I'm comfortable with Rust. Why the HW focus? I've heard about FPGAs being used for HFT, but I'm not going for sub-ms frequencies--except if it's unavoidable.
It's fine if it doesn't happen every day. Don't be obsessed about this stuff. Forgive yourself if you ever behave sub-optimally. You're not a machine, neither should you be one.
He says something similar at the end of the article:
"These four verbs aren’t a productivity system or a self-help formula. Some days I forget one. Other days, one takes over. But when I return to them, they gently reorient me."
You may be overreacting with words like "machine" and "tyranny" to an idea simply suggested as a useful and helpful goal.
I wouldn't have commented if the article kept neutral on when to apply its ideas. But the push for daily learning-reflecting-etc is there. Even the segment you're quoting uses days for accounting. You're downplaying one's potential to read something like this on the Internet and try to literally live by it.
As for machines and tyranny, they're terms capturing the Zeitgeist all too well.
> But the push for daily learning-reflecting-etc is there.
But this is a good thing; if I waste a day without learning or doing anything, I feel bad about myself. And I want to feel bad! Always pushing to improve myself has helped me immensely. It's easy to keep telling yourself 'oh, I'll do better tomorrow'; it's harder to actually do better tomorrow.
That's not to say you shouldn't take it easy on yourself every once in a while. But figuring out those exceptions isn't what this article is about, and it's certainly not a 'tyrannical' article. As a society I feel we have gone way too far in this direction; sometimes life is hard! Sometimes you have to do hard things! And often it will pay off later in life and you'll be glad you put in the work.
Everyone has their values. It's OK if there's no universal system. I don't want to feel bad if a day passes and I haven't learned or done anything; I trust my intuition and experience to discern between peaceful and warlike periods. I'm all for doing hard stuff when needed; I'm all against the ideal of always; and yes, that ideal is tyrannical.
Life is not binary. Routines are not classified into hippie XOR hardcore. Not feeling bad for not improving yourself is a good sign of having actually improved. But that's just my opinion. Take care.
I believe Oliver Burkeman calls it "daily-ish" because it may not be realistic or helpful to force yourself to do it every day. But striving for "daily-ish" is worthwhile.
I spent the most part of my PhD trying to convince people that allocators are not simple. But the not-simple part is design, specifically the strategy/policy part. In other words, minimizing fragmentation by adapting to linked program behavior. From what I know, no product-level allocator and very few research-level ones go beyond a "one size fits all" approach.
The reason why this is so is pragmatic: fancy strategies take extra compute time that is too expensive when one's sitting on the critical path. So what follows has a good chance of not bearing practical value but (i) there are setups where memory capacity is a bottleneck and (ii) hey, it's just a PhD anyway.
So what does a fancy strategy even look like? Let's look at the simplest non-trivial version of the problem. Say, we know the sizes and lifetimes of all objects in advance, and we want to pack them in as tight a contiguous address space as possible. Mathematicians call this the Dynamic Storage Allocation (DSA) problem and it's NP-complete, i.e., no known optimal algorithm exists for the general case. Deep learning compilers battling the AI memory wall have been returning to DSA lately (it's an old problem).
The implication of the above is that a real allocator, that is, one forced to work under uncertainty w.r.t. object sizes and lifetimes down the line, can always fail remarkably. So going for a general-purpose solution begs that you know what you're doing (one could argue that most programs out there are "well-behaved", and I would agree up until the point where this observation is turned into a universal law).
Nevertheless, it remains a fact that writing a toy allocator is both educational and soberingly not hard.
I perceive a negative colouring of the "academic" notion in this post. And I totally get some of the pathologies implied: publish-or-perish is a harsh environment, lots of snobbery.
