Readit Newsmustardgreen commented on How to Do What You Love (2006) paulgraham.com/love.html... · Posted by u/revorad
paul graham is like david brooks for tech. he presents a simple, clear philosophy that is very alluring when your about 20 years old. in my case, by the time i was 30 i could not believe i had ever found either interesting or compelling. to me, its a kind of philosophical junk food
That’s exactly how I would put it. I read his article on Philosophy yesterday at 30 after reading his essays at 20 and admiring him. It’s crazy how impressionable my mind was at 20
mustardgreen commented on Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction · Posted by u/edmcnulty101
I worked at a BigCo after a bunch of small ones, and got totally stressed about the friction as well. Took me a couple years away from the experience to realize that slow processes can be a great thing in their own right because it gives you a lot of time to think about your own interests in and outside of coding.
Hume’s Wikipedia page is really funny where it describes his life post breakdown. He certainly enjoyed the merry life and a good port. I thought it would be a funny idea to do a “day in the life” video following Hume’s lifestyle and just end up stone drunk on port.
Also, there’s a statue of Hume in the center of Edinburgh where he looks emaciated and serious like the ancient philosophers looked, and I’ve always thought it was a funny statue, because it completely gets his character (and stature I’m guessing) wrong.
mustardgreen commented on Not Another MFA Essay joukovsky.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/the-enemy
The author of this essay assumes a familiarity with the MFA v. PHD debate that might not be right for the HN crowd. If you're curious about this topic though, I would recommend Elif Batuman's Get a Real Degree: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n18/elif-batuman/get-a-r...
It's very funny writing, Batuman has a PHD in Russian Literature and she does a good job of giving a high-level overview.
mustardgreen commented on Ask HN: Which books in your field do you think are perfect for self study? · Posted by u/debanjan16
All of Harold Bloom’s books.
Yes
mustardgreen commented on Mental speed is high until age sixty nature.com/articles/s4156... · Posted by u/qw
Thomas Hobbes was in his 60’s when he wrote Leviathan. I think about that a lot when I get discouraged.
mustardgreen commented on Show HN: An album art-based Wordle clone called UNCVR uncvr.it/... · Posted by u/aaronlevin
I agree with others about the clicks. I weirdly got it on the first guess and thought it would be revealed after. Or more of the squares would be revealed per guess a la wordle
mustardgreen commented on Ask HN: What Books Do You Recommend Reading for 2022? · Posted by u/graderjs
I’m reading The Critique of Pure Reason right now. If anyone else
is interested we can start a book club, it’s slow going.
And now for something completely different.. (drumroll)... astronomy!
We're building a big telescope to carry out the biggest, faster, widest survey in optical astronomy. I run a small devops team in a much larger data management division - we do current data services work - lots of Python (3) data services (FastAPI) running on Kubernetes on Google Cloud and on-prem (ie sometimes in... actually clouds).
I have a number of refugees from well-known dotcoms in my team, here's why they tell me they work here despite, you know, the universe not handing out stock options:
* Sustained and humane software development, with opportunities to refactor code for incremental improvements and extend your codebase over multiple years
* No pager. If you want to turn off your phone after hours, fine (I keep mine on because fixing telescopes is actually fun to me but there's no on-call)
* No doing interviews as your job.
* 100% open source with many opportunities to upstream (all our code is on Github: https://github.com/lsst-sqre )
* Surprisingly (for academia) current toolchain and coding practices
* Benefits, stability w/ opportunity for growth. My full-stack engineer joined 8 years ago and is (still) doing better work every year. My most recent hire is a security engineer who has been with me longer than the average dotcom tenure and seems to think it's Christmas every time I tell him he's allowed to tidy up code we already have in production.
* Pay is decent, more so if you're not paying Bay Area rent. Not as much as you'd make as a Senior Engineer at Google. But:
* Nobody is the product. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
If you're interested: https://ls.st/square-job . And if you are a US taxpayer, thank you for funding our scientific mission!