amp108

> In therapy, you are unconditionally accepted with positive regard

Oh, how I wish that were true. When I was 12, my brother was heavily into drugs, my sister was violent, and my parents were ending their loveless marriage. I wasn't handling it well.

My mother decided to put me in therapy. My therapist bullied me, literally shouting at me that I wasn't normal, suggesting I should skip out on school, and offering to "teach me how to masturbate". I hated going there, and told my mother (who had been granted custody), but she just said I hated it because he told me "hard truths" and "told it like it was".

It's been decades, and for all I know he's dead. I heard that he'd been fined for insurance fraud, but never lost his license.

I'm sure a competent therapist would have helped me. I did have problems adjusting, and I suspect (only suspect) that I'm "on the spectrum", as the kids say. But I was put in exactly the wrong place to deal with that.

Moral of the story: you have to vet therapists thoroughly before you entrust your psychological well-being to them.

I've always grappled with why you call something a "metaphor" if you have no other word to call it. It always seemed to me that metaphor was something you used instead of the common term for something, for poetic or rhetorical effect; if there is no common term, why does a homonym become a metaphor? For example, what is the non-metaphorical term for the legs of a chair?

>> Unfalsifiable claims like this one tend to have a bit of baggage like eternal punishment.

> Here's something that is falsifiable and true: the teen suicide rates in the oppressive and orthodox 1950s were much lower than they are in the "liberated" times today. I cannot and will not claim that this can be reduced to belief in a higher power

You don't need to. Whether or not a result can be attributed to a belief has no bearing on whether the belief itself is true.

"Pound foolish" is not a necessary outcome of "penny wise", in this saying, but "the pounds will take care of themselves" is. Taking care of the pennies works when one is, at worst, "pound neutral". But being "pound foolish" is an additional condition in the saying, which is not accounted for in the "take care of the pennies" saying.

Any summary, for those of us who missed the availability window?

I always thought he was one of the greatest actors ever to grace the screen. Truly a shock to see the headline.

It's prevented me from keeping one at all. Years ago, my mother broke into my then 12-year-old sister's diary for no better reason than to find out what was going on when she wasn't home, which was often. I later wrote some really shitty teen-angst poetry and buried it under a stack of books and papers in a corner of my bedroom closet, and she found that. Decades later, I still feel like I can't write something emotionally honest because it will be exposed and used against me somehow.

> this is the only time in history that we have almost the whole of human knowledge accessible at our fingertips from anywhere in the world within fractions of a second. If there ever were a time that we could look up actual evidence without expending inordinate effort, that time is now!

This is also the point in time where we have the most disinformation swimming around the internet as well. And it takes effort, possibly an inordinate amount, to cull the bad information from the good. Or else we're in the same conundrum as we always have been about whom to trust.

Poetry has no more and no less meaning than language itself. The popular HN definition of a "hacker" is someone who digs deep into a system, understanding it and pushing its capabilities beyond what is commonly understood. Poets hack language. Sometimes the product is buggy, but sometimes it's an elegant hack.

Yeah, but how about this:

select region_fleet, case when status = 'delivered' then 'delivered' else 'not delivered' end as status, date_trunc('week', day) as week, count(distinct row(day, so_number)) as num_orders, count(distinct case when scheduled_accuracy_meters <= 500 then row(day, so_number) else null end) as num_accurate, avg(scheduled_accuracy_meters) as scheduled_accuracy_meters from deliveries where ... group by 1, 2, 3

vs.:

SELECT region_fleet, CASE WHEN status = 'Delivered' THEN 'Delivered' ELSE 'Not Delivered' END AS status, DATE_TRUNC('week', day) AS week, COUNT(DISTINCT ROW(day, so_number)) AS num_orders, COUNT(DISTINCT CASE WHEN scheduled_accuracy_meters <= 500 THEN ROW(day, so_number) ELSE NULL END) AS num_accurate, AVG(scheduled_accuracy_meters) AS scheduled_accuracy_meters FROM deliveries WHERE ... GROUP BY 1, 2, 3

... because a lot of time, when these nicely-formatted statements get parsed, the whitespace gets condensed, and when it gets spit out in an error message, I for one would like the all-caps keywords to be landmarks to direct my eye.

The problem for me with changing my diet is that (a) it takes sustained concentration to change habits, and (b) it takes real planning and scheduling to do something like keto. Guess what I'm bad at, since I have ADHD?

We have a subreddit: https://reddit.com/r/osr.

It's worth pointing out that Lab Lord and Swords & Wizardry have free PDFs, and emulate the Holmes-era/pre AD&D rules, with optional "advanced" rules. Old School Essentials is reputed to be the best organized restatement of the B/X rules. OSRIC is meant to be a restatement of AD&D 1e.

