While it may be difficult for someone in their 50s, I found indoor rock climbing, particularly bouldering and top-rope climbing, helped a great deal with a mild personal fear of heights, because it breaks old negative associations with heights.
I found top-rope climbing quickly acclimates people to heights, because it repeatedly puts you in situations where you are constantly in high places 5-30 feet off the ground, suspended by ropes, in a situation you're having fun. Having tied all your own knots so that you know they're good, having the ability to ascend gradually and have someone lower you if you get too nervous, having someone below encouraging you and ready to catch you with friction tools ensuring even if you let go of the wall, you just stay suspended at your current height, and getting a better physical sense for one's body as a physical, gravitational object, quickly get you used to being in the air in a context where you're actually having fun, which strongly helps break the fear.
Bouldering, rock climbing on walls without ropes about 5-12 feet in height over thickly-padded floors, accomplishes many of the same goals, and also accustoms and trains you to fall safely and trust in your balance and strength when up high. It's also easier to get started as a beginner, as all you need are rock climbing shoes and a gym.
I agree with the parent poster in regards to top roping, but I will add one thing: climb up 8 or more meters and let yourself fall about a meter allowing the rope to jolt you when it takes your weight. The subsequent adrenaline rush will make you lose your fear. I can go from freaking out to smashing climbs in about 5 minutes :)
As a note: be safe if you do this -- get an experienced climber to belay you. I do not take any responsibility for any harm this could cause.
Companies comfortable offering loans to risky candidates will feel far less comfortable doing so.
There is because there is some point where the ratio between amount of money requested, and expected postgraduate earnings for the chosen degree, would make for a bad deal due to the likelihood of default.
It’s less risky for students, but loan providers won’t want to overextend themselves to accomodate institutions who promise students the moon and demand sums they won’t be able to repay to “give” it to them.
Most student loans come from the federal government, and the rates are fixed regardless of risk. So what you and parent are really suggesting is increasing interest rates on student loans, which I totally support. Getting the government out of the student loan business so that the rates can be determined by markets would seem a good first step.
As a preface, I’m not saying that those are inherently bad choices per se, because the underlying ideas are obscure enough that anyone who knows them at this moment probably knows other things you care about.
That said, never forget that ultimately your filtering criteria leak, and candidates will begin coming in with knowledge JUST about that, because you care.
Furthermore, you’re currently optimizing for trivia obtained in CS education that skilled programmers from other STEM fields and non-traditional backgrounds will lack. Besides people directly working on SSL, very few people need to know about symmetric encryption schemes at any practical level, and at best remember it at the same level I just stated it at, as a factoid. So you’re going to mostly find people who’d know that factoid and who’d remember that factoid; put another way, canned-answer spouters.
If you set up a web server for anything in the last few years you would have picked up something about SSL. Even if you just skim the rationale before copying the configs from Mozilla.
Right. They were chosen because experienced Java devs should be extremely comfortable with them. Not just familiar, but basically experts. And if they're not, it's a big red flag that casts a shadow over really anything else they have to say.
I'm sure each language/technology has a small list of universals that experienced practitioners should be quite comfortable with. Of course there are exceptions, it's not perfect, but my point is that these things are a good proxy for estimating overall competence level.
Thank you for saying this! I have 30 years of paid CS experience, a degree, owned my own software company, worked for Fortune 50 companies and don't use any of those technologies. (I have used git, and used rebase, but like everything in git, it's so poorly named for what it does, that I don't remember exactly. I wouldn't even want to try to explain it at this point.)
This is anecdotal, but there are different forms of test prep which the wealthy have access to that are way better prep than private tutors.
For example, Kaplan training offers 4-8 (you can pay for more) fully proctored fake SATs, written, tested and graded 100% in the style of the SAT, which they then use to tell you all the answers that you got wrong, where you lost points, what subjects those points were lost in, and then gives you test prep books specifically for the microtopics you don’t know, AND THEN gives you the books most people associate with test prep, AND THEN connects you with a group class, (AND if you wanted to pay for one)
a private tutor. The tutors are trained on the subjects, are there to track your progress, and to teach speed tricks.
And if it’s still at all a possibility it doesn’t work, they guaranteed a refund on anything less than a 40% point boost on points you didn’t score or an 80% final score on someone untested.
My point is, test prep as I saw it for the wealthy is not just books, or a tutor, its a vast network of trained practitioners and materials which probe at your weaknesses and give feedback at a rate books or tutors alone could never match. Test prep between the poor and rich looks fundamentally different.
THAT, aside from all of the benefits of economic stability and the educational support parents making 100k+ can provide, is where you get these differences in outcome.
Well, that and the fact that IQ is significantly hereditable, tends to correlate with high income, and also correlates with high standardized test scores.
This idea you had, interestingly, has nasty traps.
1. You need to specify an “origin” which is (0,0).
This is hard because there is more than one good choice (base or top of a brick?), the structure base may be more than a single brick wide, and you still need an orientation for the base bricks relative to the table, since if they’re at an angle, it isn’t the same.
