electronvolt

I have moderate-to-severe apnea, but nothing that might have caused it (not overweight, don't smoke, etc.) and didn't find out until I was 21.

Using a CPAP is a night and day difference--whereas I used to require 10-12 hours to function without randomly falling asleep if I sat still for too long, and now I can get 6-8 without any issues and I'm more alert, have a better mood, etc.

I wouldn't have known except that my ex-girlfriend noticed that I wasn't breathing when I was asleep and got me to see a doctor about it. Apparently it had been going on for years and years--I asked other people who had seen/heard me sleep from 15 onwards and a lot of them also had noticed it but hadn't said anything.

If you think you have apnea, sleep studies suck to go through ("here, lets stick a bunch of monitors on you and then let you try to sleep"), but it was entirely worth it. If it's at all economical to do one, I'd suggest looking into it: even if they don't find apnea they might find something else.

I think it's a combination of playing around and math chops.

Without any mathematical knowledge, you probably couldn't come up with something like the s(i,k,o) function (which, as far as I can tell from just looking/playing around with them briefly, seems to be the function responsible for the tessellation offset), and you might not have thought to define a system like (x=X(N,t), y=Y(N,t), 0<t<1).

Without a nontrivial amount of playing around, you probably wouldn't have found the exact constants used, like (2pi(3^i)), .2/(2^i), etc.--but knowing how altering those affects the end result takes some mathematical knowledge, so it's more guided investigation than random guessing.

Just from a game consumer point of view, as opposed to a marketer (although, for the record, partly due to my childhood being largely devoid of regular advertising on cable/etc., I am, for better or worse, hard to market to):

An article like this is interesting to me, as a developer. I don't make games, although I have in the past, but I currently make software for a large company, occasionally feel less-than-enthused by it (Honestly, most of the time I'm fine/good/great and interested in my work, but sometimes I'm not), and seeing the numbers for people who don't work for a fortune 500 the way I do is interesting and valuable information. I'd gladly upvote it on this website, or Reddit if I ever read tech articles over there. If, in the future, I see this game on Steam, I'd click on the page, maybe read the reviews--that might lead to a sale.

The thing is, the article says nothing about the actual game. Nothing about this article (or other earnings related articles) is likely to make me go purchase the game, because there's nothing about the actual game in it, I've never heard of the game prior to this (it isn't something I already want), it isn't in a humble bundle with something I have heard of (it isn't associated with something I want), and I'm not presently reading or hearing positive reviews of the game from people I trust (I don't have a reason to start wanting it).

There's no reason this article (or those like it) would lead to a game sale from me. There's no reason for me to go immediately ignore all my better instincts and go purchase the game without reading the reviews--or even go and read the reviews. Actually, if anything, releasing successful sales figures makes me less intrinsically likely to go buy the game immediately after reading (as opposed to in the vague future), because it seems like the writer is doing well enough for him/her-self, and it isn't some genre or style or content that I think /really should definitely be rewarded/. (Even if it was--successful sales figures literally are the opposite of a call to action for me.)

I'd imagine the benefits of an article like this are much more long term. If, in the future, I'm searching through Steam for a new game, and I come across this game--I'm now much more likely to click through and read the reviews, and if they were largely positive and it was a genre I liked, consider buying. But it doesn't surprise me that you don't associate articles like this with a sales spike. They are literally the last thing that's likely to go get me to buy a game Right Now.

If your marketer is claiming that general good graces and articles are always good--publicity is pretty much always good. Indifference is likely to kill you, but I'll even go click through to the steam reviews on games I think are definitely bad, if only to read the reviews. I've even ended up purchasing a game I had thought was terrible because the reviews on Steam prompted me to read reviews elsewhere and I became convinced I was wrong. No matter how good (or bad) a game is, indifference is more likely to kill it with me than hatred. I think that's the main value of general marketers in the long term--they get the word out, if nothing else. (Good marketers would presumably lead me to want to buy, but I'm operating under the assumption that they're rare.)

I think hatred on reddit is a complicated mess of legitimately bizarre people being given a forum for the first time, trolls, signalling, and groupthink, depending heavily on the topic and subreddit.

Signalling of social and political grouping is particularly prevalent and obvious on the internet because you can't rely on extrinsic or physical factors to demonstrate your social groupings. In the real world someone can rely on their appearance to telegraph a lot of things--clothing and grooming choices alone can hint at sexuality, politics, social class, and a variety of other things, to say nothing of existing social structures and bonds (who you surround yourself with also telegraphs a lot). On the internet, you either need to explicitly say these things ("I'm not straight", or "I came from a well off family" or "I'm a conservative") or signal them somehow, and there are areas where it's less acceptable to overtly announce your membership in a group, so implying it through general biwords for it is socially necessary. ("I'm filthy rich" or "I'm really, really smart and intellectual" or even "I'm really, really, really ridiculously good looking" all likely fall under that category. I think that generally the more desirable the category, the more it requires either actually costly signals--e.x. displaying expensive artwork in your home or donating lots of money in the case of wealth--to do 'acceptably'.)

