scryder

While it may be difficult for someone in their 50s, I found indoor rock climbing, particularly bouldering and top-rope climbing, helped a great deal with a mild personal fear of heights, because it breaks old negative associations with heights.

I found top-rope climbing quickly acclimates people to heights, because it repeatedly puts you in situations where you are constantly in high places 5-30 feet off the ground, suspended by ropes, in a situation you're having fun. Having tied all your own knots so that you know they're good, having the ability to ascend gradually and have someone lower you if you get too nervous, having someone below encouraging you and ready to catch you with friction tools ensuring even if you let go of the wall, you just stay suspended at your current height, and getting a better physical sense for one's body as a physical, gravitational object, quickly get you used to being in the air in a context where you're actually having fun, which strongly helps break the fear.

Bouldering, rock climbing on walls without ropes about 5-12 feet in height over thickly-padded floors, accomplishes many of the same goals, and also accustoms and trains you to fall safely and trust in your balance and strength when up high. It's also easier to get started as a beginner, as all you need are rock climbing shoes and a gym.

Companies comfortable offering loans to risky candidates will feel far less comfortable doing so.

There is because there is some point where the ratio between amount of money requested, and expected postgraduate earnings for the chosen degree, would make for a bad deal due to the likelihood of default.

It’s less risky for students, but loan providers won’t want to overextend themselves to accomodate institutions who promise students the moon and demand sums they won’t be able to repay to “give” it to them.

As a preface, I’m not saying that those are inherently bad choices per se, because the underlying ideas are obscure enough that anyone who knows them at this moment probably knows other things you care about.

That said, never forget that ultimately your filtering criteria leak, and candidates will begin coming in with knowledge JUST about that, because you care.

Furthermore, you’re currently optimizing for trivia obtained in CS education that skilled programmers from other STEM fields and non-traditional backgrounds will lack. Besides people directly working on SSL, very few people need to know about symmetric encryption schemes at any practical level, and at best remember it at the same level I just stated it at, as a factoid. So you’re going to mostly find people who’d know that factoid and who’d remember that factoid; put another way, canned-answer spouters.

This is anecdotal, but there are different forms of test prep which the wealthy have access to that are way better prep than private tutors.

For example, Kaplan training offers 4-8 (you can pay for more) fully proctored fake SATs, written, tested and graded 100% in the style of the SAT, which they then use to tell you all the answers that you got wrong, where you lost points, what subjects those points were lost in, and then gives you test prep books specifically for the microtopics you don’t know, AND THEN gives you the books most people associate with test prep, AND THEN connects you with a group class, (AND if you wanted to pay for one) a private tutor. The tutors are trained on the subjects, are there to track your progress, and to teach speed tricks.

And if it’s still at all a possibility it doesn’t work, they guaranteed a refund on anything less than a 40% point boost on points you didn’t score or an 80% final score on someone untested.

My point is, test prep as I saw it for the wealthy is not just books, or a tutor, its a vast network of trained practitioners and materials which probe at your weaknesses and give feedback at a rate books or tutors alone could never match. Test prep between the poor and rich looks fundamentally different.

THAT, aside from all of the benefits of economic stability and the educational support parents making 100k+ can provide, is where you get these differences in outcome.

This idea you had, interestingly, has nasty traps.

1. You need to specify an “origin” which is (0,0).

This is hard because there is more than one good choice (base or top of a brick?), the structure base may be more than a single brick wide, and you still need an orientation for the base bricks relative to the table, since if they’re at an angle, it isn’t the same.

2. This fails, or at least complicates, on structures that are not fully connected, like 2 towers next to each other. XYZ doesn’t have tools for two towers, rotated, at an angle not parallel to the table.

3. You’re fucked on units if there are any “small” half bricks in the structure, which are common in lego sets.

4. It’s not human optimized. If you forget the origin (easy in a big structure, you fail.

It’s not a bad idea, for some forms of the problem, but this underconsideration is why explaining things is hard.

