While senior engineers don’t make NFL wages, the executives do (including some former senior engineers). Would it be fair to compare execs to NFL player instead? (While engineers are those work behind the scene to support the game)
You don't even need generics to avoid nullable pointers, you can special-case it as they special-cased slices, maps, channels, etc… e.g. `*int` -> non-nullable pointer to int; `?int` -> nullable pointer to int, and a tiny bit of flow analysis in nil checks so e.g. `if foo != nil` implicitly creates a new non-nullable version of `foo` inside the block body.
Typically publicly traded companies have trading window limitations for its employees, and one purpose is to avoid insider trading risks. But that works for “normal engineer”. Executives who have more privileged info might need to consult their lawyers case by case.
One common approach also it to have auto-sell, which will automatically sell your stock on a schedule which is set long in advance, so there's no suspicion of insider trading. Honestly I think that should be the only way to sell stocks of your own company, either that or schedule a sale at least a quarter in advance.
Both options work, but you have to choose one style depending on the stage and type of the startup.
If you are founding a new coffee shop, or a trading company, probably you should spend more time working on the actual problem. But if you are founding a future tech (eg SpaceX at its beginning) or anything that requires huge capital or fast scaling in team size, you should spend more time on getting everyone buying the story and provides you with talent and capital to actually solve it.
There is no need to "respect" the process, but just to be more thoughtful:
> What's not in a Linux inode?
> My answer was: Lots of things...dinosaurs, the moon...
You can answer that you want more clarification, or even answer that "we can google this".
The "dinosaurs" thing might make the interviewer feel that you are being unprofessional since the interview is to test one's ability to perform in a professional environment. You don't help your colleagues by answering in this way when asked similar questions in work...
The content on/recommended by TikTok has two main interesting characteristics as I observed:
- Being very "personally relevant": It doesn't only recommend generally popular stuff. It can be very quick at picking up some niche interests of yours.
- Feel very authentic. TikTok makes it easier for "ordinary people" to get millions of views "accidentally". And as a result, many popular video feels very authentic, which might be preferred compared to curated content like in Netflix or even YouTube.
I uninstalled TikTok a week ago because it was showing me too much of the same stuff, but I may eventually return after I’ve had a break from using it for a while. Not yet but maybe later. Anyway, I agree a lot especially about getting a lot of views. Though in my case not in the millions and not even in the hundreds of thousands. But one of the first videos I posted to TikTok was seen 50k+ times. And it wasn’t even a good video, just a little bit of nonsense fun. Other videos I’ve posted since then, on a different account, have only gotten a few hundred views each but to me that is a lot still compared for example to YouTube where my experience has been that the videos I’ve posted to YouTube get a handful of views.
And the most interesting part is that the videos I’ve posted to TikTok don’t get a lot of likes. And to me this says that if I am able to make better content (not an easy thing to do btw), then TikTok is very much ripe for getting a lot of views.
And this is encouraging to me, because I’ve always liked the Reddit and HN way of using upvotes and downvotes, and I feel like TikTok does the same for video that Reddit and HN do for text and links, except that with the video format they have they can also use number of loops a video is watched by each person seeing it, in addition to hearts and comments. And the most encouraging thing is seeing the videos getting those hundreds of views because it shows that TikTok really is using this mechanism and that they are showing your video to people to determine if it’s worth watching.
This is interesting both from a software development point of view, and also from a video creator point of view.
Even before TikTok I was thinking about how Reddit/HN style ranking of content could be applied to video. TikTok has the additional strength you mentioned of discovering your preferences. I think the preference discovery is difficult to replicate without a bigger team of people and probably some knowledge about Machine Learning. But I think there might be room for more video services that use the HN/Reddit ranking method like TikTok also does, while being targeted at a specific audience, like individual subreddits are and like HN is. I worked a while on this with some other people, but limited budget made it very difficult to get anywhere and I have had to pursue other paths instead for a while. But we may continue down that line again at a later point.
