On leadership, the following manuals are very organised and written well even the prefaces by themselves are succinct and take into account organisational conditions that could similarly occur for an engineering-focused org.
On technical writing aimed at and for an engineering team, since our subject is engineering strategy. Similar to the manuals above, these are succinct and cover a lot of ground.
On technical writing, this is a medical manual thats detailed and limited in scope for good reason. Look through and you can that it primarily serves as reference with the assumption of limited yet enough competence to do any medical work.
I've always had an appreciation for language, particularly concise, poignant, highly-visual word images that seem to snap you out of your mental lull in a handful of syllables.
For the most part poetry, however, was completely inaccessible to me. Uninteresting, even. It always felt too angsty, overly pretentious, seemingly trying too hard for it's own good and for my own pragmatic self to appreciate it.
Anyone can fall in love with a few easy-to-digest classics like the ending of 'The Hollow Men' (T.S. Eliot):
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
But nothing beyond those few textbook classics every clicked with me.
I don't know what changed a year or two back, now in my early 40s, but I decided to give poetry another chance recently, and I regret that I wasn't able to appreciate it's condensed, sometimes brutal, sometimes tender, ofttimes hit-and-miss relevance. Maybe just a lack of maturity on my part, but it's brought a lot of value to my life finding a handful of authors that resonate with me.
Most of them well known: W.H. Auden (“All we are not stares back at what we are.”), Seamus Heaney, T.S. Eliot, Baudelaire ("I am the wound and I the knife! \ I am the blow I give, and feel!")
Some unknown to me until recently, and whom I can't remember how I came across, but who I've grown to appreciate a lot: Ocean Vuong is definitely heavy on the angsty side, but God he can turn a phrase, pushing out some poignant parallel that catches you off guard. And you can forgive a bit of angst in the disorienting world we live in today.
I wish I'd have had more patience, or sensitivity, or just more of the requisite life experiences to appreciate poetry earlier, and not be ashamed of trying to be more open to it. All those emotions and ideas and feelings pared brutally down to the bone, until only a handful of sounds and syllables and some highly distilled reflection remains.
Christopher Fry wrote: "Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement". That expresses poetry well, for me ... at least for the authors that seem to resonate with me and my own life experiences.
If you're like me and have an interest in learning to appreciate poetry, but have no real bearings on where to start, I'd recommend 'How to Read Poetry Like a Professor' by Thomas C. Foster. He has a wonderful, witty writing style, but was an enormous help to me learning how to read and appreciate poetry.
Ordered this set of translations from Wong May just now. I'm thoroughly grounded in the Western tradition, but definitely open to a nice mental image from anywhere, and the (rather Wordsworthian) line in the subject here has a nice feel to it.
As someone with dual citizenship through marriage, and having lived 15 years in France (and speaking French at home despite English being my mother tongue), I'm amused and dismayed to discover than I'm the proverbial Karen of my adopted country ... and never had a clue before this article.
As a native anglophone, you have the required legitimacy, there should be no stigma. I'm not surprised you didn't even have a clue as there is no reason anybody would ever make fun of you.
I can empathize with the gut reaction, and the title is clickbait-y, but the article does elaborate that it's not the same tired trope of privileged kid drops out of Stanford/MIT/Harvard to become startup billionaire:
> he dropped out of high school to become a poet. It would take a chance encounter during his university years — and many moments of feeling lost — for him to find that mathematics held what he’d been looking for all along.
Having taken a similar path myself -- I dropped out of high school due to a combination of factors, but was still able to get into university 6 months later -- I can empathize with mandatory education NOT being something people fit into, and where making the right career choice isn't always clear or easy.
Not everyone who 'dropped out' did it because of unlimited mom-and-dad-money and boundless professional and social opportunities, nor wears it like a badge of honor.
I get tired of the trope and survivorship bias as well, but in this case it seems like the author did still put in the hard work of learning his niche the traditional way, if in a round-about manner: through a lot of hours of study, personal investment, natural curiosity, and using the abilities he has to the best of his abilities.
Some countries' systems rely on entrance exams, not your high school transcripts. I've seen it claimed it's common to drop out of high school in Korea to focus on the exams, though I don't really understand the details.
Thanks for taking the time to post this, and I'm sorry you had such a sh*tty start to life. I think it's important to repeat this over and over that the lines are so blurry with content online, and it's not really getting better.
