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I went back to school in sciences at age 27. This is after flunking out of maths when I was younger because I never understood the point and had challenges outside of school that distracted me...

Graduated with a masters at 32 with advanced maths under my belt.

Started working at a startup at 33. Dir Eng by 35 owing to my time as a foreman in construction and remote geophysical exploration. Turns out managing people in those fields is more difficult than software and ended up being excellent preparation.

This is all years ago now but there is nothing systemic that has changed. Career switches can give you a superpower, or at least, another perspective. The key for me is honest work, tenacity and empathy. The rest is, as they say, details.

When the team doesn't talk synchronously. So many times I've seen folks post a question that needs swift response to some issue tracker and then act indignant when they are held accountable for the thing not getting done. The answer is almost always "well no one responded until 3 days later".

Yes well no one asked you to leave some text on a server somewhere and hope someone sees it. They asked if you could do X by Y time and you said YES.

Hey cheers, I bet I'm around a decade on the same install of Arch too. That spans 3 machines. The trick for me is hot swap backups. I do an rsync backup of the drive to an identical disk (nowadays a 1TB 980 Evo) and then immediately swap the backup drive to the main drive. I have little helper scripts to format drives, do backups and automatically update fstab and the boot config. So new machine no problem, rsync the files into it and boot it up and I have everything exactly as it should be.

Now and again I'll do some package spelunking (pacman makes this straightforward) and clean out cobwebs. Next on my list is my emacs config which is like 15 years old and a couple generations out of date. I wouldn't care but startup times are slowing down and there is a lot of great ideas and packages to solve this problem. Just need the time, it's a few hours here and there, but easily enough to keep Arch going forever!

Lisp code is written in those parenthesis because in lisp, that is how you write a list. This means that your code is data that you can easily compute. It's trivial in lisp to quote some code and operate on it, also it means the macro system looks a lot like writing "regular" code. This opens up programming paradigms such as language extending, DSLs and meta programming (writing programs that write programs) that are clumsy, difficult or impossible in other languages.

When someone says "In Lisp, everything is a list" ... They really mean everything

I identify with much in this blog post. One novelty argument:

Managing is hard because it embodies the dialectic between capital and workers. Therefore a deep understanding of the Marxist critique (and exposé) of capital will help provide an analytical framing around what an effective manager needs to do. You can approach it from other lenses but they all break down due to the two polar forces most strongly at play.

This has honestly aided me greatly. Your mileage may vary.

In my fantasy world this is a useful screed.

The world I see is different. You have your dominant companies and their web apps. They set the standard and cultural forces (what's cool, modern, high quality) push everyone to adopt or get left behind (loss of user growth, status, money).

Because we are all competing for attention and dollars, this is capitalism after all, we'll keep trying to outdo each other. And the big kids with the cool toys will set the standards and everyone else will race to keep up.

Cultural forces will indeed change, new tech will distrupt and new players emerge... But the invisible hand will soon be at work again and we'll be writing WASM blackbox web apps with kubernetes and a few blockchains running on on our laptops.

That too will pass, but we'll always be pushing, adding more complexity than strictly necessary for basic needs. It's what the system demands!

This looks promising

"As the coroner's inquest reached a verdict of an act of God, Meux & Co did not have to pay compensation."

The good ol days, sometimes a lot like these current days...

Yes we're all looking at you Sacklers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family

"The bankruptcy judge acknowledged that the Sacklers had moved money to offshore accounts to protect it from claims, and he said he wished the settlement had been higher."

Wished... Indeed... Only an act of God could have stopped them surely.

Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology.

It's like a master class in historical political relations all in a single (large) book.

I see it as calling a function with the link as the Arg stored in some structure. [SomeFunc](CalledWithLinkArg)

Not sure why that one stuck for me.

I enjoy browsing around and reading comments. Probably 30 mins a day on average. I don't use Facebook or Twitter (not much anyway) and I rarely watch TV. I listen to podcasts every night as I fall asleep.

30-45 mins avg on HN in evenings, or while waiting for something, or in-between tasks... I enjoy it and it keeps me current with the industry chatter. Sometimes I find cool stuff that inspires me to dig deeper.