You see some of it on HN, too, although I think it's generally much less accepted to negatively signal here--but especially in the more social-justice-y threads, you see a lot of signalling of people picking sides going in both directions, because that's something that HN doesn't really have any sort of unity on but individuals here feel strongly about. In this thread there was a perhaps unsurprising backlash against the author (usually backed up with some logic--which is thankfully required by the etiquette here) about why the posters were justified in their active dislike of sports.

In my experience most social signaling/biwording is fairly well summed up by the basic theory of "You will only expend effort signaling if there's (a) a chance you'll be mistaken for someone in a group you don't want to be mistaken as, and (b) there's a chance you'll be seen as being in the group you want to be in because of it."

I think even among those who don't necessarily care for sports, calling them 'sports-hating snobs' is often at odds with reality.

I grew up in an academic family. My parents were at the top of their respective fields, and their work, to them was as much a labor of love as it was anything else. I found that really very few things competed in their eyes with the fun/enjoyment of doing their job. Sports didn't really make that cut, but pretty much nothing but family made that cut. Their friends (and colleagues) seemed to be similar.

It was not so much about "Eew sports" as it was "Do I want to watch sports? Or would I rather read a book?" and "Read a book" won 99.99% of the time.

That being said, I did see a lot of disdain for sports among some of the more intellectual students at my university.

I'd be willing to bet that who acts like a sports-hating-snob can be predicted by simple signalling theory: professors/academics are unlikely to have their 'intellectual credentials/worthiness' questioned. They usually wouldn't need to signal "Disdain for sports" as a way to differentiate themselves from the non-intellectual working class. Being interested in sports also probably doesn't have any potential impact on other's perception of them, but probably doesn't benefit them particularly either--so you'd see academics with an interest in sports and academics who just don't really care, but you probably wouldn't see lots of academics decrying sports. (Outside of the critiques you'd expect of the NFL/NBA/FIFA/etc.--probably focused on the organizational ethics rather than the idea of sports as inherently bad.) On the other hand, in the case of students or middle class, non-professorial individuals, the differentiation between them and the working class is less immediately obvious to them and their peers, particularly on the things that someone aspiring to appear 'intellectual' would care about. (I think this also includes people in tech.) For them, decrying sports signals that they are decidedly not working class/non-intellectual, and alleviates the risk of being identified as such.

Question: if it came out that Eich had donated to, say, the KKK, would you feel the same way?

I have mixed feelings over the way he was treated, but your argument actually seems the opposite of nuanced: the blanket claim that someone should never be fired for their political views (particularly, from a public position where their politics could have an effect on the company they represent both on internal culture and on externalities like boycotts), no matter how repugnant their politics are, seems pretty reductive.

From my experience at one of the elite public universities:

Something I noticed as a student who spent time around activists (I wouldn't say I am one--I fundamentally agree with many pretty far-left social and economic ideas but I didn't participate in marches/action and was only occasionally involved in their official groups) was that there were sometimes people who used left wing politics and the language of intersectional feminism as a bludgeon to silence any critics and generally prove their superiority. Some groups were kind of dominated by this type of person, and others weren't--it certainly wasn't universal.

The thing is, I saw similar things during my short time in a pretty right leaning debate club, just over different issues. Instead of not speaking the language of intersectional feminism, it was not speaking the language of right leaning economics, but the mechanisms seemed to be the same--an in-group who knew the language and biwords used it to enforce the group's shared values on those outside of that in-group who were interested in joining.

The realization that I had was really that there are people at every point of the political spectrum and in every philosophical movement who police orthodoxy and use it as an excuse to be disrespectful. It happens in the center as well: the people who see the far left and right as crazy demagogues and ignore/berate anyone who uses their language, regardless of their point.

The solution (for the left and the right groups) is probably to demand a certain basic amount of respect from and for other people in your movement. That doesn't mean "let them trample all over you," but instead "When someone seems genuinely interested in your movement, direct them to educational materials." In the cases given, the appropriate thing to do would probably have been to interrupt and explain either why something might be offensive or 'wrong', but defend the person being attacked not on the basis of what they said but on their personhood. And, of course, to not tolerate rabid orthodoxy at the expense of basic compassion for others.

