Very similar story here. We got married a month ago. We did everything ourselves (plus friends & family), and we started too late.
We started using Asana so that we could stop having nervous breakdowns every week. It worked. Now we use it for stuff like coordinating anything that doesn't fit on a notecard. Shopping lists generally are just on a kitchen whiteboard and you take a pic before you leave.
Any chance your school makes its exercises available? I've been trying to go through CS:APP myself, but the exercises aren't included and I believe I'd need a .edu email address to get them.
No, the authors guard that stuff pretty jealously, and instructors are forbidden from allowing the exercises or solutions from being published online. It's a well-known course used at a large number of schools outside of CMU (150+ I think?), so they're concerned about people distributing solutions or something. Maybe you can try emailing the authors about it or something?
I think nobody really touches David Simon in TV. He's like Miyazaki in anime I feel. First it's him, then everybody else. The Wire, Treme, Generation Kill... it's just another level. On the next step below we'd have things like Man Men, Deadwood, The Sopranos, etc.
I think the Wire excelled at a more difficult game because the writing adhered to a kind of journalistic dogma that didn't allow for many of the tricks used in the storytelling of Breaking Bad or The Sopranos. Walt could blow up a room and not only survive, but convince a psychopathic drug dealer to do business with him by that very act. Tony Soprano could garner empathy and understanding by showing us his dream sequences. But The Wire gave its audience only what its characters said and did. Characters who-- by and large-- couldn't just "problem solve" their way out of their circumstances like Walt did so often.
Season 5 is the most underappreciated season, but I've really started to appreciate it.
McNulty has been a character who believes the ends justify the means. In Season 1, he falsifies that Sidner (iirc) was on the roof, thus allowing the police to admit phone tapped evidence.
In Season 5, it shows how taking that mentality of by any means necessary can quickly spiral out of control.
I enjoyed deadwood, and I thought the story arc with The Comstock and George Hearst as a robber baron was going to have a huge payoff, but instead the series was cut short which is a huge shame.
There is just enough foolery to make it easily tier 2 for me: Francis Wolcott's story arc, Olyphant's acting, Seth Bullock's attempt at morale highground.
If folks aren't turned off by violence, profanity, and prostitution, it's definitely must watch tv.
Sopranos is in the tier JUST immediately below The Wire and Breaking Bad, for me. Amazing TV, but not quite at that extra-elite level. I have not yet watched Deadwood, and judging from these discussions, I should.
Hey there — AT is a well-known brand (surprised to hear you support it well with such a small team!) so I imagine HR will get a lot of applications. Would you be open to me sending you a couple questions directly via email?
Hey there — the careers page doesn't have any indications which (or any) positions are remote friendly. Do you know which of the engineering positions could be filled by US-based remote people?
Most of the roles are remote friendly for US-based remote folks. Please feel free to apply or ping me directly with the role you are interested in and I can verify.
I think the main problem is that we conflate the political spectrum (what are the responsibilities of the State?) and the epistemological spectrum (how do we determine what is true and not?). The "Western World", for better and worse, is a product of the Enlightenment, and as a result is irreducibly leftist in its epistemology: modern democracy depends on a belief that a citizenry armed with the scientific method and rational discourse can rule themselves without resorting to the authority of a king or a holy book.
The Right Wing (in the US, our Republican Party) is less identifiable by its right-wing policies as it is by its right-wing epistemology: they reject all scientific evidence for climate change, biological and geological history, medicine, etc. For the religious, this manifests itself in the old epistemology that says the Bible is the sole source of all Truth. For the non-religious, this tends to manifest itself as total nihilism, which is expressed in the more heartless strains of Libertarian Objectivism; for these people, might equals right and society is a zero-sum game where the only truth is winning and losing.
And this epistemological divide is the one that is tearing us apart. When you say there's no serious right-leaning counter-weight to (the NYT et al.), what you mean is that there is no serious news outlet that doesn't hold the Enlightenment values. And when you put it in this light, it's an obvious statement, isn't it? Politically speaking, the WSJ and the Economist can very much be considered right of center (leaving aside that the median center has moved right over the last 40 years), but they are still rooted in Enlightenment science and rationalism.
Point is, although the political right wing is currently the main base of the epistemological right wing, it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. And the problem with saying we need more right-wing voices in mainstream media is that there are so few of them who meet the basic epistemological requirements; when they do, they are often rejected by the broader right wing for being too far left!
53% agree "Global warming is caused mostly by human activity"
49% agree that "Most scientists think global warming is happening"
71% strongly agree that they "Trust climate scientists"
What struck me the most was gap between the credibility of climate scientists and the two more heavily politicized topics of whether humans are driving climate change and whether there is agreement by scientists on it happening. How can ~ 70% of people agree it is happening and trust the scientists but only ~50% believe the outcome of the research?!
I don't expect it but I think it's a great illustration of the gap between reality and political belief (something we likely all suffer from to some degree).
>>That's a very convenient and self-congratulatory view of things. Science denialism happens on both the left and the right.