> It’s time for them to get creative and adjust their business models to become relevant again

You’re assuming that at present small businesses can do this, or, at least will be able to make this transition before companies like Amazon have crowded them out of the space they operate in. I don’t think current evidence suggests that’s likely.

By analogy, small businesses right now are a bit like ants, and Amazon a child with a magnifying glass. The child and ants are categorically different, and the ants that the child chooses to melt can’t “get creative” or “adjust their model” from being the prey of a quasi-predator: they merely die, the threat is too powerful and their biology too slow to let them escape. There is such a mismatch in scale between the ants and child that even though both could, in vague terms be described as “living creatures”, and even although the ants, at their most powerful, can sting, the vast majority are merely at the child’s mercy, with the other ants only being safe by nature of being hidden.

What’s key is we’re not really seeing new small business competitors emerging who, were your model correct, should be “getting creative” and then successfully taking on Amazon locally, BUT INSTEAD we’re seeing what we expect in the unbalanced ant scenario, almost all companies and lines of business Amazon targets being taken over by them or destroyed.

Based on this, I’m inclined to believe the view you have is flawed. Not only is there not a level playing field in which getting creative would be meaningful, there isn’t even room to actually compete, were you creative, unless you’re the child’s size.

And even if you’re his size, the child is a vicious fighter.

That's definitely something which you can tell employees if you're making an app like that, but it's tolerable to use on customers too, in a pinch.

They probably won't believe you, but it's better sounding than nothing when features and tangible results are sparse.

And hey! When all else fails, it's at least guaranteed to not be false advertising.

Well, in the most trivial and banal sense possible, it is: there's now another message app that wasn't there before.

I tried to unpack why this phrase is overused. I think it is because it's one of a few things that both sounds lofty when used in a pitch, and wiil always be true.

It's also a great dodge of considering the type of change (changing the world for the better or worse?) or of that change's magnitude (substantially changing the world, or just a little?). To some of a crowd, having heard the above, they will assume things about "changing the world" that may make further probing on those points at a high level sound like duplicate questions, and thus surpresses the chance of getting them. Useful for someone trying to peddle crap.

Statistics arises from a set of axioms, assumed truths, which can be used to prove all other things in the field.

You can take a look at the three axioms people use to justify statistics. If you are willing to accept them, all else that relies on them (without using new axioms) must be true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_axioms

This same logic is used to justify development in pure mathematics: choose a set of axioms which you accept as ground truths, and prove things using them. As long as you are unable to prove your axioms are contradictory, and the axiom choice seems acceptable, then the work that you've done (with respect to them) is philosophically justified.

> You can choose your own rate, so you can go as low as $10, or go as crazy as, jeez, I dunno, $500.. although the higher you are, the more difficult it is to land a client.

I'm concerned about sites like Toptal and this price-cutting mindset they engender, because in a lot of cases, even 500 dollars is an awful rate.

For example, 500 dollars, for two weeks of full-time work, is $6.25 / Hr. If you are an American developer, this is an unconsiderably low rate, literally less than minimum wage, in a field where salaries of about $30 / Hr are unheard-of low, even for entry entry engineers.

If it is hard to land a client at these fair rates on services like TopTal, in a lot of cases this would be a good reason to avoid that service and to seek either more traditional work or independent freelance opportunities.

I also feel it's important for freelancers, at least if they're based in America, to defend the value of their work that demands months or years of technical training. Yes, I'd agree the entire situation changes if you're a developer from a different country in which being paid something like 10 dollars an hour could support a family. However, I still encourage you to recognize that because most of the clients are based in America, they are more than capable of paying you rates far higher than $500 for good work, but people must first reduce their willingness to work at $10 to make $500 a norm. Be the change you wish to see, if you are capable.

In the end, choosing to work for higher-paying clients and avoiding clients who don't care about paying a fair market rate is about life satisfaction. If you are being paid 10 dollars for technical development work which will take longer than an hour, they don't care about you or paying you fairly. This means you can expect to be treated like the slave their hourly rate implies you are. If you work for clients which pay you market rates, besides the fact that they're paying you more, they will treat you better simply because they respect your time.

