In my view, the meta-advice is to understand the goals and constraints of your boss (and their boss), and work towards those goals (while adhering to the constraints).
With that perspective, we can derive some rules of thumb:
1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.
2. As the OP says, if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted. Your boss's goals get implemented (by you), freeing them to work on their boss's goals (and maybe get their own promotion).
3. The more time you spend with your boss, the better you will understand their goals, and symmetrically, the better they will understand your strengths. That means leaving a job after a year or two is not always optimal. It also means following a good boss to another company is often a good move.
4. There will be cases where the goals of your boss (and their boss) diverge from your own goals. They often want to cut costs, but you want a salary increase. There are never easy answers to this dilemma, but seeing their perspective is useful so you can find a win-win scenario. E.g., if you come up with a way to save money in other ways, such as automating an external cost, then your increased salary will be worth it.
5. In some cases, of course, there is no way to reconcile your boss's goals with your own. Realizing that is useful so you can find a different company/boss that is more aligned.
Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents.
AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more.
If you have significant previous coding experience - even if it's a few years stale - you can drive these things extremely effectively. Especially if you have management experience, quite a lot of which transfers to "managing" coding agents (communicate clearly, set achievable goals, provide all relevant context.)
I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself.
The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch.
As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you).
What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where it's going to be in about two seconds. But the next best thing is to know where the puck is now.
If you can't see the puck then look at the players and as a last resort, look at the ref. 99% of the time they will be looking at the puck. Look where they're looking and soon enough it will appear.
I think this applies very much to this whole Google question.
The puck is gone (or on the way to the other side of the rink) and everyone is confused where it is or where it's going.
Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer there. It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but the game is the same. Leveraging attention.
The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well.
From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at chatbots and vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising, but in terms of the answer to this article's question, that seems like a good place to start.
- Building a micro-learning platform that uses AI-powered role plays and conversational assessments to gauge learner understanding instead of eg. a multiple choice questionnaire.
- I’ve just started designs and initial setup for a personal productivity system heavily inspired by the Newton & HyperCard and built in Rust. Idea is to use LLMs to build GraphRAG-like connections between content & break out of the standard app+document model. My current thinking is having ‘frames’ of content (notes, sketches, events etc) that are acted on by capabilities and displayed in views (timeline, calendar, stack, knowledge graph etc).
- Also working on a static site generator and CMS webapp that creates sites that can be viewed on anything, from web browser to TUI. Like if Gemini or Gopher also rendered to html.
If you can reduce a problem to a point where it can be solved by simple code you can get the rest of the solution very quickly.
Reducing a problem to a point where it can be solved with simple code takes a lot of skill and experience and is generally still quite a time-consuming process.
I got into quant finance 12 years ago with the mistaken idea that I was going to successfully use all these cool machine learning techniques (genetic programming! SVMs! neural networks!) to run great statistical arbitrage books.
Most machine learning techniques focus on problems where the signal is very strong, but the structure is very complex. For instance, take the problem of recognizing whether a picture is a picture of a bird. A human will do well on this task, which shows that there is very little intrinsic noise. However, the correlation of any given pixel with the class of the image is essentially 0. The "noise" is in discovering the unknown relationship between pixels and class, not in the actual output.
Noise dominates everything you will find in statistical arbitrage. R^2 of 1% are something to write home about. With this amount of noise, it's generally hard to do much better than a linear regression. Any model complexity has to come from integrating over latent parameters or manual feature engineering, the rest will overfit.
I think Geoffrey Hinton said that statistics and machine learning are really the same thing, but since we have two different names for it, we might as well call machine learning everything that focuses on dealing with problems with a complex structure and low noise, and statistics everything that focuses on dealing with problems with a large amount of noise. I like this distinction, and I did end up picking up a lot of statistics working in this field.
I'll regularly get emails from friends who tried some machine learning technique on some dataset and found promising results. As the article points out, these generally don't hold up. Accounting for every source of bias in a backtest is an art. The most common mistake is to assume that you can observe the relative price of two stocks at the close, and trade at that price. Many pairs trading strategies appear to work if you make this assumption (which tends to be the case if all you have are daily bars), but they really do not. Others include: assuming transaction costs will be the same on average (they won't, your strategy likely detects opportunities at time were the spread is very large and prices are bad), assuming index memberships don't change (they do and that creates selection bias), assuming you can short anything (stocks can be hard to short or have high borrowing costs), etc.
