On the Use of a Life
daemonology.net
daemonology.net
On the industry side, I generate and move data at scale and my teams produce industrial strength models where the SoTA won't be attempted again for years, if ever. Household brands are changing their businesses based on we've done so far, and we're just getting started.
The academic system is not where you go to have staggering impact in your lifetime. $500k or $1M a year isn't how innovation scales. Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile designs. He told Bennie Schriever: I need to deliver a payload to Moscow in 30 minutes, gave him $500M, and kept everyone out of Schriever's business.
And, have a read of Rickover: http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf
Finally, I would point to the real meat of Colin's experience: if you take on a problem, one problem, like really take it on and try to develop it, you will find 100 PhDs worth of work in short order. Mind-breakingly hard problems abound when you actually try to solve hard problems in the world.
Maybe I am overly optimistic about academia, but my understanding is that your advisor, funding agencies, journals, etc. know the layout of the field and make sure that what you’re doing is both interesting and novel - even to a fault.
"interesting and novel" in academia currently translates to "incremental improvements on the status quo". The article directly talks about an example of not being able to do anything too novel because there was no journal to review it.
It's also easy to see the distinction between different phases in academia: after PhD it's much more about what could be done against what can be done. It's more like trying to get VC money with just an idea. It's hard, but some can do it, but it requires a vastly different playbook than what is required to get the degree. If you already know how to make things work, it's easier to transition into a bootstrapped mode where you can sideline as an independent researcher without all the fluff of publishing.
a problem i am facing doing this myself is that people need all that signaling ceremony to recognize it ... the real value of any credential is extracting compliance. The entrepreneur of course invests in marketing. It's a big complicated world out there and people need brands to help make sense of it.
That said, the success criteria for solutions to problems is different. In academia, my analysis needed to be irrefutable. In industry I have often felt in different companies that whatever the sales team can push is good enough to move on. I do sometimes wonder how much of what we have given to the world is just flat wrong, because we weren't validating with the same seriousness.
Tangential topic: I'd prefer a synonym to your 'violent' agreement. I appreciate your desire to emphasize your support, but I think we can do with less violence and brutality in discussion overall. Maybe 'vehement' or 'passionate'?
On the other hand this is the venture capital model. I wonder if we'd have worse, equal or better results if Eisenhower somehow applied the venture capital and entrepreneurial model of today to missile R&D back then. It's an interesting thought experiment.
If you give so much money to a single company they squander it like during the dot com bubble. If you disperse it over many companies a chaos ensures as everybody struggles to find product market fit.
You're not really in "violent agreement" when you're just agreeing with him from the outset.
I definitely think of the term pretty much exclusively in the sense of (a) here, i.e. extreme, vehement agreement:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2007-Septem...
This is a really a generalization. Plenty of people do have "impact" while working in academia. There are also a lot of very smart people who are working on boring projects in companies or banks. It depends on so many factors...
Uh, ok, if that's what you want to do I guess academia isn't the right place.
Pretty odd example though. You might as well have chosen some of the 20th century academic scientist who discovered, I don't know, relativity, quantum mechanics, the genetic code, the neural action potential or synaptic transmission to make the opposite point.
Is it likely to be among these people? No. But that's what motivates people in academia, rather than bombing Moscow.
Yes, exactly, that's the distinction between engineering and foundational research. Academia is for the latter.
The examples that I quoted have arguably had more impact on civilization than any single engineering project, because they define what engineering can even be.
There's a separate (and IMO more interesting) discussion to be had about why many academics feel like they're not contributing to highly relevant foundational advances. But this thread right here just seems like a big misunderstanding about what academia is.
Physics has been stuck in a quagmire for 50+ years. The "foundational research" hasn't moved, possibly since Einstein (who only became an academic after publishing his important work). Meanwhile the engineers have done awesome things.
The impact on civilisation from string theory: zip
The impact on civilisation from the internet: huge
I'm not sure what foundational advances you mean, but the impact is definitely on the engineering side for the last 100 years.
