expopinions

Your eyes are an important part of your health. There are many things you can do to keep them healthy and make sure you are seeing your best. Follow these simple steps for maintaining healthy eyes well into your golden years.

Have a comprehensive dilated eye exam. You might think your vision is fine or that your eyes are healthy, but visiting your eye care professional for a comprehensive dilated eye exam is the only way to really be sure. When it comes to common vision problems, some people don’t realize they could see better with glasses or contact lenses. In addition, many common eye diseases such as glaucoma, diabetic eye disease and age-related macular degeneration often have no warning signs. A dilated eye exam is the only way to detect these diseases in their early stages.

During a comprehensive dilated eye exam, your eye care professional places drops in your eyes to dilate, or widen, the pupil to allow more light to enter the eye the same way an open door lets more light into a dark room. This enables your eye care professional to get a good look at the back of the eyes and examine them for any signs of damage or disease. Your eye care professional is the only one who can determine if your eyes are healthy and if you’re seeing your best.

Know your family’s eye health history. Talk to your family members about their eye health history. It’s important to know if anyone has been diagnosed with a disease or condition since many are hereditary. This will help to determine if you are at higher risk for developing an eye disease or condition.

Eat right to protect your sight. You’ve heard carrots are good for your eyes. But eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, particularly dark leafy greens such as spinach, kale, or collard greens is important for keeping your eyes healthy, too.

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Research has also shown there are eye health benefits from eating fish high in omega-3 fatty acids, such as salmon, tuna, and halibut.

Maintain a healthy weight. Being overweight or obese increases your risk of developing diabetes and other systemic conditions, which can lead to vision loss, such as diabetic eye disease or glaucoma. If you are having trouble maintaining a healthy weight, talk to your doctor.

Wear protective eyewear. Wear protective eyewear when playing sports or doing activities around the home. Protective eyewear includes safety glasses and goggles, safety shields, and eye guards specially designed to provide the correct protection for a certain activity. Most protective eyewear lenses are made of polycarbonate, which is 10 times stronger than other plastics. Many eye care providers sell protective eyewear, as do some sporting goods stores.

Quit smoking or never start. Smoking is as bad for your eyes as it is for the rest of your body. Research has linked smoking to an increased risk of developing age-related macular degeneration, cataract, and optic nerve damage, all of which can lead to blindness.

Be cool and wear your shades. Sunglasses are a great fashion accessory, but their most important job is to protect your eyes from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. When purchasing sunglasses, look for ones that block out 99 to 100 percent of both UV-A and UV-B radiation.

Give your eyes a rest. If you spend a lot of time at the computer or focusing on any one thing, you sometimes forget to blink and your eyes can get fatigued. Try the 20-20-20 rule: Every 20 minutes, look away about 20 feet in front of you for 20 seconds. This can help reduce eyestrain.

Clean your hands and your contact lensesproperly. To avoid the risk of infection, always wash your hands thoroughly before putting in or taking out your contact lenses. Make sure to disinfect contact lenses as instructed and replace them as appropriate.

Practice workplace eye safety. Employers are required to provide a safe work environment. When protective eyewear is required as a part of your job, make a habit of wearing the appropriate type at all times and encourage your coworkers to do the same.

One way to get some experience could be to find an open source project dealing with this kind of system and contribute there.

Examples of such open source applications in use for distributed, large scale systems all over the world are tensorflow, elasticsearch, and hystrix; this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Contributions to OSS will also be beneficial if you need to find a job in the business.

A huge part of math is learning how things work, how to look at things, when there’s actually an easier way to do things than that one formula you just learned. Even if a book can perfectly teach you this, you still lose a lot of perspective.

If you get a teacher, or at the very least someone who is helping you, or even just learning alongside you, you’ll learn far more efficiently, as what the other person thinks may be put in a phrasing, or use a tactic, or have some reasoning, the list goes on, that you could never have come up with on your own. Even if you’re smarter than Newton - well - Newton didn’t get to where he got without a little help throughout his life.

HOWEVER.

That’s not to say it’s impossible. If you really have a love for mathematics, there a loads of ways to learn more math. If you’re looking just to get some random math knowledge, then roaming YouTube is actually a pretty effective method of gaining some fun knowledge. Those guys are average joes just like you and I. They always have something fun to get your hands on.

If, however, you’re looking for a specific subject, or something that would otherwise replace a class, then get the best textbook you can find and get a tutor. Maybe you’ll be fine on your own, but two heads are still better than one, especially with education. Math builds on itself. If you just barely scrape by in Algebra, Calculus isn’t going to be fun. You need to have a pretty good understanding of everything. That’s why its so hard.