In general, statistical arbitrage isn't machine learning bound(1), and it is not a data mining endeavor. Understanding the latent market dynamics you are trying to capitalize on, finding new data feeds that provide valuable information, carefully building out a model to test your hypothesis, deriving a sound trading strategy from that model is how it works.
(1: this isn't always true. For instance, analyzing news with NLP, or using computer vision to estimate crop outputs from satellite imagery can make use of machine learning techniques to yield useful, tradeable signals. My comment mostly focuses on machine learning applied to price information. )
The golden prize for America's enemies is to remove the US dollar as a global reserve currency.
Since trade is conducted largely in USD, that means other governments must purchase USD to trade. This is the core of trade deficits. Foreign countries buy US dollars so they can trade with other people. That guarantees the deficit since they give us something in exchange for USD, which they do not then spend on goods we make.
If you no longer want the trade deficit that means payments of fealty by those who trade in dollars, which countries aren't likely to tolerate, or abandoning the USD as a global reserve currency, which would be disastrous, truly disastrous. Our debts would suddenly become existential because inflating our currency to pay for them could result in functionally not being able to import goods required to run our economy. I don't think many truly understand just how disastrous it will be.
This isn't America's liberation day. This is Russia's and China's liberation day. While America was once able to check their power, America is no longer in a position to do so, we will barely be in a position to satisfy our own military's logistics requirements.
This is a decapitation strike (Timothy Snyder: Decapitation Strike -- https://archive.is/1xkxK) on America by our enemies. It is not only a de facto soft blockade of American trade, but it is an attack on the mechanics of American hegemony. Politicians already ask for money instead of votes or actions. That means if foreign governments spend money, they can elect their preferred candidates. America's own government was a result of french support. We institute regime change in other counties, and I see no reason to believe we are immune.
If trade stops occurring in US Dollar, which is a consequence of the stated goal of our current ruling regime, that would be the coup de grace on this country's hegemony. It is the definitive end to it, and the birth of Chinese hegemony.
Try Tom Fowdy, Carl Zha, and Jerry Grey (@Jerry_grey2002) on Twitter; Daniel Dumbrill, Nathan Rich, and China Teacher Brand on Youtube.
All of these lean more towards pro-China, but they're nowhere near as crazy and blindly pro-China as the /r/sino guys, and they analyze situations pretty well. All of these are open for debate, whereas on /r/sino you get banned if you're not showing absolutely loyalty (speaking from experience).
Jerry has an excellent blog too. The funny thing is, he never intended to talk about politics, but all the bad news on China since COVID-19 frustrated him so much that he began writing. https://medium.com/@jerry_grey2002
If you wanna discuss things, feel free to seek me out.
The full quote is much more impactful and is something I come back to when I think about more mundane things like moving up in roles in a company:
> “Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.
> “I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even _existed_. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.
> “First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.
> “You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t….and that all those _other_ people are fools.
> “Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the _New York Times_ can. But that takes a while to learn.
> “In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to _learn_ from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And _that_ mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself.
> “You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”
> ….Kissinger hadn’t interrupted this long warning. As I’ve said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn’t take it as patronizing, as I’d feared. But I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn’t have the clearances yet.
The biggest thing most managers give up is their mind.
You start using corporate jargon. You become more authoritarian. You embrace careerism (a term I invented to describe people who erroneously conflate rising in corporate rank with happiness). You quickly learn that no one understands anything about the people or the business--and that all decisions are made by gut, cherry picked data, and story-telling. Suddenly, you'll be afraid to disagree.
Your only job as a manager is to protect and develop the team under you. You must actually like people and have a fundamentally benevolent worldview. You must be willing to say "I don't know" 10x more than as an IC. You must believe deep down in your core that ordering a human being to do something is a sign you must introspect about your failure as a manager, and commit to fixing the problem.
You must be prepared to tell your own manager to go kick rocks. Ambiguous situations are one thing, but you must never, ever knowingly do the the wrong thing. Everyone will know when you do it, and that will be the beginning of the end of your own happiness.