TikTok actually gives people what they want. For people in my generation (20+-5), no one reads, cares about, or trusts mainstream media. We get our news from reddit, YouTube, and tiktok.
Yet, search YouTube for anything newsworthy and you only see mainstream media these days. I don't want establishment bs, give me something different.
I'm a Danish guy from the same generation and I hope you at least try to get news from something more reliable than reddit.
>We get our news from reddit
Things I learned from reddit:
>Rapes only happen in India
Does reddit filter news about rape in other countries? Because there is plenty to take from just by looking in the crime section in local Danish news. This might be one of the more bizarre biases of reddit.
>The US will soon collapse and Europe needs to prepare
I have been hearing this one since 2011. I am still waiting for American boat refugees.
>Chinese tourists are the worst thing since the killing of Harambe
It seems like reddit can only avoid being racist against a small handful of groups that they care about right now like Black Americans and Muslims. Anyone else is free game. Especially Chinese and Indian people.
For my, the most successful strategy I've found is to have a handful of academics and journalists that you trust and who cover a sufficient breadth of topics, and reading their articles/blogs/twitter feed. Then adding a few contrarians who I strongly disagree with just to challenge me a bit.
If you're not careful, you can fall into the same traps with social media as with mainstream media:
1. getting reporting from people who lack context on the issues, or
2. getting a distorted view of which issues are important.
I suspect also that most in your cohort could not afford to pay for some of the pricier information sources (and that actually goes for a lot more people). So sidestepping cheap "establishment bs" might actually be the rational strategy.
If you can get 70% of the calories for free, then despite the (usually known, or at least suspected, and generally down-played by the vendor) side-effects can be more attractive than paying full-price. The vendor has a strategy though.
actually quality public-media is startig gaining traction on yt too, e.g. Deutsche Welle is releasing loads of interesting short background docs / reports regularly. Its entertaining and very informative, can highly recommend.
I understand why you hate “establishment BS”... the requirement of being, at least to a first approximation, accurate, is a huge constraint on entertainment value.
“JFK clone weds two-headed space alien” is better TV than “Fed announces 1.2% jobs growth in September,” but I hope that in time you start seeking out facts over entertainment.
Listen, every single time I find a piece of information regarding tech in general (often security, cloud or IPOs), whether it’s TV, papers or the internet, they’re wrong on something because the journalist didn’t care about being thorough. This is just about tech because it’s my area of expertise. Now why would I believe that it’s not the case for every single field besides tech? Why would I believe journalists are thorough regarding politics, economics, health, energy? I don’t. That’s why instead of reading journalists pieces, I follow experts I trust on the fields I care about, whether it’s on Twitter, TikTok, YouTube or whatever. And why do I trust them? Because if they know what they’re talking about, they have rock solid sources which is what I expect and that I don’t find in mainstream media. They believe they are the source because they say so, but it’s not how it works.
You are kidding yourself if you think mass media is even close to accurate. If not by anything else you should be convinced about this by how easily mass media copied completely false "news" they found on the internet.
You could call them on their BS then only because you have internet too. When it comes to other sources mass media do no better job. You just can't see that easily how crappy they are in approximating the truth.
Mass media isn’t “close” to accurate (something is accurate or not), it’s just more close, on average, than entertainment-oriented news (which includes Daily Kos and Breitbart alike).
Cable news is also entertainment-oriented. All media revolves around engagement, which now typically plays out through appeals to identity or maintaining heightened states of anxiety. Yes that includes your ABCs, CNNs, and MSNBCs.
I’ve noticed people who only watch “real news” tend to have very homogenous anxieties and information about the state of the world that is rarely the most pressing or complete view.
Yes, that is true. For example, if you just read mainstream media, you will not see how the meatpacking jobs have all gone to illegal immigrants in the last 20 years.
I deleted TikTok after a week because anticorona was so popular.
