HN user

yann2

262 karma
Posts2
Comments129
View on HN

Its not easy at all. Try it out with your family on your LAN.

People are used to so much convenience, its easy to brush under the carpet, just how much work is happening behind the scenes. Just coming up with a basic list of 3 mordern conveniences you want to support for your family will be non trivial.

In fact, just try supporting one.

(Worked as an RA in a distributed systems lab back in the day, and just getting everyone who proposed the algos and systems to use them was a nightmare)

Turing Oversold? 5 years ago

No one worked in isolation in the past either.

Move Newton, Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein 10kms away from where they were born, surround them by a different set of chimps and the story doesnt end the same way.

A good book from Niall Ferguson - the Sqaure and the Tower - makes the case tradionally Historians have studied individuals instead of groups because its easier to collect data on one chimp versus the entire troupe.

The key is finding the "right" people and proving to them you can be useful. That opens doors to all kinds of opportunities.

I had subscribed to a local newpaper and an article showed up where a govt official was complaining about how most of the historic local budget data was still in paper or pdfs. I found the pdfs and converted them to csv and excel files. Found the contact info of the guy complaining and sent him the data. He was so happy about that, he put me on a mailing list where there were a bunch of serious people talking about local issues. That was the big door opener for me.

First of all its not about standing out. In the vast majority of orgs, no one experienced expects some one fresh out of college to be a MASTER at anything. Most of them arent masters of anything either.

So dont worry about that.

Worry about location. If you AND all your friends in town arent getting responses - move. If you are sitting in the boondocks move closer to larger cities. Best case would be to move to the most buzzing active cities where you have friends who have access to school job boards and/or have landed jobs/know the process enough to help.

I spent 6 months in a smaller town getting no calls. Moved to NYC and the whole story changed. This ofcourse was because I had friends going to multiple schools there. Thanks to which I would keep getting info on which company was on campus, which team within the company, what they were looking for, what type ot questions etc. So even if I missed them on campus I would apply via the site knowing which positions to target.

Also keep brushing up every single day on a list of fundamentals, known interview questions etc. Dont let the activity over time rot the brain away. So when a call does come certains basics are on your finger tips.

Dont be cynical. Do the math.

It usually boils down to some simple scaling formula. So work it out.

They say they are targeting expats (pulling driving data from multiple national dbs) which seems to be their differentiator from incumbents.

Say 5 coders + 10 sales guys acquire 1000 customers in 6 months costing 1 Mil.

So what can you pull off with 5 mil, then 20 mil, then 80 mil...

Piece by piece sounds good. But after Xi and the rest of the old men who run the country kick the can, I find it hard to believe next gen Chinese leaders will care about Taiwan as much. Whats the upside to them for all this drama?

The argument against him is the same argument against Obama.

This is the age of Networks. Replacing one central node in a gigantic hierarchy of power doesnt seem to really do anything. There are too many hubs that need to be replaced to get anything done.

You need to report something a little more interesting than that. I mean people are busy, so if one chimp walks into the lab with a notebook filled with Ramanujam scribbles and another walks in saying their inner voice is louder which chimp do you think gets studied?

Open source intelligence should just mean fund more journalists. Some of the billions could easily go there with no expectations placed on what they do.

And not talking heads pls, just on the ground front line journos.

Big data, as covid has shown, all over the world, is full of errors and fudging as it moves up the food chain from village to town to city to state to national levels. People at the top of the food chains look like complete fools, as they get trapped having to make decisions based on pure garbage data.

The only way to combat that is a large army of trained dirt diggers at the bottom of the food chain.

It starts with Hans Christian Oersted deciding to place a compass next to a current carrying conductor.

Its such a simple thing but no one had thought of a reason to do such a thing.

What happened to the compass shocked the world and triggered Faradays many beautiful experiments.