I think there is some dubious domain claiming in these industry vs academia anecdotes.
You forgot all Quantum Mechanics. His only collaboration was the explanation photoelectric effect. (He got a Nobel price for this but is it a very tiny part of Quantum mechanics.)
The electroweak unification and quantum chromodynamics were discovered after Einstein's death. Also the Higgs boson prediction and experiments are post Einstein's death.
This is exactly what SpaceX pulled off, and cheaply so. No wonder that they are a magnet for young engineering talent, even with their insane workaholic corporate culture.
This "Industry, industry über alles!" chest beating is very unconvincing.
This is not a trivial cost. In fact, the nation was so unwilling to carry it on, that Apollo ended and the last footprints on the Moon will soon be fifty years old.
Doing things affordably is a huge, huge leap for mankind (to paraphrase Armstrong). Look, for example, at healthcare. A cancer treatment that costs 1 million USD may be theoretically revolutionary, but out of reach of most people. Drive the cost down to 15 thousand, now that is a real revolution from the point of view of a regular Joe.
Again, this makes me wonder if the gulf here is academia vs industry, or if it's just 1980 vs 2020.
Taking an existing, but very expensive or impractical idea, and reengineering it to be orders of magnitude cheaper or practical, is a huge feat.
In case of SpaceX, development costs of the Falcons was a fraction of Space Shuttle's and refurbishment of the first stage is very simple.
To be fair, their operated under very different constraints. SS program had a lot of money, but to win over senators from across the US, the manufacturing process had to be spread over half of North America, which exploded the engineering complexity and the costs. SpaceX had to integrate internally, precisely because they did not have such a war chest of money.
Falcon 9 vs. Space Shuttle is also an interesting case study on the "more money is not necessarily better" topic. Ceteris paribus perhaps, but in practice, more money tends to come with strings attached and those strings may more than compensate (negatively) for the advantages of a larger budget.
Every area that I explored deeply because I had an almost "irrational obsession" yielded new general insights about the world. For me it has been, among other things, smart volume control via signal coherence, typically only applied in radar applications. This opened up a whole world of signal math that I would not have stumbled on before. And there is plenty to develop there for the future of communications.
Truth is that modern academia is a poorly regulated and inefficient industry. It wasn't always like that I think, and I am still hoping for better days to come back.
I was also a very high achieving student in high school and university and was similarly all set for a career in academia (also studying mathematics). In my final year however, I had a full-time position doing research with CSIRO, which is a leading research organisation in Australia. I did some interesting work there - applying neural nets for classifying micro-seismic events around mine sites, and won some awards for my research. If I had wanted to, I could have stayed on and continued down that path. But I didn't.
What ultimately pushed me away was everyone I bumped in to in academia was so unhappy. There was constant bickering and frustration around getting funding (a common sentiment in the division I worked in was that you had pander to big mining/oil companies and propose research topics with clear financial gain for them). It was not a happy place to be, and at the end of my time there I jumped head first in to a software job instead.
I later found time to still do mathematics on my own, and have written about that journey and shared it previously on HN: https://www.neilwithdata.com/mathematics-self-learner and have had some other little successes in my life that make me feel like I made the right choice: https://www.neilwithdata.com/how-i-built-bbsmart
Tangentially, this I think is also why I'm more open to hearing ideas from organisations like Numenta, and seeing research done outside of academia by folks like Stephen Wolfram. I think increasingly much of the most novel interesting research will be done outside of traditional academia.
Drake meme: 1. NN's for classifying micro-seismic events a la Oklahoma 2. Coming up with something new to blast shale with
Not sure if the vibe is different elsewhere, but my department was similarly unhappy. At the very least, I'm glad that the experience gave me a taste of shoddy research enough to hate it and develop my own preferences.
I'd much rather academia had ample enough funding where people could work on what they wanted and what they felt was useful without the need to appeal to large businesses or metaphorically knife-fight for grants.
