michaelrpeskin

8 ms·

31.
by michaelrpeskin 1y ago
I attribute my barriers to entry as things that forced me to really learn. All my family could afford was a 386 with 16MB of ram when 486s where pretty common. I had to really hack to make things work. Working under constraints meant I w
32.
by michaelrpeskin 1y ago
yes - I often think about what I would do if I "won the lottery" or similarly got a significant amount of cash. Even though I have a low mortgage rate (refied in the middle of COVID), I'd probably still pay off my house. I
33.
by michaelrpeskin 1y ago
You haven't been in the industry long enough :)
34.
by michaelrpeskin 1y ago
Yes, this! A couple of week ago, I had a little down time and thought about a new algorithm I wanted to implement. In my head it seemed simple enough that 1) I thought the solution was already known, and 2) it would be fairly easy to write
35.
by michaelrpeskin 1y ago
Yeah, I don't like it in "channels" either because it's too random. What I started years ago at a previous company who was using Confluence (yuck, I know), as the knowledge base was to have a "Personal Space"
36.
by michaelrpeskin 1y ago
This parallels an article that someone I follow wrote a couple of weeks ago. His way of describing this is the "second world effect". The article is better than I could write (link below). But basically, the "third world&q
37.
by michaelrpeskin 1y ago
A little snarky but: In my experience, the folks who are 100x more productive are multiplying 100 times a small number. I've found great success with LLMs in the research phase of coding. Last week I needed to write some domain-speci
38.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
Was it Larry Wall that said "it's easier to port a shell than a shell script"? I've done similar inter-language changes, and I have always found it easier to not change the language of the business logic. (Unless the ch
39.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
Yes! I came here to say this. It's like saying my skills in "English" are equivalent to Maya Angelou's skills in "English" Skills are things can do regardless of the technology/language. My skills are in
40.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
Regarding Opportunity Cost... For a long time, I felt stupid for getting my PhD during the buildup before the 08 bubble. I could have socked away a lot more money than my measly stipend. And afterwards, I always had decent jobs but not SV
41.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
I have a old guy that I work with - PhD in Math (because CS didn't exist then) - who does lots of algorithm development with me. I often get Word docs of pseudo code from him. I'll do a search-and-replace on things like "LE
42.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
I've been in similar positions throughout most of my career (early promotion above my current skill level with no mentor). If I look back, I think only my first internship ever did I have a good mentor to learn from. So I think I kno
43.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
Yep, we found the google-youtube url issue too. Right now, I have youtube filtered by MAC on my Roku. I would like to add granularity so that they can watch some youtube, but they make that too hard. So we all just share the living room T
44.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
That's "equity" for you. We can't be unfair and give someone something that makes them better. It's easier to keep the top kids down than it is to lift the bottom kids up.
45.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
^^ This! My 4th grader has some sound sensitivity issues, so he uses that as an excuse to go out in the hall and read a book or listen to an auto book on his school-supplied chromebook when the classroom gets too loud for him Well, guess wh
46.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
My take on it is that ACA set up the insurance companies as essentially a cost-plus system. I forget the actual name for it in the ACA, but the general idea is that insurance needs to spend at least 80% of the premiums on health care. Sou
47.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
I think that PP is generally talked about backwards. Everyone says that the least experienced programmer should drive while the senior programmer talks. When I was an intern 25+ years ago before pair programming had a name, I sat beside t
48.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
The lack of control on the layout can sometimes be a feature. If something starts to look bad, I often use it as a sign that my architecture is wrong. I’ve found that many times it’s helped point me in a better direction. If it’s easy for t
49.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
I remember when I was in grad school, I was out with drinks with a bunch of students from the biology department. One of them was talking about finishing up a paper to submit to the FDA on a drug she was testing. She called the FDA "
50.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
Ha! When we were putting in the flooring in the kitchen, I kept interrupting him "optimizing" the layout and he snapped at me like one of his workers. He immediately apologized since I was paying him, but I told him that he was
51.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
Agree - I have a great handyman who also lets me "help". I can do the grunt work (carrying heavy stuff from the truck, demoing stuff, etc) saving him time, and he can do the stuff he's experienced at (he can eyeball a measur
52.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
> A unit system is not just something that matches objective reality but something that has some cognitive ergonomy. Beautifully stated! And that's one reason why I like the US units of measurement better than SI. I mean, the divid
53.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
I think it's even MORE important to have good "soft" skills to graduate above a senior engineer. If you go to a management track, you kind of have the prestige of "being the boss" that means you can be pretty bad a
54.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
Yeah. I’m an aged mountain biker. Very mediocre. But when I travel to low altitude, I feel like Superman when I ride. I live at 5000 ft now, but in my 30s I lived and slept at 9000 but did all my rides near 5000. That was an amazing time fo
55.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
I did a similar thing using some titanium out of the scrap bin. (Yes, I know that it will be nearly impossibly to cut off in an emergency, but we just take them off before we go climb or do other dangerous stuff.) It’s been 15 years and th
56.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
For me, I like that HeyNote auto saves to buffer.txt and I can have a crib job auto commit that to git at regular intervals.
57.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
Is desktop on the roadmap? I use HeyNote (desktop) every day and the only feature I _really_ want is multiple notes. You added that, but I need desktop because of corporate rules.
58.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
Roughly it can be viewed as a change of coordinates and then recognizing the symmetry. Say you had a 2D function of x and y and transformed it to r and theta and then noticed that it was independent of theta. You go from an 2D problem to a
59.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
This doesn't really answer the sign problem (which is just an arbitrarily chosen convention), but I view it more as "the field makes the electrons move". The rule of thumb I always use is that at household voltages and curren
60.
by michaelrpeskin 2y ago
Thirded. I just got back from a customer visit. They were trying to do something where the back of the napkin math said it would take a couple dozen CPU years to solve. I recognized a simple (in the math world) transformation we could do an

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