carucez's comments

One way to rephrase this is... why commit to a one-time decision when you might be able to run away and never look back? -- reinvent oneself in a new land.

Few legal constructs cannot be run from. Few legal arrangements cannot be undone. For those that cannot... run!

... just considering this possibility is often enough to give you the strength to keep fighting through whatever current situation or struggle you find yourself in.

Welcome to the future of CS. As technical fields cross into the phase of commonly understood knowledge, the ability to exploit imbalances rises. Opportunity exists everywhere, but we as insiders with our vast technical knowledge are distracted by our awe of capability. We fail to exploit the low hanging fruit that a capitalist might immediately sense. We would rather pursue deeper knowledge within our domain to be masters of our craft.

People selling cell phone mods don't usually know anything about electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, or manufacturing; yet they somehow can pull millions of dollars of profits out of plastic cases and LED mods simply by dangling a few slices of pizza in front of a hungry college student.

Point is, exploitation is everywhere -- don't be exploited, and computer science is at the stage where it's simple enough to follow some rules and slap a few APIs together to build a decent mash-up that's never existed before... that a fraction of people are willing to pay for, and "make bank bro".

I hate it. It's not just you feeling this frustration. Just see the writing on the wall, and know that app dev / pipelining of data feeds is going to be as "easy" as programming a VCR in the 90's.

San Diego County, California.

M-F: 06:30 stock market alarm rings. I sleep in.

06:30-07:15 twitter alerts inform me of stocks to trade.

07:30 I get out of bed

08:00 showered, i head downstairs to read more twitter

08:30 leave for work

09:30 arrive at work (yea, suck)... do work all day, non-stop, no lunch, no break.

17:00 leave for home

18:05 arrive at home, turn on oven, crack beer, clean up

18:15 pizza in oven, read twitter, ebook, or other reading

18:45 eat dinner

19:00 watch video lectures, set stock alerts

20:00 write notes, draw pictures, prepare for tomorrow's code session

21:00 tea and quiet time, screens avoided.

21:30 prepare for bed

21:45 in bed, lights out

S-S: 08:30 get out of bed... naturally

08:35 coffee, cold water, email

09:00 notes for items to do today

09:30 eat oatmeal, clean kitchen/house/bathrooms... whatever

10:30 computer time

11:00 programming time (or venture outside for a change)

17:00 make rice

17:45 prepare dinner

18:00 eat

18:30 dishes, tv

20:30 twitter/news/world events

21:30 prepare for bed

22:00 in bed... (possibly read a book)

22:30 lights out

self doubt will destroy you.

having read through a good majority of the peanut gallery, i'm compelled to say that your contract is your duty.

having said that, ... get a good lawyer. the original contract might be vague enough that the lawyer has had experience with similarly worded crap in the past.

any company that tries to steal your personal development for the entire time you're employed is not some company that you want to work with. a good fight is just a good american spirit. fight that crap that junk corporate throws at you.

tl;dr - fuck 'em. let the lawyers fight it out, but get a good lawyer. dollar-for-dollar, they're worth it. no matter, your education is worth the lawyer dollars regardless.

damn near everybody is intrigued by that guy that's got one foot out the door.

say you're a double-agent. the only thing that matters is if you're working against the common good. if you're totally on another level, you really have nothing to worry about.

the contracts you signed when you were new and stupid are an entirely different beast. get a good lawyer; you should be fine 9 times out of 10 as long as you're not violating a typical no-compete clause... or that no-compete clause over-steps its boundaries.

no ad-block unless in low bandwidth situation. always block plugins by default.

take a block of text, sentence, or paragraph.

build 2 classifiers: #1 that classifies a sentence that contains the information you want, and #2 that classifies the actual data within that subset.

NLP

12 years at one company. work was interesting. then we took on a project that just wouldn't quit. the work was remote and exotic. then it was repetitive and mindless. then it was copying data. now i sit waiting for the day to be over because, i don't want to review the repetitive data that was recorded. 10 TB ... of crap.

Funny how that was one of the first few things I had to teach myself, as distributed systems was something that only the biggest businesses had when I started school, and so, the curriculum didn't exist yet.

Hadoop is not exactly the best example of distributed, but it does contain all the core components. If you want a highly efficient, distributed system, then I suggest one tries to write their own. This ground is still being tested.

Sockets and asyncrony are tricky things, and I'm sure there exist better ways of achieving distributed computing.

1) Compute-intensive, job-centric? 2) Compute-intensive, parallel reductions? 3) Database-intensive, map-reduce? 4) Database-intensive, sharded, non-normalized? ...