That can only ever be a temporary state of affairs unless you deliberately keep the population of researchers small. Competition for scarce resources exists except in high growth domains and growth does not stay high forever. Realistically an even larger majority of PhDs than nowadays would get expelled to industry and other places academics don’t care about like unemployment.
I find it particularly interesting that you mentioned you decision being influenced by how unhappy people in academia seemed. Also, how frustrating it could be to secure funding. I find that interesting because, you can easily find people outside of academia making the same argument.
I assume your experience in the industry is better than academia was (considering your account) but I also wonder how much of that was brought up by your prominent success in college. In my own anecdotal experience, that sort of experience, knowledge, and access can lead you to opportunities that are not representative of the majority of cases.
I remember one student who just couldn't laugh. Sure a chuckle here and there, but not real laughter. When we'd go grab lunch with a prospective new student, he's warn them off academia altogether. Such lunch meetings weren't all that uncommon with people in other labs.
Maybe our experiences were unique and rare, but they felt more common than not.
This observation seems a bit at odds with the abundance of core technologies that originated in academia. The ENIAC (and a good chunk of the history of early computers), the internet, the world wide web (counting CERN as an academic institution here), most of the core ideas in programming language design (most programming languages we use aren't academic, but most of their ideas can be traced back to academia), most of the history of AI (including neural nets), probably most published work on algorithms and data structures, ...
And that's just talking about CS. This doesn't necessarily disprove the author's point: most of the things I've listed are quite old, academia may have worsened in the meantime. But I think they glossed over the main advantage of academia over entrepreneurship: shielding the researcher from market effects. Although investors can do the same thing, as a system academia is more reliable, and for some technologies which take very long to develop or are too hard to monetize (such as algorithms) I don't think entrepreneurship offers an alternative.
EDIT (small addition): I think the author is also a bit quick to generalize from "I had a lousy experience in academia" to "academia is a lousy place to do nover research".
This is, I believe, correct, and the problem.
> But I think they glossed over the main advantage of academia over entrepreneurship: shielding the researcher from market effects
Both I and others moved to academia for this reason. However, it is incorrect. Perhaps "market" is not the right word, but the life of an academic is dominated by competition for grant funding, and mostly focused on "salesmanship" -- more focused on selling than an entrepreneur, in fact.
> This is, I believe, correct, and the problem.
I think it's a bit of the opposite: academia didn't get _that_ worse but entrepreneurship has gotten much much better. In reality it's probably a mix of both.
So really the choice comes down to the problem you want to solve: if it's easier to sell to reviewers do it in academia, if it's easier to sell to customers do it in industry.
(* if not the detail - non academic impact is worth quite a lot in uk academia nowadays, and you may at times measure that through e.g. sales figures, but these in turn must ultimately be sold to reviewers)
This depends heavily on where you are. I personally don't spend an onerous amount of time applying for grants. If you're at what are called "R1" universities in the US (places like MIT, Stanford, UT-Austin, etc.), then yes, your job as professor (at least in STEM) is basically to run a research lab of maybe 4-10 people, which means a lot of personnel management, finding funding to pay them, and PR (although there is some research, mentorship, etc too).
At smaller places with either a teaching orientation or more of a mixed research/teaching orientation, things work a lot differently. I personally feel quite free in my choice of research problems and how I spend my time outside of teaching. We don't have a PhD program and I don't run a "lab", just do my own research, sometimes with BS/MS students and sometimes with colleagues at other universities, so I don't have a lot of funding needs. The university does appreciate if I apply for grants now and then, but maybe 0.5-1 applications a year (I got one small NSF one, which they were super happy about). I do teach more classes than at an R1: a prof there would typically teach one a semester, while I teach two. Overall I'd estimate I spend about 15-20 hours/wk on teaching my two classes (including prep, grading, etc.), 5-10 on administration/service, and thus have about 10-20 working hours left to do whatever kind of research I'd like to do. In the summer of course the research time goes up as I don't teach.
