chipuni's comments

Painting.

God loves museums and art galleries, and she often hangs around them, sipping a cup of coffee (one cream, two sugars).

[citation needed]

A good measurement of whether a language is "dead" or not is the TIOBE index: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Is Perl dead? No, it's still among the top-20 programming languages.

Is Perl dying? Yes; it dropped 8 places among the top-20 programming languages.

Good information. Terrible editorializing.

The single best thing I ever did to level up my knowledge:

I left a (huge) company that I had been working with for seven years, to work for a tiny company. It taught me just how little I really knew.

If you want to level up as an engineer, once your current company runs out of things for you to learn, change companies to the exact opposite. Shift from a large company to a startup. Shift from education-based to finance-based. Shift everything that you can, so that you get completely different problems.

random.org definitely uses that process.

See: https://www.random.org/statistics/source-purity/

I'm going to agree with @dempedempe , and throw out examples of questions (not company-specific) that I've added in the last week:

> The git command that returns the .git directory that's controlling the directory you're in is git rev-parse --absolute-git-dir .

> In Scala, you have an array, a. What's the best way to turn a into a String? a.mkString(" ")

> In HTML, how do you tell an li tag to start at 3? <li value="3">

> In Scala, how do you do exponentiation? Use scala.math.pow(). Do not use Math.pow().

> In Scala, you have a variable "val l: List[SNid]". How do you convert l to a ListBuffer[SNid]? "l.to[ListBuffer]". Note that it's not "l.to[ListBuffer[SNid]]" or "l.asInstanceOf[ListBuffer[SNid]]"

> In multiple linear regression, is it better to have a large or a small RSE? A small RSE is better. RSE is the Reducible Standard Error.

These questions came from things I got wrong in the last week.

Here's my system, when I want to know something forever:

1. Get a good article or book about the topic. Not a video.

2. Read it multiple times. Each time, highlight and leave notes in the margins. By the third read-through, there's usually nothing more to comment on. (I can't do this with videos.)

3. Turn those notes into new Anki (spaced repetition software) cards that go into the unseen pile.

4. Every day, Anki adds ten cards from the unseen pile to the cards I'm reviewing.

I've been doing this for twelve years, and it works very well for me.

That sounds a lot like what https://www.random.org/ does to create random numbers.

I just use the XKCD random number generator:

https://xkcd.com/221/

I'm not the original poster, but I have more than 23k cards in Anki.

I would emphatically not want to publish my flashcards publicly. Many of them are internal to where I work, and simply aren't interesting outside my workspace.

(Does any one outside my company want to memorize the class names for the eight steps my company uses to do on-the-fly scoring of open opportunities? I didn't think so...)

I'm not the original poster, but I have 19,324 cards in my computer science deck and 3,632 in my Spanish deck... so our numbers are similar.

I use my decks to keep topics in mind for years until I choose to forget them. But these cards are things I always have memorized -- they're not something that I restudy when I need them.

25k cards hardly exceed your brain's capacity! That's about the same amount of information as 12,000 words in a second language -- plenty of people are bilingual.

Do I retain them all? Errrr... not really. My retention of cards I haven't seen for a while is about 85%. Further, 1,354 of the cards are "suspended" -- that is, I've gotten them wrong enough times that Anki won't show them to me again unless I un-suspend them.

The most important questions to ask any one who's using a flashcard system are:

- What do you get out of it? - What are your costs?

For me, I get years' worth of material I no longer need to look up and a good foundation in Spanish, even though I only travel every few years. But my costs are an hour a day, every day, trying to remember things that are just about to be forgotten.

Good luck!

Easy.

Tell people that everything from when they were young is "right" and that everything new in the last n years is "wrong".

You won't even need to do much research. Hand around people of the age that you're targeting, and just parrot their opinions.

(WARNING: This doesn't work if the people you hang around are perpetual learners and constantly challenge themselves. If they're the kind of person who takes language classes "for fun", run away -- their opinions will have nothing to do with your target.)

Please, try playing your harmonic ideas with real sounds.

Here's some things to try:

- How bad or good do two synthesized violins sound together at 800 and 900 hertz? Think about them as overtones: Does adding a tone at 100 hertz resolve the sound? Think of them as undertones: Does adding a new tone at 7200 hertz resolve that sound?

- Does the instrument change the harmony? What happens to harmony when the instrument is a clarinet? What happens to harmony when the instrument is a sine wave? What happens to harmony when the instrument is a tuned tympani?

- Try to play together the overtone series, for example, 1000 hz, 2000 hz, 3000 hz, ... How does that sound?

- Try to play together the undertone series, for example, 2520 hz, 1260 hz, 840 hz, 630 hz, 504 hz, ... How does that sound?

Bitcoin, and other alt-currencies, are mostly owned by a very small number of people: https://blog.dshr.org/2018/10/gini-coefficients-of-cryptocur...

On paper, they are very, very rich.

In reality, they can very quickly and easily crash bitcoin by flooding the market.

No thanks.

People lie on their resumes.

There's a huge surplus of people claiming skills they don't have. You'd be shocked at how many people who claim to be strong data scientists don't know SQL.

When I last hired for a technical position, I had half an hour for each candidate to decide whether to move forward with them. I wrote up seven questions that took fifteen minutes to answer. I also spent fifteen minutes talking about the job, the co-workers, and answering questions about the fit of the position.

Of course, gutenberg.org is a great resource for those forgotten books.

One of the most popular books from the 19th century was "Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum" http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50115

The parallels between P. T. Barnum and Donald Trump were obvious, but P. T. Barnum's jump into politics was far, far kinder.

According to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ , among US closed cases, 8% of people who test positive for Covid-19 die.

(BIG CLUE: Use closed cases for estimating mortality of an illness.)

Mu.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Goya-Goya-Nectar-9-6-oz/142388990

Yes, I use Anki every day.

When I was working from an office, I used the commute time (I take the train) to practice Anki. Now, it's the evenings.