In minds in danger of substituting counting, imitating, slop-spitting, relinquishing control for thinking, designing, daring in practice and not in prompting.

No hard feelings against the OP; they just happened to be the trigger. I fully understand I'm the shoemaker equivalent from 100 years ago. I just don't care--or rather care too much.

Current reading list arranged by topic below. Any further suggestions/advice? Thanks!

Culture: The Man Who Beat the Market, A Man for All Markets, Market Wizards, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

Finance basics: CFA Prerequisites, Trading & Exchanges (Larry Harris), Wilmott, Hull

Mathematics: Chris Bishop's books (ML/DL/probability), E. T. Jayne's book, David Mackay's Information theory book, Shreve's Stochastic Calculus books

Algo trading: Robert Carver, Ernest Chan

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45014333

Points: 2

# Comments: 5

Life is not binary. Routines are not classified into hippie XOR hardcore. Not feeling bad for not improving yourself is a good sign of having actually improved. But that's just my opinion. Take care.

As for machines and tyranny, they're terms capturing the Zeitgeist all too well.

It's fine if it doesn't happen every day. Don't be obsessed about this stuff. Forgive yourself if you ever behave sub-optimally. You're not a machine, neither should you be one.

Tyranny starts with the best of intentions.

This is not research; it's an opinion piece by a Bridgewater employee that may prove right in the years to come.

Plus, the rhetoric of differentiating China from the "free world" paints a Big Red Flag over the article's face.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44710581

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44695851

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44593433

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44581802

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The reason why this is so is pragmatic: fancy strategies take extra compute time that is too expensive when one's sitting on the critical path. So what follows has a good chance of not bearing practical value but (i) there are setups where memory capacity is a bottleneck and (ii) hey, it's just a PhD anyway.

So what does a fancy strategy even look like? Let's look at the simplest non-trivial version of the problem. Say, we know the sizes and lifetimes of all objects in advance, and we want to pack them in as tight a contiguous address space as possible. Mathematicians call this the Dynamic Storage Allocation (DSA) problem and it's NP-complete, i.e., no known optimal algorithm exists for the general case. Deep learning compilers battling the AI memory wall have been returning to DSA lately (it's an old problem).

The implication of the above is that a real allocator, that is, one forced to work under uncertainty w.r.t. object sizes and lifetimes down the line, can always fail remarkably. So going for a general-purpose solution begs that you know what you're doing (one could argue that most programs out there are "well-behaved", and I would agree up until the point where this observation is turned into a universal law).

Nevertheless, it remains a fact that writing a toy allocator is both educational and soberingly not hard.

With all respect, however, this industry/academia dualism looks to me at best as a false and at worst as a harmful dichotomy. I mean, there are similarly cliché pathologies in whatever one chooses to overload "industry" with. There are successful academic projects that end up in industry (RISC-V) and successful industrial open-source (?) projects loved by academics (Rust). At the end of the day, everyone wants to build something. Tools and methods are needed. Some of them may not exist yet. The act of building one's tools and methods (or something completely new with existing tools and methods) is research regardless from where it happens or how it is labelled.

Why is this not enough? What extra benefits go with differentiating myself as either an academic or a practitioner? Honest question!

POV: CompEng PhD looking for industrial vacancies.

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: EU or UK

Technologies: Rust, Linux

Résumé/CV: https://shorturl.at/0ZdaL

Email: cplamprakos@proton.me

I am 30 years old. I am working through my last few months as a computer engineering PhD student. Eventually, it went good. Not great (the world gives zero f*cks about my work, nobody has offered me a job yet), but not hellish either (didn't quit, still mostly sane, learned a ton of stuff that I never had the guts or prudence to delve into as an undergraduate, and most importantly, I decided I like computers).

Now my background is anything but academic: none of my parents finished high school, people from my village consider me either batshit crazy or a genius. I mean, I was thrown into the PhD archipelago by life itself, rather unconsciously. I just knew that "corporate IT" wasn't my thing, and as for the cool computing jobs, I wasn't their thing. Again, I spent my years as an ECE undergraduate burying my insecurities instead of building my future. To understand the degree of mental fragmentation I was under, I had never made the connection between my digital design courses and my operating systems courses (all of this is the story of the computer, stupid, it's in the title of your degree for God's sake!).... Anyways.

It took me six years to get to today. I am another person now. The PhD (well, and the pandemic, and all that followed) crushed all of my assumptions about the world, myself, the meaning of life. There's no way to put it in the condensed form that an HN comment requires without sounding naive, but I'm telling you the truth. Being forced to survive an alien landscape can make you whole again. It made me.

At the end of the day, talking sh*t about hard stuff is sooo easy. You could replace any polemic against a PhD with one against starting a family, or a company, or in any way rejecting "safety" for the potential of leaving your own mark on the world. Being you. Like that poem by Robert Frost, these things make all the difference.

Stuff like this gives me hope that I'm not merely wet-dreaming.