With all respect, however, this industry/academia dualism looks to me at best as a false and at worst as a harmful dichotomy. I mean, there are similarly cliché pathologies in whatever one chooses to overload "industry" with. There are successful academic projects that end up in industry (RISC-V) and successful industrial open-source (?) projects loved by academics (Rust). At the end of the day, everyone wants to build something. Tools and methods are needed. Some of them may not exist yet. The act of building one's tools and methods (or something completely new with existing tools and methods) is research regardless from where it happens or how it is labelled.
Why is this not enough? What extra benefits go with differentiating myself as either an academic or a practitioner? Honest question!
POV: CompEng PhD looking for industrial vacancies.
> successful industrial open-source (?) projects loved by academics (Rust)
Is Rust loved by academics? And much more importantly in my mind, was it even recognized by academics before it became an industrial success?
The very first published Rust paper that I'm aware of appeared in the "ACM SIGAda Ada Letters" (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2692956.2663188). Today that paper is the most cited paper to ever appear in that journal (which has a 4 decade history) and it's not even close. It also has more citations that all but three papers that appeared at PLDI that same year, for comparison. That certainly doesn't suggest to me that it was recognized at the time. This was also published only 6 months before Rust shipped 1.0. It wasn't that early.
My (third-hand and now-decade-old, so take it for the very little it's worth) recollection is that academic forums weren't interested in Rust because nothing in it is particularly novel in a PL theory sense (a point Graydon himself made from the very beginning, see slides 6 and 7 at http://venge.net/graydon/talks/intro-talk-2.pdf). But it did package those ideas into something that was practically usable for industry and at this point the results speak for themselves.
IMO this is a good example of why a lot of "practitioners" in industry wouldn't bother trying to publish anything in a forum dominated by academics.
Yes, all Rust papers anyone tried to submit were consistently rejected up until Rust became popular, at which point Rust became the hot new thing in applied programming language research. Academic PL is very insular (to its detriment, I'm convinced).
There are countless pragmatic reasons to avoid a PhD, and no doubt both the article and other commenters will bring them up. The most constructive thing I can do is share a personal perspective.
I am 30 years old. I am working through my last few months as a computer engineering PhD student. Eventually, it went good. Not great (the world gives zero f*cks about my work, nobody has offered me a job yet), but not hellish either (didn't quit, still mostly sane, learned a ton of stuff that I never had the guts or prudence to delve into as an undergraduate, and most importantly, I decided I like computers).
Now my background is anything but academic: none of my parents finished high school, people from my village consider me either batshit crazy or a genius. I mean, I was thrown into the PhD archipelago by life itself, rather unconsciously. I just knew that "corporate IT" wasn't my thing, and as for the cool computing jobs, I wasn't their thing. Again, I spent my years as an ECE undergraduate burying my insecurities instead of building my future. To understand the degree of mental fragmentation I was under, I had never made the connection between my digital design courses and my operating systems courses (all of this is the story of the computer, stupid, it's in the title of your degree for God's sake!).... Anyways.
It took me six years to get to today. I am another person now. The PhD (well, and the pandemic, and all that followed) crushed all of my assumptions about the world, myself, the meaning of life. There's no way to put it in the condensed form that an HN comment requires without sounding naive, but I'm telling you the truth. Being forced to survive an alien landscape can make you whole again. It made me.
At the end of the day, talking sh*t about hard stuff is sooo easy. You could replace any polemic against a PhD with one against starting a family, or a company, or in any way rejecting "safety" for the potential of leaving your own mark on the world. Being you. Like that poem by Robert Frost, these things make all the difference.
Another great thing about PhD programs is you generally don’t end them with 6 figures in college debt from the degree. As long as you get the PhD in something that gives you a marketable skill, it’s not going to hurt too much vs all the MBAs and Lawyers I know with a ton of debt and just marginally increased career choices.
Maybe, but if you compare paying 30-50k per year plus living expenses for an average masters program for 2-3 years and then paying student loans for a really long time because you couldn't afford it in the first place vs paying no tuition and getting a $30k-40k stipend for 4-5 years. The advantage of a year or two of additional work isn't as great as you think, when you subtract out tuition and the stipend they give you during the PhD and compare the pay differential and job prospects when you finish.
