dasmithii

Location: Boston

Remote: Yes, strongly preferred

Willing to relocate: Unlikely

Technologies: Python, Golang, C, C++, Javascript, TensorFlow, Mathematica, HTML/CSS

Résumé/CV: Can be provided upon request

Email: iihtimsad@gmail.com

Background in math, linguistics, and creative writing. Some machine learning and NLP. Some parsing and compiler work. Have been working remotely for the past 2.5 years for an established company as a primarily backend website and application developer. Also lead the small part time software team for an independent newspaper. Looking for an interesting and challenging position dealing with new technologies and/or research.

Reading it now and enjoying it a lot. It's destroying one romance in favor of another!

I didn't believe my eyes when I saw "psytrance" on the front page of HN...

Anyways, for anyone in North America looking for psytrance festivals, here is a guide put together by fractaltribe:

https://www.fractaltribe.org/blog/north-american-psytrance-f...

I honestly prefer the old design. My two cents.

Please oh please help the Tor network. You will be eternally loved.

My instinct is to see chins as shields to the Adam's apple. I have no explanation for why primates have less prominent chins, though.

After a quick read, I'm impressed. Looks like general improvement over c++.

I tend to use Go's panic() in many situations where, in C, I would make assertions.

I'm suggesting that these are commonly held beliefs, not that I hold them personally. More so, I was looking for input on the subject, as my personal experience in this area is virtually nonexistent.

Violent crime is, to some degree, a defining characteristic of mental instability. Is it not? Should it be?

"Freedom from whom, and to do what?"

> Sure would be fucking nice if they (democrats and republicans) could not have to take opposing sides on fucking everything

There is a selection bias in the issues you speak of. Non-polarizing topics are handled swiftly, without much attention from the public spotlight. There is no point in discussing what's already agreed upon, and that's one of the more reasonable justifications of political polarization.

That said, the polarization is greater than would be optimal, so I do agree - it would be nice.

Agreed. Criminalizing antagonism would provide dirt on just about everyone. Hell, half of YouTube [commenters] would be prosecutable.

Not all wrongful doings ought be illegal.

Good point. It could be doubly motivated as well, by (1) anticipated twisting of words, and (2) potential censoring of content.

When reading this post, I almost expected the writer to turn things around and make a realization of this sort. No hard feelings on my part though - just a sense of anticipation at work.

Are you better off because of your diagnosis? And why?

First of all, thank you for this in-depth response. It beats the hell out of anonymous and explanation-less downvotes.

I had never come across the word neurotypical before your comment and now, after reading the corresponding wikipedia page, I am aware that it does characterize me (i.e. "anyone who does not have autism, dyslexia, developmental coordination disorder, bipolar disorder, ADD/ADHD, or other similar conditions").

For the majority of elementary, middle, and secondary school, I fit your anecdote pretty well, minus the getting drunk part (I was young, sheltered, and without access to or interest in alcohol).

However, after sophomore year or so, I realized how much time I had wasted pushing through boring, repetitive tasks, and I grew incapable of completing assignments. This turning point left me in the position of ADHD-afflicted individuals for the final two years of high school. Call it burnout, early senioritous, or whatever - the symptoms were the same. With fear of college app rejections as my motivation (like your fear of unemployment), I couldn't bring myself to do mandatory, largely weighted assignments. They were just too boring, meaningless. Somehow I remained motivated up until then. I really don't know how, to be honest.

Out of curiosity, how would you say my realization [and subsequent drop-off in academic performance] relate to ADHD and NT?

On another note, are A DHD-afflicted individuals literally incapable of mustering the "internal whatever" you speak of? Is the ability to conjure motivation entirely absent? It's really hard to compare similarly subjective abilities, like pain thresholds and the like.

Even if this incapability is just that: a true incapability, I'm not certain that portrayal of ADHD as an affliction is a net-benefit. It seems better for people to believe in their own capabilities, even when many are literally incapable, as you say. Similarly, the belief in free will is good for people and society - even if free will is obviously nonexistent. Determinism yields higher rates of depression and discourages self-responsibility.