If company politics won't allow it, there are several possible reasons why which I can come up with:

>Possible Good Reasons

>They don't want to divert resources from guaranteed useful development to fix the possibility of a hack

>No one has got around to it yet and they're just hoping nothing goes wrong in the meantime

>No one has the expertise or has had enough time with the code to know that a problem exists at all

>Possible Bad Reasons

>Higher ups or peers want to implement and take credit for having implemented security fixes themselves. You doing it, specifically, would hurt their resume

>Personal data exposure is intentional and someone's either looking through it or wants to, for whatever reason.

So it seems like it's either a question of how priorities have historically worked out, or how your peers and managers get their jollies.

The former is easy to deal with: Find three similar companies (or bigger if you can't find similar) who had data breaches, tell someone in your company with the ability to alter priorities (probably your manager) how much money they lost from it (shuttered being the 'number' you really want to say, it's dramatic but tickles the brain in all the right ways), and hope they agree that you can fix that.

Alternatively, and even better, before even speaking with him, spend 20% of your work time implementing what would be a working solution to the security flaw(s) allowing a data breach before even making your pitch.

Selling a manager on

>"Hey, I have this thing that I built that would make the whole company much more secure, it won't cost you any more development time then I already spent since it's ready, and blocking holes similar to this probably will save the company from bad press and something like 5 million dollars down the road, based on similar breaches to the ones it stops."

Is a lot easier than selling them on the current alternative it seems like you're giving them:

>"Hey, we have an abstract problem that will probably bite us later. I think it's morally wrong, but I have no idea how long it will take to fix because I haven't tried yet, I have no proof that this problem will impact our bottom line, and I don't necessarily care enough to fix it myself. Despite all this, would you do us all a favor and make fixing it, rather than making new, sellable features, a priority?

Which is most of the real politics at work. The first speech is selling a ready-made and immediate resume boost to your manager with the literal words he would actually use, which I've never seen rejected, the latter is asking THEM to make the resource commitment of unknown time to fix the holes and, in doing so, when he could instead tell you to build features, to stick his own neck out for security's sake. It's not company politics that's the problem here in this case; it's that your manager knows better than to follow whims.

Give him fodder to stick his neck out, or do it for him, and you're more likely to succeed.

In the other case, where it's because someone else wants to fix it instead of you or data breachability being a problem is intentional, you'll meet pushback the whole way if you try, although you still can if you don't mind the potential fallout. Take comfort in the first case that at least someone cares, and that in the second case that CS hiring is still enough of a hot market that you'll probably be able to find somewhere else to work.

I am not saying Apple is a bad brand; their computers are of high quality, are great for personal use, and are more than capable of productive work.

However, statistically Apple computers certainly are not, in aggregate, established as work computers.

Windows maintains continuing dominance at 90% market share of the desktop market, and optimistic projections from Apple-favorable sites estimate about 8% market share, with Linux at about 1-2%. [1]

You can think Apple tech is good but recognize in the workplace Apple has presently lost and is playing catch-up.

[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/04/11/apple-grows-to-74-...

This looks like a preliminary move by Apple to establish itself as a viable work computer.

Windows and linux environments currently appear to reign supreme over the workplace, the former because of programs like Skype and outlook integration, the latter for ease of development. I think Apple has a long uphill battle attempting to break into the industry against the value-sell of existing options.

If "smart person" is a proxy for "scientists and engineers", the answer seems obvious; it's not included in their education.

Not in primary school, not in secondary school, not in their major, and not in graduate school.

If people truly believed in the importance of "smart people" learning about philosophy, they would put more effort into making sure they were actually taught some at some point.

>At some point, enough developers/managers will begin to take advantage of the system until executives wise up.

They only wise up if they have data that tells them they need to.

Who is the source of that data? Developers and managers.

This is why it is very, very hard for big companies to stay agile: the management hierarchy insulates self-interested managers from consequences.

You're not being naïve and if you're thinking in terms of maximizing positive company financial impact, you're correct.

At the scale of most major, non-startup tech companies, however, 99k worth of work is miniscule: it is less than the cost of a single fully-loaded engineer's salary and benefits package.