It depends on your career prospects. If you can expect to make $200k out of grad school then it’s definitely not better to spend your time in school, financially. But yeah it’s a math question at that point.
I don't think even smart folks here realize how much of a boost is some good income cash when you are starting your life from poor background. But one has to save it and not burn on 'better' lifestyle with trying to match peers or impress women (clue - if they don't like who you really are, no shiny expensive thing will ever make it work long term and you will just attract very wrong crowd).
I can attest it allowed me to do literal jumps way above what my peers and rest could do setting up much better life path. Pure numbers don't do this justice, not sure how to explain it properly.
Now it may not be your goal in life and thats fine, this comes from a guy who spent 6 months on unpaid backpacking all over India and Nepal well into his career work days, but be sure you are really fine with these decisions long, I mean LONG term. And we don't know who we will be in 2 decades.
Also a good quick start could easily mean retiring much earlier if one has a bit of luck and can control expenses growth (and they will grow regardless of your life path). One can focus on academia then.
It depends on what you want to do. I think 90% of the people here are computer science / programmers / IT people. There are people who don't even have a college degree and are self taught.
I'm in integrated circuit / semiconductor design. I only have a bachelors degree but that was 30 years ago. These days the vast majority of new graduates that we hire have a masters degree. IT's really hard to stand out with only a bachelors in my industry.
But can you still get $125k directly after undergrad? How many employers are willing to pay 2x the median wage to someone with no experience and no demonstrated skills, simply because they went to a school? To someone who is likely to make a net negative contribution until they learn how things work and require less guidance? To someone who is at a high risk of taking another job after a couple of years?
It's more common that entry-level jobs in highly paid fields start at close to the median wage. Salaries can rise rapidly once you have demonstrated your worth. But unless there is a talent shortage in your field, it doesn't make sense to pay much for an unknown quantity.
FAANG or some company in a high-rent area where you could most definitely not save that kind of money, as far as I know.
And, I love how making $125K is some sort of great salary. I live in MN and while it’s above the median HHI for the state, it’s by no means a comfortable enough wage to save that kind of money unless your housing is covered by family or something.
Here in the MSP metro, you’re looking at $2500/mo for rent + utils or $3500/mo for mortgage + utils for what’s a pretty average living arrangement. Unless you’re making $200K+ you’re definitely not saving shit.
It's amazing how out of touch people are. It's one thing to say your lifestyle choices make it hard to save money at that income level, but it's certainly also true that many folks are perfectly able to save a lot at that income level. Out of college, rent in my area was $1500 for a one bedroom, but I was able to rent a house with a few friends for $800/month per person. Even with frequent eating out and outings I saved up over half my income per year, making under 100k the entire time. If you want a really nice car, travel a bunch, or similar, or live alone, I'm sure it gets much harder to save much, but those are lifestyle choices.
If you’re doing a PhD in anything other than the highly paid field of “computer stuff”, the opportunity costs look much, much different.
When I did my PhD, I was making roughly the same money as all of my friends (none of whom were in tech) except I had waaay more freedom and job satisfaction.
If your other opportunities are things like a school teacher or generic “office job”, a PhD program doesn’t really have an opportunity cost penalty
Unrealistic unless you’re talking about eating beans and rice, and sharing an apartment with a few other people for all six years. Remember taxes, etc.
> Being forced to survive an alien landscape can make you whole again.
I can't agree more. My sister died at the hardest point of my PhD and I buried myself in my work for nearly every waking second for years, confident that at least I was doing it for myself. I couldn't have done that if I were working a normal job.
Were I to design a computer (both HW & SW), the founding principle should be compatibility with legacy code at no expense of performance or user effort.
Stuff like this gives me hope that I'm not merely wet-dreaming.