As a side note I wouldn't conclude from this post or the occurrences that I saw that "political correctness" (of either the left or right variety) is totally out of hand or wrongheaded or invalid. As other commentators on the internet have pointed out, a lot of what gets labeled as "abusive leftist social-justice-warrior political correctness" is actually "treating people who are different from you with respect." If someone regularly says things like "Gays are terrible aberrations in the eyes of God" or "All Muslims aren't civilized", then it's fair to conclude that they probably do not respect Gays or Muslims as groups of people, no matter how much they claim otherwise.

You're correct that CS isn't about code. Programming is, and that's what I was drawing the comparison with.

Most of the CS we have from pre-1950 is fundamentally mathematics: algorithms, theory of computation, etc.

I'm fairly certain it's this, given the history of CS and programming. It started as a branch of mathematics. As an academic field, even in the 1980s/1990s and in some places today, it was/is taught as a branch of math. And comparatively, programming/operating computers was not high prestige and was seen more as grunt work.

Interestingly, in some ways the people in Bell Labs were right: the mathematics is what objectively /lasts/. Consider: how much mathematics from the 1950s is still in use and relevant, versus how much written code is still in use and relevant? Mathematics (and algorithms, etc.) have a permanency to them that simply written programs don't.

I mean, the often cited model of depression as a serotonin 'deficiency'--e.x. "I'm depressed because I don't have enough serotonin" is definitely not supported by the science/literature that I'm familiar with. It does seem to have embedded itself in the popular mind, but if it was the case you would see patients with depression having abnormally low levels of serotonin, which isn't, to my knowledge, substantiated--the studies I've read didn't, as I recall, show a significant correlation between serum serotonin levels and mood. Low levels of serotonin do correlate with other things, though. (impulsivity, suicide risk)

The serotonin system having an effect on mood, though, or SSRIs as treatments for depression: that's an entirely different realm. They do seem to be much less effective on people who are on the minor/moderate end of the spectrum, and are definitely less effective than they were once advertised as being. There are a lot of reasons (aforementioned side effects, effectiveness of various types of therapies, prevalence of environmental effects in many people's depression) to try other options than SSRIs if you aren't severely depressed--but the clinical evidence for their efficacy in treating severe depression isn't really arguable either.

As a side note, there's some fairly recent research from the middle of last year (see these for the summary version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianeptine and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuptake_enhancer) that shows that the only drug ever released as an SSRE probably isn't effective because of that action (if it even is an SSRE--see the second link).

> except that the serotonin model of depression has been disproven without a shadow of a doubt

I'd hesitate to say that. First, treatment and cause are obviously not the same thing: increasing serotonin levels in a person and that making their depression 'go away' does not mean that low serotonin levels was the original cause for the depression. So in that sense, there isn't really a "serotonin model of depression"--we're talking about treatments and if they're effective. It's also true that for a lot of mild/moderate depression (which can still be serious in terms of suicide risk) SSRIs do not do hugely better than placebo, although they do perform on average better than placebo (~20%). However, for the more severe cases of unipolar major depressive disorder, SSRIs (and other antidepressants, for that matter) are significantly more effective than placebo.

It's also reasonable to point out that the serotonin system likely has an effect on bipolar depression, given the pretty convincing evidence that SSRIs can induce full blown mania in bipolar patients--even those who have not had a full manic episode before (only hypomanic ones).

Basically: it's complex. There are other confounding factors, too, such as lower serotonin levels being linked with aggression and impulsivity (and suicide) even in patients who don't report or show any depressive symptoms. So there might also be non-'it cures depression' arguments for SSRIs as preventatives, although there isn't a lot of research that I've read into that in particular.

This isn't an argument for this device in particular, though--my bullshit detector is being set off pretty rapidly by the site and claims.

Edit: some clarifications, rewordings.

I'd actually wonder (and somewhat worry) what effect that has from a social perspective on future generations of programmers.

Certainly not all programmers start as kids, but it seems like a huge number of them do, and it seems like almost all of the really, really excellent ones I've met and worked with started programming before the second half of high school (I can think of one notable exception who started in his second year of college). However: many, perhaps most, of them did not start on their own general purpose computer: they all seem to have been exposed to a general purpose computer through their parents and picked it up from there.

If many, or most, people do not actually /need/ a general purpose computer (as you argue, and as I kind of agree), then that kind of access would be greatly hampered. I worry about the potential educational effect that would have for people who come into programming the way I and multiple people I know did, without any outside prodding and long before anyone sane starts thinking about their child's future career in some industry.