Sure, but the left treats its science deniers with equal levels of disdain and does its best to marginalize them. The right cheers its science deniers on and elects them to government positions.
The right has religion. The left has post-modernism. One says science is false, the other says science does not matter. The end result is roughly the same.
>Sure, but the left treats its science deniers with equal levels of disdain and does its best to marginalize them.
I haven't seen any significant scorn directed towards post-modernist views from NYT, WaPo and co. At least not in the last several years. In fact, they seem to implicitly welcome those views.
> The right has religion. The left has post-modernism. One says science is false, the other says science does not matter.
Neither does religion in general statement that science is false, not does post-modernism in general say that science doesn't matter. Some religious views may either deny science generally or, more often, deny only that science that conflicts with the religion's axiomatic beliefs (which implies that the religion have axiomatic beliefs in the domain to which science applies, which not all do.)
And while post-modernism may, depending on the particular flavor, deny either the fundamental existence of or the accessibility of an objective root truth, it has no fundamental conflict with the utilitarian argument for empiricism and science (it conflicts essentially with the quasi-religious belief that science extends beyond being a useful means of predicting future experiences to being something that ultimately tells the root truth of the universe, but that belief is not essential to science.)
Thank you for illustrating my point by conflating the political spectrum with the epistemological spectrum. :)
As for "self-congratulatory", I was responding to the old chestnut that mainstream media is too far to the left. Next time we talk about GMOs and anti-vaxxers, I'll have a chance to chastise the people who are more likely to be on my side of the political spectrum.
I would put it differently. I think the episemological divide (or at least one of them) is between pre- and post-Hegelian views. Post-Hegel, real truth (in the old sense) is gone, and all that's left is a repeated cycle of dialectic.
What we're left with is that "truth" is only true within a society or group; I can have my truth that's true for me, and demand that you respect it. (I was going to say that this is what we're left with on part of the left, but on reflection the behavior you're complaining about on the right fits this pattern as well.)
Yes, I certainly do think it possible. But it will be more difficult and slower going. Read widely, as the biggest hurdle for a self-learner will be in identifying and filling their gaps of knowledge. Read papers so you learn how to use language such that you are not setting off any crank or dangerous dabbler alarms. Reading lots is also necessary to habituate yourself to the jargon. Read the books by David MacKay and Christopher Bishop. Don't waste time if you're stuck on papers, it means either you're lacking either the shared knowledge or the authors are being purposely obtuse. Save anything you think is the prior for later (unless is a minor iteration of something, which most are). It might take multiple readings spread out over a large time span before you can truly understand the important concepts and papers.
If you can, try and organize or join study groups where the levels of skill are varying. Having a group will help in those times when it seems all too much and you're ready to quit.
Finally, don't try to compete with the well heeled industry titans and their GPU Factory Farms. Find an understudied but important niche where your lack of knowledge is not so much a setback because even if available mental tools will differ, everyone is equally ignorant on the terrain.
> Usually, the "liberal" response I get from my more left-leaning friends is somewhere along the lines of "POC have been mistreated, they can't be racist...
You should have asked your friends why a black person can't be racist, because to most white people it's an absurd proposition. So allow me to explain a bit here.
Racism, unlike what we mostly think, is not a state of mind or an emotion. Racism is a sociological system that transcends the intentions of any one individual. In case US history is not forefront in anyone's mind: 150 years ago, a black person had the same legal status as a pig; 100 years ago, it was illegal for a white person to marry a black person; 60 years ago, it was illegal for a black person to drink at a water fountain.
Today, the likelihood that you'll be shot by a cop if you're black is astronomically higher than if you're white. If you have a black sounding name, you're less likely to have a company respond to your job application.
These things are institutional. When we say a black person can't be racist -- we don't mean they can't be prejudiced. They can, just like all people. But the privileges and paved roads that a white person enjoys simply aren't there by default for a POC, so they can't benefit from institutional racism.
TL;DR - false equivalency. "Black X Thing" is in the context of a historically disenfranchised people overcoming an entire country hellbent on keeping them disenfranchised. "White X Thing" is ridiculous because it's redundant: "Thing" is already White by default.
> Today, the likelihood that you'll be shot by a cop if you're black is astronomically higher than if you're white.
This is not true. Not only is there no astronomically higher probability, there is no higher probability.[1] Other studies found that officers hesitate longer before shooting an armed black suspect than they do white or Hispanic suspects.[2]
Read into the perspective of Roland G. Fryer (an african american), the author of the study you cite [1]. His conclusion is a little bit more nuanced then the one you are driving to.
Also I'm not driving to anything. I'm pointing out that research, as opposed to narrative, shows that blacks are not shot by police at astronomically higher rates.
This "racism is a system" always sounded to me a bit a rhetorical voodoo, because it allows people to claim that there's still "racism" even if they have no evidence beyond what's in their heads besides the difference in socioeconomic outcomes between different races.
