This looks like it will be quite useful for anyone practicing languages that have their own word for 10,000 (Chinese, Japanese, etc), thanks!
In Chinese, the number "100,000" is not read as "100 thousand", rather it is "10 ten-thousands". This makes translating numbers in the range of 100,000-10,000,000 a bit awkward if you are not used to it.
"And open and good is what Macs are again, finally. The intervening years have created a situation that is, as far as I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end, but not in the middle. My seventy year old mother has a Mac laptop. My friends with PhDs in computer science have Mac laptops. [2] And yet Apple's overall market share is still small.
Though unprecedented, I predict this situation is also temporary"
Are you in the US? If so, not having a CS major shouldn't hold you back too much.
My major was not CS and I am working for a well-known technology company as a software engineer. Feel free to reach out to me privately (email in profile).
I have a finance degree and am in the US. I've been self taught for the past few years. I know the basics of programming and its easy for me to learn a new language but proving to tech firms here has proved difficult except for small short term gigs ironing out wordpress issues and writing data mining scripts. Any advice how to break out into the industry would be greatly appreciated.
Interviewers normally care about education when they've not got much else to go on. Build something impressive to show them, your proving what your actually capable of, so they don't have to guess capabilities based on your education.
As a former teacher with no CS degree and now on my 3rd developer job that I really enjoy I +1 this sentiment. I have some other tips if you need some, e-mail me I'd be happy to help. david at moja dot io
It uses Python's Twisted framework. You don't need to use this for your development, but I would recommend working through and understanding the tutorial. Once you get the concepts, you'll be able to apply them to other libraries/concepts.
I'd recommend at least adding contact info into the 'about' section of your profile. Right now you have none. (The email field is only shown to admins).
What method did you use to initially learn the characters? If you just used Anki, I could see your result as making sense.
I used Heisig's Remembering the Hanzi to learn the characters and then would practice them in a space repetition system. A few years later I can still write most of them. His method has you create a story and make mental image associations for each character. Eventually you forget the stories over time, but the character usually sticks.
> What method did you use to initially learn the characters?
We were introduced to the characters in class and subsequently learned how to write them. So after being introduced to a character I repeated it on paper for a couple of lines. I repeated this exercise from time to time. I also read the stories of the text book out loud and listened to the recording of the texts. But as I've pointed out in my other post, you have to have context to really learn a language. Just the fact that I used several types of learning doesn't mean that they weren't kind of shallow.
The technique you've delineated above certainly sounds like a better approach.
I share the opinion of the parent comment, pretty much exactly.
Some of my comrades call this a layer-8 problem. (hint: there is only 7 technology levels, 8 is the human one).
One story in particular my firm was hired to come into a startup that had failed to scale, both technology wise, and personnel wise. They had hired up to 25 engineers, hoping to fix their stability issues, and almost going bankrupt doing it. I am at no liberty to say which company this is publicly unfortunately.
It was stressful, but you can't take things personal. You have to put aside feelings, to get useful data out of these people to make the platform work. You can't possibly care about someone's ethics, approach, and often even coding style on these missions. The goal is to try and not piss off as many people as you and, and go ahead not worry if you do have to piss someone off to get the job done, and not lose sleep at night if someone does not get along with you.
The end result was that they had to shed, through various reasons the great majority of their internal team. We stabilized things and bought them lots of time, while they slowly brought in new senior tech management and rebuilt their internal team from the ground up.
It was a multi year affair, and involved working on over 12 codebases and consolidating applications from 3 different hosting providers into AWS.
They got very close to running the ship into the ground. If you think staying up late and pulling the occasional all-nighter is unhealthy, or having a job that has extremely high expectations and leave you no time for a personal life is bad, this is about one hundred times worse. Since my team is small and highly skilled we can get a lot done in a short amount of time, and occasionally we are terse even with each other. But the amount of sleep deprivation that comes with a task of gargantuan size, where your dealing with hundreds and thousands of requests (sometimes per second), the company is going for broke, and a single code change can improve monetary situations in instantaneous, tractable ways, it gets super intense.
You have the CEO, the COO, the CFO all breathing down your neck. One day they see light at the end of the tunnel from fixing the currently broken problem, and then the next day, you discover another codebase lost in git that powers commerce for android, is starting to experience issue, and you don't even know where to find credentials to log into its production systems since it was setup by some employee in the middle of the night a year ago that is no longer there.
I can go on and on and on. But honestly, please don't read this as a recommendation. Being a digital mercenary is fun in your 20s, but it got old quick. Of course I still do it, but I have a much healthier way of saying NO, more often now. You can make a very lucrative living doing this sort of work, but its hard to earn the reputation to get these clients, and you may end up forgetting what your family looks like by the end of a 2 year job that is 365/24/7.
The story did have a happy ending though. The company does well today. Extremely well. A new era of management has come in over the last year, and I think everyone learned a lot. They are a household brand and I hear about them in the news it seems like monthly.
>you don't even know where to find credentials to log into its production systems since it was setup by some employee in the middle of the night a year ago that is no longer there.
Recently I was searching for some report generating code that my team had been voluntold to maintain. I spent a day trying to find the code that generated and uploaded the report. Once I finally was able to get in contact with the last person who had worked on it I found that a developer in India was manually running and uploading the report every week. Why? Because job security.
