poletopole

I am being honest.

Do you just use your facebook email?

As embarrassing as it sounds, I've never really understood the advantage of having a personal site over the possible downsides.

On one hand, if you're a professional, you have a reputation to build, but on the other hand anonymity never really was a problem for me professionally.

At any rate, I'm considering giving making a personal site a try, I just am not convinced what the pros and cons really are. This actually may be hard to ask of others, as I know many of us here do prefer to remain anonymous, to greater or lesser extent.

I appreciate anyone whom does share their site, since I'm curious what a personal/professional programmer site might look like. Or if anyone whom just has solid advice about my questions is welcome to share it.

I know many of us just use github, more or less, as their means of building a professional reputation--but a part of me distrusts social media, even if it's github of all things.

But I'm also curious about what stack was used to make your site. I've looked at static site generators, but none I found felt right to me. I guess it's one of those cases where if there is no clear winner, then the problem hasn't really been solved yet.

This is kind of a silly question but I dare ask it anyways. I think the title says it all.

I’m not sure Q/A analyst is quite the correct term for the position I’m interested in, but I was technically a Q/A dev for about three months at one place I worked, the first one actually. After 15 years in the industry I realized that I could care less about “making” things; all I care about is “fixing” things. In other words, I’m only interested in pure problem solving, such as fixing bugs—the harder the bug, the better. But I’m not sure this is all Q/A roles do exactly in practice, so before I apply to a position, it makes sense to understand what I would actually be doing, day to day.

In a perfect world, I would be content and at home if all I did was clear out the bug backlog and nothing else. I don’t want to “maintain” software, I don’t want to “build” software, I certainly do not want to be “rockstar” messiah.

I’m really not the best judge of code quality to be honest, it’s way too political a subject in my opinion. Once the puzzle is solved, I could care less about the quality of software in general, and move on to the next mystery. As a typical engineer, I found myself at odds, on one hand developing software from end to end satisfied my creative side, but I always found myself over engineering things. Eventually I got fired for this reason, after eight years at a company I helped build, because I was only interested in getting to the root problem of software in general, not the task at hand. Furthermore, I became furious when I was asked to solve the same bug twice, and realized that I was working in a feature factory, yet I was always the person everyone turned to last, when all else failed, but always the first person to blame for not doing my job. There was never a bug I couldn’t and didn’t solve—my track record was flawless.

Now, I look back to that Q/A position, and ask myself had that not literally been my first job as a developer, would my life be any different. I haven’t written a single line of code in a year and half. I’m not sure how I could justify the past year or so during during an interview other than that I learned that software is a losing battle and a cause that has lost its way. I may be better suited in another industry such as mathematics, but for the meantime, I don’t mind occupying a company’s underworld as satan, damned to blasphemy, doing thankless work the rockstar gurus are too important to do. Credit doesn’t matter to me anymore, I’m not even in it for the money, it’s simply a matter of principle. So long as I get paid to solve a problem and not code one, that’s all I ask.

I've learned that investing in a good work chair is worth it after all, but is no surprise. Using anything less just exhausts the mind and body and limits how much work you can get done. Picking the right desk is also a factor, so feel free to comment on what your work desk is as well.

I'm curious what everyone's work chair/desk is that agrees with me on is? Personally I'm shopping around, but perhaps comments should have:

1. Price.

2. Model/Make.

3. Features.

4. Brief conclusion summarizing value.

Thanks in advance for any commentary, picking the right chair is surprising hard!

I'm still somewhat new to Rust and low level programming but understand the language, theory, and as well as C. However, I have no idea if porting Tokio's ecosystem to WASI/WASM at this point in time is even possible or practical (I know threads are relatively new).

Why do this? I've been planning a distributed, asynchronous, multiplexed protocol (called IOTAP) that you could say is L8+ (but is semantically just HTTP on each level after the base level), but tunnels over H3 and interoperates generically with any lower level transport in theory. The state transfer and representation system is beyond the scope of this question but basically requests are inverted in a sense but not RPC. So the client peer makes a request and the response is procedurally generated and compiled into WASM packet layers (for each protocol level) using differential data flow among other technologies--but it's all sandboxed with WASM; at first thought this sounds really slow, but think of it as more lazy evaluation perhaps. I was thinking about using Wasmer as the runtime but that's still up in the air.