All other approaches will lead to you failing to deliver results, failing to retain, and a drag on the org.
The error I have seen most engineers-turn-manager make is they had a deep dissatisfaction with other terrible managers, so now its their chance to make the right decisions and do things their way.
I like Jiang Shigong's perspective on all of these "Two Sides" "Cold War" articles:
>The reason why I emphasize here that this is a new type of “world empire,” instead of accepting Darwin’s “world-system” designation or the usual “liberal international order” from international political theory, is that the theory of sovereign states obscures the imperial essence of Western hegemony. This “new imperial history” narrative, based on postmodern theory, diminishes the political dimension of imperialism. The framing of “U.S.-China relations” or “U.S.-China competition” that is so commonplace today, premised on the concept of sovereign states, is actually deceptive and misleading. It is deceptive and misleading to portray China and the United States as two equal sovereign states, ignoring the three faces of modern Western imperialism, and the fact that the imperial system of the United States is even more complex than the British Empire’s ever was. The United States operates an imperial arrangement within its continental territory, followed by a second imperial core in the form of the Five Eyes alliance, followed by a system of vassal states in the guise of allies such as the military domination systems of Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, operates Latin America as a “backyard,” and, of course, it also has control over other supplementary “world-systems” such as the Internet, finance, and trade. Thus, the U.S.-China relationship is better characterized as China, a rising sovereign state, facing the U.S.-dominated world empire or world system. It’s not a question of managing a relationship between two sovereign states, but a question of how China faces the U.S.-dominated world empire. The “U.S.-China decoupling” that has been the focus of public discussion in recent years would be better understood as an effort on the part of the U.S. to expel China from the “world imperial system.” Therefore, the U.S.-China struggle is not only about the fate of the two countries, but also about the future of the world order itself, i.e., is the whole world subservient to the U.S.-dominated world empire, or will it establish truly equal international relations between sovereign states? When the U.S. and Soviet superpowers were trying to build two different types of world empires, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) that emerged in countries like India and China intended to create a more fair and rational international order. Today’s U.S.-China rivalry represents a struggle over these two world visions and the shared destiny of humanity.
edit: Some HN anti-"spam" mechanism is restricting me from replying to people downstream. I'll try to get around to it later. Anyone saying "China also wants an empire" or "Empire is inevitable" is categorically wrong, though, or at the very least has not at all engaged with the essay above.
As Jiang Shigong points out, Lenin's imperialism isn't the incorrect and idealist "power thirst expansionism" of liberal theory, which doesn't really explain anything. It's the inevitable outcome of fully developed capitalism. If China continues to be socialist and repress their capitalists, they'll easily be able to inaugurate a new and pluralist peaceful era.
It has nothing to do with idealism or with good morals, but rather with optimal economic planning and carving out one's own course.
After all, fewer and fewer people in China covet the arrangement that the U.S. built up for itself:
>Eurasia Group Foundation finds “28% of Chinese respondents reported an unfavourable view of the US, up from 17% a year earlier, while the number reporting a favourable view fell to 39% from 58%.”
>According to Harvard University’s large-scale 2003-2016 study tracking the evolution of public opinion via 32,000 individual respondents, at the time of the study’s conclusion “95.5 percent of respondents were either ‘relatively satisfied’ or ‘highly satisfied’ with Beijing.”
>According to data from polling firm Dalia Research cited by Bloomberg News, 84% of Chinese believe “Democracy is important” and 73% agree with the statement “My country is democratic.” For comparison, here are some other countries and their equivalent scores: Brazil (83/51), Japan (60/46), U.S. (73/49), Germany (85/67).