"Layer 8 Error" is one of my favourites, classier than PEBKAC or ID-10-T. It's based off the OSI 7-layer networking model. Next layer up from the application? Must be the user...
>you don't even know where to find credentials to log into its production systems since it was setup by some employee in the middle of the night a year ago that is no longer there.
I've been the 'some employee'. I setup the prod systems of a former employer's client. While I did hand over the credentials, for the first few months after leaving I expected to get a call from my former employer asking for them.
I think there's only one that I'm comfortable talking about since it was long ago and the people involved have all moved on from their parent companies.
Louis Vuitton was relaunching their public-facing website, which was tightly integrated with their back-end systems - inventory, manufacturing, etc. IOW, it wasn't just a regular website.
They hired a consulting company here in Europe who sold them a solution that was the epitome of using the wrong tool for the job - it was a non-relational database solution for what was obviously a pretty traditional relational db application. (except the product content - images, movies, etc, had to be tied to their back-end db systems)
Louis Vuitton rented out the Louvre for the launch party, hosted by the CEO. But no one took it upon themselves to let the CEO know that the rewrite would not be done in time for the launch. Not even close. The launch party happened but the new site wasn't ready. There was nothing to present at the launch.
The CTO was fired of course. We were hired to help bring the project back on track along with a couple of other consulting companies - it was about 5 senior developers and a few dozen junior developers.
However, the work was being done in France where the norm is to not work under pressure like what we had to do. And the senior consultants where all american, swiss, and german, and only one very good and amazing french developer. I spent most of my time working on politics and very little time developing. We managed to get some of the work away from the managing French company to be done by Swiss and German companies. And then I was transferred to another project with another desperate client.
I was in Hyderabad a couple of years later and met the fired CTO at a party - he was starting a consulting company in India to provide consultants to Europe. Nice guy but meeting him made me understand why what happened happened.
But if you take a 2 hour train ride to Shijiazhuang, you'll get stares all day. :)
And for those that don't know, it's not a small city (urban population: 2.7 million, metro population: 4.7 million). I had some young kids there tell me I was the first westerner they had ever seen.
Not a small city by US/EU reckoning. There are 30+ cities in China with populations more than 2.7M in the urban area. That is an order of magnitude more than the US. The children in China grow up with a concept of scale that overshadows what we intuitively grasp in the US and EU (and most of the rest of the world, for that matter).
Comparing the "urban area" numbers is a bit misleading because the structure of cities is so different in different places (even in the US, where for example Chicago officially annexed various suburbs over time while Boston did not).
If you look at the metro area numbers, Shijiazhuang is 26th in China according to your first link, with about 4M in its metro area (assuming "Built-Up area" is the metro area, of course; it's hard to tell from this Wikipedia page). Tehre are 12 more cities with 3M+ in the built-up area.
More interesting would be to just flat-out compare list positions. #26 on the list of US cities by actual city population is Baltimore. On the urban area list it's San Antonio. Neither one is what one would consider small (nor large, of course).
Good points, thanks for the feedback. Apart from raw population number comparisons here, I personally find the "urban" metric more interesting because that represents the population groupings already in densely-configured spaces. With density comes greater efficiencies across a broad spectrum of measures (energy, face-to-face interactions, waste management, etc.) and those efficiencies, prudently managed, hold out the future promise of unlocking compounding economic advantages. There are of course downsides to dense populations (pollution management, real estate speculation, etc.), as well.
As for density of US cities, Cambridge is administratively a suburb of Boston, but has a population density of 6400/km^2. At https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... it's the 5th densest city on the list. Boston itself has a population density of 5100/km^2, which is less dense.
OK, so maybe Cambridge is weird. But Somerville is right next to Cambridge and has a density of 7400/km^2. Oh, and for economic interaction purposes, Cambridge and Somerville are a lot closer to downtown Boston than many parts of Boston proper. Similar for Chelsea (6100/km^2). Everett (4700/km^2) and Malden (4500/km^2) are up there too.
Other Boston suburbs are a bit less dense: Brookline is at 3300/km^2, Watertown at 3000/km^2, Arlington at 3200/km^2. The interesting thing is to compare those to places like Chicago (4500/km^2) or Los Angeles (3100/km^2). Those are cities that annexed their suburbs, unlike Boston, so if you just compare the "city" population you're comparing apples to oranges. Comparing the population of the "densely zoned/settled area" would be useful, but no one seems to publish that. I assume it would be possible to get that information from census data, though...
Of course as long as we're talking about cities that annexed various surrounding stuff, Houston is at 1300/km^2 and so is Dallas. ;) Which just goes to show that comparing "city" stuff is hard, because cities are just so different from each other.
Yeah, I get zero stares in Shanghai or Hangzhou, but in nearby Shaoxing foreigners are few and far between enough that I get plenty of looks. People who haven't spent time in a "tier 1" city generally have not seen foreigners in the flesh.
In Chinese, the number "100,000" is not read as "100 thousand", rather it is "10 ten-thousands". This makes translating numbers in the range of 100,000-10,000,000 a bit awkward if you are not used to it.