We can look at the manager based on this and see his choice from two angles, depending on if we assume he has good or bad faith for the company:

>Good faith:

"The large team is effectively guaranteed to succeed.

The likelihood that the 400 dollar solution works is an unknown quantity, and since that single engineer made it in the first place, I'd be putting a lot of negotiation power in his hands to ask for some large portion of the savings back as pay, meaning it's less likely we succeed and extremely possible he goes rogue. I'll go with the team."

>Bad faith:

"The company doesn't care about the difference between those numbers, they're the same at our scale. If I can waste ten people's time and net a sexy resume boost out of it for that little cost to the company, I'm probably the best manager they have.

No, you're not going to get to sabotage my next job if you're not going to do any work helping me spin this as somehow being better for my resume than me running a department with 10 people under me.

Actually, I've got an idea about that! I'm sure I can find something either wrong with your solution (or you) that allows me to say I tried for the savings, and after that failed, I went for the department I wanted anyways. I love a good compromise, don't you?"

This logic is wrongheaded, as it ignores the context which causes information to expire:

>Socially:

I'll expand this one the most, because a similar argumentative line will apply to all the other ones.

Current events stories are a common point of discussion, and current stories become less relevant over time.

For example, discussion about politics at this moment, during last October, and during this January, are marked by such flux in notable talking points that if you were reading articles from each time period during the others, you will not be meaningfully contributing to any individual political discourse.

This is true in discourse about some (or many) other fields, including tech, sports, and all modern forms of mass media, including film, television, and literature.

People who sit waiting for others to collate their media decisions for them while things wait in the queue for months will only be citing and capable of discussing settled true-isms, which is far more useless and uninteresting for discussion than being right or wrong. This is socially bad for you, and sociability, for better or worse, strongly correlates with your life satisfaction and income. In some sense, you're implicitly arguing happiness and money aren't useful or important.

>Relationship-wise:

The difference between wishing a friend a "Happy Birthday" on their birthday and a month later is in the latter case most people would recommend not bringing it up, as you waited too long. Relationships matter to most people, so shelf life on dealing with available relationship info is time sensitive

>Economically:

The moment you as a general person are aware of a major economic trend is, roughly speaking, the moment when the best parts of it have already been scraped over and most of the remainder of the trend will be late-comers fighting over scraps (e.g, bitcoin mining, getting a law degree, web startups in the 2000s, getting into machine learning and designing self-driving cars, etc). True economic edges, the ones that make people extraordinarily wealthy, come from knowledge that is going to be important but people don't currently recognize yet as such. This means time is of the essence with regards to economic information.

You can sit for months, but all you are doing is hoarding dead, useless, historic arcana: Big abstractions and high ideals, but nothing new or meaningful.

Living, useful information must be sought out in a timely manner.

>I don't think of a reading TODO as "food" such that you should eat the old food before the new food. (The old food will expire so it makes sense to consume that first.)

Based on this explanation, maybe you should. News and information often decrease in usefulness and relevance the longer you wait to digest it.

Codecademy's model tends to be very poor for topics that are sufficienty theoretically complex, as the turnaround time between exercise beginning and conclusion appears to be about 5 minutes for non-project work.

Repetition/drilling for understanding and examination of knowledge by self-testing are wholly absent.

Projects like "free code camp" can dodge this problem because the staff is working for free as an open source project, but it would take a lot more 5 minute segments to teach someone linear algebra, the theory behind any type of model, and the background information that is necessary to generate provably compelling insight than companies like Codeacademy seem interested in tackling.

If I can be extremely frank, you don't HAVE to force someone gullible enough to do it willingly.

And though this is conjecture on my part, even if you find refactoring and rewriting interesting, if you had the 50 hours back from doing these things and were instead rewriting and refactoring your own personal projects, I suspect you'd be equally as happy and would be something like 30x as likely to get fair remunerations for your work, rather than either enjoying the pittance they're going to give you or feeling the eventual heartbreak when they realize you're demanding a lot of money and they could just hire another passionate drone to pick up where you left off.