The various forms of distributed systems is something that many people don't fully grasp. It's rather easy to build your own #1 or #3 (hadoop). Facebook has done an alright job at #4. Parallel reductions on distributed systems... I'm thinking million factor by billion-row matricies. That is something that we have yet to explore. Sure, we've done thousand-factor by billion row no problem. That's essentially a map-reduce. But doing the matrix reductions on 1e6 by 1e9+ is not something typically done. ... at all. One would need to find alternate ways of representing those 1e6 features as separate matrices... perhaps some form of Bernoulli/Bayes combination and increase the number of operations by 1000-fold.

// Forgive me for the rant. This is something I do like to think of in my spare time. You're right in that self-taught's don't have this skill. My value-add is that a lot of school-educated don't possess this skill either.

Yes. There's no denying that. I would not have studied finite automata, nor subjected myself to the horrors of compiler design, or even still, hardware languages such as vhdl or verilog, had it not been for spending 100k+ on some formal education.

Why does this matter? Well: All my code is as efficient as possible, to the best of my working knowledge, all while meeting deadlines.

How did I do it? Well: Get it to work. Make optimizations. Repeat. Potentially refactor. You'll always have a fallback that works, because you had to in order to get a non-failing grade.

business decisions. a broadly supported and internally consistent scripting language. a compiled language that's dominant in the broader fields that you happen to share an interest in.

If Google shut off only it's search in protest of SOPA, wouldn't they run into anti-trust issues? I know technically, there's still Bing, but since they command the majority of the market, isn't this essentially the same as Rockefeller's give oil away for free to harm competition? Now, for sake of argument, the competition could be defined as any web company that happens to be pro-sopa, and Google's shutting down search could be viewed as malicious acts against a competitor ... you see where I'm going with this. IANAL.

Screw SOPA! If we lose this, we lose the internet... and we built the damn thing... each in our own small way.

Let's make the headlines read: "Hundreds of the largest web sites went black today in protest of SOPA" The more black sites, the more powerful the message. It really needs to be pervasive, and it can't be limited to just tech companies.

Your book selection is among the best.

Occasionally, I take 2-4wk coding breaks to re-evaluate something that's been nagging me each time I code. Is OO working for me? Do I like functional languages (I don't)? How's that PHP treating you (unstable buggy broken)?

I've discovered that PHP makes me angry. Functional is good for small stuff. I need [much] more practice with OO. I don't know anything about ... a lot.

The next 2-4 wks are spent reading and comparing alternatives to doing whatever it was that was nagging me. These time blocks do actually include small coding problems (1-2hrs), but I can't really call it coding. I then begin with new optimism about the new language/skill/feature/paradigm that I've now incorporated into my daily programming.

Developer here.

I check back with the competency matrix semi-annually to re-evaluate where I'm at. Anything that I'm unfamiliar/unskilled with is fare game for the next 6 months.

If I were focused solely on global supremacy, I would check the matrix weekly, but alas, I have work to do, and I'm competent enough to do it now.

READ. It's the best way to discover the unknown unknowns.

Your ability compared to others only matters only when framed in the context of "What do I want?" What skills do you need for the career path you want? What skills do your future employer(s) need from you. What are the non-academic PhD guys working on, and does that interest you enough to wake up at 3am for?

Yes, but only with highly competitive markets, like the 4-function calculator. cough Think harder...

I implemented a lot of statistics functions to learn how to program in a language. Some of the things I've learned on include:

  * moving averages
  * linear regression
  * matrix operations
  * matrix lu factorization
  * polynomial interpolation.
  * multiple linear regression
  * cubic spline interpolation
  * variance, covariance, correlation
  * gamma function
  * t-test, t-value calculations

One limitation of the above is that it doesn't explore all of a language's features. The above are mostly interested in array processing. There aren't any classes or generic types or what-have-you.

In 11th grade (1999), I learned how to program in Javascript from http://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/jsp . I went through every single one of those documents / primers.

As zedshaw says, do every exercise, type every bit of code, etc.

After learning javascript, I went on to learn something more immediately useful. It took me about a month before I had built and completed my own local file search engine with jscript (windows scripting) and ms access. I altered my sleep schedule to 34/14 (awake 34 hours, sleep 14). If your mind is actively engaged in the learning, you won't need to sleep regularly. Sleep was the only limiting factor.

3 months after first learning javascript, I had rewritten my file search engine in perl and C, and upgraded my database from ms access to mysql. I didn't know much about perl and C, but I was happy to now "know" 3 languages and 2 databases.