I'm satisfied and don't beat myself up about it as I'm pretty busy and need downtime. So I don't feel the need to optimize much. Oh I do use Google Keep to save articles or items of interest so I can dig them out later if I have time to hack around with stuff.

... I have 2 young kids so hobby time is rare right now. It's increasing with time though :)

Fourier Analysis.

Knowing how easy it is to go from time to frequency (fft), how there is an uncertainty principle at play between resolution in time and frequency and interesting use cases such as pulling out periodic patterns from data sets (sensor data is great).

It's pretty fun and accessible. Introduces beautiful mathematics and you can easily play with them visually in a Python or Julia notebook etc.

Ha indeed, s/Humility/Hubris.

Thanks Brian for the link. Looking forward to watching where Open Firmware community / Oxide / Rust take embedded. Exciting stuff.

Oh awesome thanks, I'll take a look

I've ordered the STM32F3 & thinking of ordering the audio dev STM32F4 board to try out Humility.

I read all the docs and I understand Humility as an OS, it's extremely simple (for a OS) and it is going to be fun to develop against. Or at least, I'm excited to give it a shot.

My initial ideas are audio controllers that parse sensor streams and convert that to OSC signals but I have no idea what implementing the network stack will look like as I need UDP from Rust on a microcontroller.

If anyone has experience and wants to share drop me a line at @ben:matrix.graythwaite.ca I'd love to chat about it

If you enjoyed the effort but ultimately failed anyway... I guess it works if you manage to die relatively happy instead of miserable.

This logic can also apply to hobby projects and interests. "There are amazing artists or software programmers building world class stuff, what can I add?" is a common enough refrain I've encountered here on HN.

It's not just about the end results, it's about being the person or seeking the experiences you want to have.

Maybe you want to be the person who builds companies. Go build one. Maybe you want to make 3d designs or game engines or hack on circuits. Buy the book and get started. You're not likely to be the next maestro, no one is. But you do bring your unique identity and a fresh perspective which those before did not have.

Even if you don't build a world changing something or other at least you did the things you wanted to do and were the person you wanted to be. Even getting close to that is a life well lived, and lucky and privileged in many eyes.

Another point that is often lost is how mathematical Julia code can look, especially for matrix functions.

Yeh this is superficial, but so are 200 dollar sneakers and they do just fine.

Honestly there is a real pleasure writing code that looks like it could be on the blackboard. The numpy / numba world in Python just feels... not great.

Ha it's still going strong. Now bifurcated between node+next and the rise of Deno.

It won't stop either because the road between between JS client dev and JS server dev is so smooth. Path of least resistance type thing.

I wholeheartedly agree. X instead of reasonably-similar-Y isn't convincing in and of itself. I'm not even convinced Julia will be the dominant numerical programming language.

That said I'd like it if it develops a robust and large ecosystem because I personally like coding in it. It has built-in matrix ops, parallel ops, dynamic dispatch etc that are really nice to work with in the numerical space. Like Matlab but well rounded and fast.

So I admit my comment is less argument and more cheerleading. "Hey folks let's make this the case so us numerical people can have a slightly improved experience".

In the grand scheme of things this is as noble or ignoble as any.

Java has a massive ecosystem yet we continue to see rapid replacement of backends in JavaScript (Node now Deno) and Golang. Each of those language ecosystems rapidly became both large (arguably too large) and robust.

Rust has been eating C++ lunch. Same rapid rise of ecosystem story.

Instead of forcing Python to be a language it isn't it might be more efficient and ultimately the "right choice" to invest the time in Julia.

Julia is great for numerical computing, it needs faster time to plot and more hands in the ecosystem. The former will be solved and the latter seems inevitable to me. Pitch in!

I'm going to be controversial and say this has a marginal impact on educational outcomes. Probably skewed towards better as I'm assuming they've done their homework.

Look, kids who love math and nerd out in their spare time will still be tearing into calc in uni.

Those who don't will still pick up enough to hit the trades or JOB.

The kids who don't need advanced maths might actually get more out of what they do learn as it's delivered at a higher age.

Ok who knows maybe it has marginally lower outcomes over all. No one knows and the people in this thread decrying the end of exceptionalism are deluding themselves into thinking life outcomes are extremely sensitive to high school educational content. I don't think that's verifiable.