Trivially: fire you, and hire another poor shmuck at your starting salary to spend 90 hour weeks in time for the next launch.

If they are willing to do that once, rewriting everything using a coding pack animal, it is pathological and they WILL be willing to do it twice, regardless of whatever reassurances to the contrary they give you on a death march.

The 40 hour workweek as a standard isn't arbitrary, it's about preventing workers from creating a race to the bottom on hours worked, because that ends with anyone unwilling to be driven like a slave becoming unemployed.

Do your part and defend your right to your personal time and to go home unmolested after your workday ends.

This is because many European city were designed in a time preceding pubicly-accessible transport and thus were - and are - designed to be almost completely traversible on foot.

This makes coverage gaps in public transport less obvious or problematic than in the US. Cities modernized around the car are best traveled theough by car.

>Every time I've heard from someone who has switched from a manual feature engineering approach to deep learning I've heard the same results ... dramatic improvements in accuracy, generally within a few days of work

It bothers me how often otherwise rational individuals continue to be susceptible to survivorship bias.

Of course you'd only hear about the successes, the failures are either embarrassed or know better than to tell you their story.

The people who tried it for several months, saw accuracy cap out at something like 60-70% for processes that need something like >90% confidence to justify expenses, and which proceed to get ignominiously shifted into a different team (or fired) for building what the higher-ups view as a massive waste of money at your salary and the other engineers see as a data-guzzling black box. No, these guys aren't likely to tell their story. Or, at least THIS story.

The story you instead get from these guys is how

>After having had some fun times doing deep learning and data analysis, I'm excited get into the big new field of $THING_THAT_WAS_HIRING

and all the other dross that modern vocal programmers use to mask any possible scent of failure and actual on-the-job difficulty experienced.

"The easiest way to avoid loopholes" and "frequency of use in real life" are not equivalent.

I'd certainly argue there are plenty of vague, overbroad laws, regardless of the frequency of strict liability's usage.

I'd further argue infrequency actually increases the likelihood that otherwise innocent individuals are swept up in such cases: they have less reason to suspect that they've done anything wrong.

>Law ... monstrocities

We already have that, though, and "sufficienty written" is a very dangerous standard.

The easiest way to guard against "all" malicious input is write a vague law without clauses that demand mens reas, which means that regardless of whether or not you knowingly broke the law, by violating its provisions, you automatically did.

The leeway to "serve justice" also tends to be the leeway to condemn justice or to interpret law in ways it was never designed to account for.

The lawcomic, written by a lawyer, has a good section about the kind of overcriminalization you're discussing:

http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1031

>I can go just about anywhere for a random mix of subject

You're not wrong that this is short-term easier to establish an audience, but your long-term goal is to get to a point where a hypothetical reader of your blog will say "Well, yeah, you could find that topic anywhere, but personally I'm more interested in $NAME's opinion on the topic".

The best way to establish that is put out really good content until you've built up enough blogger 'cred' that you can tell me about other parts of you and I'll just wanna know.

>Everyone goes through 'my life is hard because X' - the solution is to work around it.

It's pithy to say, but telling someone to work around memtal illness is just not in the same category of standard woes - the fundamental tools of cognition you're expected to use to come up with, or implement, a workaround (like the one you propose) are also the tools which are malfunctioning. Acting like there is no difference between normal issues and mental illness is simply reductionist.

Now, because another thing you said was so left field, and seems to reveal a critical assumption of your views though, I'd like to take a minute to call it out.

>If the author was a super athlete and couldn't relate to people, he would simply be a 'jerk'. I bet he wouldn't have written that article :)

There's incredible survivorship bias in this assumption, in a way that tells me you're failing to contextualize that it's actually remarkable and important that the article was written by someone you don't know versus by an athlete.

Athletes are first and foremost entertainers, and especially in sports, the channels and forms through which they express their opinions are heavily monitored and limited. This is very visible when someone isn't playing ball with the standard line to toe -

(Aside: The lines you've probably heard from most athletes: I love my coach and team; We're all in this together; I'm grateful to be out here playing today; the other team is made up of great guys and we both played pretty well and had some fun; it's not about the money, it's about the love of the game; I'm an everyman and you could be me someday, kids, making bank! Try your hardest and you'll get there; $SOCIETAL_ISSUE? I don't really think about that, I just want to play $SPORT.

