interviewee, I always gauged the enthusiasm of the interviewer before 'unleashing my talent'. I have had my share of insipid interviews where the focus was on API specifics instead of ideas and larger pictures. I politely excused myself out of the building mid interview when I realized they needed just a code monkey, albeit with experience. Seizing control would have been a total waste.

I have also conducted my share of interviews. The biggest turn off for me is when candidates try too hard to impress, either by listing out insignificant contributions to FOSS they have made, especially when not asked, or wearing their supposed geekiness on their sleeves. The worst are the self declared nerds and geeks, who speak, look and act in a way that covers all the stereotypes floating on the web. Its worse when, out of turn, they bring up a cool thing they 'hacked'.

Generally, going beyond job interviews, I think the need for being alpha is ridiculously amusing. I am no psychologist, but it smacks of overcompensation and utter lack of self confidence. I avoid such people in life.

I always had this inkling, so since early on, despite the hype and 'attractive' prices, I have bought nothing but books. In fact, I can't see myself buying anything but books online, from any vendor and not just Amazon.

Even with books, especially technical books, I have fallen to the trap of unwittingly buying Indian version of the book (I am an Indian living in India) where chapters are culled, contents are 'adapted', preface and other such items are missing etc. But this could be my fault as I failed to read the fine print, which does exist.

(It enrages me that Indians are forced to use substandard versions of internationally acclaimed books for their reference. I am fine with using gray scale instead of 32M color images, or using thinner paper, smaller fonts etc but altering content, skipping content etc is bad. I am sure there is an economic constraint behind this - Indian versions are usually 1/5th to 1/8th the international price - and often think why don't they use substandard presentation instead of substandard content, but what do I know.

Many times, I buy older version of a book which will be far cheaper, and in 'Indian price range', than the freshly minted, latest and up to date version, especially when it deals with 'static' topics like maths, physics, linguistics etc because I have come to realize that the book companies whip out newer versions with negligible changes just to keep their business running, especially when its supposed to be a text book.)

The situation is nothing new. I am from Bangalore and often hear a well known anecdote about Mysore, a large historically rich city about 100 km from Bangalore. I hear it from people of my parents' generation, so it must be the 60s. Its invariably said in a humorous tone.

The 10th year of school is a very important stage, transitioning to university, and the exam has always been stress inducing. On the day of the result, there were policemen guarding a lake called kukkarahalli kere in order to stop students who failed from committing suicide.

I don't drink, smoke or do narcotics, so I have no first hand account to agree or disagree with the veracity of this study. However, what I have experienced is sleep deprivation (not insomnia but self induced sleep deprivation because there is just not enough time to do stuff) makes me creative. I find solutions that are innovative, out of the box, laterally thought etc to problems that keep bugging me (I don't mean just programming or software problems). The strange thing is, the solutions come out of nowhere, like a divine inspiration or something.

And just like being drunk, the sleep deprivation, at least to me, causes noticeable loss in physical strength, makes me irritable and generally less socially convivial, causes gas, heart burn and bad breath, even shows signs of the dreaded ED, but the benefit of solution epiphany makes me want to go through it often. I know its bad for the health, so, now that I am over 35, I use it quite sparingly, only to problems that I estimate are really worth it.

The epiphany thing doesn't need sleep deprivation and there are several 'aha moments' in the normal state. I am sure most people who routinely ponder on problems have had this experience. But the quality of solutions and the thrill it provides makes the Sleep Deprived Solution Epiphany (tm) quite a stimulating and almost spiritual experience. I feel refreshed and more confident in my abilities after an episode.

Creepy stalker vs subservient personal assistant is just a point of view. The example you cite is not creepy. It just shows that the ads are not congruent with the content of website that is showing it. Not sure who is at fault here, the webmaster or the ad algorithm, but its just odd, not creepy.

Lets start with something simpler first. How about websites asking for user permission before using cookies instead of being genteel and saying "please note that we use cookies thank you", or at least have a 'delete cookie' button next to 'ok'? Doing this shows the respect for user's wishes wrt privacy. If this can't be done, then there is no hope of changing a billion dollar industry which is essentially based on similar tactics.

As for the topic, I can't understand why people demonize targeted advertising. This has been happening forever. On TV, you see products targeted towards housewives during soaps and products targeted towards men during sports. The same goes to news papers and magazines. You wouldn't find an ad for sanitary pads in a car and bike magazine. Stereotypes rule here. What we have now is just a more advanced technique, with good amount of maths helping it.

I think I know the answer myself - people conflate breach of privacy with targeted advertising. For me, breach of privacy would be something like my phone number being sold to telemarketers who make cold calls for bovine excreta, or gmail showing ads based on email content. However, google showing ads related to items I have recently searched is perfectly acceptable, even beneficial when done right.

