I spent 11 years working as a contractor for the U.S. State Department. During this time I:
- In 1996 built and deployed a system to keep track of the removal of landmines in Bosnia. In 2015 I met someone who knew my work as a child in Sarajevo, producing the maps they’d give out to schoolchildren.
- I managed a project with over 30 team members to build a system to help former Soviet Union countries manage their import/export control policies.
- I helped create a system for generating some annual reports for Poland that was a requirememnt for them to join NATO.
Never worked for the federal government but my first “real” full time dev job was at a small state government agency and the work I did there had very visible positive effects for people interacting with the agency. Pay was really low though.
For 10 years I spoke at every conference, user group, etc. that I could find. I sustained a 9 person consulting company finding gigs through the network of other speakers and attendees that would come up and ask me questions. Every question can be rephrased as “I have a problem you can help me solve”, but you also have to qualify to make sure there is a company with a budget for solving that problem. That takes a little business development.
For conference attendees, you have to have some free giveaway to keep a connection… like a free 2 hour code review of your existing project, or “I’m willing to do this presentation for an in-house user group as a lunchtime thing if you’re interested”. Those little giveaways get you closer to the management and the confidence you know what you’re talking about.
I think that highlights though that a steady stream of decent paying gigs isn't a few hours "after the kids are in bed" sort of thing for the most part. Every now and then I'll do a little (non-coding) consulting for someone I know but my observation--not having looked very hard, mind you--is that anything between having a serious go at it and picking up low-paying scraps is hard to do on a regular basis.
That's a very good point. But at the same time, I do wonder why there aren't more temporary things that are carved out. I think it speaks somewhat to the design of software, because surely people have little pieces, components, libraries, etc. developed that just need some time and eyes on them and don't require onboarding to the full system or long-term commitments or even full-time commitments. But I suppose there's effort in doing that carving out and the way that systems are sort of organically designed and developed doesn't lend itself to that.
I'd think there would be so much coordination and onboarding overhead that it wouldn't be worthwhile unless it was so specialized/unique that your own staff doesn't understand it--and then why are you using software you don't understand and can't maintain.
Where I've had the most experience with using consultants and agencies for short-term/part-time are things like the following:
-- You have a specific problem related to, say, ball bearing design and you really need to consult with an expert specialist.
-- You need a speaker for an event and want a name of some sort
-- You need a discrete project that you could probably do in-house but an agency specializes in that sort of thing
-- You need a fractional share of some specialty (e.g. public relations)
I realized I should clarify “I could find”. I’m in the Washington D.C. Metro area, but I spoke _at least_ once a week everywhere from Richmond to Philadelphia, and occasionally as far as Ohio.
Sounds like you are in my neck of the woods. Trying to get some good side gigs here. Is there any good speaking conferences that you can recommend? Personally, I am much more inclined into govt contracting.
2. You should be able to write pseudocode on a whiteboard without worrying about syntax.
3. Pseudocode should be loose enough that it suggests a domain-specific language that it might inspire.
4. If your pseudocode requires a mechanism for comments, you’ve lost the plot. In their example, they comment ‘v1’ as ‘variable holding candidate 1’s tally’. Then name it that! ‘tally_can1’ would be much better.
Fair, but if you're teaching an entry-level undergraduate CS course, you have to to start somewhere, right? Giving them a set of best practices and a clear syntax does that. And then, as students progress, they can be as creative as you suggest.
Right. I don't believe anyone lacks that capacity. It's very en vogue to have mental problems and it's the perfect one to have because it's 100% unprovable.
I used to be a lot like this. Without trying to demean you, I would suggest stepping down from your awesome bubble and talk to the common people on the ground. The 99.99% of the people are not like us.
Once you learn to listen to them, a whole new world opens up.
About the payment/price; you are lowering the cost of your time way below what you should priced yourself at. Instead of me doing, maintaining, if I can buy time with a subscription the price of a coffee, I'd always go for that and free up my time just to laze around or read something or sleep under a tree. Just imagine that, not worrying if the server I self-hosted on a German ISP will go down because I paid off $9.99 a month. ;-)
This is definitely our thought process too! The aim is to get you to note things down more / access insights faster so that there's less you're relying on your brain to remember.
This is actually a legitimate concern. Productivity tools are overflowing right now, so the main confusion for us is do we aim to replace your existing notemaking suite or supplement it,
For now, why not try out the free beta? Would like to know how/if it works with your workflow.