Getting people to school and keeping them from dropping out is likely a better first order optimization to overall outcomes. Kids are still going to get their calcs in uni and the universities will still be pumping out overly-educated overly-indebted young adults...

I'm working on some music synth stuff because I learned to play piano (rudimentary) and know how to write code. It's a great creative outlet.

I am not, and never will be, the next Kraftwerk or author of SuperCollider or whatever.

I do like exploring and have interests. And with what I do know (enough code and music to be dangerous) it ends up being a lot of fun (well it involves code so sometimes it's frustrating as hell, but any creator will say the same thing about their medium).

I guess the point here is that you could get angry or disappointed with life or you can focus on things you enjoy.

This can be naive advice if there are other issues. I had luck with therapy, it's a good idea for every human IMO. HN is OK but professionals are better.

I've been running Arch Linux for about a decade to avoid exactly that. I mean, I put up with some crap... GPU drivers, Alsa to Pulse to Pipewire, terrible or non existent Slack, Teams, Zoom apps, bizarre overlapping partially redundant X configuration, Xorg to Wayland, building emacs from SRC to get it to load faster... Endless crap really.

But man, it only loads services I know about and it's sooooo fast. And best of all it shuts up when I stop working :)

I've declined PRs in the past (and had mine declined) over boolean flag args, magic numbers etc. When you work in a team readability is an important factor.

Still, I do wince sometimes at the Everest sized heaps created in JS to do even the most trivial of tasks. 10s of thousands or hundreds of thousands of objects being generated in a smallish React app.

It's fast enough, the VM is obscenely optimized, and it's readable. But what is all that stuff really _doing_?

It reminds me I recently had a company ship me a laptop with Win on it. I turned it on and logged in and the CPU was just a madhouse with Edge and 2 tabs open. What is the CPU even _doing_??? Does the company mine crypto on company laptops for cash flow... or, what?

Lot's of people have ideas, great ideas even. Ideas are not particularly rare nor hard. Luck, expertise, privilege (for those not born into it) and timing are more difficult. More importantly, to help ensure maximum impact, one needs to want to push an idea into the world, and push hard. Generally there are better and more fun things to do in life (most would agree with me as pg noted himself).

Academics have great ideas and it takes thousands of them building on each other to drive a technological revolution. There would have been another Einstein (or collection of Einsteinlettes), it may have taken a decade but the soil was fertile. Einstein helped develop the ideas behind Quantum Physics but had no further world changing ideas left to contribute once it materialized.

So what type of ideas are we talking about? Capitalist entrepreneurial ideas for building startups with? That seems like a depressingly narrow understanding of ideas and what they mean for humanity.

I'm looking forward to something like the brilliant rayon parallel operations library https://github.com/rayon-rs/rayon

We won't get data race free guarantees but if built into pandas or Vaex we can have a near transparent API.

It'll really open things up for those apps running on 32 core machines. They're out there, I deploy these things frequently (Plotly Dash framework for large Enterprise customers).

There are plenty of countries that have higher minimum wages than the US and don't experience greater inflation. One reason is that the money for these higher wages comes not from higher prices, but from executive and investor compensation. If workers have more leverage and companies compete in a competitive market then prices can stay low by cutting fat from above to feed those below.

That higher wages == inflation is a self serving argument that only gets rolled out when those wages are blue collar wages. You don't see it applied to the ridiculous amounts of money the managerial and investor classes earn.

The 50's and 60's saw modest inflation and rapid wage increases. Workers had more leverage and the US wasn't nearly as unequal.

Clickhouse went corp a couple weeks ago, Timescale goes fully managed, Snowflake, Dremio, DBX ... :popcorn:

Apache Arrow, K8s, ML analytics have given rise to another DB War.

The end of NoSQL was the realization that SQL had a good reason for existing in most cases. Now we have massively distributed SQL in many flavours. I wonder what the hard lessons will be this time?

I'll wager small data companies will be spending good money on vastly overpowered engines... I wonder what else tho?

Since you're a software dev you may have explored supercollider and other environments where you can employ great tools. I've been looking for a hybrid UI/UX + Audio programming environment that would combine the freedom of code with the visual cues of a DAW but haven't found the ideal fit. So far I've been rolling my own with cl-collider, a common lisp client for Supercollider which uses some lisp tricks (macros) to good effect.