A guy only posted stuff which was fitting his narrative and ignored basic logic for his videos.
He also didn't care at all when I pointed out the issues of his 'reseqrch'.
He posted a study saying that they had issues correlating corona measurements to corona numbers. Eve the researchers and the study itself concluded that it doesn't say Corona measurements are not working they only stated that they were not able to determine the right reasons but postulated why like that talking about measurements can have an effect etc.
He used the study to conclude that Corona measurements are useless!
This is super dangerous and crazy that other people like his videos and get their broken narrative supported.
He is literally part of the probl of missinformation.
He also posted a video from a ex vice president for allergies from Pfizer who worked there 10 years ago and knows nothing about Corona who talks about how crazy and wrong it is.
This guy trusts some dude who is not an expert more than real experts.
I have never could have imagined that it would ever be a problem to allow any person uneducated or not to just freely communicate stuff to someone else.
But this is so ridiculously braindead.
I don't even want to accept anymore that it's okay for someone to not get vaccinated because of their opinion. They are probably not able to properly determine if it makes sense.
Start listing to normal and known media again pls! Listen to experts in their fields first!
Always be critical but do not believe anyone else just because you like more what they say.
"For people in my generation (20+-5), no one reads, cares about, or trusts mainstream media. We get our news from reddit, YouTube, and tiktok."
And this in a nutshell is why I don't have hope for your and future generations. Instead of researched and published stuff you prefer "news" from unknown sources (including nefarious state actors)
Let’s be honest, most of the “research and published stuff” is also crap. The majority is built out of reposting things from those “untrustworthy” places, or from “interviewing experts”, that 9 out of 10 times are tangentially linked to the issue.
News has always been more about entertainment than getting information.
Actually I encountered on tiktok few bits of interesting scientific information I haven't seen anywhere else that when I googled them turned out to be pretty well researched.
For example young Hoatzin birds have wing claws like archeopteryx and use them for climbing branches in unbirdlike manner.
TikToks can be up to 3 minutes long and can be multipart. There’s tons of things that you can learn in 3 minutes or less: stuff about plants, music, mechanics, History, fashion, animals, lifestyle… And TikTok has a community vibe, some songs transcend the niches, that’s why everyone has heard the Wellerman song for instance.
Note that TikTok’s success is a response to The artificially 10-15 minutes long videos on YouTube. Strip the ads, the sponsorships and the algorithms which requires 10 minutes and you have TikTok.
Not to dismiss this course since I never tried it, but my personal experience is that I procrastinate a lot when I don’t enjoy my work, have a lot of FUD around the project, or simply not passionate about the profession.
On the contrary, when I got motivated by my work and feel excited, I just naturally stop procrastination. In fact, it becomes difficult to pay attention to things beyond work at that state.
My advice to people who suffer from procrastination: first think about the root cause, that is whether pivoting from current job is what you really need to do.
Agreed, but for me there have been a few more reasons than boredom. Broadly I see 3 reasons I’ve procrastinated in the past.
1. I’m bored, and not learning anything new, just doing the same thing over and over.
2. I don’t see where this is going, or the point of doing it. Felt this a lot with university assignments in particular.
3. I’m afraid. This is the only one where I think it’s worth persisting. Sometimes something is new and scary, like public speaking or deploying to production for the first time. In this case, what I’ve found to work really well is to just sit with the fear, observe the sensations it produces in the body, and then it naturally just sort of weakens.
For 1 and 2, I think the procrastination is actually telling you something important.
There's a view out there (partially promoted by Taleb) that procrastination is good - it indicates that you shouldn't pursue something, that it's not natural for you.
The problem is that while sometimes that applies, sometimes it doesn't, and it's worth overcoming (I fall more on this side of the issue). In any case, I'm a big advocate for reflecting on why people procrastinate. There are many different reasons.
Completely with you on 3. This is the most dangerous one - its like not wanting to hear bad news or give bad news. I have found myself doing this with health issues.