This, however, is absurd. In economics, there's a crucial distinction between historical processes (e.g. accumulation of wealth or economic development) and general economic processes (e.g. the pricing of a good) in that historical processes are not mean-reverting. They're subject to certain rules (e.g. preferential attachment, positive feedbacks, increasing returns) which make them generally path dependent[0]. As a result, initial differences will perpetuate themselves for an indefinately long time.
For example, a familial lineages might remain poor or rich for an arbitrarily long time purely through inheritance. New York might remain more populous than Dallas for an undefined amount of time since the economic benefit of moving into any of those two cities is a function of their population (through economies of agglomeration[1]). And Peru might remain much poorer than the United States for an eternity, because how much capital and labor countries draw to themselves if proportional to how much innovation going on there, which is itself a function of those variables.
History, even as completely blind process, will still produce self-sustaining inequalities. But none of this has anything to do with "racism", but with the fact that the past matters and we live in a world of crucial events. In a mean-reverting world, in all likelihood, there wouldn't even be such a thing as an European colonization of America. In a sense, you might be right in thinking that non one wants all this. But calling these process a result of "racism" is beyond stretching the meaning of the word.
There's no way to maintain a reasonable expectation that different entities (nevermind races) should attain equal outcomes unless the "Just World Hypothesis" is assumed.
> Racism is a sociological system that transcends the intentions of any one individual
I think that's a rather ambitious definition of racism. Racism is the discrimination of some person/group due to their race. You are either denying that being white is a race (Caucasian more specifically), or you are denying the global definition of the word. Both are wrong.
Anyway, onto your pseudo-fact opinions, since these are always sad to see purported as facts on HN:
> Today, the likelihood that you'll be shot by a cop if you're black is astronomically higher than if you're white.
...Because black crime is 4x greater, not from any mass cop bias. False correlation. Also, "astronomical" is a totally inappropriate exaggeration. Please, look at statistics before hurling words at screens.
> so they can't benefit from institutional racism.
But, that is not even "racism". That is an expansion of the term that is not the term itself. It's irrelevant. Also, have you seen US University GPA requirements? I think you'll find that it favors POC more than anybody, and makes it hardest for Asians, then whites. So. That's not universally correct right off the bat.
> "Thing" is already White by default.
Another exaggeration.
Regardless, I definitely do disagree with your general opinion that negative past events towards POC should mean they are treated specially now. Like in another comment, don't you think that trying to "revenge" on historical racism by being racist again with opposite races, is a little, well, stupid? You can already see that it doesn't work by how dissatisfied white people are with this mindset.
Why is that? Why is it that every voice like yours stops the analysis there. "Black crime commit more crimes, end of story". Ask the 5 why's! You don't think there are institutional and socio-cultural (history driven) issues that lead to this?
We've banned this account for continuing to post political and ideological rants after we've asked you repeatedly to stop. That's not what this site is for, and it's an abuse to use it primarily for that purpose.
Ironically, could it be black culture that causes it?
You have all sorts of terrorist groups like BLM that are telling, instructing, pleading all black people to commit crimes. That's definitely not anecdotal.
BLM is a terrorist group? I didn't realize they were put on a list by the southern poverty law center or the American department of homeland security. Can I have a link? Extremely interested.
So how do we know if it's a terrorist group if there isn't an organization that recognizes them as a terrorist group? Not even organizations that specialize in discerning terrorist behavior can discern their actions as terrorism, so what metric do we use? Is there evidence that certain social movements are given more leeway to terrorism than others, and if there isn't due to inability to study this subject for black-favorability culture, how does one objectively determine whether or not a black favorability culture exists to the point where terrorism occurs?
My eyes were opened to this when I was able to have an honest and open conversation with an African-American friend (I'm not American and never understood the history), and he described the level of victimisation that is passed on from generation to generation after traumatic events that span multiple generations. There is a deep wound in American history that is unique to the African-American experience.
Museums like this try to capture some of it. But really, America should be looking to Truth and Reconciliation commission type of platforms that has worked in other places. Finish what was started in the Reconstruction-era, or continue to suffer from this wound.
Well, you don't get to define what's "worse-off" for another culture. And should that give us pause about current policies that may cause the same behaviour later on?
> "Today, the likelihood that you'll be shot by a cop if you're black is astronomically higher than if you're white."
That's actually false and it's an impression being carried out by the media. When interacting with the police, you are more like to to be shot if you are white than if you are black.
If you look at the linked study they're careful to point out that they're only looking at what happens when you're already stopped by police. Blacks in America are much more likely to be stopped overall, so it's not definitive.
They're looking at P(shot|stopped by police and white) and P(shot|stopped by police and black) not P(shot by police|black) and P(shot by police|white).
Well, it makes sense that blacks are more stoped by the police in the USA than whites, since they are the ones committing - by a great margin - most of the violent crimes. The black community in the USA (representing 12% of the population) commits more homicides and attempted homicides than all the white community (which is 5x times larger). Thereby, of course they have more interaction with the police.
We started using Asana so that we could stop having nervous breakdowns every week. It worked. Now we use it for stuff like coordinating anything that doesn't fit on a notecard. Shopping lists generally are just on a kitchen whiteboard and you take a pic before you leave.