I know that the main advance that computers gave my parents, professionally, over typewriters was the ability to google and the backspace key, followed shortly by .mp3s and the ability to burn CDs (one is a professor of music). If those things were divorced from general purpose computing, I wouldn't have had access to a general purpose computer until easily 5 years after I made my first website, 4 years after I started to learn a Turing complete language, and two years after I started programming in earnest/doing more than snippets of javascript as part of web design (Java, followed shortly after by scheme). I'm not sure I would have actually gone into computer science/programming as a field if I hadn't fallen into it early on: there are a lot of other fields that people were genuinely telling me I should pay attention to or get good at (math, physics, science in general), and I worry that din would have shut out my own interests if I hadn't stumbled into them as early as I did.

This is why devices like the iPad worried me from when they were released (when I was in high school) onward: what would I have done if my parents owned an iPad instead of a Mac? If that walled garden was my only exposure to computing at a young age? (I certainly wouldn't have been given the keys to the Apple store to buy educational games about programming, my parents didn't trust me as a child with their money.) I'm not sure I'd be in this field (which I enjoy very much), as there were almost no examples of 'other programmers' in my life until I was in high school, and that was only because I sought them out.

What about dropping support for the Equal Rights Amendment and attempting to reinforce/reinstate "traditional gender roles" isn't about putting the breaks on the advancement of women in society?

The issue wasn't just abortion: abortion was, perhaps, a catalyst or a trigger issue, but it also had implications on the rhetoric surrounding the passing of anti-discrimination laws, domestic violence laws, etc.

Any prior Republican support for women's reproductive rights/etc. had dried up at that time because of their alignment in the '80s with the evangelical Christian right. In the '80s the party platform dropped support for the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights.

Also, religious groups that were traditionally very liberal/voted Democrat (e.x. Catholics) on social issues also broke off from the Democrats over abortion and reproductive rights related issues over the course of the '80s, which isn't to say they were specifically /for/ those things at any point, they just became something more political in the '80s.

I wouldn't really have said that 1991 was a clear date for the 'start' of that process, though. Perhaps more "When it got into full swing." The other thing is that the loss of large groups like the Catholics and the involvement of the Christian Right in general caused the Democrats to swing right as well, which means that even when the Dems were in power in the '90s their attitudes and the policies they enacted were often more conservative than they had been before RE: women's lib/rights/etc., even if they still supported most of the issues on paper.

> You can't become better by taking a drug

I'm going to mostly point out that although this is an appealing idea: that we only get out of ourselves what we put in/etc./etc. there's no reason for it to be true. In fact, I'd expect that for some drugs, it's probably not true: if you're talking about a substance that has dramatic, longer term effects on the functioning of seratonin/dopamine systems in the brain.

Moving away from the kind of nebulous 'better person' realm and into a slightly more measurable/agreed upon "normal person" realm, it's patently untrue for those with nonstandard brain chemistry (and completely backed by scientific+medical consensus--drugs are a baseline treatment for bipolar disorder or schizophrenia), and so I think there's no reason why drug use should not improve the experience/behaviors of people with what our society has deemed 'normal' or 'normal-enough' brain chemistry. I don't think there's something so different about people with what are considered diseases with a larger genetic component which have lasted for centuries: they are likely caused by a combination of otherwise beneficial traits coming together in a less than beneficial way.

Also, since the diseases I mentioned often do involve long term maintenance medication taken on a daily basis (such that there's always some amount of it in a patient's bloodstream), I think it's worth also mentioning that there are treatments for otherwise drug resistant depression such as electroconvulsive therapy which are effective when used every few months or only once or twice. I don't think it's unreasonable to assert that there are likely compounds that have impacts on people's brain chemistry that last longer than the life of the drug in the bloodstream.

I'd like to note, though, that I'm not advocating going and taking psychedelic drugs in an attempt to better oneself. They're compounds which have debatable (and unresearched) longer term effects on those who imbibe them, and which have fairly established negative impact on people who take them and are at risk for developing a serious mental illness. (family history, etc.) I think that the appropriate thing to do is to pressure govt. and push society to allow for actual, well founded scientific research into the matter. (I say this as someone who has taken a psychedelic drug once, and wouldn't attribute any long term betterment or changes in personality/etc. to it. However, as someone fairly familiar with mental illness and its treatment, I think that it's reasonable to assert that drugs with strong impacts on brain chemistry--and certainly on the functioning of the seratonin system, which is often implicated in depression, bipolar disorder, and psychotic disorders might have beneficial uses in treatment of some individuals, and perhaps betterment of those with more 'normal' brain chemistry.)

Interesting papers! I appreciate the links.

>a) boxes are a mean of dealing with complexity - less complexity means we can have bigger boxes and more opportunities for cross-layer optimisation b) the places we have drawn those boxes are largely arbitrary and shift over time - the existence of the boxes does not imply that we can't benefit by moving the lines around or by merging some of them.