1 and 2 can be helped with a bit of discipline and perseverance.
4. I am exhausted or did not sleep enough. Sometimes it is difficult to realise / accept that I simply need some downtime. In that case cut yourself some slack.
5. I start day-dreaming about the root cause of a problem and how there are better ways to solve it. Often leading to some frustration about why there does not exist a better solution for. A good reason to start googling around or have a look at some HN for possible interesting solutions or approaches.
Yep, not enjoying the work in general is definitely one cause, but there are other ones. In our materials, we divide the causes into: behavioral, temporary, and deeper causes. Then we deal with them more specifically.
From personal experience I know that the same work can be daunting or motivating, depending on the personal habits/behaviors and systems. In other words, they are temporary. That's what the course focuses on (not looking for a new job).
In any case, your advice about figuring out the root cause is spot on (and also in the course).
Good advice. Also one thing that has very often worked for me which I learned from a run-of-the-mill Youtube video is just countdown from 5-4-3-2-1 and then do it for 5 minutes. So many times I've ended up working the whole day after that and often enjoyed myself too.
For a lot of people it's like the static friction vs kinetic friction kinda deal.
I like the friction analogy but would have it on an inclined plane to account for the energy produced/consumed once it's started. For example a task which provides its own motivation (once started) would be downhill and may only need an initial push to overcome static friction, then might be self-sustaining. On the other hand, an unrelentingly unpleasant task would be "uphill" and require constant willpower (cf. mechanical power) to finish.
Unless you just think of it like you are the person applying the "force" (to get something done), then the analogy is that you have to keep applying it but less once you get into motion.
Yes and no. I usually procrastinate also when the project or even ticket is too big or I'm not that familiar with the topic and I get a form of "writer's block". In that case, pairing with someone else or try to split the task in smaller chunks helps me. But not always, unfortunately.
1. Doing something else instead. But something that's also valuable. Not just scrolling on your phone, but learning something, building something, training, etc.
2. Put yourself out there. If you do good work and get positive feedback regularly, it is easier to keep going.
Oh man, I feel exactly the same way. Even if it is something I actually like, just getting started can be so hard.
My only real trick is to try and do something for ten minutes and then I can continue or not as I want. Often I want to continue, sometimes so much I get irrationally angry on the timer because it interrupts my work.
The catalyst should also be specific. A smartphone is a very broad-spectrum catalyst that accelerates all kinds of side reactions, depleting your free energy.
You want to have specific catalysts (think enzymes), clean feedstocks, and a good supply of free energy. Also the pressure (physical/mental confinement within one area) and temperature (level of stress/energy/chaos) need to be managed.
I find that I procrastinate the most when I have to write something “required.”
I basically never procrastinate on writing code.
I also don’t procrastinate when I’m writing things for intrinsic reasons, like I want to describe a neat thing I discovered.
But anything that’s required is hard. Writing conference papers for my PhD was horrid. I’d stare at a blank screen for days. I really wish I knew how to get past that, but I never figured it out.
This assumes that procrastination is some sort of a problem. I'd like start from scratch. What is the purpose of doing anything? What is the point of productivity? Is this subjective and materials like these are for people that see it as a problem or is there some generality to it?
Sometimes you don't always have a choice with the task. Eg filing your taxes. You can pay someone to do your taxes but my point is there are plenty of procrastinating triggering tasks in life you can't escape
I agree with your points, having experienced both sides. One other thing that I've noticed helps a lot is to have a starter template. It's a lot easier to not procrastinate when you have a structure to think with even if the structure is bad and you end up changing it completely. I tend to procrastinate more when I have to do something from scratch
Can’t agree more. Chinese branch of KFC/McDonalds not only has many delicious specials you can’t find outside China, even the basic fried chicken is much more juicy and flavorful. I can only find similar fried chicken in some very niche brands in US.