At the moment, partly due to industry hiring away so many CS academics, I believe it's actually a quite good job to be a CS academic at a non-R1 place if you like the teaching part and the salary is sufficient for your needs/preferences. The university knows that you can leave and hiring people in this area is difficult, so if you teach reasonably well, publish anything at all, and apply for a grant now and then, they're basically just happy you're staying. This is CS-specific though; academic jobs are much more scarce in other fields, so it's less of an "employee's market" there.
Also, imo writing papers feels more like "persuasion" than "salesmanship". For one, in-depth discussion of the shortcomings or drawbacks of your approach tends to be appreciated in academia.
I absolutely concur that academia has worsened. There used to be enough money sloshing around that you could get plenty without needing to be particularly good at selling yourself to grant committees.
Tuition has gone up much faster than inflation; I know that rarely funds research directly, but it should at least prevent an operational drain on endowments.
Speaking of endowments, investments in general have done quite well over the past 30 years, even taking into account major impacts like the dotcom crash, 9/11, 2008 meltdown, pandemic, etc. Endowments should be doing well.
Has private giving declined? Is the government spending less on research?
To be clear: I'm just curious.
I'm a former tenured professor at a major research university who left my position, in part because I came to hate my department (there was an exodus of faculty and it and the university changed substantially), developed a sense that academics is in crisis, and because of family issues (good issues, of the compelling kind).
The salience of grants has increased for a variety of reasons.
The first, and in my mind, most important reason is because of indirect funds on grants, which universities have come to recognize as a revenue stream. It's not just that grants are harder to get, it's that university administration is focused more on profit as a major administrative goal. A former NIH head lamented this once in an article by pointing out that indirect funds (vague, nonitemized pay demanded for things like heat, police pay, etc.) scale linearly with direct funds (the actual cost of the research), even as the actual indirect costs are bounded sublinearly. This is because most universities just negotiate a percentage of the direct funded grant award be indirect funds, but those indirect costs don't continue to increase--e.g., the cost for a heated office and phone line are the same whether you have 100k in direct funds or 1m in direct funds, but the government pays a lot more in the latter case (in which case taxpayer money isn't really paying for the heated office and phone line).
You might recognize this, as do many HN readers, but it's difficult to convey how pernicious an effect it has had. In my time in the department, I saw the attitude change from "people should seek funding to cover their research" to money, and indirect funds in particular, being the primary goal above all else. In preparing grants, by the time I left, grand administrators would strongly encourage you to apply for grants that were maybe 2-4x what were needed for the actual research, just to increase indirect funds that would be paid off the grant. Note that this leads to a spiral, in that inflated asks that are met by the government lead to less money for others.
I do think there's been a shift in administrative goals for whatever reason, maybe due to career administration types increasing, admin coming from outside the university rather than inside, etc. etc. Some of it has to do with changes in how administration is trained for administrative roles per se. Some of it is changes in demands by legislatures, who want to see universities independently turn profits and serve corporate interests more, indirectly or directly. I don't know what it is. But the goals have shifted, and it's enabled by indirect funds from the federal government. The number one thing someone could do to change the grant culture in the US is to eliminate indirect funds, or at least to raise requirements so that they are no longer a source of profit for universities.
Another question is why grant monies are scarcer though. One answer is the pyramid scheme of university research at the moment, which has changed over time. There's a great paper about this by some former federal agency heads (I think in PNAS?) with revealing analyses and figures showing that the indirect fund seeking really picked up steam in the late 90s to around 2000, when per researcher funding was at a peak. Around that time is when universities and researchers started this indirect fund seeking -- admin and researchers realized there was enough to go around, and they could bring in grad students and postdocs ala pyramid scheme to support the indirect funds and it all worked. After that, with increasing newcomers, funding per researcher started to decline, but the incentives for indirect fund seeking remained. So basically in 1999-2000 the current system was established whereby universities get profits from indirect funds from federal agencies, burning through newcomers (grad students and postdocs) to make it work. Although it's not explicitly stated, trainees are essentially seen as disposable labor, justified under some Darwinian idea that the best will rise to the top and the rest will just leave the field. The core issue, whether or not indirect funds are really justified, or whether or not grant money is an appropriate metric of research value, or whether those leaving the field truly have no value in the sense that they should be funded, is left unaddressed.
