1,066 karma · joined February 12, 2013
However, I noticed that if you use their HTML version (i.e., use duckduckgo.com/html/<query> instead), that they don't do the click-tracking. The only downside I've noticed is that there's no infinite-scrolling mode, you have to hit "next".
Whether they're still tracking the search queries, though, I have no idea...
See: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/4/29/glenn_greenwald_o...
> Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.
So, not surprising at all if you've been paying attention, but it's good to have confirmation.
Thanks for pointing that out, that sucks. I'm glad I'm not much of an overclocker. Also a shame that they don't seem to have plans for any chips with >4 cores, and they're still disabling hyperthreading on a lot of models.
It probably won't stop me from buying a Haswell, I'm drooling for all those new instructions...
This should be of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_lambda_calculus
I'm in Austin, and it's pretty nice. I imagine you know enough about the tech scene already (perhaps more than me?). There are lots of opportunities, but the "good" software jobs are rather elusive (especially for a college dropout like myself).
He's not saying you lose anything, more that it's harder to use those things when you're constantly thinking about how wrong they are. Similarly, the overuse of certain habits is not always avoidable.
I guess I've sort-of known this, though it's nice to hear someone else confirm it... I know that my procrastination and perfectionism are quite interrelated, as whenever I try and work on a project, my mind manages to find zillions of problems with it, I don't get any real stimulation out it, and I return to distracting habits that give more immediate pleasure (damn you HN!).
Perfectionism, in turn, has its roots in childhood stress (at least it does for me). Not getting enough positive feedback for so many years, not believing in myself, etc. It seems so simple in retrospect, but I didn't realize how much emotional stress I had built up my whole life until maybe a year or so ago. Incidentally, I noticed this when I was reading about the causes of RSI, which turned out to be caused by psychosomatic effects (TMS, again, at least for me). So these stresses, left unresolved, can turn into real physical pain.
The human brain is fucking weird.
I quit a while back and have surprisingly had little urge to do it any more. While I greatly value the difference in perspective it can offer, I was just using it way too often for too long, without even really enjoying it a lot of the time.
Absolutely--and I think pretty much all software is like this. Engineering/optimization is, in a vague sense, all about how much shit you can throw at a wall and how well you can tell what sticks. The faster/easier/more accurately you can do this, the better. If you're going to be bound to the first pile of shit you throw due to business constraints or whatever, you're not likely to end up with something very nice.
> The biggest thing I learned. The thing I also hope my team has learned. Everyone else has hit the limits of what they can do because they weren’t willing to burn it all to the ground and start over. We start over a lot. We code for 3 days and then decide this won’t work, and we do it over again. We take the lessons we learned but little of the code. The second, or thrid time we do it right based on what we now know.
I am a big fan of rewrites, and am sad to see how much of the software engineering world has centered around the Spolskyesque idea of rewriting being a horrible waste of time. Truth is, 99.9...% of software just sucks. The more and more infrastructure we build up around it, the more constrained we become. Just look at the most common languages/tools/technologies we use on a daily basis. C++/Java/JS/Python? These are just awful. Hell, I'm even like Python compared to most languages, but there's still so much historical cruft, and it's ridiculously slow to boot.
I think this is mostly because people just suck at writing software in general. Rewriting in the industry usually doesn't buy you anything since it's the same people writing it, and they're still constrained by all the other software that they interact with. But if everyone was more willing to rewrite, focusing on code quality, I believe our tools would be less intertwined, we could achieve much faster rates of progress, and the life of a software engineer would be a lot more tolerable.
I find it pretty hard to function in typical management structures, though I work better with teams/some sort of external visibility (my personal projects tend to gather dust too easily, though I'm working on improving this). The concept of an incubator-like environment for collaborating on ideas without the extreme focus on growth would be a perfect fit for people like me.
That's not functional though--this_crashes() has side effects. I'm far from a Haskell expert, but I guess in practice you'd be returning some error type from that function, and it didn't matter whether it's evaluated or not, since True || arbitrary_expression will always just be True.
Laziness, AFAIK, only complicates compilation due to making it hard to reason about memory/performance, and for having branches all over to see if expressions have been evaluated yet.
Another fascinating set of exercises (that I became aware of reading an article on Ithkuil, an invented language, that was on here a little while ago) is "deconcentration of attention". There's a simple website at http://deconcentration-of-attention.com/, which happens to talk about its applications to software engineering. It's somewhat similar to meditation, and focuses on harnessing the parallelism of the subconscious mind to think more non-linearly.
It seems pretty out-there, and I'm not sure if anybody has really had any success with it, but just reading the exercises is quite intriguing to me (e.g. try to hear "red" in your head, visualize "red" without the word, and then try to feel "red" without visualizing it). Another exercise I thought of after reading the page (and which is quite hard for me, it turns out), is to count in your head without subconsciously speaking/hearing the numbers.