If you ever get a full background check done on you by a 3rd party service like First Advantage or Hire Right, please ask for a copy of the full background check if they provide that option. Like several here have said, minor discrepancies like date mismatches will be found and flagged. Having a copy of your corrected background check will be invaluable for future background check requests.
Not sure you will see this. Congrats on your journey into full time dev! I stumbled upon the podcast below a couple years ago, and I found it fascinating. It defines "Mission Critical" as teams that need to make decisions in a couple minutes that impact life-and-death situations. You might find it interesting given your background.
Mission Critical Team Institute (MCTI) Teamcast
Exploring the questions vexing the most elite teams in the world
Congrats on your trading venture! Not sure you will see this but one of my all-time favorite HN comments is by a trader named fiaz about trading and failing.
I'm going to first share a personal experience from my early trading days to illustrate where I'm coming from. I used to wake up at 4:30 am everyday in the Chicago suburbs to beat rush hour traffic and make it into downtown Chicago at 6:30 am. In order to wake up so early, I fell into a habit of sleeping at 9:00 pm and like a robot waking up at 4:30 am. This simple routine was indirectly helpful when things seemed darkest.
For the first six months, I lost money and was ridiculed constantly by other traders who were more successful than me (which was about 20 other guys CONSTANTLY using me as a punching/whipping bag). The only thing that kept me going was the fact that some of the very same traders that would be making wise cracks at me for losing money were some of the most successful people I knew at the time. For better or worse, if I needed a trader to model myself after, it was the same people that were telling me how bad a trader I was - and although I was not open to really hear what they were saying, they were right about my skills in every way (but their feedback was always packaged in some sort of insult)
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Wow, thanks for sharing this!! I have experience a bit of the same, although I don't have a group of traders making fun of me, the challenge sometimes comes from having to believe in myself, and also from how family sees it, i.e. going from a high salary "secure" tech job to attempting to accomplish something by myself...
I also find curious the human part of wishing to be believed. The numbers in trading are completely ridiculous given that the ceiling is very high for a skilled trader, and thus most people bundle it together with Vegas the hundreds of thousands of dollars in a gambling game or horse race.
I keep forgetting my own complete unbelief until I experienced a trade with triple digit returns... that makes no sense but I did it (the trick is to not return that to the market and to know that those are exceptions and slow and steady wins the race!).
The irony is that many people here in HN (this is y combinator after all) attempting entrepreneurial pursuits with the hope of making a living and a big payout on acquisition and whatnot... in spite of knowing the statistics of how rare it is for that to happen.
At any rate, thanks a ton for sharing that, it is very encouraging! I've seen people do it, that post is one example, and I have the wild believe that I can do it too! I'm expecting nothing but blood, sweat, and tears, but it's worth it for me :-)
As of now, bird flu is extremely uncommon. Even getting the genetic test to confirm it is something that most labs are not setup to do. The current primary symptom of bird flu is conjunctivitis (red eye) with some of those infected exhibiting symptoms of severe conjunctivitis.
> We’re stuck with other people and all the games people play.
I assume you have at least heard about or may even have read “Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre” by Keith Johnstone. If not, I think you would find it interesting.
I hate seeing Techmeme links because it always guarantees I'll need to click yet another link before getting to the original URL. It's like a useless middleman.
It made more sense before the blogosphere collapsed and you would see lots of unique takes from independent blogs instead of links to a few short posts on a handful of enormous social media sites plus maybe posts from the biggest still surviving sites.
> Imagine a self-replicating code that is able to find zero-days and spread through the internet, finding niches of Turing-completeness offering compute keeping itself spreading.
Conduits in the walls that meet junction boxes in each room to allow flexibility in the future of running or replacing cable. Check your local building codes what conduits are allowed (plastic, metal, PVC, plenum) before doing so.
Yep. Don't put in anything "smart", don't make assumptions about what the future homeowners will want or have access to - give them the tools and flexibility to decide for themselves.
Destin Sandlin from “Smarter Every Day” recently called out this 1971 report. I just resubmitted it as it did not get attention it may deserve 2 weeks ago.