Another, subtler issue is that many in administration who are former researchers came of age during the pre-2000 era, and so are just used to the system, and don't really see the problems. They were funded early on, and get grant extensions or career funding, and are not faced with the issue of whether or not they would have survived in the current system, so they don't demand any changes (there's a lot of research showing that the average age of first R01 has increased over time, and that older researchers are much more likely to get extensions to large grants than newcomers are to get new research funded). This is exacerbated by the fact that those who did come of age later are used to the current system also, and sort of see it as "well this is what I had to deal with, so you should have to deal with it too."
Another issue that doesn't get as much attention is the decline of tenure. Tenure is a favorite thing to criticize in many circles, but what many don't realize is that it has been severely declining. In many fields or areas of academics, most faculty are untenured, and in other areas tenured faculty have been replaced by adjunct faculty and so forth. The problem with this is that it means that increasingly the faculty that do exist are dependent on grants for survival, which increases the pressure to obtain grants, and more grants. Even if you're tenured, admin sort of sees the untenured grant-contingent faculty and uses them as a comparison (rather than asking how can their time be balanced between teaching and research, or is their research value really best indexed by grant dollars).
There's also a general issue of the black box of increasing university costs, which no one seems to have a good answer to, and is probably due to a combination of things. Increasingly top-heavy admin, "glamor project" funding, increasingly extreme retention salary offers are some of it. Some of it at public institutions is declining state funding, although that doesn't account for private universities. As the pandemic has highlighted, endowments are often fixed in the sense that they're dedicated to specific things, like the library, or whatever.
So:
Increasing university costs no one can really fully explain (or wants to explain). Decreased state funding. Decreased federal grant money availability, worsened by inflated grant proposals. Increased number of researchers due to pyramid scheme incentives. Increased pressure from admin to seek indirect funds, due to increased profit motive and other factors. Decreased protections from tenure and other similar things.
Really you could write an entire large book about these issues, and it's only the tip of the iceberg.
Colin, you are an inspiration. You have achieved so much and I can't wait to see what comes next.
Frankly, working backups are good enough because his service has allowed people to recover from disaster. Hope instead of misery is a fine way to spend one's life.
> In 2009, having had many users ask for passphrase-protected Tarsnap key files, and having determined that the current state of the art of password based key derivation was sorely lacking, I invented scrypt — and in the process, opened up a whole new field of cryptography. Sure, I was doing this because it was something I could do to make Tarsnap more secure; but it would be a stretch to place this under the umbrella of "spending my time working on backups".
For those who (like me) were wondering what cryptocurrency this was referring to: Litecoin has a ~$3B market cap and uses scrypt. Dogecoin also uses it but has a much smaller market cap, closer to $350M.
scrypt is an interesting choice for cryptocurrencies because it does not only need a significant amount of compute resources – which can be scaled using GPUs to perform huge amounts of work in parallel – but also requires large amounts of memory which is much more difficult to scale to the same level.
This hit me. I was focused on getting a Masters in Math, and I had a 4.0 GPA and 40 hours of credit with just a test or thesis preventing me from a credential. Instead, I dropped out to focus on building products with friends.
Best decision ever.
At least for me since I'm 38 and on the verge of retiring.
> academic institutions systemically promote exactly the sort of short-term optimization
The whole publish or perish ideology is teaching people the wrong f'n skills on imaginary problems, so I gave on reading on academic papers years ago because the amount of noise to signal was intolerable.
Like Colin, I do independent research but in a different space. I'm currently writing a programming language for board games ( http://www.adama-lang.org/ ) which I believe could turn into something crazy as I'm inventing a low-cost way of doing "serverless stateful micro services" or "a key to state machine service".