>Though it came as a shock to Western audiences, who understand China to be a tyrannical state-capitalist authoritarian regime, observers in the imperial periphery have always seen things rather differently. As far back as 2004, Fidel Castro argued that “China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries,” [4] and in August 2014, he reaffirmed this sanguine outlook: “Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life.” [5] In May 2018, Professor Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek Minister of Finance, assuaged an anxious member of the audience at a Cambridge Forum: “I have to tell you that, from my understanding of China, it’s a very interesting social experiment, in the sense that at the local level or the regional level you now have a boisterous democracy, with popular success stories in overthrowing local authorities, local bureaucrats who have been corrupt.” [6] Later that same year, before his 2019 ouster in a US-backed coup, Evo Morales said “I trust China very much. China has always accompanied us in many of our aspirations in the social, cultural, political and economic spheres” [7] and that “China’s support and aid to Bolivia’s economic and social development never attaches any political conditions.” [8] In 2020 the former Liberian Minister for Public Works W. Gyude Moore bluntly wrote “China has built more infrastructure in Africa in two decades than the West has in centuries, China is also our friend,” [9] and in 2021 Iran signed a 25-year cooperation agreement with China. Despite the vehement insistence of Western punditry, world consensus against China’s “tyranny” fails to materialize.
Generally speaking the world doesn't envy America, and those who do envy America tend to go there, creating a distorted idea that everyone would go to America if they could. In reality, America is something that the rest of us have had to deal with without recourse. Its driving principles—capitalism—are not eternal, nor inevitable.
I went to a private Montessori school grades 3K-5, and my children have been or are in Montessori school grades 3K-6. As you might have guessed, I am a fan.
As most Montessori schools are private, my impression is that the variance in the quality of Montessori implementation varies considerably, but at a high level I have positive views of many of the same method characteristics as other comments:
I would guess that most Montessori schools are smaller than schools kids transition into, which might make transitioning to other schools hard socially (it was for me, but not for my kids), but that also is highly dependent on the individual I think. Other than that, I think the method tends to yield:
- independence in both learning/working and life in general
- love of learning
- kindness towards others
Things I would ask about before choosing a school:
- are you accredited by AMS, AMI and/or SAIS?
- are your teachers trained primarily through AMS or AMI?
- how long have your teachers been with the school, on average?
- where do students go after this school, and what are their outcomes (what colleges, high school honor graduates, etc.)?
- does the school do standardized testing that is accepted by the local school district or otherwise make it easy to transition to other schools after they age out?
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
> I think I found the issue - you might be confusing criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party with criticisms of the Chinese culture or people, and those are two very different things.
This is something I have heard many times before, but it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
For one, I have debated with a lot of people. The majority of them say something along this line, but then a few messages later they post things like "Chinese people can't innovate, only copy" or "they are brainwashed". A lot of people hide blatant racism, sinophobia or plain prejudice behind "we are only against the CCP, not the people". This is no criticism to you or the other poster specifically, but is a criticism against the general public.
Furthermore, even among the more honest people, what I have noticed is that most of even them are not so much "against the CCP and not the people", but rather "against the CCP and don't care about the people". They will happily suggest actions (sanctions, revolutions, overthrow of government, war, etc) that will result in Chinese people suffering. But they consider that fine, because they are just "standing up to the CCP". In other words, they don't care whether Chinese people become cannon fodder and collateral damage in their fight of justice against the Chinese government.
Why would Chinese people want this? We just got out of 120 years of war, revolution and famine. We've tried many things. Many different governing and social organization forms failed, and now when things are finally going well foreigners want us to start over again just because they think our government is bad? Can't we have a say in this too? Can't we say, look the government is not perfect but it's not as bad as you think, they also do a lot of good things and things are still improving (and they have improved), so we don't want another revolution and we certainly don't want you to encourage one for us?
Anti-China sentiment (or anti-CCP sentiment, as you'd prefer to call it) isn't just about logic and debate, it's a gateway drug into a war against China. The US military industrial complex is literally pouring millions of dollars in anti-China propaganda and the prop-up of "the China threat", with the aim of manufacturing consent for a war against China.
The more people jump on the China-evil (or the CCP-evil) bandwagon, the more you enlarge the echo chamber and the more willingness there is for a war. It doesn't matter whether the bandwagon is "China is evil" or "the Chinese government (but not its people) is evil" — the potential outcomes are equally disastrous. You can already see this on the streets: anti-Asian violence has spiked in the US thanks to all the anti-China reporting. Thugs on the streets don't care whether a person is Vietnamese or Taiwanese or anti-CCP Chinese or whatever, they are all Chinese to them. Kishore Mahbubani, ex-UN Security Council head, ex-Singapore diplomat, recently visited New York, reporting that the mood in New York is very dark: people see the Chinese state as "the enemy".
