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Does anyone have advice for getting an entry level software-development job? I'm finding a lot seem to want several years of experience, or a degree, while I'm self taught.
In response to
Open Thread for February 11 - 17
If you have the skills to do software interviews well, the hardest part will be getting past resume screening. If you can, try to use personal connections to bypass that step and get interviews. Then your skills will speak for themselves.
Thanks. Fixed.
I bet wouldn't too much
Off by one.
In response to
How to become a PC?
I try to view problems as opportunities. If it's raining outside, that's training in the rain. Snowing? Awesome, snow running! Too hot? High-temperature training. Too cold? Low-temperature training. I'm too tired? Fatigue training. I also try to look at things from what I call a "mediative" point of view. So let's say I'm out running my regular route but it's cold, windy, raining, etc, and I feel miserable. I try to remember how I felt running the same route on a beautiful day and bring my mind back to that state. Or if I'm fatigued, I try to remember a day when what I was doing felt easy and set myself the challenge of trying to regain that mindset. Again, it's about turning problems into opportunities: fatigue is an opportunity for fatigue-mastery. It helps to take an interest in the mental element of training, sports, etc, so you can think of mastering mental adversity as part of your training.
There's also the option of trying to find a method of exercise that avoids as many of those willpower-draining hassles as possible. If you can, that is.
In response to
Flashes of Nondecisionmaking
Heh. This is the old discussion about freedom of will.
The correct answer to the question of freedom of will is "shut up!" :-)
No, this discussion is substantially different, actually. It's not about the metaphysics of "do we REALLY control our own actions, even when we're trying to? I mean REALLY?" It's more like, "Under what circumstances is our brain even consciously thinking about what we're doing, and under what circumstances are we just operating out of habit?" You don't have to have an opinion on the metaphysics of the thing to have an opinion on the physical reality and physical question: do we think in a self-aware way about most things, or not?
It's an interesting idea, but infers an initial step having been taken: 'find someone else'. Outside of first-degree relatives, I don't think I'm on a first-name basis with anyone in my county. (If I didn't buy my own groceries, I could easily be categorized as a hikikomori; I'm reasonably sure that a p-doc could classify me as having schizoid personality disorder.)
... I don't suppose any of those first-degree relatives are also interested in becoming more fit and healthy?
In response to
How to become a PC?
If you can find someone else to exercise with, it could help a lot. For me having someone else counting on me to show up is an excellent motivator.
I meant alienated from society at large, not from LW, although the influence of society at large obviously affects discussion on LW.
One aspect of my feeling is that I increasingly suspect that the fundamental reason people believe things in the political realm is that they feel a powerful psychological need to justify hatred. The naive view of political psychology is that people form ideological beliefs out of their experience and perceptions of the world, and those beliefs suggest that a certain category of people is harming the world, and so therefore they are justified in feeling hatred against that category of people. But my new view is that causality flows in the opposite direction: people feel hatred as a primal psychological urge, and so their conscious forebrain is forced to concoct an ideology that justifies the hatred while still allowing the individual to maintain a positive pro-social self-image.
This theory is partially testable, because it posits that a basic prerequisite of an ideology is that it identifies an out-group and justifies hatred against that out-group.
Do you have an in-person community that you feel close to?
What I'm trying to get at is, does it bother you specifically that you are alienated from "society at large," or do you feel alienated in general?
In response to
Open thread, January 25- February 1
I'm in art school and I have a big problem with precision and lack of "sloppiness" in my work. I'm sort of hesitant to try to improve in this area, however, because I suspect it reflects some sort of biological limit - maybe the size of some area in the cerebellum or something, I don't know. Am I right in thinking this?
Seems to me that that's likely a self-fulfilling prophecy, which I subjectively estimate is at least as likely to prevent you from doing better as an actual biological problem. Maybe try to think of more ways to get better at it - perhaps some different kind of exercises - and do your best at those, before drawing any conclusions about your fundamental limits... because those conclusions themselves will limit you even more.
In response to
Open thread, January 25- February 1
Repeating my post from the last open thread, for better visibility:
I want to study probability and statistics in a deeper way than the Probability and Statistics course I had to take in the university. The problem is, my mathematical education isn't very good (on the level of Calculus 101). I'm not afraid of math, but so far all the books I could find are either about pure application, with barely any explanations, or they start with a lot of assumptions about my knowledge and introduce reams of unfamiliar notation.
I want a deeper understanding of the basic concepts. Like, mean is an indicator of the central tendency of a sample. Intuitively, it makes sense. But why this particular formula of sum/n? You can apply all kinds of mathematical stuff to the sample. And it's even worse with variance...
Any ideas how to proceed?
Attending a CFAR workshop and session on Bayes (the 'advanced' session) helped me understand a lot of things in an intuitive way. Reading some online stuff to get intuitions about how Bayes' theorem and probability mass work was helpful too. I took an advanced stats course right after doing these things, and ended up learning all the math correctly, and it solidified my intuitions in a really nice way. (Other students didn't seem to have as good a time without those intuitions.) So that might be a good order to do things in.
Some multidimensional calc might be helpful, but other than that, I think you don't need too much other math to support learning more probability and stats.
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I observed a significant training effect when I did these. Could be a problem with other tests too.
The way to handle this is probably to do the tests for a while, plotting the results, wait until they appear to be flatlining, then start the experiment.