I agree completely. However, the manifesto seems (to me) to advocate all-over unification as the end goal, which I think is naive. I read it as "if a program needs to be divided into separate boxes, perhaps you need to make it simpler", which to me seems like the wrong way to go about things.

I feel like this is a kind of naive approach that might work for some end user programs, but isn't a good principle in general. Large/monolithic programs like databases, operating systems, compilers, etc. all can benefit from added overall complexity. (new data structures for storing data on disk, better memory management and program separation, better/more aggressive optimization+static analysis+etc.) You can argue that monolithic programs like those should be broken down into smaller parts (they already are, though), but in the end adding an R*-tree to a database allows you to do more types of lookups efficiently and makes your program /better/.

The thing that no developer really benefits from is added state complexity. But we've spent the last 30+ years coming up with ways to hide that kind of complexity from a programmer. That's /why/ we have our programs and processes divided into boxes (PL, OS, etc.) and /why/ we use things like higher level languages instead of assembly, object oriented programming, and general data hiding. On the other hand, it sounds much less sexy to say "People should do a better job of following best practices, and a lot of the problems in our industry are because people prefer to glue things onto existing code instead of being willing to do a higher level restructuring of a code base when a new need is established."

I'd agree that a lot of programming is not science. We shouldn't be treating it as such. The harder parts of programming are an application of theoretical mathematics (Dijkstra pointed this out years ago, and it's still true), but very little of CS is 'science' the way something like physics or chemistry is 'science'.

I think that you're right about this. People with poor social skills are going to be worse at negotiating pay and in much lower demand, overall. On the other hand, I'd assert that they're going to be harder to manage and lead to more interpersonal issues (almost by definition).

I think that falling into the trap of treating social skills and technical ability as a trade-off is a mistake. It's a hackneyed stereotype that I don't think has ever been true--but I'd imagine it has sometimes led to people expressly trying to seem socially abnormal in order to fit the idea of someone technically adept. I recall an anecdote about how a younger mathematician at a top research institution took up running his hand along the wall as he went places in order to seem odder, since it seemed like the best senior mathematicians there all had odd quirks. I'd imagine that the idea that social skills and technical ability are inversely correlated has led to similar things.

But also, my experience in TAing the weed out course for the CS major (and from seeing my fellow TAs teach and work, who were more or less the best in class at my University--so much so that I was flown out by a company simply because of my involvement in that class) was that social skills had absolutely no correlation to technical ability: your ability to understand how pointers or complex data structures worked had absolutely no relation to how socially fluent you were. In fact, it often went the opposite way, up to a point: there was some base line of social fluency that everyone I worked with and the best people I taught seemed to meet. The single best coder I have /ever/ seen work (he alone makes me absolutely certain that the best people in our industry are 10x/100x more productive than the average) was also one of the most comfortable with people and had a very clear idea of his career goals. I'd expect him to give confident, unhesitating responses to "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" and "What's your greatest strength/weakness?" Negatively weighting that would mean you'd miss the hands down most productive person I've ever seen work: and you'd probably miss a decent number of the other people I taught with. (Who, as I said, were basically the cream of the crop from the program I was in. Not all of the best people were there, but all of the people there were among the best.)

Now, I don't think they're particularly good interview questions, even though I understand why they're asked. I think that asking questions about actual workplace soft skills (conflict resolution, for instance) would be a much better use of everyone's time, since in the end it's those things that actually hold a team together.

This is actually one of the few reasons I wouldn't be totally against this kind of technology. (For security reasons, I think that putting software with open on the air connections into a 1-2+ ton metal machine powered by explosions that moves ridiculously fast is mostly a bad idea.) Particularly in America, even fairly 'bicycle friendly' cities can be pretty dangerous to ride a bike in, and often for design reasons that force bikers to either endanger themselves or put themselves in a place where cars will make dangerous maneuvers near them. (Example below) A system that you could attach to a bike that would basically give your bike a warning system for nearby cars (and them a warning system for bikes) would be fantastic. Another good thing about it would be that it could be used to give motorcycles the profile of a car, which would make riding them much less dangerous: no matter how safe a motorcycle rider you are, you're smaller than a car and that lower visibility can cause accidents.