As someone who thinks about many things rationally, what I find stupid about this bandwagon is that half of the reasons people cite for declaring the Chinese government as bad, are based non-understanding of Chinese context and values, an inflated sense of "the China threat", the idea that the western perspective is the only legitimate one, or just plain biased reporting. Yet most people refuse to critically examine whether their attitude against China/CCP is even correct and based on the right facts and the right perspectives. Most people start with the final conclusion that China/CCP is evil and then they find arguments to fit that conclusion, while sticking to the notion that the western perspective is the only perspective that could possibly be right. This attitude perfectly aligns with the goal of manufacturing a consent for war.
TLDR: focussing on the people-government separation is akin to sleepwalking into a war.
TLDR 2: Attacks on the CCP are attacks on the Chinese people. But not because I see it as such, but because the western public makes it into such, as measured by potential practical outcomes.
I probably don't need to remind you that a war with China can escalate into WW3, in which lights all over the planet will go out.
It will take you through the basics of the internet, HTTP, browsers, requests, cookies, databases, caching, hasing, passwords, by having you build a web application. Granted, it's on Google App Engine, but still, most of the router syntax out there is similar (webapp2 from web.py, similar to Flask, Tornado, and others).
You will learn a lot, and you'll see the result right in your browser by having a live web application. You can then take that knowledge and develop tools for yourself and others and put them online for all to access and use.
If you want to do it better and "leap-frog", read Brett Slatkin's "Effective Python: 90 Specific Ways to Write Better Python". This book will make you write code as if you had been coding for years... But, that's only doing it "right", you need something to do right in the first place: you've been in business, strategy, and operations, and you've been trained in mechanical engineering: I think you are in no shortage of ideas and things to code, so have a it.
You're in an excellent position of having been at the intersection of a bunch of cross pollinated fields, and you'll have a new skill to bring them together and do wonders. All the best!
Your account has existed for 10 years so I'm not going to ban you outright just now, but the fact that you're using HN primarily (exclusively?) for nationalistic and ideological flamewar is a serious abuse of the site. We ban accounts that do this, regardless of what they're battling for or against. If you want to keep posting to HN, we need you to seriously recalibrate how you're doing it, and reorient to the intended use of the site, as described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The users foolishly accusing you of being a communist agent are also breaking the rules. That's not relevant to the fact that you're abusing HN.
Actually, I would have a lot more sympathy if you did have a personal connection to China. HN's Chinese users (and those with other connections, such as their family background or couple relationship or work history) are under extreme pressure in these threads, because the forum is majority Western, aligned with Western media and geopolitical views, and a subset of the majority users have the kind of adamancy (and even aggression) that can only come from ignorance. That's a serious problem—users of Chinese background have even been hounded off this site, just for sincerely trying to represent their own viewpoint. I've even been personally accused of being Chinese (as if that were somehow an insult) just for trying to bring more respect into these threads. If you or anyone is interested, you can see some of that moderation history at these links:
None of that applies to your case, though, if I'm reading your comments correctly, because you seem to be posting strictly out of ideological battle. That's, unfortunately, much cheaper and more destructive behavior. We don't allow it here, because the purpose of the site is curious conversation in which people relate to and learn from each other. Smiting enemies is precisely the opposite spirit of that.
I know what it feels like to hold a minority ideological viewpoint too (having been in that situation many times)—it comes with a feeling of righteousness and resentment that causes one to lash out and feel justified in treating others disrespectfully because, after all, one's cause is right and the truth is more important. Unfortunately this syndrome is poison to the sort of internet forum we're trying for here. Regardless of how right you are (or feel you are), or how important the truths you bring are (or you feel they are), we're going to ban you if you continue this way. We have no choice but to do that, in order to try to preserve HN for its intended purpose. Moreover, it makes little difference how right you are or what truths you're bringing, if this is the way you're going about it, because people don't listen when they're being blasted.
It's extremely difficult to get unbiased information on China. However, there are some good sources.
If you have the money, Sinocism[0] is a great newsletter that collects the top (mostly political) stories of the day. Some other good (free) Substacks are Chinarrative[1], which publishes translated human interest stories, and Chinese Journal Review[2], which translates abstracts of a selection of academic papers.
