Hacker News: mechEpleb

New comment by mechEpleb in "Note that I wouldn’t pass the listed minimum requirements"

mechEpleb — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 12:31:51 +0000

The most important thing is just to apply because unless you're connected, the job search process is much like a lottery.

New comment by mechEpleb in "Stop using your work laptop or phone for personal stuff, because I know you are"

mechEpleb — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 11:03:19 +0000

Establishing the habit of regularly checking your schedule and thus being aware of any upcoming events would mostly solve this.

New comment by mechEpleb in "The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014) [video]"

mechEpleb — Sun, 20 Jun 2021 20:33:03 +0000

You'd think that, wouldn't you? Yet here I am, someone who grew up thinking computers were obtuse and boring because getting the computer to do anything interesting seemed like it would require knowing a thousand things not related to the issue at hand. I was always a mechanically minded person, so while the inner workings of things seemed interesting, making toy websites (the entry level computer thing to do in that time period) seemed about as interesting as watching paint dry.

But here I am, working as a software engineer and half way through my MSc in computer science. It took a couple of low level microcontroller classes in my mechanical engineering undergrad for me to see the light.

New comment by mechEpleb in "The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014) [video]"

mechEpleb — Sun, 20 Jun 2021 10:37:59 +0000

I get the feeling that the world was significantly more open to kids growing up with access to computers in the 80s and 90s, because as someone whose formative years were the 00s and early 10s, the interesting bits of technology were already buried under a thousand layers of abstraction and indirection. Kids nowadays won't ever learn what a shell is unless they go out of their way to learn it for some reason.

New comment by mechEpleb in "Seizing the Middle: Chess Strategy in Business"

mechEpleb — Sat, 19 Jun 2021 20:53:56 +0000

And they did that because it makes sense from a military perspective, not because they were aping go strategies. Are you being obtuse on purpose? You're taking two radically different problem domains and producing a shaky, extremely high level mapping between some elements in them that is essentially unfalsifiable.

New comment by mechEpleb in "Seizing the Middle: Chess Strategy in Business"

mechEpleb — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 15:26:34 +0000

I would argue that this is ridiculously reductionist and probably has nothing to do with the actual decision making process on either side.

New comment by mechEpleb in "The Consciousness of Invertebrates"

mechEpleb — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 04:30:30 +0000

I said nothing of qualia. Science has no tools to even begin trying to model, describe or explain them. All I am saying is that from a physical perspective, a mind is just as deterministic as an orbit. So far nobody has discovered anything to suggest otherwise. You're taking a concept that exists outside the conceptual space of physics and using it to make statements about physical systems.

New comment by mechEpleb in "You use more open source software than you think"

mechEpleb — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 21:33:22 +0000

Getting it out there. If your goal is just to ensure that a well supported open source solution exists and people can use it instead of having nothing at all or only paid proprietary garbage, a permissive license makes far more sense.

If your goal is sticking it to the man and demolishing capitalism or whatever then it's different of course.

New comment by mechEpleb in "The Consciousness of Invertebrates"

mechEpleb — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 09:20:10 +0000

>You can show all sorts of chemical and biological explanations for the behavior, but it is still "behavior." It can be predictable, but it is not deterministic.

What makes it non-deterministic? A neural network is a system with a huge number of parameters and therefore a wildly chaotic output, but the output is still deterministic. Even if you introduce a number of environmental confounders.

To claim that brains are (more) non-deterministic (than other kinds of macroscopical physical processes) you would have to show that quantum effects have a (more) significant impact on their outcomes.

New comment by mechEpleb in "“That Won't Work”"

mechEpleb — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 11:26:55 +0000

>Like, if someone thinks what I does suck I always invite people to tell me so.

That's you. Plenty of other people will defend whatever they come up with regardless and need to protect their fragile egos.

New comment by mechEpleb in "Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer"

mechEpleb — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 19:52:37 +0000

I'm not sure misogyny is the only possible explanation here, and I am almost certain it doesn't account for the entire gap.

New comment by mechEpleb in "Kinda a Big Announcement"

mechEpleb — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 19:51:03 +0000

> Though I think that's mostly on Google "optimizing" my queries by dumbing them down.

I'd say it's become a lot worse than it was just a couple years ago when you could massage the queries to get you exactly what you want. Now google seems to think it's more clever than you and turns every question into an entry level one.

New comment by mechEpleb in "Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer"

mechEpleb — Mon, 31 May 2021 00:32:10 +0000

I don't think derisive attitudes in the workplace adequately explain it, because there are a lot fewer women in CS/engineering school too.

New comment by mechEpleb in "I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages"

mechEpleb — Thu, 20 May 2021 08:48:31 +0000

>There are lots of actual engineers being outearned by boot camp grads with two years experience.

Hasn't that been the case for decades now?

New comment by mechEpleb in "I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages"

mechEpleb — Thu, 20 May 2021 08:28:17 +0000

You can't demand more when plenty of others will do it for far cheaper.

New comment by mechEpleb in "What's Accenture? (2020)"

mechEpleb — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 19:12:31 +0000

In house there's less incentive to underbid and overpromise

New comment by mechEpleb in "What's Accenture? (2020)"

mechEpleb — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 19:09:18 +0000

>hey intern, here's the topic, here's some buzzwords, here's the word and slide count, you have 3 hours

New comment by mechEpleb in "Tech companies say they can’t find good employees – companies may be the problem"

mechEpleb — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 13:02:53 +0000

Yes, usually that reason is that once you are unemployed you fall to the bottom of any hiring manager's list of eligible applicants.

New comment by mechEpleb in "Tech companies say they can’t find good employees – companies may be the problem"

mechEpleb — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 12:58:19 +0000

Because you are already stuck on the path you picked and have no choice

New comment by mechEpleb in "Student passes 3 classes in 4 years, ranks near top half of class with 0.13 GPA"

mechEpleb — Sat, 06 Mar 2021 09:02:41 +0000

That would be true if said intelligent people were optimizing exclusively for the metric you're looking at right now. In reality they usually are not, as they are themselves stuck in a system where their incentives are to optimize for things other than their supposed mission statement.

The world is full of tangled messes where everybody is acting with respect to their own local incentives and everyone is worse off as a result