> We treat every new project like a piece of bespoke furniture, meticulously hand-carving the same legs, joints, and frames that have been built a million times before.
No, we don't. The scale of his own code contributions relative to "Postgres, Timescale and S3), a view layer (a set of Vue web apps) and a business logic layer, consisting of a set of NestJS") is negligible. The price he paid was the time it took to climb a learning curve.
The bank account analogy (or "social capital") ignores distinctions between spending and investing, and how these depend on culture.
If you are simply the wrong person in a "toxic" culture, there is no action that can increase your social capital. In a well-functioning culture, constructive criticism would be investment, rather than spending.
> In that time, I internalized a simple truth: ideas are cheap, execution is everything.
This has never been true.
To believe this, you would have had to miss the number of functioning apps and games on all the app stores that no one cares about, to just give one example. Or all the excellent but abandoned open source projects.
Rewards follow an exponential distribution ("power law ..."). Ideas and execution are important ingredients. Furthermore, they are not easily separable.
Execution of great ideas is what yield success - the two are joined at the hip. But the great idea precedes the execution. Execution without a great idea is in essence a sunk cost of ones life.
In C, one can build data structures with pointers that would require reference counting and heap allocation in Rust. The performance would also depend on what kind of CPU/features it is compiled for.
All the other tools before that made programming more efficient results in rising salaries. I imagine salaries would only fall if AI can 100% replace a human, which currently it cannot. It remains to be seen what happens in the future of course.
Remember that an average software engineer only spends around 25% of their time coding.
This looks more worrying than impressive. It's long files of code with if-statements and flag-checking unicode bit patterns, with an enormous number of potential test-cases.
It's not conceptually challenging to understand, but time consuming to write, test, and trust. Having an LLM write these types of things can save time, but please don't trust it blindly.
The Pearson correlation coefficient is covariance normalised to the range [-1, 1] by dividing with the standard deviations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation_coefficien...). So not quite same as the normalised scalar product, even though the formulas look related.
Pearson correlation = cosine of the angle between centered random variables. Finite-variance centered random variables form a Hilbert space so it’s not a coincedence. Standard deviation is the length of the random variable as a vector in that space.
That makes sense; I don't actually know much about this.
That being said, weirdly, the normalization by standard deviation happens outside the call to `cov` in the paper (page 181, column 1, equations (unnumbered) 1 and 2). And in equation 2 they've expanded `cov` to be the sum of pointwise multiplication of the (scores - average score) people have given to posts.
Again, not my area of expertise, just looking at the math here.
They offered KTM a 10 hour advertisement series, which would go on to become a classic for motorcycling enthusiasts worldwide. KTM's response was "eh no you could never pull that off, and will make us look bad". It had nothing to do with the cost of the bikes.
> It is by far the most useful skill to have in workplace.
This might be defacto true in most workplaces, but defending "politics over competence" boils down to "I deserve the rewards from other people's work".
People oppose it because it is morally wrong, not because they think it is an inaccurate description of reality.
You say that as if politics is optional. It isn't, decisions need to be made and politics is the process of making those decisions: who decides, and why.
In academia, for example, there is less politics because the publishing system sort of becomes the decision process. You apply with your ideas in the form of papers, the referees decide if your ideas are good enough (and demonstrated well enough) for the wider audience to even get to see. Then some politics, a popularity contest. But crucially this system famously leads to a LOT of resources being wasted, good research that never goes anywhere because nobody cares about it, or bad research that does nothing but everyone cares (cold fusion).
Politics is just a name for how we decide things. And yes, it sucks, but that's because we suck.
With this understanding of academia, you are perfectly suited to doing software development for them, because if you think there is "less politics" in academia, you are being foolish.
Academia is notorious for politics, especially around tenure and grants, scholarships, etc.
Publication politics are just a small part of that, but even there, working out which name goes in what order of the authorship of the paper is political.
Academia is not more notorious for politics than a corporate job, in my opinion. I've done both. Academia tries its very best to be meritocratic if anything. There is of course some degree of politics, it is inevitable, which was the point I was trying to make.
No, we don't. The scale of his own code contributions relative to "Postgres, Timescale and S3), a view layer (a set of Vue web apps) and a business logic layer, consisting of a set of NestJS") is negligible. The price he paid was the time it took to climb a learning curve.
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