Career/finance

I haven't studied the field in awhile, but back when I did, I got a lot from Advanced Compiler Design & Implementation by Steven Muchnick.

There is an unfortunate tendency, when teaching about compilers, to teach about components in the order they would be built in a project course, which puts a lot of undue emphasis on the boring solved problem of parsing. The layman's view of a compiler is that it translates from high-level languages to machine code; the reality is that it translates from a high-level language through a series of intermediate representations, each of which brings out some property that makes it amenable to optimizations; and these optimizations and representations are what make up the bulk of a compiler. A good litmus-test for understanding, is ability to translate a function into static single assignment (SSA) form.

Thanks for this. Asking people "how much would you have pledged?" is of course only a semi-reliable method of ascertaining how much someone actually would have pledged. Some people - like yourself - might neglect that fact that they would have been convinced by the same arguments from other sources; others might be overoptimistic about how their future self would live up to their youthful ideals. We try to be as conservative as reasonable with our assumptions in this area: we take the data and then err on the side of caution. We assumed that 54% of the pledged donations would have happened anyway, that 25% of donations would have gone to comparably good charities, and that we have a dropout rate amortized over time equivalent to 50% of people dropping out immediately. It's possible that these assumptions still aren't conservative enough.

I recently sent in my membership for GWWC, and just got confirmation for the larger of my two donations for the year, and this article got me thinking:

The membership form asked me (iirc) what I expected to be donating before learning about GWWC and what I expect after joining GWWC. I filled in the "before" field based on historical behavior (~2% of income). But I think that was a wrong answer on my part -- the main thing that GWWC changed for me was the idea of 10% of income as the focal point. But since I decided to join a year ago, I've encountered the 10% idea elsewhere, in only slightly less persuasive ways, so I probably would have committed to 10% pretty soon anyway. We may be overcounting the impact of GWWC because people whose donation patterns would have gone up over time anyway are not accounting for that (unless you already do in your analysis).

I'm an open source driver developer, and I've been involved in the hiring process for our driver team. From my experience in hiring: Participating in any open source project you're interested in is the best way to recommend yourself as a candidate. We get to totally skip the resume[1] and the write-some-code-on-the-whiteboard BS, because we've already googled you and looked through the actual patches you've made and how you interacted with other developers on the projects you've tried to work with. The interview process then becomes "let me tell you about our group and what it's like and some things we might be interested in you working on."

[1] (actually, a bachelor's degree in something is required. CS does not score bonus points)

If you live in a city: Zipcar (Disclosure: Promotional link - if you sign up through this, we both get a $25 credit)

Saves a lot of money and stress. I don't worry about registration or car insurance or gas prices or parking. When I need a car, I pay a pre-determined rate, and then stop worrying about it. Warm fuzzy bonus: Positive externalities in (less land allocated to parking)+(less traffic)+(fewer CO2 emissions).

First Portland meetup, and I'm out of town for the weekend. Hope it becomes a recurring event.