Most of these lines are bullshit we don't actually think represents the athlete's opinions, and everyone involved knows it. We still expect them, though. Why?

In the end, sane athletes are basically compelled to say them, either by their contract or by common sense, to avoid starting a media shitstorm about a rogue athlete.)

So, you'll only ever hear about athlete's views when they're either absolute top-of-the-heap untouchable AND they know they are willing to accept the personal consequences ala Muhammad Ali, or when then they don't care about the consequences and are willing to be despised ala Colin Kaepernick.

All this is to say that an athlete with a brand and surrounded by brands wouldn't post an article about themselves being autistic and struggling to form emotional connections NOT because they're good at something, but because they're being watched like hawks for any slip-ups, their sponsors will abandon them because they want to use them to sell to kids and wannabees who don't want their brands associated with mental illness, and if you admit to being mentally ill as a public figure it is all you will be known for.

This is where this becomes a core assumption: you've assumed a clean split - on one side, the poor-me's who would write this kind of article, and on the other side the successful people who have found a coping workaround and thus wouldn't want to write this article.

That divide doesn't exist, and can be explained by individuals in public roles rationally recognizing and fearing that writing an article like this would have terrible consequences for their public image and their livelihood. You need to, roughly speaking, have nothing more to lose to be willing to write this kind of article.

Your assuming that this is from a 'complainer' who hasn't found a powerful and public dedication, rather than recognizing that those with public dedications are not always "Doing just fine", but are merely forced to hide it, tells me that you're only focusing on messages you see about mental illness, rather than noticing how poignant it is that those specific messages are the ones you see, compared to the ones that seem to be absent.

I'm not sure about this article's core assumption that sharing this type of knowledge in clear and understandable forms is a good thing.

Just as magicians often agree not to share how a trick is done, because doing so kills the joy of the magic for many viewers, I wonder if doing so for game design weakens the power of video games as a medium.

This kind of article will change perceptions of "a hugely expansive, beautiful world" for many laymen into "well optimized frustrum culling".

In the end, I'm not sure we should assume that just because someone can learn about these things, that we should go out of our way to show people how they're done. Something is lost.

I think you may be overthinking how seriously your interlocuters take interpreting the behavioral questions.

The vast majority of CS interview questions are really just one or both of two categories:

1. Say something entertaining or that makes me like you.

2. Say something that proves you're competent so if I like you it's not a hard sell to hire you.

When you read this hard into a question that can in this framework be reworded "talk about stuff you programmed that you thought was mentally interesting when you made it", they truly only are thinking about your skills at the most basic surface level, they really just want to let you gush for a minute.

Even in the most embarrassing code you've written there are dumb bugs and little moments of triumph, and they're begging you to share some of the juicy details, of which I'm fairly sure every programmer has a few they can recall.

If you have no example of work you've done you can gush over, then yeah it's a problem, but to me this is a sign that the only truly wrong answer is NO answer or trying to fake a modicum of passion by gushing about something you actually don't care about, and THEN sounding wooden when doing so, because if you didn't come off as wooden, even this would be sufficient.

But saying playing politics is a good idea so that you "don't get fired" seems to directly contradict why you said politics playing was a good idea in the first place:

>"...[Y]our direct supervisor does not want you to do more or better because that might get you promoted over him. Instead, he wants you to do not very well. Then he can have an excuse to fire you..."

Which means that it's not really play along and don't get fired, it's play along and get fired at an indeterminate time that under such a manager probably is much sooner than later.

It seems that if your boss really fears you being promoted over him, that implies it must be a serious possibility. Since in either case, focusing or not focusing on politics gets you get fired (i.e, it's not actionable, or at best futilely so), why sit and wait on the feedlot to get slaughtered and instead focus on what you do control, getting a promotion and building the skills/doing the things that get you closer to that?