The whole idea of ethical porn is something that needs more discussion, and it's an area where if you enjoy porn you should put your money where your ideals are and encourage something involving consenting adults respecting certain norms, and treating people involved with the human dignity they deserve. Paying to encourage those kinds of ethical productions is the only sensible solution, IMO. Endlessly frequenting copy-and-paste free content sites is a race to the bottom that isn't doing anyone any good.
In any case, I hope you have some people in your life who have shown you the respect you deserve as well, and been there to help when you needed it, and not just take what they could get from you whatever the cost.
lol, it wasn't shitty, it was weird. there have been maybe 10-20 horrible days in my life. I also got to hang out with every rock star I looked up to, and hang out with almost every celebrity I loved. I have a few left on the list, but, with great highs come great lows. And, I never smoked crack, so at least I can say that.
If it's your kind of thing, there are so many incredibly talented furry & anime digital artists who you can commission to draw beautiful & ethical art for adults, where no sentient beings were ever harmed in its creation.
Sorry if this is too long form for HN, but if you read the article you clearly have some patience as well.
I'm surprised all the comments here seem to be solely around the technical details with blockchain and crypto. It's HN, I get the technical bent and find it interesting as well, but the human side of this one is pretty rough, and it made me appreciate that there are people -- likely sorely underpaid relative to what they'd make elsewhere -- following these (sordid) threads, often at significant emotional cost to themselves.
I did appreciate the odd bits of relief like 'Bitcoin Jesus' and 'Octopus Guy':
> At one point Faruqui remembers a German official asking him, as they stood in the cold outside the Seoul hotel where they were staying, how the Americans had gotten the Koreans on board so quickly. “Oh, Octopus Guy,” Faruqui had explained. “You don’t have Octopus Guy. We have Octopus Guy.”
But mostly, humor aside, it made me wonder for the 1000th time if I'm making the right career and life choices myself in a comfy, well paid job where I'm probably near the top of the pyramid in terms of professional respect, working on problems that I think have reach and import in my narrow speciality ... but am I really solving the problems that matter? I'm not in advertising (thank whatever god you imagine), more in security lately, so the work isn't meaningless ... but I work with some brilliant people whose technical capacities I admire, and I wonder what would happen if a bit more of that gray matter was directed at solving some of the terrible problems described here?
So much money is invested in understanding the psychology of how to force better engagement and squeeze out every last penny of hapless consumers in whatever social network. What would happen if a fraction of that went into trying to focus on influencing the people making these awful, life-destroying choices and somehow (re)sensitizing them to the costs of their actions and navigating them away from that preventatively, even if the success rate is only 1-2 percent? Or identifying victims of abuse through posting patterns to try to make sure they're potentially being flagged to receive content and help they may not be able to believe even exists? How much is invested in psychological profiling to maximize profit for the most banal advertising ends, when maybe for once some of that gray matter making those algorithms could do something positive identifying patterns indicative of abuse, beyond just the current simple fig leaf approach to pretend the owners of your social network of choice cares about your well being.
I'd love to do better, and I'd take a decent pay cut if I felt I could do something for that, and maybe even get to feel a bit better as a person in this weird world as a side effect. Seems like we not only should but could do a lot more here, before this gets to the criminal investigation level.
I have to feel that on some level, actively seeking out jobs where you review CSAM on a daily basis should be at least something of a red flag to those employers.
Indeed, I'd hate to be the recruiter for that. I can't imagine the kind of psychological profile you'd need for something like that. The end of the article describes the psychological cost the investigation had on the investigators who were parents themselves.
But even at an algorithmic level, it seems like there are all kinds of red flags you could pull out of public posts and do a much better job of redirecting potentially victimized people to some organisations doing meaningful work to help victims.
How many categories does my online profile fit in based on all my interests, and how many hundreds of bright people are wasting their lives to discern that I happen to like A + B + C and I'm in financial bracket F, with political leaning G ... to try to show me an advert I'm probably just blocking anyway.
For the past two years, I've been working on and off on a basic, open source scientific computing library in C (basic linear algebra on embedded devices, etc.), and hired a student this summer to work on adding some orientation algorithms.
It's still a work in progress, but we did dig up a couple other filter options to try out beyond the usual Extended Kalman (contributors very much welcome!) [1].
