tikhonj

69 ms·

841.
by tikhonj 9y ago
Thing is, you don't need every job, you just need one job. It's not hard to find teams that are reasonable and don't get obsessed over traditional "red flags" that actually carry almost no useful signal.
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by tikhonj 9y ago
Facebook _is_ crumbling and, for all we know, it's actually because the author left.
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by tikhonj 9y ago
I remember seeing a great post about this a few years ago: "In Search of the Cookie Dough Tree"[1] by Aaron Greenspan. It stands out all these years as a vivid, personal account of an issue I simply hadn't thought about befor
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by tikhonj 9y ago
I work on largeish commercial Haskell codebase and I never have to look anywhere to figure it out—I know what the do block is doing because I know what function it's in and what the return type is. With a bit of experience I started ke
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by tikhonj 9y ago
They're a great way to seed your recruiting pipeline. Enough of them ought to be good hires to make this useful. After that, you just have to trust your hiring process, just like you would for any other source of candidates.
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by tikhonj 9y ago
Extensive non-advertising product offerings that somehow don't translate into extensive non-advertising revenue...
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by tikhonj 9y ago
The subtitle is misleading out of context . The actual title is far more representative of the article.
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by tikhonj 9y ago
The standardization process is really slow and conservative, and making it faster is not a priority for anyone because—at least at the moment—GHC is the only meaningful compiler, so the standard wouldn't be doing more than explicitly r
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by tikhonj 9y ago
Most Haskellers I know think that library is too complicated—it's trying too hard to make Haskell look like Perl. I haven't seen it used in serious code and I never use it myself; chances are, if I want to parse anything even remo
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by tikhonj 9y ago
Haha, great example—that's exactly what I want from my bash scripts too :). Just a simple list of commands. Salman Rushdie style is reserved for libraries that make a massive impact. Learning abstractions like that is like learning a
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by tikhonj 9y ago
Well, no. Each individual piece in the child-like code might be easy to understand, but you lose the forest for the trees. You, as the reader, have to reconstruct how all the simple (simplistic?) pieces fit together to accomplish, well, w
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by tikhonj 9y ago
The thing with local politics is that engagement is low and extremely self-selected. I'm never surprised when local voters and politicians are disproportionately on the busybody end of the spectrum rather than "live and let live&q
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by tikhonj 9y ago
On the flipside, it could be that Y Combinator has made a lot of money by creating an environment that helps startups succeed . Apart from money, they provide founders advice, structure and a set of motivated peers. More cynically, they al
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by tikhonj 9y ago
My guess is that it's significantly more difficult than that—those movies are pure legacy code by now, and we all know how difficult it is to modernize legacy applications :).
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by tikhonj 9y ago
I haven't looked at the data, but my guess would be that it's the difference between weighing based on individuals (number of individual millionaires) vs total wealth. The latter is going to be dominated by the richest part of the
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by tikhonj 9y ago
I think it's significantly less true in tech, even if it's still present. People are far more flexible about hiring and working with programmers of different backgrounds, and the views I've heard on tech company prestige ar
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by tikhonj 9y ago
I don't think it's a unique problem to academia. I recently read something in exactly the same spirit from a lawyer (almost literally "we won't hire anyone not from a T14 school"). If anything, the interesting thing
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by tikhonj 9y ago
It also extends to things outside finding like graduate school admissions or even peer review. On top of that, you know who's making the low-level decisions for giving grants? People from and steeped in the same academic culture. That&
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by tikhonj 9y ago
The way a company like a retailer delivers goods is an implementation detail under their control, not dictated purely by consumer habits. If the cost structure of shipping by truck changed, retailers would do a better job of traffic optimiz
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by tikhonj 9y ago
Blaming individual scientists is largely misplaced, but you can definitely blame then collectively. The root cause of a lot of these problems is that academia has an almost farcical obsession with prestige, and that's largely a botto
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by tikhonj 9y ago
How much impact does DE Shaw Research have? I think that would be the most direct point of comparison. I'm not asking this rhetorically—I'm curious but also don't have much experience to bioinformatics.
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by tikhonj 9y ago
More cynically, the difference is 100k/year :P.
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by tikhonj 9y ago
Some friends and I used to hold a hybrid drinking/Project Euler contest. You would have hated our solutions. I remember winning on the back of nine nested for-loops and, on a separate occasion, doing a primality check using a literal
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by tikhonj 9y ago
I think the games in question are actually the opposite of that: they are played by millions and millions of people, often for free, but financed by a small, rich minority. It is super aggressive price discrimination, which actually benef
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by tikhonj 9y ago
Even in person, the laws distinguish between "true threats" and hyperbole, which will take both the content of a threat and its context into account.
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by tikhonj 9y ago
I don't necessarily mean publishable—that's doable but difficult in CS—but novel in the sense of requiring non-trivial creativity and insight within the field rather than replaying things you were taught directly. An example might
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by tikhonj 9y ago
To be fair, they do a pretty bad job teaching CS too. Your average undergrad program is almost entirely learning about CS, not learning CS. A non-trivial of students get through a CS degree never doing anything novel in CS —a real sham
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by tikhonj 9y ago
The point is that patterns shouldn't be patterns in books—they should be abstractions in libraries. You know what's better than having a shared vocabulary you expect everyone to know from a book? Having a shared vocabulary define
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by tikhonj 9y ago
No, the idea is that your language should be able to express patterns in the language . Then they're not patterns any more—they're libraries! Working with an explicit abstraction from a library is far more pleasant than working w
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by tikhonj 9y ago
I use Nix and it's awesome, but still in early adopter territory. It works wonderfully if you really value reproducible builds and are willing to put some effort in the initial setup, but it's still a bit fiddly and documentation

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