Software engineer for 12 years then got depressed about the job. Got into firefighting because I want to go to heaven and figured that with the 1 day on 2 days off schedule I can continue software on the side anyway.
Turns out just because you are a good software engineer, it doesnt mean you will be a good firefighter, and I need to dedicate a huge amount of time learning the job because software is a creativity focued job and Fire/EMS is a memory based one, and i have a bad memory.
The sleep is terrible, im an introvert and have a hard time getting along with others at the firehouse, but will say without a doubt it was absolute best decision ive ever made in my life. You will never see the facial expressions behind a computer you see in this job.
Im doing creative data analytics for fire depts to see how to save more lives, and thinking about making the swap to law enforcement just because i think my past as a software engineer can save more lives there. One example of my analytics is posting cops in areas where statistically it isnt likely for fire/EMS to show up in time, if the cop gets on sceane sooner, they can begin patient care sooner, and unltimaly increase rosc rare. You gotta be the change you want to see in the world you know?
That is a good question, I live way below my means - One day i would like to have a wife and kids and as long as we are all fed our daily bread then thats all i ask for. The data analytics part was all volenteered and unpaid. If i stopped getting paid tomorrow, i would still volenteer to do it, i dont know where that puts me. Jesus healed people, hospitals heal people, i dont know of any hospitals that will train you how to heal over a long period of time without also wanting you on thier payroll
It seems like I didn't quite get my point across, when I said reward, I meant Heaven, not economic compensation, I went into a little more Detail in my other answer in this Thread
That's not what I meant, To my knowledge, in Christianity , you ought to do good, not because you'd be rewarded, but because it's the right thing to do
The same applies for doing bad things, your motives shouldn't be to not be punished, but to act rightly
An extension of this, Could you be blamed for the things you do when you're under duress? If I pointed a gun to your head and made you do something wrong, are you to blame?
The threat of hell (And the reward of heaven) might just be a different kind of gun, you might not be to blame for the wrong, but then you're also not the source of the good either, you're just acting on your own selfish interest
Id rather not hijack this thread and make it about the bible so this reply is only for the purposes of clarifying my original comment, and will be my final reply. There are many denominations of christianity, my interpritation of the bible shows heaven and eternal life as a reward for those who follow jesus. The bible says in black and white that those who live in sin do not inherit the kingdom of heaven. If you point a gun at me and tell me to sin, i wont. If you shoot me, i go to heaven. A HN comment section is not the place to form your opinions about the bible. I recomend reading the bible and bringing your questions to a priest.
Ah, but the Bible also says that you can sin all you like as long as you later follow Jesus: he’s a get out of hell free card! And that it’s OK to sell your children into slavery. And I’m pretty sure you, sir, sin a hell of a lot by the lights of some of the people who claim to live by the bible.
Your knowledge of these subjects is not only very weak, but comes across as dishonest as well. To the extent that if we had this exchange with our faces and reputations on the line, you'd be savaged by my words and look like a fool. I encourage you to be more humble and also to actually contest your own claims on your own in earnestness so that you can see if those claims are actually true or just edgy hot takes from some dishonest individuals you mingled with or learned from in the past.
The Bible is against slavery. See Philemon. Sinning until the last moment doesn't count unless it's a true heart change. See Ezekiel. Treating it as a Get Out Of Hell Free card would not fly.
It’s okay to learn about Jesus and the Bible on HN. It’s only one of N threads underneath the submission, after all, not to mention relevant to the parent. Definitely agreed that the best approach is to read the Bible and consult an expert in a real setting if possible.
I'm a Lutheran. We believe it's impossible to do enough good to reach God, so you'll never earn your way into heaven by being doing good deeds. Strangely, the church (ELCA) is one of the most active when it comes to actually doing good deeds.
The firefights that I know are dead. Most left their wives with small children. I had the opportunity but I knew too many men who went to work and never came home.
That's awesome! Since you mention data analytics and being able to get to people quickly, have a look at 'set covering problem' for ways to find optimal solutions.
Right, but reserve requirements are in the order of a few percent, certainly not enough to prevent a bank run, or preventing you from being insolvent when the bonds you're holding went down in value by 20% due to interest rate movements. At the end of the day what you actually care about is whether you have more assets (cash or equity) than liabilities.
Reserves are but one tool in the arsenal and it's also for tightly managing the maximum leverage. If all your assets are not cash-equivalent and they fluctuate in value then there is no maximum leverage that can be guaranteed a priori and there is operational risk.
