I'm always surprised that reading source code is such a rare occurrence or suggestion in this world. If you consider yourself even in the vicinity of "advanced", I think you're capable of learning great stuff by looking at anything on github. Something big, but well organized. Lo-dash, Node, Mocha, etc.
Of course you won't understand everything on first read. But you will learn really good things if you know how to look at something confusing and identify what it is you don't understand; then you can go find didactic materials to fill in the gaps.
This is an amazing way to learn. You get to see how some of the most used, or cutting-edge tools are implemented (for free!). You learn about the tools themselves and thus gain expertise in them. And, you gain the meta-skill of working in unfamiliar territory, which I think is a fundamental key to being considered "advanced".
Totally fine, so long as you know that makes you an "advanced user".
I can't imagine you'll find a sane place to work where senior people are only capable of learning something after consuming a tutorial or a manual. The nature of the work is to drill down one layer below what you're working on. Do you need to know how to smelt steel in order to be a good car mechanic? No, of course not, but it sure helps to have taken an engine apart. And if you're trying to build the next, better engine, it's really great to see the internals (and the commented motivations!) of previous implementations.
Very similar story here. We got married a month ago. We did everything ourselves (plus friends & family), and we started too late.
We started using Asana so that we could stop having nervous breakdowns every week. It worked. Now we use it for stuff like coordinating anything that doesn't fit on a notecard. Shopping lists generally are just on a kitchen whiteboard and you take a pic before you leave.
Any chance your school makes its exercises available? I've been trying to go through CS:APP myself, but the exercises aren't included and I believe I'd need a .edu email address to get them.
No, the authors guard that stuff pretty jealously, and instructors are forbidden from allowing the exercises or solutions from being published online. It's a well-known course used at a large number of schools outside of CMU (150+ I think?), so they're concerned about people distributing solutions or something. Maybe you can try emailing the authors about it or something?
I think nobody really touches David Simon in TV. He's like Miyazaki in anime I feel. First it's him, then everybody else. The Wire, Treme, Generation Kill... it's just another level. On the next step below we'd have things like Man Men, Deadwood, The Sopranos, etc.
I think the Wire excelled at a more difficult game because the writing adhered to a kind of journalistic dogma that didn't allow for many of the tricks used in the storytelling of Breaking Bad or The Sopranos. Walt could blow up a room and not only survive, but convince a psychopathic drug dealer to do business with him by that very act. Tony Soprano could garner empathy and understanding by showing us his dream sequences. But The Wire gave its audience only what its characters said and did. Characters who-- by and large-- couldn't just "problem solve" their way out of their circumstances like Walt did so often.
Season 5 is the most underappreciated season, but I've really started to appreciate it.
McNulty has been a character who believes the ends justify the means. In Season 1, he falsifies that Sidner (iirc) was on the roof, thus allowing the police to admit phone tapped evidence.
In Season 5, it shows how taking that mentality of by any means necessary can quickly spiral out of control.
I enjoyed deadwood, and I thought the story arc with The Comstock and George Hearst as a robber baron was going to have a huge payoff, but instead the series was cut short which is a huge shame.
There is just enough foolery to make it easily tier 2 for me: Francis Wolcott's story arc, Olyphant's acting, Seth Bullock's attempt at morale highground.
If folks aren't turned off by violence, profanity, and prostitution, it's definitely must watch tv.
Sopranos is in the tier JUST immediately below The Wire and Breaking Bad, for me. Amazing TV, but not quite at that extra-elite level. I have not yet watched Deadwood, and judging from these discussions, I should.
Hey there — AT is a well-known brand (surprised to hear you support it well with such a small team!) so I imagine HR will get a lot of applications. Would you be open to me sending you a couple questions directly via email?
Hey there — the careers page doesn't have any indications which (or any) positions are remote friendly. Do you know which of the engineering positions could be filled by US-based remote people?
Most of the roles are remote friendly for US-based remote folks. Please feel free to apply or ping me directly with the role you are interested in and I can verify.
I think the main problem is that we conflate the political spectrum (what are the responsibilities of the State?) and the epistemological spectrum (how do we determine what is true and not?). The "Western World", for better and worse, is a product of the Enlightenment, and as a result is irreducibly leftist in its epistemology: modern democracy depends on a belief that a citizenry armed with the scientific method and rational discourse can rule themselves without resorting to the authority of a king or a holy book.
The Right Wing (in the US, our Republican Party) is less identifiable by its right-wing policies as it is by its right-wing epistemology: they reject all scientific evidence for climate change, biological and geological history, medicine, etc. For the religious, this manifests itself in the old epistemology that says the Bible is the sole source of all Truth. For the non-religious, this tends to manifest itself as total nihilism, which is expressed in the more heartless strains of Libertarian Objectivism; for these people, might equals right and society is a zero-sum game where the only truth is winning and losing.
