pfarrell
Joined 1,618 karma
- pfarrell parentDon’t forget your investors and your board.
- Yeah that’s pretty much what happened. What I was thinking was we over estimated what the table stakes were. We were building a collaborative SQL editor aka notebooks. We spent way too much time getting it working with different dbs instead of focusing on a couple and building the things that actually made us stand out. A single customer wouldn’t really care about all the dbs we could talk to that were the one she was using.
- I learned something similar founding a startup. If I could do it again, I would have aggressively avoided pursuing the table stakes feature in our space. Instead we should have done the minimal amount to be comfortable that our architecture could support the enterprisey things. We should have then concentrated everything on something that would set us apart, something we could demo and get a “wow… I see where this could go” instead of something like “oh this is just a clone of x”.
- I have a daily updated dataset that has the HN data split out by months. I've published it on my web page, but it’s served from my home server so I don’t want to link to it directly. Each month is about 30mb of compressed csv. I’ve wanted to torrent it, but don’t know how to get enough seeders since each month will produce a new torrent file (unless I’m mistaken). If you’re interested, send me a message. My email is mrpatfarrell. Use gmail for the domain.
- A few are dated but number 74 is one I think about a lot when programming.
Important to remember this was written in the early ‘80’s at the end of Perlis’s long career. For most of these to stay relevant and humorous 50 years later is pretty impressive.Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to see it as a soap bubble? - Makes me think about Dijkstra being horrified to learn that the US was sending astronauts into space using unproven computer code [0]. Eventually, we'll have programmers trusting the AI generated code as much as we trust compiler generated code. Sometimes I think this will be the evolution of programming (like binary to assembler to compiled to interpreted to generated)... Other times I think about how we've grown used to buggier and buggier code and yet we press on.
0: https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/translating-dijakstra.html
- There’s a neat documentary from the late 1970’s, “Farewell etaoin shrdlu”. It’s about the final day the New York Times was printed using their linotype machines.
- I went through it at the beginning of the year. In the end, a cold inbound from a recruiter for a leadership position that I wasn’t right for led to her referring me to another recruiter with something that was perfect. The point? Work every angle and treat looking for a job as your full time job.
You only have to find one gig, so don’t get sucked into self-pity endlessly focusing on everyone who’s having trouble, when it happens, have something constructive to divert you.
If you’re going for remote work, expect that the whole process will take longer and the same rules won’t apply. The candidate pool is vast and you need to stand out. You need to apply early, when the position is posted.
Realize your resume is likely being parsed by software before it’s even screened by HR. If you can get your resume directly to a hiring manager, do that. Otherwise consider feeding your resume through various parsers to see how it looks to algorithms. Cover letters that are written to the exact specs of the job as posted can’t hurt.
- Veritasium has an excellent video explaining the proof and the historical context.
- A friend of mine had some content reach the front page maybe 6 months ago. I don't know this for 100%, but I think for cool projects that dang thinks are of interest to the community, he will post them to the front page manually some time after the original post date when (speculation here) the front page needs some interesting content. When something like this happened to him, my friend's post date got reset, but the votes and comments it may have received while it was waiting remained. This might explain the instant votes mentioned.
Nice little project, I'm glad to have seen it. Music generation stuff is always of interest to me.
edit: Saw this on another thread. Seems to line up with what I was talking about: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=26998308
- I considered buying a pinball machine in my 20's. An older, wiser guy I knew told me,
Now that I've got a basement and am reasonably stable, the itch is coming back."Do you like working on small gadgets and tinkering with lots of rubber bands and motors and solenoids?" "Not really, but I love playing pinball." "Don't buy a pinball machine." - My takeaway is that Sussman is looking at his field after a lifetime of contribution. He's looking for signposts on where we can go next. He's not valuing one over the other, but looking at the brain and saying, "Here's something that exists that's operating on problems in a way we can't begin to approach using current software/hardware techniques". He sees some hints available to us in the noise reduction things he talks about at the end. In that way, the talk is more him challenging the audience to question our approaches and implied constraints rather than him trying to present us with an answer. It's one of my favorite videos (the way too loud HI at the beginning, notwithstanding).
- William Gibson wrote about similar stuff in various stories in the collection “Burning Chrome” and in Neuromancer. IIRC, there was an elite hacker whose mind had been saved in ROM, the Dixie Construct, I think. It was helping with a job. It’s reward if they succeeded? It wanted to be erased. Not really a spoiler, just a detail that I was reminded of by this discussion.