That's the whole point of shell scripting, to take a series of minimal programs and tie them together into something that does a more complex task. There's no reason to distrust a shell script simply because it is a script any more than there is to trust a binary simply because it's a binary.

"Can you use sshd?"

I went to a job interview recently where the interviewer was trying to phrase the question properly: "I'm trying to figure out how to ask this next one, so if you have a lot of Customers, and... umm..."

And I interjected during a long pause and said "It sounds like you're trying to ask a question which could be answered by using a HAVING clause. So something like, only those Customers who have two or more orders, which would be 'GROUP BY Customers HAVING count(Orders) > 2'."

I was right, he was looking for that. Still didn't get the job.

> It's composition meant the star must have come into being before iron became commonplace.

Hypothesis 1: the star formed in a way that did not involve or produce a lot of iron.

Hypothesis 2: the star is older than the universe itself.

Clearly, hypothesis 2 is the more likely.

> Why just women?

Because they are the people who have been made uncomfortable by his behavior. If it were men, or also men, I'm sure the parent post would have read "men or women". This is not an abstract case, so implying that somehow men are underrepresented when dealing with a person whose (alleged) behavior has been targeted at women sounds a little petty.

Imagine someone is accused of abusing children, and the local prosecutor says "if we find that any children have been harmed, we will press charges". Do you really think you need to correct them by saying "but what about adults?" It's unnecessary, and distracts from the actual case.

Something that worked for me was playing a TV show that I've watched to death (Archer, Community, Rick and Morty.) on my phone. Listening to a story that I already know occupies my brain just enough to let go of my own worries, and since I know the end of them all, I don't have the need to sit up and wonder what's going to happen next.

Kind of the opposite of what they recommend (completely silent and dark room) for so-called "sleep hygiene", which, when I practiced it, only served to keep me awake longer.

> Which makes me wonder what I missed with regards to J.R. Tolkien and George R. Martin.

A second "R", for one.

I have read the pronunciation is bad in the 1966 film Incubus/Inkubo, (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(1966_film)) but William Shatner acts like he's a native speaker in it.

> Maybe it's one of those things where "you had to be there at the time".

Nope, not really. I didn't get into IF until 2002, and I suspect that it's just a matter of taste. If you'd been around in the early days, maybe you'd be more into pinball or reading or bowling or something.

I worked for a company that asked me not to use hash tables, because it no one else at the company knew how to use them. Finding your way around an arbitrary-length array of arbitrary-length arrays was apparently "easier" for them than learning the full capabilities of their chosen language (ColdFusion).

Point being, a little bit of "cleverness" in one place may save a lot of effort down the line. I've also never been too fond of that quote.

> But even more significant is that the Go authors cannot seem to grasp the importance of pre-existing conventions. Almost every language I've used in the past decade allows and encourages the variable, Class, CONSTANT convention.

What "pre-existing conventions" do you see in the Go code that you've had to refactor? The fact that conventions from Java or C++ aren't the same simply reinforces the fact that Go is a different language, and that's A Good Thing.

There are many kinds of meditation. The unifying idea behind them all is that it deliberately directs the mind to some task, but the tasks can be widely different. What you're describing is just one way to practice a particular kind of mindfulness meditation.

> Underlying all of the points in this article is the idea that people are somehow entitled to success.

No, underlying all of the points in this article is that works are separate from the person who produced them, and it does us no good to erase all reference to their works for actions that are sometimes no more criminal than a stupid tweet. It turns out that, when you suppress a work that many people have collaborated on because of something one member did, a lot of innocent people lose out.

> Meanwhile, zero sympathy for the people who experienced professional repercussions after being harassed or assaulted. Before you're successful, people can harm your career or discriminate against you all they want. It's okay!

Please Google "straw man argument". You have no idea what amount of sympathy the author has for the victims; it simply isn't the focus of her article. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

> There's some strong similarities there.

In that they both use a descending chromatic line over a minor chord in the harmony, a device that has been used in music for over 300 years.

Their differences are great, notably in the structural importance of the figure (it happens in the middle of an ambient passage in Taurus, but it's the opening, passage of Stairway); in the fact that Stairway uses a melodic line on top of the chords, whereas Taurus doesn't; and that Stairway uses it as a structural block for the whole song, and in Taurus, it's only a moment in the middle of a larger section.

One thing universities should teach is efficient problem solving. If it was more work to cheat than to memorize, I'd say you might want to re-evaluate whether "not memorizing things" is a principle you should cling so dogmatically to.

Ignore everything that makes stories different from each other, only look at the beginning and the end states, and hey-presto, you can reduce every story to one of six types.

Specificity of recall is not an end, but it is a necessary means to the end goal of education. We can only know that someone is an independent lifelong learner if we can tell that they have learned something; not only that, but that they have learned a lot of related, non-obvious facts, and can work with them. This dichotomy, between learning facts and learning concepts, is not an innate one and I wish that notion would go away.