Nah, the alternative that popped in my mind was "phantasizing", so I guess my wording aligns with my feelings. Whether these feelings are healthy is another discussion :D
Great, useful article. Remember: the same principle holds in the world of the psyche. Those people walking around, seeming effortlessly happy? Unless if they're little children, a horrendous amount of effort has been invested to their inner peace. It took me years to realize that. Being envious is much easier than being humble and diligent with getting one's shit together.
My wish for 2025 is for massive, decentralized, slow yet steady psychological magic. HNY, HN.
A good and often useful generality, however it's important to recognize how vast the difference can be in the amount of energy needed to achieve inner peace from one person to the next.
For example, I had absent drug addict parents, was instead raised by extremely abusive and restrictive guardians. I was homeless since 16 and I spent my 20's undertaking the self-actualization that I should have been doing in my teens but lacked the safety, stability, autonomy and financial requirements.
Meanwhile, my typical peer has a functioning family unit, and has enjoyed a relatively struggle-free existence. I also had to overcome disabilities such as ADHD, which has had an enormous negative impact on my life and mental health.
I'm not jealous of anyone, and I love and support my peers who were provided more opportunities and didn't waste them. But it's quite clear to me that the level of effort that I and the average US adult had to expend in order to achieve inner peace is off by magnitudes. Cognizance of this fact is important.
I see your point. I've had my fair share of trouble as well. Talking about this stuff on HN after the storm has passed, from a financially stable place, is a luxury on its own.
Nevertheless, I don't see any value on acknowledging the delta between me and peers that happened to be luckier. It'd be useful were I on the other side: for instance, if I hadn't seen my father sink into dementia, if he was still with me, I'd better keep reminding myself of the importance and blessing of growing alongside a functional, healthy dad.
But now... Thoughts like "I have struggled more than these guys" seem dangerous to me. Whenever I've taken them seriously I've ended up using them as justification for the next tiny act of self-destruction.
It all really comes down to the tiny acts of building one's self or wasting the time... Yes a (non-wasteful) strategy & goal is key, but it comes down to how we spend our seconds...
It's not about people who have already gone through it, or about yourself. It's about people who are still going through it, and how you treat them. For most people, the delta isn't (just) used to justify their own self-destruction, but to justify their cruelty to others. You never know what battles people are fighting. And while it's true that someone can do a lot of damage to themselves, that pales in comparison to what a group of others who don't understand their struggle can do to them.
Yeah, I should have been clearer that my intent is that the delta should be used to increase empathy, not decrease it. Anyone out there could be dealing with anything.
I've lashed out at people before while under a great deal of stress. I've been the recipient of such as well. I've seen and experienced what poverty, illness and depression can do to the mind, how it warps habits and motivations. How things that some people might see as no-brainers for fixing a situation might simply not be options for others at that moment, at least not without assistance. A good support network makes all the difference in someone's life.
There is some truth to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and in addition to not being jealous of those dealt a better hand, we should be supportive and attentive to those who weren't, and resist applying our own heuristics to their lives.
> Meanwhile, my typical peer has a functioning family unit, and has enjoyed a relatively struggle-free existence.
Are you sure about this? I know that I enjoyed a relatively struggle-free existence, and assumed that most other people did. But, whenever I have taken the time to get to know someone really well, I have found that they had struggles beyond anything I had to handle, and that do not reveal themselves at all until you know them very well.
That's a valid question, but I don't know how to answer it without going into great depth rehashing stuff I've said on here before as well as stuff I haven't. Suffice to say that my Adverse Childhood Experiences score is quite high, and that my life has been marked by a series of unfortunate experiences which I have found myself unable to relate with the vast majority of my peers over.
And I have tried. The older I get, the more it just looks like PTSD when I do try and relate with people. That doesn't mean that each of them haven't had their share of struggles, it just seems like a magnitude or more less for the majority of folk I know.
The difference in current struggle has dropped off a bit in the last few years because life has been getting rough for everyone outside the wealthy class, but the majority of my life was absolute hell. The first time I put a gun in my mouth and sat with a finger on the trigger, I was nine years old.