The promised example: A common dangerous design for bikers in cities is bike lanes right up against a lane of parked cars. Depending on how fast a biker is going and the local terrain, someone opening up their door into the bike lane can be lethal: you might not have time to stop yourself, and your options might be to slam into the door and maybe a person getting out of the car or to swerve into traffic, both of which are very dangerous. The safest thing to do when that's the case is actually to ride in the car lane, but that has its own dangers: many cars will try to pass you by going part of the way or all of the way into the lane to the left of them, which might have oncoming traffic or traffic coming from behind that the drivers don't check for, which can lead to them swerving back towards you. That means that the most safe thing you can do for everyone in that situation is to ride dead center of the lane so that passing you by going only halfway into a lane isn't possible (since many car drivers seem to treat that kind of passing differently from an actual lane change), but car drivers absolutely hate that and will do all sorts of other dangerous things like following super close.

I think that's more a sign of the current pressures to succeed (get good grades) in college and double major and etc. are extremely high and the perceived penalties for 'failing' also quite high. A combination of a high pressure situation, more work than most people can comfortably manage, and the opportunity to take a pill that allows you to do more maintained, focused work than you would be able to otherwise? I think many people would go for the pills. They're extremely effective at allowing you to maintain an intense focus on an activity for much longer than most unmedicated people would be able to.

There isn't any evidence that I'm aware of that there has been any noticeable change in people's abilities to do actual, focused work: studies today show that most people can at most manage around 4-5 hours of focused work, and as far as I know that hasn't changed much in the last 200+ years. Ritalin can allow a healthy person to put in bursts of 10+ hours of focused work. Of course students are going to take advantage of that. My understanding is that it's also fairly common in other high pressure situations that require prolonged focus (stock trading, etc.).

Things like the web/etc. do allow people to do more multitasking-esque behaviors (with the obvious impacts on focus), but that's less about people's brains being rewired at some fundamental level and more that there are now more opportunities to goof off. Pre-internet, you had a much higher activation energy of chatting with friends (you had to go call them and talk with them, versus clicking three times to get to Facebook). I don't think that's limited to people in the younger generation, though: one of my family members (an English professor, one of the top in her field in the world) will sometimes turn off the internet/block distracting sites while writing and does all of her editing away from the computer in order to avoid Facebook/reading the news/playing scrabble against the computer.

In this case, it's being compared to the normal demographics of people doing programming/CS related stuff.

The demographics here are pretty stark: the percentage of women, and the percentages of hispanic and black people in programming and other tech related jobs (and studying it at the high school/college level) are way, way below their representation in the overall population.

So "diverse" can both being used to (as another poster mentioned) refer to "non-white", as in the states it's often used as a byword for that, but I think in this case it's being used as a comparison to the expected demographics.

As a much more off topic explanation of why "diverse" gets that use in the US dialogue: the US has serious problems talking about the fact that racism and inequalities along race lines both are still incredibly prevalent; many people would prefer to think it ended after the civil rights movement in the '60s (and that is largely how it is taught in the public school system). Saying something along the lines of "I was impressed by the number of black people/African Americans who attended" or even "I was impressed by how many non-white people attended" isn't politically correct in some circles, (and can open you up to accusations of racism) despite the fact that it mainly acts to highlight underlying inequalities and race lines rather than actually actively perpetuating and enforcing them. However, "diverse" is used as a byword to mean the same thing without actively highlighting any particular racial inequalities, which is more palpable for some people. (In my opinion, more palpable mainly for the people who are uncomfortable acknowledging the problems or who would rather not address them, but that's more social commentary than an explanation of the use.)

Functional programming has been around since the late 50s/early 60s, depending on what you count as the start of LISP as a programming language.

In some ways the reason it isn't used a lot is for historic reasons as much as anything else. Functional programming, for a long time, was seen (often rightly so) as more computationally expensive than the same imperative code for most tasks. For a long time, that meant that you weren't going to use functional programming: when every single byte and cycle matters, you're going to go with assembly or whatever is closest to it/translates really well to it. (e.x. C)

We now live in a world with abundant memory and excessive unused clock cycles. If I remember correctly, there's also been a good bit of research and work in the last 20-30 years The historic reasons for not using functional programming are gone for many (but definitely not all; people still hand roll assembly, too) of the original use cases. However, you then have 30+ years of programmers who were largely trained in and almost exclusively used imperative languages over the course of their career. That kind of market share is hard to compete with (because it's similar to market share; if everyone is using imperative languages, you need to be familiar with them too if you want to stay in most parts of the industry), and is self perpetuating (if you want to work in CS, you're going to need to know imperative languages for most jobs).

I'm also fairly certain there's a good number of useful, reuseable programs that're written in functional languages, but I'm in an airport and nothing immediately comes to mind.

