231–240 of 332 posts
Is it common for programmers to dislike debugging? I'm stunned. I never considered the possibility, it's always been something I enjoyed. I don't believe it impacts you either way in terms of capability but I imagine it impacts your desire to continue.
i enjoy chopping vegetables much more than most people, and i'm told i'm quite good at e.g. making sauerkraut - an activity i truly enjoy. but i get paid a lot more to write software, which is also reasonably fun. to be honest i think i only enjoy writing software about as much as the next person! can we be honest that it's an absurdly good job currently? https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/
(I have a bit of a thing for grating cheese - I find it strangely therapeutic.)
This dichotomy, and the realization that it can fuel smart people to use their abilities to do amazing things in the world, is what upsets me most about the startup ecosystem. I'm a programmer. Writing weather software doesn't seem like work to me. However, since going through a startup accelerator, I'm supposed to all these things that are very much "work" - and it gets me down. Things that are important, for sure,…
I knew some folks at Google who were very content to stay an engineer at the bottom of the org chart and watch the people they mentored get promoted above them, because they understood that what made them happy was writing code and solving tough technical problems, not managing people or playing political games. I always respected them for that. Same reason that Steve Wozniak was always far more of a hero to me than…
This excerpt - "what he really liked was solving problems. The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook he'd immediately work out all the problems—to the slight annoyance of his teacher, since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually." is literally me. I did that. Every year at my school I did exactly that. Once I actually turned in m…
As (failed) physics major, it sounds so strange to hear someone claim to be good at math but not physics. To me physics is 98% math. It's a few empirical facts from experiments and then bucketloads of math.
I recall that a physics chapter would start by "we take the Maxwell equations as [complex formulae]..." and for the life of me I wasn't able to understand them, or see where the teacher took that from.
On the other hand, maths seemed more logical, and even now - almost 15 years later - I can correctly recall my undergraduate maths classes, because I have them so well ingrained in me, because I could understand how various ideas connected to each other.
Sorry, did Paul just say that he helped people cheat in their college classes? Or did the professors know he was writing others' papers?
I am surprised at how casually he dropped this in there: "When I was in college I used to write papers for my friends. It was quite interesting to write a paper for a class I wasn't taking. Plus they were always so relieved." Yikes. Really?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know exactly what you mean. But that's the system we live in, isn't it? One must sell one's time And one's soul to survive. What's the way out?
First start by recognizing that there can never be an alternative system to having to earn your way in this world. One way or another, someone's productive effort has to pay for things that get created, whether by currency or direct barter. The only alternative is slavery: someone else being forced to work to fulfill your needs, for no compensation or trade. And then understand that money is nothing but frozen time a…
Yes, trading value must be necessary in a system with scarcity.
But most of the things that make work a struggle for me are simply not necessary at all.
It's not necessary to have nonsense like a few weeks of holiday. The UK is far better than the US in this regard and still we get only a few weeks.
It's not necessary for there to be ludicrous entrenched inequality, which results in most employment being with a mega corporation.
I could go on but I lack the energy, I've had this discussion too many times to count.
The issue is the way in which the system seems artificially set up to benefit the rich. In the UK homes are unaffordable for most of the population now in a way that wasn't the case a few decades ago. That means that the idea of saving for retirement is a total dream for anyone other than a tiny elite of workers.
What if the idea of work itself is what you dislike? There are plenty of activities I can enjoy, and some, quite a few of them in fact, are profitable. Once you shoe-horn them into the power dynamic situation of a traditional job (with the bureaucracy that entails unless you're dealing with Actual People as opposed to corporations), suddenly a lot of the luster disappears. As a ridiculous example - I enjoy reading. I…
As an addition to this, I've struggled a lot with the concept of working for pay and only recently could I really begin to explain why. Some people would probably call it 'entitlement', but I'm not really sure that's an accurate description. As an employee, your role is essentially a permanent state of brown nosing. First of all you must convince a rich person/company that you are worthy. Then you must convince them…
An HNer who commented below said one other possibility is finding work you're overqualified for, which can be an option, too. This would allow you to do non-challenging work while being able to challenge yourself in other ways in your off time. If you combine this with working online, you may find it to be the solution to your woes. I often say, "I don't care what I do, per se, I care about what that work situation allows me to do" (in my off time, in how I control my time, in where and how I can live).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As (failed) physics major, it sounds so strange to hear someone claim to be good at math but not physics. To me physics is 98% math. It's a few empirical facts from experiments and then bucketloads of math.
There are some skills in physics which are sort of foreign to the math method of problem solving. (Speaking as a physics major) For example, picking a nice reference frame in simple mechanics problems is something that a physical intuition is good for. Same with spotting symmetries in an EM problem. Also, in physics you need to have a good grasp of what to ignore because they have only a small effect on the solution…
> Also, in physics you need to have a good grasp of what to ignore because they have only a small effect on the solution or because it operates on a different scale (fringing effects, transient solutions in ODEs), which often relies on a very hand-wavey type of reasoning.
Physics is often taught in an exceedingly vague and hand-wavey way. Physics students have to learn to ignore that nagging feeling that something is not quite right. This is impossible for a mathematician. A mathematician wants to cleanly separate the math from the problem that is being solved using math. The problem specification consists of a list of assumptions, and the solution of the problem consists of 100% rock solid math. Physicists weave the two together, so that in the end it's often not clear what is actually being assumed. Furthermore, it's usually not explained based on which experiments those assumptions are justified. A counterexample is special relativity. There it's clearly assumed that the speed of light is constant, and the experiments on which that assumption is based are explained, and from there it's mostly logical deduction. In other topics that is sadly not the case. I would love a physics education where you start with the experiments and work from there, instead of saying "Bam! Here are Maxwell's differential equations. Now deduce things from that based on hand-wavey arguments". I don't mean having the students perform the experiments themselves, just describe what somebody else did and what the results were, and why that led people to believe that the laws of physics are as they are. To make time for that, we should remove the endless by hand solving of special cases of special cases. We live in the 21st century. Instead use numerical methods everywhere, which easily tackle the general case. Got n electrons with initial positions and initial velocities, and you want to see what happens? No problem.
/rant