As another poster mentioned, finding the right parameters for the filters is essential, and involves a fair amount of testing and some trial and error to narrow them down to the right range for your application. There isn't a lot of info out there on that, either.
I wouldn't call it the same concept. Zephyr uses the Devicetree format to create headers and configure the compilation of the kernel, but userspace code has zero visibility into whatever was set up in the devicetree file.
Zephyr is chock full of these creature comforts to make Linux developers feel at home but only deliver 50% of the usability. I went back to FreeRTOS.
I've downloaded Zephyr, but haven't produced anything useful with it. I was put off by the learning curve. It also suffers from a lot of these OS's do: layer upon layer of abstraction. I also hate everyone's weird and wonderful build tool.
Some stuff looks like it might be implemented well in these OS's, like using DMA, and suchlike. So they could possibly be fast. And yet, I think the way to bet is that they will be slower. Get comfortable with CMSIS, and your results are likely to be substantially faster.
Maybe throw in a bit of FreeRTOS if you feel you need it. I haven't experimented with tinygo yet, but I wonder if that's the way to go if you want concurrency.
I think that the whole notion of abstracting away the machine is an ill-conceived idea anyway, particularly when it comes to microcontrollers. The whole point of mcus is to use their particular features and strengths, which basically the opposite of abstraction.
I dunno, if something is complicated enough to use Zephyr, then maybe it's complicated enough to just ditch it and use a Raspberry Pi.
There's this intersection point in the MCU/SoC world where you can get by with a Cortex-M3/M4/M7 and need solid multitasking but don't have an MMU. ucLinux is a dead end, and then you have FreeRTOS (sorry, AmazonRTOS) or ThreadX (cough, AzureRTOS). And if you can afford GreenHills Integrity you probably aren't reading HN anyway.
I spent a year hacking with a Broadcom-supplied fork of Zephyr to Cortex-A and it was just a mess. It never worked right. Maybe it does now and it's mainline but I wouldn't trust it.
For a project started by WindRiver, taken over by Intel, then released to OSS it's mind-boggling how bad of a state it was in given its age.
I mean on the small ROM of MCUs you don't usually want to keep the device tree around, so it's just sensible that it gets turned into macros and is not accessible at run time.
Given that FreeRTOS does not deal with hardware at all, I don't see how it is a comparison.
It's not a comparison, but if you're looking for a lightweight RTOS and trying to decide between the two Zephyr looks appealing at first because you think you're getting a lot of facilities that are equivalent to a Linux-class kernel.
And then you discover you're not getting any of that.
If all Zephyr DT is doing is making a fancy header file for me, I'd rather just build my own and skip the learning curve.
Historically, this hasn't always been the case, and the US were actively opposed to Israel's covert Nuclear program, for example, which was built with French support against the wishes of the US government at the time. The world has change significantly since then, including the French and American governments alignment of interests and weighing to pros and cons. I'm sure other people here can provide more nuance than I'm able to on the 'why', although there is a lot of emotional nonsense and baggage that comes with this particular topic, so you need to take it with a healthy dose of skepticism that there are NO blanket right and wrong people here and there is blood on everyone's hands.
Essentially, though, ignoring conspiracy theories and set in stone agendas, Israel simple represented a palatable partner in an incredibly complex, hostile part of the world and there is simple more in common between the two countries, despite their own at times competing interests. But US interests align far more with Israel, or politically moderate countries like Jordan than some others in the region.
I'm sure there is an element of playing to your electoral base TODAY, but honestly, I think it's just pragmatism at the end of the day in a region where the math can be brutal and bloody, and there are no easy choices of solutions, and real partnerships are fleeting in the region since the powerbrokers in one country or region today maybe be out of the picture tomorrow. Despite internal politics in Israel looking like a bloodsport from outside, they are at least a consistent voice in a highly turbulent region.
That's just my relatively uninformed, I'm sure biased opinion, but I don't have a fixed opinion on who the good and bad people here are, and thing there's a lot of blame in every direction, and no real will to change that on any side.
I agree that it's mostly interests rather than electoral politics, though there's a certain amount of the latter as well (and Israel have invested heavily in public diplomacy programmes to try to keep their stock high in that regard). It's worth noting that one of the other closest allies of the US/UK in the region is Saudi Arabia, who nobody would describe as 'politically moderate' or close in values.