If you would like a local insight into more young/liberal perspectives, Sixth Tone[3] is fairly interesting. Be aware that this is a state-owned media source, so it has an interest in presenting China as progressive in ways that outside of middle class communities in top tier cities it usually isn't. Just because it's state-owned doesn't mean it's not informative, though! China Media Project[4] is perhaps a useful accompanying source to try understand exactly how the state media is biased.
Of the western media, New York Times probably does the best reporting on China (they even have a Chinese language version), but like all western media they struggle to get access. Inside China, Caixin is probably the best newspaper, but unfortunately it is pay-walled.
From left wing perspective I can also recommend Made In China Journal[5].
People are still creating great stuff along these lines - you just won't find it through Google or Facebook or most of Reddit. Complex, interesting hypertext creations and web sites are still everywhere. But try typing "interesting hypertext" into Google or Facebook and see where it gets you. You can't search for something that's off the beaten track.
This is where directories come back in. Check some of these out:
Competing with Google in search has become an insurmountable task. Personal directories attack from the opposite direction (human curation, no algorithm) in a way that actually puts Google far behind. It's kind of exciting and unexpected.
Instead of this, I keep a permanent log of every shell command I ever typed and have a handy alias to keep through it.
It also keeps track of the directory a command was run from, so I can limit my search. That way if I ever want to get back into a project I was working on long ago, I can just grep for commands run from that directory.
Not only that, but I can use it to cd to directories quickly. So if I was working under a huge p
10 level deep directory path, I have a alias that will match a string and cd into the last matching path in the permanent history file.
Not only that, but I can also search and then choose and rerun a command in the history, and also edit before rerunning it.
Wait a minute... You're pretending like trade is only "fair" if selling happens in both directions. Doesn't that fly directly in the face of what trade means?
You buy something, but you get value in return. That's why it's not called "donation". If the thing you bought is not valuable to you then why did you buy it in the first place?
Also, there is all this talk about "forced" tech transfers, but nobody forced US companies at gunpoint. US companies always had the choice to not enter the China market. They signed tech tranfer contracts, willingly, because they think the upsides (gaining a new market) are higher than the downsides, or that the downsides are manageable. The fact is, companies made a choice. And now the US government is making that choice for them?
From a national supply chain security or technology hegemony point of view it makes sense to deny certain transfers, but let's recognize that this is just geopolitics and not about ethics, fairness, etc. The rherotic about fairness just doesn't make sense upon further scrutiny. If the US government doesn't fully believe in free market, why not just go ahead and say so instead of all the mental gymnastics?
This is something that has really struck me during the Corona crisis: the misplaced Western believe of superiority towards Asian countries. I am European and I feel embarrassed about how much arrogance is displayed by some people and governments.
It started already in the beginning, when the virus was spreading rapidly in China. Reports about the failing Chinese authority were all over the place, but nobody seemed to worry that when the virus would eventually reach Europe, we would be in trouble as well. After all how could we, with our superior health system and our governments that would react quickly and rationally on such a trivial threat as this.
When the virus had reached Europe, it had already reached South Korea and Taiwan as well. These countries had learned from the earlier SARS outbreak how to deal with it and thoroughly tested everyone that could possibly have the virus, symptoms or not. The reaction I saw in the media was mostly about the breach in privacy that these measures brought. Surely this was not something that we, as enlightened Western societies, would want. And anyway, what were we frightened of. This virus could never spread so fast in Europe as it did in China, because .. Well because of what actually.
Now that the pandemic has wrecked havoc in the entire Western world and most people are realising that a strategy of first constraining the virus (like in Wuhan) and then testing everybody to contain in (like in South Korea) is the only realistic way to deal with it, one might think that a bit of humbleness towards Asia would be in place.
Think again. What we're seeing more and more instead is denial. Investigations are started if the Covid virus was manifactured in a laboratory in Wuhan for instance.
I am a senior software architect. My job is to balance performance against complexity.
If my system is slow, it's my fault.
If debugging or expanding the system is too difficult, it's my fault.
If someone wants to know how the system or business works in depth, I am the one that they should come to.
I spend the majority of my time chasing down, enforcing, and simplifying the universal theory of our business (the core of our software solution).