The executive summary of that report should have a number of dot points that should lead with. Almost unlimited money and a workforce of 400K people pulling in the same direction for one objective.
Work these days has less money, fewer people and less clear direction. Half of all projects are working out what the actual job is.
Given that a current task assigned to NASA is manned flight to the moon (which was accomplished decades ago) it's more likely there is no direction at all. No one really doubts it's possible.
It is as if I bought a controlling interest in Honda and told them my revolutionary idea for the North American market was to introduce a small car with 4 doors to appeal to budget conscious buyers.
And not just a little less money. Apollo was around 2.5% of the GDP for 10 years. That'd be about $200B a year today. For comparison, an SLS launch is about $2B
2.5% of the US GDP ($26 trillion in 2023) would be 600 billion. At its peak in 1967, the Apollo program budget was 3 billion, while the US GDP was about 850 billion. So 0.35 percent. US government spending in 1967 was about 112 billion, so closer to 2.5 percent of the federal budget, not the GDP. Converting to today’s 6,000 billion federal budget, about 150 billion today, or not quite 20% of the defense budget, the largest federal expenditure after Social Security (the defense budget is essentially tied with Medicare).
Plus NASA has become more risk averse, which makes project progress slower and likely ultimately more expensive, at least compared to private space companies. However, NASA is still far ahead of the other space agencies.
Another key factor: NASA has no control over its funding (and thus vision) it’s at the mercy of congress each year which makes planning and financing large projects hard. They have projects and designs imposed from above regardless of the scientific or engineering benefit.
Perhaps the tragic reason for NASA's success in the 60s was Kennedy's assassination. Kennedy set the goal and the deadline, and after his death, it could not be revised.
This doesn't really align with the fact that NASA has had far more manned spaceflight accidents after the Apollo missions. They are more risk averse, but also have more accidents?
Risk aversion doesn’t actually mean you’re good at addressing risk; in fact it may keep you from implementing changes (change is risky) that address real risks.
"Risk aversion" here is more a synonym for "prefer planning ahead and trying to account for everything in advance instead of using an iterative trial and error approach". SpaceX is very trial and error focused, which means they learn more quickly. It doesn't mean that their end product, e.g. their Dragon capsule, ends up being more (or less) risky to use for humans than, e.g., NASAs Orion capsule.
I'm good with NASA being risk averse when it comes to human lives. NASA is about exploration, and space isn't going anywhere. If it takes us 10 or 20 or 100 extra years it's all still space.
Last time NASA rushed it was because of a "war", and even then it was really just a vast international tantrum. Nobody really "won" the space race. Somebody got a trophy and someone got a participation certificate and the world went on as before.
I am glad for the research and I would far rather nations competed via engineering stunts than blowing each other up. Especially when those stunts manage to produce some spinoffs and some science... though any science is bound to produce both.
Space exploration could save humanity in so many ways. Nevermind the big "what if" discoveries that would impact the trajectory of our entire species, we also discover valuable science along the way - things that help us in our every day life.
More importantly, the country with the most advanced space agency by default has the most advanced weapons. A hostile nation could pretty easily tow a small asteroid toward Earth and wipe our any country they wanted. Rocket technology, fuel technology, etc.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the space race helped to collapse the Soviet Union to some degree, didn't it?
Regardless of whether my last point stands, I think space is incredibly important to humanity's future.
You’re confusing science fiction with reality here. Attacking a country with an asteroid would be an absurdly slow process without engines which are already weapons on their own. It’s like declaring you’re going to launch a full scale nuclear strike in 6 years and not a moment sooner, you spend all these resources which don’t help you until after you’ve lost the war.
The space race had little to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union, for one thing the timing is off significantly. The Soviet union mostly failed due to internal issues that were only tangentially related to the US. Excess military spending was more a symptom than an underlying cause, you can just as easily blame poor manufacturing becoming an increasing issue as technology advances, a culture of mismanagement etc. Corruption, infighting, apathy, ethnic tensions, mismanagement, etc all kept compounding until you got societal collapse.
