Mahh's comments

I'm not the person you responded to, but I did also recently make a transition from an individual contributor role into a management role and can share some experiences.

In addition to taking on more leadership roles in engineering projects, I began finding and taking on opportunities on the side that have a managerial element to them, for instance recruiting (sourcing, behavioral interviews, selling candidates, redesigning our interviewing processes), mentoring/coaching people, driving our company's internship program, etc. I found that I enjoyed that sort of nontechnical work. In particular, I liked thinking about how to grow other people and help them be effective.

I vaguely started thinking that I wanted to just switch into management, and I advertised that fact (mostly to managers). I wasn't too urgent about it, and an opportunity showed up [after a few months] and the management team thought of me first as someone who could be a good fit. Part of what made it a good fit was that the team was not 'on fire' or anything, so if I were to do a bad job or realize I didn't like management and thus needed to switch back, the company wouldn't be in a particularly bad situation.

The fact here isn't quite right. (I'm an employee at Dropbox)

Primarily, until 2 years ago we did lean on S3 for all block storage, but most of the rest of the infrastructure (metadata storage, etc) ran in our own datacenters.

Your point I think you're getting at sounds like something I'd agree with though -- you can wait a bit the cost efficiency starts to be what is important/impactful to work on before shifting your usage away from some of these providers.

I think a few visits to a therapist may help you discover more about yourself. (Though I do think some people associate 'going to therapy' as 'having problems', I see it also just as a resource for guiding introspection. There probably is not any "problem" you need to "fix"... it can just be a way to discover yourself.)

In your case, topics like emotional attachment style come to mind. Some people just grow up learning to condition their emotions become more numb... though in some cases it also becomes harder to become excited about things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory#Anxious-avoi...

This is not to say that this is how you are... since it's not like I actually know you or your childhood, etc. But this is certainly a topic that I'm reminded of when I hear your example, and something like therapy can be an interesting way to dive into this.

I would recommend trying to learn whatever tools they use, so that when you start you can focus your mind on the projects and less so on the environment. Once you start, you will be less overwhelmed, and you'll consciously feel good about how much pain you saved yourself. Just ship your future team an email and ask them what they think would be useful to know.

That's only in regard to a phishing attack, but two factor authentication protects you in the case that you lose your password to an adversary who tries to log in themselves.

If said adversary can steal your password through other means (for example, you use the same password over multiple sites, and the adversary happens to run one of them), they still would have to coerce you into giving the Allow on your phone.

Hashing passwords for storage is standard practice in all systems that involve password based authentication.

Even then, the password must reside in memory at some point in order to compute the hash of your password [using bycrypt or whatever scheme], which is necessary for both generating the hash the first time AND generating the hash for authentication attempts. This is the issue described in the given link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function#Pas...

If you're interested becoming afraid around your cars, some of my security friends at the University of Washington have been busting up cars for research: http://www.autosec.org/faq.html

This paper is particularly in depth and interesting: http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf

Of course, their exploits are a bit more complex and involve various side channels and hardware vulnerabilities, while the keypad issue can be executed by someone just typing in numbers with their fingers.

I'm a CS student at the University of Washington.

We do something [that I consider] interesting here to staff TAs for courses, which is hire undergraduate teaching assistants. Generally, a course will have one head TA who is a grad student, and multiple undergraduate TAs. I've TA'd for a while as an undergraduate, and it's been a really great experience for my career.

Especially in the intro courses and lower level courses, I don't think that it's necessary to hire computer science gurus -- it's actually easier to find undergraduates who are capable and passionate for teaching than it is to find graduate students (partly because there are more undergraduates).

Some documents produced by one of the lecturers who I work for as a TA.

http://www.cs.washington.edu/public_files/publications/msb/h...

ftp://ftp.awl.com/cseng/authors/roberts/cs1-c/documents/ugradtas.txt

An additional thought on this is that not only my own time went into games, but my competitive spirit did too. After dropping games, my hunger for being competitive and becoming more skilled did go into computer science, and my rate of improvement and excitement shot up with it.