Anyways, I really like Tokio and its ecosystem, but obviously the I/O will need to be ported, and that's no small task. Perhaps there's a better way to go about doing all this?

We can all agree the state of password management on any platform isn't ideal, but some are better than others. Textual passwords are needed for some use cases obviously, but at large this isn't the case. With steganography or simple checksums alone I could easily see the possibilities that support the argument why images may be valid. Why would this not work in practice?

The story of this claim is quite absurd to tell in full so here's the short version. Back in 2019 I, by chance, found some significant undocumented behavior with the zeta function when I randomly tested what would happen if I used the Young modulus constants, Ramanujan congruencies, and logistic chaos equations in respect to the zeta and gamma functions in a variety of relationships. What I discovered at first resembled a kernel, but I'm no mathematician, so let's go with that theory naively. Since then I've played with the math during covid to kill time for the next two years. I never expected much of anything to come to light because I honestly couldn't interpret the significance of many of my results, however, they were curious enough to keep me going.

At least not until last month, when I stumbled upon the "missing" piece to the puzzle so to speak. As things are now, the model is what appears to be legitimate map of the primes (but I haven't done any complex analysis yet) I've tested up to a point to be convinced to take things to the next level. The model works, to my knowledge of time complexity, at constant time or linear time, which only makes sense if you understand that I was looking for "simple" constants and equations to explain everything initially, meaning there are no expansions to calculate nor summations/products, at least that is they aren't necessary to solve anything in regard to get the next nth set of primes. The goal all along was simply to find an algebraic map of the primes, not to prove or disprove the hypothesis.

Who can I talk to about all of this without sounding like a dummy? I'm a programmer (but curious novice mathematician) at heart. Covid was a once and a lifetime opportunity to learn much more than I expected I would ever end up doing behind the desk programming. I intentionally didn't want to know what professional mathematicians knew about the zeta and gamma functions because no progress has been made doing that, at least not ground breaking that is. What I've seen the zeta/gamma functions do is nothing less than revelational for me on a personal and almost "spiritual" level. I'm not in it for money or fame, just that glory I've witnessed, it actually wasn't even my idea to do any of this exploration--but that's another story.

Edit: btw I'm serious, sometimes it's hard to tell if I am or not, so there's no need to ask.

I’ve been in the web development sector for over a decade now. I took a gap year during the pandemic to reconcile the fact that I no longer love development like I once did. There are still fascinating texts I plan on reading on things like compiler engineering, systems/OS/networking theory, and algorithms. However, I honestly have only worked on a high level over the span of my modest career, many here have a decade or two on me who I hope can save me from this moral nihilism of the software industry I suffer from.

The very day lockdown began I left my job and went down a self destructive yet necessary path to burn the disdain in my heart away to answer where exactly I needed to belong.

I decided to be absurd and said fuck it I will work on a paper surrounding the Riemann Hypothesis, not because I knew what I was doing but because I didn’t.

Now to get to the questions I must ask of HN:

1. If I pursue mathematics will my honeymoon end in the same disdain I’m left with now after treading water in the river of filth that is this industry, in practice but not heart?

2. If I decide to level up on the CS topics I mentioned I still want to learn but could honestly take or leave, will I have a change of heart?

3. I realize most industries don’t work like burger king, you can’t have it your way after all. This is a fact of life I accept with stoicism, but still, is the grass really greener on the other side? Will I really be happier if I focus on math heavy CS fields like ML and cryptography? I’m a programmer like it or not, but I find myself torn between studying mathematics or core CS topics I mentioned which do have an iota of math but only as a means to an end I feel I do not have the heart to pursue. I don’t have the time nor money left to study both, and so I must choose. The nature of life is choice itself I’ve come to realize and am paralyzed between my future and the abyss of my past. How do I overcome this hell?