And this epistemological divide is the one that is tearing us apart. When you say there's no serious right-leaning counter-weight to (the NYT et al.), what you mean is that there is no serious news outlet that doesn't hold the Enlightenment values. And when you put it in this light, it's an obvious statement, isn't it? Politically speaking, the WSJ and the Economist can very much be considered right of center (leaving aside that the median center has moved right over the last 40 years), but they are still rooted in Enlightenment science and rationalism.
Point is, although the political right wing is currently the main base of the epistemological right wing, it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. And the problem with saying we need more right-wing voices in mainstream media is that there are so few of them who meet the basic epistemological requirements; when they do, they are often rejected by the broader right wing for being too far left!
53% agree "Global warming is caused mostly by human activity"
49% agree that "Most scientists think global warming is happening"
71% strongly agree that they "Trust climate scientists"
What struck me the most was gap between the credibility of climate scientists and the two more heavily politicized topics of whether humans are driving climate change and whether there is agreement by scientists on it happening. How can ~ 70% of people agree it is happening and trust the scientists but only ~50% believe the outcome of the research?!
I don't expect it but I think it's a great illustration of the gap between reality and political belief (something we likely all suffer from to some degree).
>>That's a very convenient and self-congratulatory view of things. Science denialism happens on both the left and the right.
Sure, but the left treats its science deniers with equal levels of disdain and does its best to marginalize them. The right cheers its science deniers on and elects them to government positions.
The right has religion. The left has post-modernism. One says science is false, the other says science does not matter. The end result is roughly the same.
>Sure, but the left treats its science deniers with equal levels of disdain and does its best to marginalize them.
I haven't seen any significant scorn directed towards post-modernist views from NYT, WaPo and co. At least not in the last several years. In fact, they seem to implicitly welcome those views.
> The right has religion. The left has post-modernism. One says science is false, the other says science does not matter.
Neither does religion in general statement that science is false, not does post-modernism in general say that science doesn't matter. Some religious views may either deny science generally or, more often, deny only that science that conflicts with the religion's axiomatic beliefs (which implies that the religion have axiomatic beliefs in the domain to which science applies, which not all do.)
And while post-modernism may, depending on the particular flavor, deny either the fundamental existence of or the accessibility of an objective root truth, it has no fundamental conflict with the utilitarian argument for empiricism and science (it conflicts essentially with the quasi-religious belief that science extends beyond being a useful means of predicting future experiences to being something that ultimately tells the root truth of the universe, but that belief is not essential to science.)
Thank you for illustrating my point by conflating the political spectrum with the epistemological spectrum. :)
As for "self-congratulatory", I was responding to the old chestnut that mainstream media is too far to the left. Next time we talk about GMOs and anti-vaxxers, I'll have a chance to chastise the people who are more likely to be on my side of the political spectrum.
I would put it differently. I think the episemological divide (or at least one of them) is between pre- and post-Hegelian views. Post-Hegel, real truth (in the old sense) is gone, and all that's left is a repeated cycle of dialectic.
What we're left with is that "truth" is only true within a society or group; I can have my truth that's true for me, and demand that you respect it. (I was going to say that this is what we're left with on part of the left, but on reflection the behavior you're complaining about on the right fits this pattern as well.)
Yes, I certainly do think it possible. But it will be more difficult and slower going. Read widely, as the biggest hurdle for a self-learner will be in identifying and filling their gaps of knowledge. Read papers so you learn how to use language such that you are not setting off any crank or dangerous dabbler alarms. Reading lots is also necessary to habituate yourself to the jargon. Read the books by David MacKay and Christopher Bishop. Don't waste time if you're stuck on papers, it means either you're lacking either the shared knowledge or the authors are being purposely obtuse. Save anything you think is the prior for later (unless is a minor iteration of something, which most are). It might take multiple readings spread out over a large time span before you can truly understand the important concepts and papers.
If you can, try and organize or join study groups where the levels of skill are varying. Having a group will help in those times when it seems all too much and you're ready to quit.
Finally, don't try to compete with the well heeled industry titans and their GPU Factory Farms. Find an understudied but important niche where your lack of knowledge is not so much a setback because even if available mental tools will differ, everyone is equally ignorant on the terrain.
Of course you won't understand everything on first read. But you will learn really good things if you know how to look at something confusing and identify what it is you don't understand; then you can go find didactic materials to fill in the gaps.
This is an amazing way to learn. You get to see how some of the most used, or cutting-edge tools are implemented (for free!). You learn about the tools themselves and thus gain expertise in them. And, you gain the meta-skill of working in unfamiliar territory, which I think is a fundamental key to being considered "advanced".