Playing videogames, I used to have thoughts like, "It'd be cool you could level up like this in the real world to become uber powerful by just training a lot like this". It turns out you can [in our industry].

I still do enjoy videogames a bit, but not with any sorts of long term thinking with it. It acts as the chill-out activity now.

Most of the mainstream tech companies that the other students are going after don't ask for GPA. The only company who did go out of their way to ask for it is Google. I don't list my GPA on my resume at all, and it's worked out pretty well (as long as you can fill the space with side projects or other experiences). I tend to apply solely to those companies and startups, so I definitely can't say anything about the whole field.

Just one anecdotal data point for you.

Do you have any resources for studying up on design concerns?

It's easy to find software examples and instructions online, but I really have no idea where to start with building my eye for design.

Thanks.

This reads like a post that exists just so that people pirating music can give themselves an excuse to keep doing so.

I'd be interested in seeing the process that Hammond took to establish this relationship between pre release piracy and album sales. It says causal, but it seems like you can't truly control for all of the variables when you're dealing with phenomena in society.

One thing that sort of makes me itch is that the reported benefit of a one month in advance leak is a value rather than a ratio. It seems like a figure like that lets weight ruin the measure -- an album that was popular anyway will weight heavily when it comes down to the expected value.

You might consider looking for companies that really interest you, and you can directly email their recruiters. As a student who has had my fair share of internship hunting, I find it more reliable to go hunting for what interests me rather than hoping something interesting happens to show up. Opportunities do just show up(linkedin recruiters sort of thing), but it's just a far lower chance that those turn out to be as interesting as companies that I scouted out on my own.

Some places to start: http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs Or these: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3783657

And if you wait two days from now, it'll be May, and you'll find a fat list of companies who might want to hire you two as interns in the 'Who is Hiring, May 2012' posting.

His discussion pertains to actual sources of randomness(not just the notion of randomness). Even randomness in our technology is generated from deterministic models.

It's sort of strange -- Physics seems like it should be deterministic, so where could random possibly come from? If the Universe is deterministic, then shouldn't anything we observe that seems 'random' actually not random(including human thoughts!?!?)? Enter philosophy land.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/multitask.html Really liked this one since we all try to multitask all the time(and fail context switching)

I wouldn't worry about it since you have so much time. Seems like you're in a pretty good spot. I'd consider getting into internships while you're in University(If you go to Waterloo, I think that they pretty much force you to do these in order to graduate) -- you can try working at some startups or bigger companies and see where you'll fit there. I wouldn't plan it out too much. You have to see what you'll enjoy through your experiences.

I wonder if finding sketchiness in those image results could be automated. Everyone through the machine stands in the same position, they're just of sort of various statures.

I mean, the supposed upgrade would mean that they are reducing the ability of operators to observe images. What's the point in it then? At a certain point, the humans won't be able to beat software.

I know the reasoning of security theater(that none of this actually matters), but it's pretty fun to imagine what we could solve with technology and software.

I'd say that the point is more on the company's perspective.

Even if some people realize <what you said> and know to just go for it, the job description scares away some people who could otherwise be qualified.

And a new startup probably can't afford to scare away potential hires.

He's only saying that a copy of a brain would create a separate entity, and that separate entities won't share experiences. Like how identical twins have different experiences. There were no claims about morality of using brain models for testing.

Putting myself in positions where I have to pull through.

Like signing up to be a TA at the university -- now I know that I have to really master the course content.

Or telling people that I do/will do x and y.. so now I have to do x and y or else I'm a hypocrite and that sure would be bad. I tell my friends that I get out of bed by counting down out loud from 5..0, and that I ALWAYS get out of bed at 0. And I've convinced myself that I'm a hypocrite or fool of some sort if I don't follow through, just because i told people.

Also made a fun screen scraper last week for a course at the University that filled up with only Seniors and Juniors(has at least 100 students trying to get in). Crontabs to run my script which logs me into the course website and checks the spot availability of the class(and then alerts me if it's open). That's fun because only me and the other CS kids could possibly do this.