One last tip: pace yourself. If you think you’ve got a topic after reading it and working on a couple of problems, still take a day on it. You’ll find something you missed, find a shortcut, or something, and it’ll make the next topic just that much easier. And again, that’ll carry on.

You can right click on any file/s and select a colored label from the menu. After that you can click on any of the colored labels on the sidebar and see what files you tagged with which color.

I’ve used both platforms pretty extensively to beef up my data structures and algorithms knowledge.

Hackerank Strengths

Tons, and I mean tons, of questions and organized into Tracks. Want to learn about how to use Regular Expressions/ Java/ SQL/ Algorithms/ Data Structures/ Python/Math? Each one of those topics and more have specific paths with specific sub topics. If you are using these sites to get interview prep, a lot of companies send their coding challenges through Hacker rank as apart of the interview process, so it’s good to get familiar. Expedia, GE, Goldman Sachs and Optiver to name a few You get almost all functionality (if not all) from the website for free. On Leetcode without the paid subscription, there are definite drawbacks. For instance you can’t always submit your solution right away, due to how they run the solution to rank against all other solutions. Almost all problem statements have examples of 1 or 2 test cases and answers and pretty thorough explanations of why the answer is the way it is. That’s much less common on Leetcode. Every question posted on Hackerrank has a verified solution on the “Editorial” tab. Not every Leetcode question has one ( Though you could easily get an answer on both platforms clicking on the “discussions” tab) Both sites have visible test cases to run your code with before submitting. Hackerrank does a pretty good job of making those visible ones the common cases, while Leetcode almost always uses an edge case for the visible test. Hackerrack has vim bindings! (If you’re into that) Leetcode Strengths

Something I love about Leetcode is that they have straight to the point problem statements. Hackerrank tends to have a bit lengthy introductions and drawn out scenarios that mask the actual task. For example: Hackerrank could be like “Sally loves chocolate but only wants to eat chocolate with the lowest amount of sodium. Given an array of sodium levels, return the lowest chocolate with lowest sodium” Leetcode equivalent would be “Given an array of integers, return the min element” Both Hackerrank and Leetcode compare the run time costs of your algorithm by timing the solution with test cases. However, once your solution has been approved, it lists it against all approved solutions in the same programming language and the percentage of how many solutions you beat out for speed. The testing environment is far superior. When you enter a custom test case it also runs the correct solution too so you can immediately know if your’s is right or wrong. On Hackerrank, running a custom test case only runs your solution. Another thing I love, for every problem, the coding interface requires only working with some predefined function signature. In Hackerrank, a lot of the time you have to handle the input/output, and it runs string matching to validate the answer which can get a little annoying Seriously… why I should print “YES” or “NO” when the quicker equivalent is just keeping a Boolean object? Leetcode has that fancy “Question was asked by X Company with Y% frequency”, that you can access with the subscription. I personally think that this tool isn’t that useful, and gives false impression that people can just memorize all those specific questions once they get an interview with X company. I personally like LeetCode better and, ultimately, it comes down to what you’re using it for.

First choice - Lubuntu 16.04 LTS, it is quite Window$ like in function and appearance.

Second - Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, the full version of Lubuntu. Not quite as Window$ like but close enough for most people to run without too much trouble. My wife’s new build kitchen PC came to life with Ubuntu 14.04, upped to 16.04, and she has had very few issues.

Third - Maybe Fedora, I am trying it out now and seems to install and run very well.

Stay away from Mint, Mate and Cinnamon, they are just skins for Ubuntu and a new comer does not need another later of confusion. I could not get Arch or Manjaro to install and run in either of my test machines. One is a 32 bit laptop, and Arch does not have a 32 bit version. Stick with a distribution that will write to a USB via UnetBootin or RUFUS, a newbie will not run 5 lines of code to build a USB drive.

It is possible. As others said, you will have a somewhat of a tough time getting an interview, but if you get one and nail it, you will get an offer just the same. As to how to get an interview in such situation? - be very proactive and find alternative ways to get your resume in front of the eyes of engineers or engineering managers. If you rely only on submitting through the standard Jobs page, your resume will most likely never make it through the layers of automated software and recruiters filtering. Find a friend that works in one of these companies and ask them to help you out, lurk in the groups where employes frequent and try to make a name for yourself, make sure one of your apps is moderately successful and meets a need for one of these companies.

Note that getting an offer is also contingent on your eligibility to work in US. If you are not a US citizen or a green card holder, the requirements to get an H1 visa are to have the equivalent of four years of education, where each three years of work experience counted as a year of education. (There are other H1 class visas, but they are not as common in the computer industry) But the company has to like you really a lot to go through the trouble in that case...

And since you managed to pique my interest, Id be curious to look at your resume. I'll leave out the part of figuring out how to send it (without it being caught by the junk filters) as an exercise to you. Shouldn't be that hard..