The universal theory of our business is a living collection of concepts, designed to accurately model non-virtual concerns in virtual space. If there are too many edge cases, it is a sign that the universal theory is inaccurate, or not robust enough in some areas. If there are too many bugs, it is a sign that the universal theory has not been communicated or enforced well enough, is inaccurate, or is too complex in some areas. As our business grows, or our understanding of the business expands, the universal theory will change; at times dramatically. Malleability (the ability to adapt our software to these changes effectively and efficiently) is one of my top two concerns; the other is latency (how long it takes for any one request to get a complete response).
The theory shrinks and becomes better documented as it evolves; the goal is to move from describing behaviors as correlation to describing them as accurate causation. To fill in the blanks.
I should mention here that this does not mean every line of code in my projects is easy to understand. Writing a fast system of high complexity requires at least some components that are written exclusively for the computer's benefit (that is, highly optimized and inherently difficult to read). These components should be written with clear documentation, clearly defined public members, written discussions of why it works the way it does (and common ways to accidentally break it), redundant ownership, and regular auditing to ensure code rot is avoided.
I have yet to meet another architect that sees their job the way I see mine.
If the system you're working on defies complete understanding, you can probably blame your architect.
> My long standing hypothesis on Medallion is that they figured out how to apply gauge theoretic techniques to financial markets.
No. Listen to the Talking Machines podcast with Nick Patterson (who was a senior VP in research at RennTech for a long time). To paraphrase he says that the vast majority of their strategies are no more than simple linear regression. The challenge is that even though regression is conceptually simple it still takes smart people to answer questions like "what should you be regressing", or "should you apply any transform" or "how should you clean your data" or "do you understand the process well enough to realize when results are obviously unrealistic".
The thing that makes a firm like Renaissance a league above a firm like Two Sigma is the same thing that makes Two Sigma a league above a firm like Winton. It's not mathematical gnosticism, it's plain old operational excellence. It's things like expansive reliable curated datasets, deep expertise on market structure, good execution systems, powerful research and backtesting software, good access to markets, economies of scale, talented practitioners, and excellent organizational management.
These kinds of characterisations frustrate me. It's a horrible simplification that leads one to a whole set of conclusions that are probably way off target. No complex society runs without rules. By and large, if members of the society do not follow those rules then the result is chaos. Clearly, China is not a lawless state where people do whatever they choose and the strongest one wins. It is a country with real laws and and vast majority of people need to follow those laws. These laws are, of course, not applied universally. However, we can point to examples of this non-universality of law in every single country on Earth. The question is the extent of that non-universality.
The other thing that's important to realise is that the Chinese government is incredibly complex internally. There isn't some Bond-like villain stroking his white cat all day and issuing decrees. It's a massive beaurocracy. Politics are crazy. The totalitarian state does not act as a single will -- it's a massive system of infighting and people trying to get the upper hand. Within that system, each of the players will be using their legal system against one another. It really isn't the case that there is any one entity that's just making up the rules as they go along and that can do whatever they want with impunity (as your posting implies to me).
So, I'm inclined to lean towards believing a more complex reality than "they forced him to say that".
You can find a bunch of papers published by people at RenTec. Search MathSciNet for "Renaissance Technologies" as the corporate affiliation for the author.
Likewise, search Google Scholar for "@rentec.com", or "Renaissance Technologies."
With that perspective, we can derive some rules of thumb:
1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.
2. As the OP says, if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted. Your boss's goals get implemented (by you), freeing them to work on their boss's goals (and maybe get their own promotion).
3. The more time you spend with your boss, the better you will understand their goals, and symmetrically, the better they will understand your strengths. That means leaving a job after a year or two is not always optimal. It also means following a good boss to another company is often a good move.
4. There will be cases where the goals of your boss (and their boss) diverge from your own goals. They often want to cut costs, but you want a salary increase. There are never easy answers to this dilemma, but seeing their perspective is useful so you can find a win-win scenario. E.g., if you come up with a way to save money in other ways, such as automating an external cost, then your increased salary will be worth it.
5. In some cases, of course, there is no way to reconcile your boss's goals with your own. Realizing that is useful so you can find a different company/boss that is more aligned.