2. This fails, or at least complicates, on structures that are not fully connected, like 2 towers next to each other. XYZ doesn’t have tools for two towers, rotated, at an angle not parallel to the table.
3. You’re fucked on units if there are any “small” half bricks in the structure, which are common in lego sets.
4. It’s not human optimized. If you forget the origin (easy in a big structure, you fail.
It’s not a bad idea, for some forms of the problem, but this underconsideration is why explaining things is hard.
I've had to explain to folks many times (and convince myself) that at some point, once you recognize there are multiple valid 'good' options, you need to move forward. There's often little long term benefit to identifying the 'better' or 'best' option for many projects - you just need an agreed consensus on the ground rules.
Also, what seems to be left off of these exercises sometimes is the concept of subroutines. At some point, rather than giving you explicit instructions for PB&J (like, extend hand, move towards knife, curl fingers around knife handle, move arm back to original position, etc), that can be coded as a named macro/subroutine, and we can just say "grab knife". (or... "grab knife by handle!")
To truly explain concepts to another, you have to be able to think like them or at least imagine what it would be like to think like them; you have to listen to them, observe them and react accordingly. In addition you need to be a subject matter expert to such a degree that you can invent or recall appropriate analogies and metaphors which suit your audience. All told this is a rare find, requiring either instinct, or long experience.
> It’s time for them to get creative and adjust their business models to become relevant again
You’re assuming that at present small businesses can do this, or, at least will be able to make this transition before companies like Amazon have crowded them out of the space they operate in. I don’t think current evidence suggests that’s likely.
By analogy, small businesses right now are a bit like ants, and Amazon a child with a magnifying glass. The child and ants are categorically different, and the ants that the child chooses to melt can’t “get creative” or “adjust their model” from being the prey of a quasi-predator: they merely die, the threat is too powerful and their biology too slow to let them escape. There is such a mismatch in scale between the ants and child that even though both could, in vague terms be described as “living creatures”, and even although the ants, at their most powerful, can sting, the vast majority are merely at the child’s mercy, with the other ants only being safe by nature of being hidden.
What’s key is we’re not really seeing new small business competitors emerging who, were your model correct, should be “getting creative” and then successfully taking on Amazon locally, BUT INSTEAD we’re seeing what we expect in the unbalanced ant scenario, almost all companies and lines of business Amazon targets being taken over by them or destroyed.
Based on this, I’m inclined to believe the view you have is flawed. Not only is there not a level playing field in which getting creative would be meaningful, there isn’t even room to actually compete, were you creative, unless you’re the child’s size.
And even if you’re his size, the child is a vicious fighter.
What you describe is a monopoly. As such those in oversight of such don’t see it that way and neither do I. Amazon’s sales still pale to that of Walmart’s. Is Wal-Mart threatened by Amazon sure! Because they haven’t innovated like Amazon has.
Ants and children are a good comparison. Individually, the ants are much smaller than the child, but the total biomass of ants and humans is roughly equal. With vastly different abilities, ants and humans are roughly equally successful at making more of themselves.
I'm not talking about a theoretical situation in which small businesses or even large ones might get creative to compete against Amazon. This is something that's actually happening right now, and consumers are benefiting from it. Prices are going down while the expected quality of customer service is going up. Wages in retail are starting to rise to attract better talent as competition increases. Companies that used to be complacent because they owned their local markets are rethinking their strategy for the first time in a long time because they have no choice.
Well, in the most trivial and banal sense possible, it is: there's now another message app that wasn't there before.
I tried to unpack why this phrase is overused. I think it is because it's one of a few things that both sounds lofty when used in a pitch, and wiil always be true.
It's also a great dodge of considering the type of change (changing the world for the better or worse?) or of that change's magnitude (substantially changing the world, or just a little?). To some of a crowd, having heard the above, they will assume things about "changing the world" that may make further probing on those points at a high level sound like duplicate questions, and thus surpresses the chance of getting them. Useful for someone trying to peddle crap.
I only really see it used on potential employees, rather than potential customers. It sounds better than the more-correct 'come and sacrifice your best years on this pointless app that might make me rich but probably will crash and burn like all the others'.
Statistics arises from a set of axioms, assumed truths, which can be used to prove all other things in the field.
You can take a look at the three axioms people use to justify statistics. If you are willing to accept them, all else that relies on them (without using new axioms) must be true:
This same logic is used to justify development in pure mathematics: choose a set of axioms which you accept as ground truths, and prove things using them. As long as you are unable to prove your axioms are contradictory, and the axiom choice seems acceptable, then the work that you've done (with respect to them) is philosophically justified.
Just for reference, not everyone is OK with the foundations of probability - what you might call "conventional mathematical probability" as axiomatized by Kolmogorov. See http://www2.idsia.ch/cms/isipta-ecsqaru/ for the most recent in a series of workshops.
One entry into this set of ideas is what Peter Walley has called the "Bayesian dogma of precision" - that every event has a precise probability, that every outcome has a known cost. There are real-world situations when these probabilities cannot be assessed, or may not even exist; same for utilities.