I started watching it, but the whole thing turned me off because they took two fantastic women involved at NASA - Margaret Hamilton and Poppy Northcut, and combined them into one character that in the several episodes I saw was trending towards being a love interest.
For a show that should have accuracy at the start, this was unforgivable given the need for strong women role models in tech.
Leaving aside the tendency to want to have love interests in movies, the two women didn't even work in the same place. Margaret Hamilton worked for a subcontractor (one of many) that was not introduced in the series.
(There is probably also a tendency in general to make it all about NASA which, while obviously central to the whole effort, heavily depended on the aerospace industry and their network of subcontractors.)
The thing I'm picking up from her is how she seems to be one of the main driving forces behind NASA's success in the show, as hinted at by the fact how she spent years living in her office and gets problems solved trough her USSR contact.
This alsp pissed me off. He is totally ignoring Benoit Mandel brot’s work in the 1950’s and John Conways work in the 1970’s. He sounds like a petulent child who takes himself too seriously and expects others do the same. It distracts from an otherwise interesting classification paradigm.
I do not see much difference between his 4th paradigm and a breadth-first search through an np (nondeterministic polynomial) problem. I’d love to know what other mathemeticians that work on dynamical systems (Dr Krieger, anyone?) think of his work…
I may have actually given him a bit too much credit initially (I'll admit, I didn't read the full article). Even if I acknowledge that Wolfram probably knows a lot more graduate-level math than me, sentences like these raise some eyebrows:
"There are regions of 'metamathematical space' (the slices of proof space) that might have higher 'densities of proofs' corresponding to more interconnected fields of mathematics - or more 'metamathematical energy'. And as part of the generic behavior of multicomputational systems we can expect an analog of Einstein’s equations, and we can expect that 'proof geodesics' will be 'gravitationally attracted' to regions of higher 'metamathematical energy'. (...) In the presence of large amounts of 'metamathematical energy' there’ll effectively be a metamathematical black hole formed. And where there’s a 'singularity in metamathematical space' there’ll be a whole collection of proof paths that just end—effectively corresponding to a decidable area of mathematics."
Is this for real? Is this a legit mathematical theory that leads to new mathematical discoveries? Are these conjectures that he expects to be rigorously provable? Or are these just ramblings of someone who left the game a long time ago and who thinks that he still 'has it'?
It seems to make sense, if you view
that as current math theories
treated as "windows" into a space
of possible mathematics, like e.g.
quantum string theory possibility
space(10^500) vs "accepted string theories"
https://www.dummies.com/article/academics-the-arts/science/p...
Not to give any credence to Wolfram's theories, I'm wholly unqualified, but why not? Mathematics extends all the way into algorithms and complexity. We have already established that for example machine learning could lead to new mathematical discoveries, and machine learning is easily described by math.
Of course whether such a space is in any way practically computable or of a scale that could even reasonably comprehendable to a human being or even to some machine is an unanswered question.
Sure, in principle it's interesting, and I can fathom that statements like these could in principle be provable. This 'graphical' perspective could lead to interesting insights eg in proof theory (I actually wouldn't be surprised if things like that had already been done).
My point was rather: making any statement in modern mathematics is hard. I was wondering how serious he is about formally establishing any insights about his ideas, eg a connection between proof spaces and Einstein's equations (presumably general relativity).
Theorising about a structure behind proofs made of an alphabet isnt new - its part of theorems like Godels Incompleteness, etc.
Actually exploring or evaluating objects in this space has always (and continues to be) intractable due to the high complexity and computational power required.
The big ego stuff and always needing to feed it with claiming credit for everything reminds me a lot of narcissistic personality disorder, which is caused by childhood emotional abuse, so I think we should just humor his ego and recognize it for what it is, that is be kind and understand what causes that sort of thing, while not letting it distract us from the value of the research he’s doing. Intellectually Wolfram is clearly a very intelligent person; emotionally he is underdeveloped.
I doubt that any personality disorder has as its sole cause "childhood emotional abuse", so I would not want to indirectly someone's parents because of their perceived personality flaws.
I think a fairer reading of the paragraph isn't that he's claiming to have initiated work in cellular automata as a whole but that he's claiming to have been the initiator of the "burst of productivity" in the 80s.
But he does call it a new idea, directly followed by three strong words (ultimately, primary, initiator). I'm not saying the only reasonable interpretation of the sentence is that he's overstating his role. But what does make me cringe is that it can easily mislead readers who aren't familiar with the history of this specific idea, and that this confusion would have been easy to avoid.