That said, the point about ads that discriminate racially or based on other social factors is unethical and worrisome. I have no idea how the ad industry works behind the scenes, beyond the technology, but a business that socially discriminates in real world will always discriminate online as well. So this point is really sociological and not technological.

> How do you sustain your passion for the work you do?

This may be a cliche, but, passion comes automatically and sustains indefinitely if you are doing what you really like to do as opposed what you have to do because its your job. That's all there is to it. I have been lucky in that I found jobs that excited me, and I would be self employed soon, so I have no advice wrt finding passion in a forced marriage.

> How do you know when it's time to be okay with retooling and trying something radically different?

This feeds off the previous point. Retooling must be an organic development and not forced. If you are trying to learn something new simply to get a higher paying job with a cooler image, then you are doing it wrong, and are bound to revisit the feeling of being disengaged. However, if the need arises out of having to move on to the next stage because the current stage is lacking and the new stage will be a better replacement or better augments the current stage, you'll know it without needing to ask.

Take me as an example. I was a C++ developer focusing on desktop products all my career, which is more than a decade. I quit my well paying job in order to pursue some product ideas. A few months into the hiatus I realized that my products are better served and used on the web platform as opposed to being the traditional desktop products. Reasons included upgrade cycles and platform specific building and testing headaches. I had never gone beyond basic HTML and had to learn everything - DOM, JavaScript, databases, server side scripting and the whole gamut - from scratch. This was quite drastic a change. However, I was thoroughly immersed in the learning and experimenting process because that was an absolute necessity. It was imperative to my future plans. As painful as front end JS development is, I completely enjoyed (still enjoying) the experience. The backend development is even more fun. Had I shifted to web development only to get a "better and more challenging" job, I would not have survived three weeks.

I often think that people conflate bad product with bad luck. Specifically wrt tech startups/companies, there are way too many copycats that churn out half baked and substandard products that are yet another version of an already established and popular product. Further, there won't be many important things that set them apart from the products they intend to siphon off the customers from. These are destined to fail.

If anything, some copy cats are indeed lucky and take off, leaving most wondering how exactly did they succeed. Of course, these lucky ones later cobble together stuff that makes then a bit different from the competition, possibly eventually acquiring big competitors.

The only thing I agree with is that weak promotion and marketing can harm the success of a good product. That said, it is my firm belief that quality always wins. A really good product will become a sleeper hit sooner or later if it has gathered enough mass.

I am pleasantly surprised to see Kannada and Karnataka mentioned. I am a Kannadiga from Bengaluru. As for street slang of the city, don't ignore the copious amounts of Urdu loan words!

As you might already know, the case with Kannada is more complex. Firstly, it has high amount of diglossia. Even with all the unnecessary, flowery Sanskrit loan words removed, the spoken form is greatly different from the written form. Next, the spoken language has many many regional variants, as with most languages in the world. Further, the spoken language varies according to social groups aka caste within the regions. One could even attempt to find variations based on economic status, aka rich to poor scale, but as an amateur linguist I don't find anything particularly noteworthy to hold such a classification, and, if anything, the variation is mostly confined to the tone of speech (not same as being tonal) and a bit of inflectional oddities rather than vocabulary. In modern times, the rich tend to use more English words which muddles the matter further. Beyond all this, there are about half a dozen languages that are identified as child languages of Kannada that are mostly associated with tribal groups living in forests and mountains. I guess this kind of diversity is expected of a language which is in continuous use for nearly two millennia.

For those intrigued and interested by this, I can't give any references on the internet beyond the wikipedia page because Kannada and Karnataka are severely underrated and underrepresented in Indian historical scene. Any work of worth written in English belong to the colonial times, with 1930s being the latest. The information in this post comes from knowledge acquired by reading books published, in Kannada, by language departments of universities of the state and the literary organization, and others are from personal experiences.

> Nearly 50 languages are indigenous to that one region alone. Not dialects. Languages.

I am a native Indian, born, raised and living there (I mean in India). I find it hard to process this claim. I am pretty sure there are about 10 languages in any fairly diverse region of the country, but beyond that what we find are mostly dialects of various languages.

I am not sure if you are a 'western mind' (as you self identify in a later post) of Indian descent and whether you made that claim based on reading about Indian languages or by interacting with locals and asking them if they spoke languages or dialects. You see, almost all Indian languages (AFAIK) lack words to distinguish the concept of language and dialect. For academics sake, linguists do use some words but they haven't trickled down to general public. The tendency is to use the word 'bhasha' (or its variations such as bhashe, basai etc), which just means 'language', for both language and dialect, and even for such ideas as register and slang. So, any claim made by the general public about they speaking a different 'bhashe' must be evaluated properly and not taken at face value.