Some examples are in betting and markets (asymmetric information, bounded rationality), and in complex simulation environments having so many parameters and encoded physics that the interpretation of their probabilistic predictions is unclear.
> You can choose your own rate, so you can go as low as $10, or go as crazy as, jeez, I dunno, $500.. although the higher you are, the more difficult it is to land a client.
I'm concerned about sites like Toptal and this price-cutting mindset they engender, because in a lot of cases, even 500 dollars is an awful rate.
For example, 500 dollars, for two weeks of full-time work, is $6.25 / Hr. If you are an American developer, this is an unconsiderably low rate, literally less than minimum wage, in a field where salaries of about $30 / Hr are unheard-of low, even for entry entry engineers.
If it is hard to land a client at these fair rates on services like TopTal, in a lot of cases this would be a good reason to avoid that service and to seek either more traditional work or independent freelance opportunities.
I also feel it's important for freelancers, at least if they're based in America, to defend the value of their work that demands months or years of technical training. Yes, I'd agree the entire situation changes if you're a developer from a different country in which being paid something like 10 dollars an hour could support a family. However, I still encourage you to recognize that because most of the clients are based in America, they are more than capable of paying you rates far higher than $500 for good work, but people must first reduce their willingness to work at $10 to make $500 a norm. Be the change you wish to see, if you are capable.
In the end, choosing to work for higher-paying clients and avoiding clients who don't care about paying a fair market rate is about life satisfaction. If you are being paid 10 dollars for technical development work which will take longer than an hour, they don't care about you or paying you fairly. This means you can expect to be treated like the slave their hourly rate implies you are. If you work for clients which pay you market rates, besides the fact that they're paying you more, they will treat you better simply because they respect your time.
If company politics won't allow it, there are several possible reasons why which I can come up with:
>Possible Good Reasons
>They don't want to divert resources from guaranteed useful development to fix the possibility of a hack
>No one has got around to it yet and they're just hoping nothing goes wrong in the meantime
>No one has the expertise or has had enough time with the code to know that a problem exists at all
>Possible Bad Reasons
>Higher ups or peers want to implement and take credit for having implemented security fixes themselves. You doing it, specifically, would hurt their resume
>Personal data exposure is intentional and someone's either looking through it or wants to, for whatever reason.
So it seems like it's either a question of how priorities have historically worked out, or how your peers and managers get their jollies.
The former is easy to deal with: Find three similar companies (or bigger if you can't find similar) who had data breaches, tell someone in your company with the ability to alter priorities (probably your manager) how much money they lost from it (shuttered being the 'number' you really want to say, it's dramatic but tickles the brain in all the right ways), and hope they agree that you can fix that.
Alternatively, and even better, before even speaking with him, spend 20% of your work time implementing what would be a working solution to the security flaw(s) allowing a data breach before even making your pitch.
Selling a manager on
>"Hey, I have this thing that I built that would make the whole company much more secure, it won't cost you any more development time then I already spent since it's ready, and blocking holes similar to this probably will save the company from bad press and something like 5 million dollars down the road, based on similar breaches to the ones it stops."
Is a lot easier than selling them on the current alternative it seems like you're giving them:
>"Hey, we have an abstract problem that will probably bite us later. I think it's morally wrong, but I have no idea how long it will take to fix because I haven't tried yet, I have no proof that this problem will impact our bottom line, and I don't necessarily care enough to fix it myself. Despite all this, would you do us all a favor and make fixing it, rather than making new, sellable features, a priority?
Which is most of the real politics at work. The first speech is selling a ready-made and immediate resume boost to your manager with the literal words he would actually use, which I've never seen rejected, the latter is asking THEM to make the resource commitment of unknown time to fix the holes and, in doing so, when he could instead tell you to build features, to stick his own neck out for security's sake. It's not company politics that's the problem here in this case; it's that your manager knows better than to follow whims.
Give him fodder to stick his neck out, or do it for him, and you're more likely to succeed.
In the other case, where it's because someone else wants to fix it instead of you or data breachability being a problem is intentional, you'll meet pushback the whole way if you try, although you still can if you don't mind the potential fallout. Take comfort in the first case that at least someone cares, and that in the second case that CS hiring is still enough of a hot market that you'll probably be able to find somewhere else to work.
I found top-rope climbing quickly acclimates people to heights, because it repeatedly puts you in situations where you are constantly in high places 5-30 feet off the ground, suspended by ropes, in a situation you're having fun. Having tied all your own knots so that you know they're good, having the ability to ascend gradually and have someone lower you if you get too nervous, having someone below encouraging you and ready to catch you with friction tools ensuring even if you let go of the wall, you just stay suspended at your current height, and getting a better physical sense for one's body as a physical, gravitational object, quickly get you used to being in the air in a context where you're actually having fun, which strongly helps break the fear.
Bouldering, rock climbing on walls without ropes about 5-12 feet in height over thickly-padded floors, accomplishes many of the same goals, and also accustoms and trains you to fall safely and trust in your balance and strength when up high. It's also easier to get started as a beginner, as all you need are rock climbing shoes and a gym.