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sarah_eu's comments

sarah_eu | 1 year ago | on: Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong (a primer) (2020)

Americans look at their 9k a month salary and don't care about loosing an extra 300 USD on health insurance. I've experienced the British and Swiss systems - Swiss is like the American - pay roughly 600 CHF a month - and it's way better than the NHS. You can see a specialist the next day, get a scan the next day etc.

sarah_eu | 1 year ago | on: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

Well it will be multimodal, training and inferring on feeds of distributed sensing networks; radio, optical, acoustic, accelerometer, vibration, anything that's in your phone and much besides. I think the time of the text-only transformer has already passed.

sarah_eu | 2 years ago | on: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

In the UK, most CS degrees are actually Software Engineering, little maths content. There are probably a handful of universities where CS is treated as a branch of maths (top 3 or 4). Any kind of engineering or physics will leave you in a better place to do engineering design work or scientific programming than a CS degree.

sarah_eu | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who got hired from HN?

What's a problem you get only after 15 years? Lower back pain? I've never heard of interesting problems being gate-kept by years of experience. PhDs have the best share of current interesting problems.

sarah_eu | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Do you work nights/weekends?

I prefer to work for between 2 and 4 hours on Saturday and Sunday. And it's always work for myself, not an employer. I'm always fresh for a few hours after I wake up, and enjoy it. Never regretted fewer hours more often. Often regretted more hours in a single sitting (ie. I don't work late).

sarah_eu | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Are leaders genuinely afraid of AI or do they have an agenda?

I think there's reason for concern. I own, but haven't read Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence", which lays out the risk scenario in depth. I have read Bostrom's "Global Catastrophic Risks", which treats AI in a chapter rather than a book, and I found the argument for AI being a genuine threat convincing.

sarah_eu | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: How did you rebuild yourself after having hit rock bottom?

I would wipe your partner from your mind. Forget about tracing any problems to your parents too. It's worse than unhelpful. If you can't stand your parents, keep them out your mind. Focus on yourself. Be consistent with your gym. Finish the PhD in in least stressful way possible. Take up some hobbies; something manly, like Judo or BJJ two or three times a week, and something social that has girls, like swing dancing or salsa.

sarah_eu | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?

Never regretted quitting either. My first job was pretty stellar too, in engineering R&D, and probably the smartest set of people I've worked with to date. I must have been among the top earning graduates from the CS program at my university (which isn't a great university for CS, to be fair). I quit because I couldn't adjust to being a company employee, working in a bland business park on the edge of a new city, writing Python in an open-plan, doing agile, and going to lunch with the same people at the same time every day. Great company, feel nauseous just thinking about it.

sarah_eu | 3 years ago | on: Godot 4.0 Released

I've been working with it for a few weeks. Developer but no gamedev background. I love it. Very easy, documentation is extensive, good support on the forums. I will agree with others in this thread who've said they don't like GDScript. For me it's not necessarily a problem with the language (although it's not immediately clear how script execution works - each script is attached to a tree node), but rather that it's another thing to learn. Given that, I've used custom modules (module compiled into engine) and GDExtension (module compiled as a shared library). GDExtension is what I wanted, and I can write a game in C++, and have it build quickly.

sarah_eu | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Is it worth it to get a masters degree in CS for SWE?

I'll expand on this by adding that at the beginning of your career you're often happy to be doing any paid work related to your degree. After time you want a combination of interesting work, independence (autonomy) and scope for the future. You find this combination more often with research institutes and university labs. A Masters can prepare your for this route, but only if you go hard with it, and if it's specialised and not in generic software engineering. I'm thinking something like Robotics / Mechatronics, Computer Vision.
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