How so?

Watts doesn't deny the differences between those affected by ADHD and those who are not. He argues that these differences are best understood as personality traits and not products of an affliction.

This isn't a matter of ignorance, but interpretation of and reaction to scientific discoveries.

Here's an audio snippet of Alan Watt's perspective on this issue. In general, he sees modern mental illnesses as personality traits. Thoughts?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN8B8jMuDZE

I'd be interested to hear what Alan Watts would think of this self dialog.

> "I don't have a short attention span and I'm not hyperactive"

I thought these were the defining characteristics of ADHD? I'm sorry, please forgive my lack of familiarity.

> "When things lose my interest or are pointless they become tedious"...

I don't understand how this is considered a symptom of anything. To me, this is entirely normal. Things that you aren't interested in should be tedious. The mental barrier you speak of is internal honesty - you don't find importance or interest in X, and consequently, motivation doesn't emerge.

I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I'm suggesting that it be considered a characteristic, and not an external force. This way, we don't grow dualistic, differentiating between oneself and one's brain.

I guess it's the dualism here that I'm criticizing, not ADHD itself. See the fourth paragraph:

"if you have the 'illness,' the real problem is that, to your brain, the world that you live in essentially feels not very interesting."

This distinction between "you" and "your brain" is what bothers me.

I'm not a fan of the perspective from which this article is written. Where the author writes "X is affected by ADHD", I'm inclined toward "X has a short attention span", or "X is hyperactive".

The same perspective is taken by "victims" of ADHD, parents, and members of the media alike. I think we'd all be better off if we stopped speaking of these conditions as external forces acting upon the self, and instead, as mutable characteristics of the self.

No, not at all. It's the other way around, really. Those who don't use Meteor for their projects may not be able to without trashing existing codebases.

At this point, what percentage of web development can't/shouldn't be done with Meteor? It seems like everything else is obsolete in comparison. The only non-Meteor cases I can think of involve especially large scale.

Because gob encodings begin with type specifiers, all objects of the same type number are grouped together. That's the only guarantee made across all types.

For strings and numeric arrays, lexicographic order is maintained, yes. But be careful with structs and other types - I'm not sure about those yet, or of gob's byte ordering can be depended on.

I'm implementing for-each-of-type iteration right now, and for stringified keys, this iteration will function will be lexicographic.

A JSON-formatted return value would be convenient

- "If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately."

These words describe how I've been feeling since the beginning of this year, when I first became a self-described programmer. Before then, I loved playing around with little toy projects, but I never considered myself as a programmer. Instead, I was a regular kid who programmed sometimes.

After realizing that, over some time, I had gained some real skills, I felt obligated to make use of them. It was no longer a playful activity, I put a burden on my own shoulders that my programs had to be significant or important to others in some way.

This sense of importance ruined programming for me. Though self-imposed, the homework-effect took over and I lost interest right away.

I'm sure many of you code for a defined purpose, whether it be profit or world effect. But for me, my computer is a toy.

The problem with analogy-based programming is the lack of determinacy. There are no guarantees when it comes to abstract, knowledge-based inference. And so many concepts in modern programming would have to be abandoned to make this shift. Unit tests, for instance, would lost value dramatically.

In the end, an analogy-based approach seems inevitable though, especially once natural language-based inexact. grow popular. Everyday speech is littered with ambiguities, and programming "languages" need to handle these. They can't throw compilation errors upon each inexact command.

With any improvement in programming language technology, we narrow the disparity between human and computer representations of logic. In it's simplest form, this is the premise of language designers.

The biggest difficulty with current languages is their reliance on absolute determinacy. Programmers must express in exact form what computations ought be performs, and the languages possesses no intelligence in themselves. I think this needs to change. Inference should have applications outside type declaration, and the vast knowledge base that is the Internet should be taken into account.

At this point, there are two promising pursuits that I've seen. First is Wolfram Language, which you've all heard of. The other is Escher, which enables "programming in analogies". It's on early stages right now, but I'd encourage you to check it out at https://github.com/gocircuit/escher.