Just on the subject of not medicating, specifically for bipolar disorder: in the case of bipolar disorder, medication is considered the only completely responsible primary treatment, with anything else acting as a supplemental treatment. (Therapy simply won't prevent later episodes, lifestyle changes can only lower the chance, and are less reliable than medication.) Medication adherence is also a problem in bipolar patients because mania and hypomania are characterized by euphoria, delusions of grandeur, overconfidence, and a lot of other symptoms people find enjoyable in the moment.

I'd echo the suggestion of educating yourself to the best of your ability. Most people from HN are pretty intelligent: learning about one disease and the treatments for it is not difficult to do at a basic level. Generally those who've spent years studying it (say, doctors) are going to know more and be able to better contextualize that information, but it helps to know what the evidence is for a particular treatment, if it's considered responsible, what side effects to expect, etc., as it helps you better evaluate the doctor and makes you aware of your options.

Pointing out that categories are used to create a false dichotomy in public discourse is not "playing coy", or a "quibble".

Unless you can show scientific research that firmly differentiates the addictivity and/or health effects of what people would consider hard drugs from what people wouldn't, in some meaningful way, your argument that "hard drugs" is a meaningful category doesn't hold up. You need to be able to make a meaningful distinction between 'hard drugs' and 'soft drugs', which holds up under scrutiny, which hasn't really been done in the public discourse.

As I said before, I don't think anyone is claiming that there are drugs that're more addictive and more harmful than marijuana: it's just that many legal drugs also fall into that category. If you aren't going to consider alcohol a hard drug (which is frankly an incredibly dangerous substance, fairly easy to overdose on, addictive, incredibly bad for almost all of your body, has one of the most dangerous withdrawal profiles, and causes some people to become aggressive, violent or otherwise dangerous), then you're clearly drawing the line somewhere other than where you're claiming to have drawn it.

Pointing out that what are usually stigmatized as 'hard drugs' are used in medical situations is meaningful, because it puts into question the categorization of a substance as 'hard' versus 'soft' drugs, which is reasonable.

Your characterization of all 'hard drugs' as 'chemically addictive drugs that are more dangerous than things like marijuana' also is at odds with the governmental classification system and the public debate: many people would put things like LSD (no known LD-50 in humans and in no way chemically addictive) in the realm of 'hard drugs', and nobody talks of tobacco as a hard drug (despite it being one of the most addictive drugs available, with a lot of dangers to one's health; certainly 'more dangerous than marijuana' and 'chemically addictive' by every study/classification I've seen), or alcohol as a hard drug (again, chemically addictive and quite bad for your body). People would probably also not classify Adderall (amphetamine salts) as a 'hard drug', despite it having similar effects as meth (methamphetamine salts) and similar symptoms for overdose, addiction, and withdrawal. (I don't know amounts or the like, so I'm not going to claim adderall is 'the same as meth', or 'as safe as meth', but it is in many ways a similar substance. As a side note, the way you take in a drug has a large effect on its half life, and to my understanding, therefore its addictiveness; if I remember the drugs class I sat in on in college, drugs with short half lives tend to be much more addictive than drugs with long half lives. Your classification system becomes even weaker if my memory is correct, as the uptake + half life of /the same or almost the same drug/ will differ depending on if you're snorting it, injecting it, smoking it, etc. When, then, is a drug 'hard' or 'soft'? What sort of addictiveness do you use if you can snort or orally take a drug?)

Classification systems like 'hard' and 'soft' for drugs are not rationally constructed, they exist because of public debate and because of what is and isn't legal. I don't think anyone could argue with your assertion that there are many drugs that are chemically addictive and more dangerous than marijuana: every study I've seen basically puts marijuana as 'not chemically addictive' and 'less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco', for instance. But the "hard drug"/"soft drug" classification is in many ways a red herring and socially constructed, it isn't really based on scientific facts.

(As a side note, alcohol withdrawal is one of the /most dangerous/ drug withdrawals to go through. It can /kill/ you, unlike the withdrawal from many 'hard drugs'.)

I recently finished up my undergraduate education and realized there were certain large important parts of computer science I knew very little to nothing about (I stopped really taking CS classes to go take a lot of advanced math courses my last two years, which I'm not certain was the best decision, but it wasn't a bad one either), so I've been thinking a lot in the past few months about what my best options were for learning about subjects I'm weak in or knew next to nothing about. (E.x.: implementation of databases, OS design, AI, HCI, and other fields) Putting that into words wasn't too difficult, and hopefully it'll make figuring things out easier for someone else... I tried the reading papers and textbook approach, which is part of why I wouldn't recommend them.

If you want to improve at programming: follow the advice about either making a personal project or working on an open source project. The fastest way to get better at programming is to program more.

