kenny-log_ins

I like to be able to tweet someone after I have consumed some of their content - If I read a good guide/technical article or an interesting post it's nice to be able to instantly send something telling the author that it was useful or enjoyable.

yep. whenever i read anything sensational about QC I immediately head over to his blog to read about what it actually means.

This guy reminds me how normal i am in the grand scheme of things: "I felt discouraged and depressed. I tried to buy myself some fancy clothes and toys to feel better about myself. I immersed myself in a shallow relationship with a model who would end up being Miss Universe China 2014. I took weekly hiking trips with my friends in the hills of Beijing on psychadelic mushrooms."

I vehemently disagree with the authors taste in music, but she makes some good points. Soundcloud is just a platform though, and if you live by the sword of constantly available unlimited new content all the time then you kind of have to die by it, too. Content producers change styles to chase trends, tracks get taken down and everything changes when more money and popularity is involved. Enjoy free online content for what it is, but support a scene by buying releases/merch, going to events and spreading the word - it wont implode just because soundcloud changes.

On this note, design and web skills. Whatever you do, its useful to be able to make it look good. If you are working with people who aren't savvy with web tech then it is very useful to be able to knock good looking sites up quickly and will impress easily. learn how to use bootstrap templates to generate simple nice looking web pages. also bonus points for learning basic graphic design skills so you can generate your own images to customise your pages further.

It depends - the amounts of data involved are mammoth by today's standards, but the idea is that we will develop new methods and tools to make the project feasible. The announcement and funding of the SKA will probably help this process along too, as specific challenges are addressed throughout the programme

The optical private network from CERN to the tier 1 site where I work was upgraded from 10 Gb to 40 Gb between the first and second runs of the LHC. depending on what goes on during the second run that might need to be increased again. Building high bandwidth infrastructure for use by lots of (paying!) customers is probably more viable for large corporations than it is for science, where you have a budget at the start rather than having things pay for themselves over time

The storage will need to constantly increase in that time, too.

The technical challenges posed by the SKA really are astoundingly huge. The data generated by these dishes will require much higher data throuput than even the fastest optical links between CERN and its tier 1 sites (40 Gb/s), and they will be in the middle of a remote desert. Then there is the scale of compute and storage needed to analyse the data, which would be totally unfeasible with the tech we have today. It's an exciting time to be working in scientific computing!!

cool didnt know about the algolia tool! thanks for the tip :)

I posted this because I thought that while most HN readers probably don't think like this, it's a useful exercise to get a different perspective in case you come across people who do.

Is there any way that cookie clicker could have been farming CPU cycles? I remember playing it and thinking that it was consuming an awful lot of resources after a while...

Hi mannimow,

I experience the same anxiety - I have a divergent way of thinking about things and tend to get interested in lots of different things at once rather than one thing in depth. Sometimes its good - I can think of different approaches to problems, for example. It seems like it makes it difficult to learn new skills to the point where they would be useful/worth anything to prospective employers, however.

My current strategy to address this is pretty simple: choose one thing at a time. To echo uniclaude's comment as well, it helps to build things - don't read about 10 different ways to do linear regression, choose one and try to make it work. I would also add that its fun to work with other people, and it can help you stay focussed. Obviously there are a million ways to contact people who you can work with on the internet, but I have been using meetup.com to find groups of people who share my interests. going to hacks, workshops, presentations and even having general discussions with people around one topic can make the learning process more engaging and you get the added benefit of being able to draw on other people's expertise and experience.

good luck!