Website is designed for desktop with pretty good UX tbh even if it looks like breaking common patterns. It’s a very small learning curve considering it achieves the immersion it intends to.
It's nice because scrolling is a 1d interaction, and the path you're navigating is 1d. It's superior to a movie because this scheme makes it super simple to control how long you spend at various points, and they open up optional interactions at various points.
I don't understand why a lot of scrolling would be problematic, doesn't seem different then e.g. pushing arrow keys over and over when playing a video game.
A single repeated movement is very tiring. You compare to games, but games have you press different buttons, and there is usually either some rythm and variety to it, or at least hold the button (e.g. in a racing game you usually hold the acceleration button)
In this website you need to keep scrolling, which is pretty monotonous, it would be equivalent of spamming "next" on an overly complicated late 2000s Windows software installer. Or watching a Youtube video by spamming the frame skip shortcut.
If you want to make a scroll interactive experience (please don't), then at least do the courtesy of having 1 scroll gesture = 1 piece of information, don't have users scroll their wheels like 6 times just to wade through a path slowly. Or at the very least support the page up/down buttons!
Look at this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ52fo5g03Q. I even accidentally skipped over some text sections because I was scrolling furiously to be able to go anywhere. Finally, I accidentally used the tilt key of my scroll wheel and it went to the previous page, and I had to start all over.
Oh. This has nothing to do with the fact that it's a scroll-based interaction. It looks like it just doesn't work correctly with your mouse—i.e. you ran into a bug, not something that's wrong with scrolling in principle. But yeah, that looks like an annoying bug (maybe related to mouse having very high res scroll?).
I tried with trackpad and mouse on my end, and the app is well-configured for both of my devices at least: I'm able to have fine-grained control over my location by making small adjustments to scroll position.
> In this website you need to keep scrolling, which is pretty monotonous, it would be equivalent of spamming "next" on an overly complicated late 2000s Windows software installer. Or watching a Youtube video by spamming the frame skip shortcut.
Or scrolling through a long document, as the scroll wheel is designed to do?
You're not supposed to scroll straight through, there's stuff to see and read! If you want to skip around, there's navigation on the right side.
> Or scrolling through a long document, as the scroll wheel is designed to do?
And it does with a reasonable speed configurable by the user, which is easily mentally mapped to how much it will move since it's just a 2D surface. For example, I have mine set so each full scroll gesture (as you see in the video) is mapped to a whole screenful of movement. So I know that a complete scroll will show me all new information.
Scrolling through this path, each segment has different lengths and speeds, so you need trial and error to reach a specific point. And then sometimes it's just an animation and your scroll doesn't matter beyond initiating it. Not to mention that it's roughly 3 full scrolls to reach a new POI, the in-between is just transition.
> [...] there's stuff to see [...]
There is not [any more stuff to see thanks to the scrolling], because I can't look around, so it's just a video that wastes more GPU power.
> [...] and read!
Yes! And I skip right through some of it because when there is not a text in sight, I need to spam the wheel to get anywhere and overshoot.
> If you want to skip around, there's navigation on the right side.
True, but it's a miserable experience, since I have to hover each dot individually to know what it's about, as they don't show up on the overview map.
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Don't get me wrong, this is an amazing recreation full of very interesting information, it's just presented in the most frustrating possible way to use it. Take heart to the interactive medium, give me WASD and mouse-look! (Or at least a Google Steet View like spherical navigation, since it's probably more accessible) Let me go and walk to a corner so I can look back and see the full scale of the architecture, or wander among the columns of the great halls! This is so much wasted potential just in terms of interactivity.
Idk, I thought the text was frequent enough for the experience to work.
> I can't look around, so it's just a video that wastes more GPU power.
Fwiw, you can drag to look around most scenes. (Although I actually don't think this added much and agree that using WebGL was probably wasteful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30965352)
Out of all places this is exactly the place where that actually works. “Scroll to walk” is better than “push a button to walk” and works on both mobile and desktop.
- In 1996 built and deployed a system to keep track of the removal of landmines in Bosnia. In 2015 I met someone who knew my work as a child in Sarajevo, producing the maps they’d give out to schoolchildren.
- I managed a project with over 30 team members to build a system to help former Soviet Union countries manage their import/export control policies.
- I helped create a system for generating some annual reports for Poland that was a requirememnt for them to join NATO.