However: it sounds like your interests are actually more in the realm of Computer Science than Programming, though: type theory, theory of computation, compilers, AI, etc. are less in the realm of programming and much more in the realm of computer science. You don't really need to know how an NFA or DFA works in most day to day programming, frankly. For learning Computer Science, I would suggest finding an advanced course with all of its material online (MIT OpenCourseware is a good place to start, or any of the other free online courses places), and working through a course on the topic. If it has prerequisites that you don't know any/most of the material from, then find a course on those. In my opinion, the other common options (reading through a textbook, reading papers, working on a project related and just learning what you need for that) all have flaws: textbooks are usually designed to accompany a course, which means they usually have much more than you need to learn a lot about the subject (and, in my experience, many are unbelievably boring and poorly written; if you want to go that route, make sure you find ones that are appropriate for self study). Reading papers is really interesting (and a lot more fun than reading textbooks), but without context or knowledge about the area, it's hard to evaluate the paper's meaningfulness/claims/etc., and hard to decide which papers are important to read. Working on just a project (e.x. just writing a compiler) leads to learning just enough to make that project, and not more. If you want to improve at programming: follow the advice about either making a personal project or working on an open source project. The fastest way to get better at programming is to program more.

Frankly: it sounds like you are decidedly not as much of an 'expert beginner' as you think you are. Familiarity with basic data structures+complexity, an understanding of theory, and an understanding of math through linear, ODEs, and discrete already puts you on a very firm grounding. (Outside of certain very specific parts of CS, you /do not/ need more math than that. If you're going into graphics research, knowing differential topology+geometry might be handy. I'm having a hard time thinking of things other than that, though.) From your description, you have more or less finished the 'beginner' stage, moved well beyond the 'novice' stage, and are moving towards becoming someone with a lot of advanced knowledge. Just knowing that you're interested in things like type theory+compilers/machine learning+expert systems+AI already puts you /way/ beyond being a beginner.

Shameless plug of someone else's stuff: if you're not sure where to start on the courses front, and want to start on the programming languages side of things (compilers, etc.), this course might be a good place to start: https://www.udacity.com/course/cs262 I haven't worked through this course in particular, and I don't know its exact difficulty, but I took undergraduate programming languages from this professor and he's an /amazing/ teacher.

Edit: don't know why I had two copies of that written, but now there should only be one. Also, cryptography is another part of CS that you need more math (in this case, abstract algebra). (More multiple copies? I seem to be pretty bad at this "say things once" thing, and need to make some preference changes.)

Dijkstra (the one who has a graph algorithm named after him, aside from being a really influential computer scientist in many ways) argued more or less exactly what you're arguing: that formal methods (that is, formally proving, mathematically, that your code will behave as it should) are the appropriate way to teach computer science/programming. His argument is basically that computer science is very hard applied math, and should be treated as such.

You might find https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E... an interesting read, if you haven't read it before. There's been some interesting discussion of it on HN in the past, too.

> I don't know what the most advanced classes were in your field, but Berkeley (and other top top schools) teach classes that are unimaginable at other universities. An undergraduate SDE class really is "unimaginable" most places, and learning the material from a textbook would be impossible -- it's too difficult and appropriate textbooks don't exist. The "textbook" is usually the instructor's notes from the last time they taught the class.

Not a Berkeley alum, but I went to UVa; which is considered a similar tier (if I remember right, the top 3 public schools in the US, at least by News+World rankings, are usually a toss up between Berkeley, UVa, and UCLA).

I think this is definitely true, and in basically every field a top school is strong in. The upper level courses, even at the undergraduate level (especially the ones people are not required to take. If it's a required course, /someone/ has to teach it, and they might not be that into it, particularly if they aren't teaching faculty. If it's an elective, they're teaching it because they think the subject is awesome.) are usually being taught by people who have made it their entire life's work to study that field, and at that level of University are often some of the best people in that field. That kind of perspective, depth of knowledge, and passion don't necessarily translate well to teaching (I can think of some math professors that I had...), but it often does, and even if it doesn't those professors are usually /amazing/ resources outside of class if you want to know more about (subject of choice), what the current problems in that field are, what's considered important or valuable, etc.

I'd hesitate to make sweeping generalizations, but I think that if you didn't manage to take as many advanced courses (particularly graduate ones. Good undergrads at institutions like that can almost always handle the graduate courses they offer after they have the sufficient background) with as many top people in a field (or fields) as possible, you wasted an opportunity if you were at a school like that.

(Full disclosure: I come from a family of liberal arts professors at UVa, whose social circle largely consisted of other liberal arts professors at UVa. I might be a little biased on the matter... but those people /know their field incredibly well/. All of the ones I've met, both outside and in school, are both very, very smart and many of them spend the majority of their time thinking about one field or area of study.)