The bank also had very few chocolate coins (probably none), but that doesn't mean requiring them to hold more of those in their vault would have improved matters.
The problem is that the bank is insolvent; not so much that the bank is out of liquidity.
If they were solvent, someone would lend them the liquidity they need.
Do this at you own risk, ive done this with lidar data (which didnt need to be as persice as binary, which is what im seeing in this post) which worked fine. 3 years later i revisited the project and it was broken because youtube compressed the files in such a way where it made the lidar just innaccurate enough to be unusable. I cant imagine storing data in binary where just one bit wrong screws everything
When i was 5 i was given a gameboy color, i got additcted to it, so my parents banned everything "computer related" until i was 14, depending on their mood this also included tv. When i was a kid i hated it because my parents were never able to explain why they did. But looking back, i think it was the right move. Many people i grew up with became dopamine slaves and cant stop themsevles from indulging in socialmedia/ videogames/ hedonism every day. From 14-18 i played videogames everyday as much as i could each day. I dont consider it a relapse because im antisocial and will naturally gravitate to an activity i can do alone. If i never had the childhood without tech, i could see an adulthood without anything else. If you have never lived your life without freedom, you really dont know it's value. If you always had it, you either over value it or under value it. I became a software engineer, but generally have grown a dislike for 70% of all tech on the market. I will probably end up raising my kids as close to amish as possible. Will the pendulum swing the other way and they rebell? Maybe. But a rebellion into a worse solution is temporary and I'll always support my kids in a low tech household when tech burns them.
I was an early helper when I saw that on reddit and joined your slack before you had a discord. I was also one of the ones you mentioned that fizzled out after the initial excitement died down. But I didn't stop helping because the excitement died down. I stopped helping because I felt like we weren't "doing" anything. Other than raising money and getting paperwork in order. Have you guys actually "done" anything in the three years since? Other than, you know, collecting data and sitting around talking about "stuff"
I can only give my perspective on the project: I showed up when PDAP had 2,500 members in Slack, right after Kristin made her original case study and Reddit post. There was a flurry of conversation. I empathize with the people trying to keep everyone focused in those days. It was like trying to have a 2500 person web scraping flashmob with nothing planned in advance. However, all that conversation was important. We still benefit from the combined relevant experience of those 2500 passionate people.
I took a step back from the project for a few months, not having time to volunteer. My understanding is that the board was basically formed out of all the people remaining after some enthusiasm died down.
When I came back, the board had incorporated and applied for 501c3 status. There were four board members, and a few volunteers who mostly just helped talk through the massive problem and plan. Eventually Kristin (OP) stepped down from the board, but was still at some meetings. A rotating cast of 2-3 other people would be hanging around the meetings at any given time.
I became Director of Operations on a volunteer basis for a bit over a year. This mostly just means paying bills, knowing passwords, and updating the website.
We had weekly meetings, where we'd talk for a few minutes or hours about the project, our ideas, and what we could do to move things forward. [0]
We ran a data bounty during this time [1]. One volunteer, Eric, made a bunch of prototypes around metadata for data sources.
Then we got 501c3 status after waiting for almost a year. I quit my day job and started writing grants and set up online donations. I hired two contractors for a bit of grant writing help, but otherwise did not have "coworkers" or "co-volunteers".
We got the grant money [2] about 8 months later. I went looking for a full-time software engineer. I started getting a salary and working full-time on the project as Executive Director, doing all the non-technical design, planning, and product work.
Throughout, I spent a lot of time interviewing and doing design research: investigating the work being done journalists, transparency activists, and local data users in Pittsburgh (and elsewhere). I've also been collecting feedback and experience from everyone in the Discord. Most of our current ideas about what's important and where to start come from that work, and the recent addition of an engineer with excellent journalism and software experience (about 6 weeks ago) has allowed us to start prototyping and developing something together in earnest.
Now: We're excited about our strategies, and it's probably a little early for broad consumption. We didn't coordinate this post; everything you can see is a work in progress. There's lively discussion in Discord about our goals, and I've been typing for about 24 hours straight with a break to nap and a break to eat something.
Clarifying: when I said "otherwise did not have "coworkers" or "co-volunteers" I mean only for a period of a few months. There have almost always been people in the Discord to respond if something came up, but there were many working sessions in a row where I was the only one to show up.