There clearly aren't a lot of good bedfellows to be had in the region. US engagement in ME politics is rife with contradictions and blind self-interest, as are political calculations in the EU, China, or anywhere else with enough reach to matter. When you have to weigh blood, oil, military projection, and short-term regional influence in a unpredictable region, it's hard to see anyone as being on the right side of anything. At least the Russians aren't even pretending otherwise, which is sadly refreshing!
Anything involved Israel just has a depressing tendency to quickly degrade into double standards, name calling and selective vision from otherwise intelligent-seeming people I would normally respect. That's what really depresses me: the inability to have an intelligent rational discussion on anything involving Israel.
Be mercilessly critical if it's justified! I certainly am, and don't think oil is worth so much blood. But it's as necessary with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, and Palestine as it is with Israel. Just be lucid, honest and fair about it, and willing to admit you don't have all the facts or answers. Why that's so damned hard baffles me, especially from people like engineers who trade in complexity and nuance and edge cases days in and day out.
> But it's as necessary with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, and Palestine as it is with Israel.
If Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Palestine have reasons to hate each other, then why intervene? It's not like backing one side will stop the conflicts and bring peace as recent history showed us.
The Iraqi prime minister just escaped a bomb attack a few days ago. No friend of Saddam, but I believe the US has responsibilities now. Well, that would be true for Iran as well...
It's not just the US and UK supporting Saudi Arabia (and other Middle Eastern dictatorships like the UAE), but pretty much all of the EU as well. Look at the sort of military tech they're able to get quite easily from Germany (despite the occasional temporary freeze after bad press, later quietly lifted), France, the Netherlands, Belgium, etc.
It's all geopolitics in the end, and Saudi Arabia not only has influence by virtue of controlling so much of the world's energy supply but because it's a relatively stable and consistent power and its regional aims are in line with the US and Europe's desired strategic outcomes.
There isn't a single European government that would rather Saudi Arabia be a democratic country right now.
The second largest political party in the first Knesset was Mapam, which had ideological ties to the Soviet Union (the largest party was the center left Worker's Party or Mapai). The USSR was the first country to recognize Israel, followed by future Warsaw Pact members Czechosolvakia and Poland. Then Hungary and Romania recognized Israel. The next year, the US decided to recognize Israel. So Israel initially had better diplomatic relations with the future Warsaw Pact than the USA.
With the 1967 war, these Warsaw Pact countries all broke diplomatic relations with Israel (except Romania, which was in the process of breaking away from the USSR). Relations between the US and Israel improved dramatically in 1967. In 1973 Israel had an ill-fated war with Egypt, whose Sinai peninsula was occupied by Israel since 1967, and in 1977, Likud took over the Knesset for the first time.
So 1967 was an important year in the relationship shift.
Comparing the blood on the conquerer hands and the blood on the conquered hand is always a strong indicator of either misinformation or bad faith.
It would be like saying 'Sure, the USA did a lot of terrible things in Afghanistan, but did you know that Taliban recruits child soldiers? There are blood on everybody's hand', well yes detective it's called a war, nobody is innocent in a war. The relevant issue is who let the first blood flow, who broke into a land not theirs and started the whole deadly recursion. Certainly not the people who lived there for 2000+ years.
No, I'm saying that the US also committed human rights abuses, so it's not very useful to look at human rights abuses as a measure of who's more evil. You have two tools, both run on linux and windows, so portability is not a useful measure of which tool is better, remove it from both sides of the equation and look at what's left.
If you remove human rights abuses from the side of Taliban, you get a bunch of people defending their home lands. If you remove human rights abuses from the side of USA, you get an empire willing to violate the sovereignty of an entire nation because it's government didn't cooperate enough with them in chasing down one outlaw. Compare those two and decide who's more at fault in the war.
Applying the same procedure to the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict is left as an exercise for the reader.
It tends to be a very small world where you get to know everyone after a certain point, or you know someone who knows someone, and jobs tend to be had by word of mouth. If you have a good reputation (which can be gained working on problems on visible open source projects), work tends to present itself. Even more so than in other fields because it is such a small world, despite the enormous amounts of money involved in semiconductors.
There aren't a lot of advertised jobs, but I think this is often because they tend to get filled via word-of-mouth and employability is rarely a problem for a decent embedded engineer.