I don't know how I could even get a grant for such work, but it interests me. And, I've reached a nice point in my life where success is measured by whether a task brings me joy rather than external signals.
In a sense, when I decide to retire, I'll have the ultimate freedom of the idealized tenure that I built myself.
I think this is why sharing stories is important so wandering people can find ideas for them achieving better results.
Academy is where they made the social connections (each other and VC) needed to launch a business, before they hired DEC people to build the tech.
"academia is a lousy place to do novel research"
"It became clear, both from my own experiences and from advice I received, that if I wanted to succeed in academia I would need to churn out incremental research papers every year — at very least until I had tenure."
"In many ways, starting my own company has given me the sort of freedom which academics aspire to"
> I considered replying in the thread, but I think it deserves an in-depth answer — and one which will be seen by more people than would notice a reply in the middle of a 100+ comment thread.
I feel like you're going directly against the long-form answer the author intended to give, so I'm downvoting you.
I typically read the shortest and most down voted comments as those are clear pointers to things that I need to learn/research further, such as "do I gain anything from a piece of writing longer than a tweet?"
I feel like the TLDR'ing of someone else's writing is a negative reinforcement loop that needs to be challenged because it leads us all into doing the same.
Personally I read comments sections to find things that are not in the OP and point out weak points or blind spots--you know, actual discussion.
The answer of course, is if someone can provide me a two sentence reason that explains very clearly why that extra 3% of value is so crucial.
Comparing:
- Reading the source code of HashMap vs reading the API.
to
- Reading HN comments vs source articles.
...is not a fair comparison, IMO. Well what is, then? Ok, glad you asked!
Reading HN comments vs source articles is more like:
- Reading the book vs reading the reviews on Amazon about the book.
Comments on an article are not the API docs to the article. Going with your analogy, the API docs of an article would be something like the spec for how a concept fits into a perspective of a topic (...this sounds so confusing...but, just work with me for a minute, please :D). Unlike something like HashMap, articles are almost always going to be less objective and more subjective. When something is subjective, you could think of it like everyone designs their own API docs; the protocol with which you interact with a concept can be designed by yourself.
The problem with not designing your own protocols (perspectives) for interacting with a concept is that you could be missing an arbitrary 3% of information or the information that your gleaned could be of a completely different taxonomy (or unforeseen perspective dependancies, maybe deps that you don't agree with) than what you would have designed if you had read the article.
This matters because when your perspective is guided by the perspectives of others, you miss out on a lot of opportunities to make connections across topics throughout time. Maybe the cryptographic inventions the author describe connect with another detail in an article about DIY satellite programming or some voting machine vulnerability that inspires you to do something bold (whatever, who knows, that's the point); changing the course of your life.
As a species, I think (super opinionated part) we will advance further if as many of us as possible are actively 'reading the books' and 'forming the opinions'. I don't think the amount of value someone can bring to the world is strictly correlated with their IQ. So everyone can bring value to a discussion or a body of work or whatever, if they think critically about it and develop their own opinions based on their own unique perspectives.
You can mitigate that risk by reading a summary from a trusted source, however you can never fully eliminate it. Everything is a trade-off.
I feel like we do academics wrong. We should encourage a large gap between undergrad and graduate school for two reasons. First, develop empathy for the realities of shipping software (or whatever the field is). Second, build some wealth to not chase wrong grants.
I take Arnold Schwarzenegger as an inspiration on this front. He did hard work and had some good fortune due to great timing (real-estate in California) to build up wealth before becoming an actor, and this manifested in the freedom to go all in on Acting.
The thing that I take as inspiring is that instead of chasing the money via that path or just chilling out, he went hard on a passion.
I went to work at 17 and had my first company by the ripe old age of 21. The alternative, some degree (likely CS) and doing computer science would seem terribly boring compared to the live that I ended up living and I feel no less productive because of missing out on that crucial secondary education.
Colin is obviously about a million times smarter than I am, he would have probably moved the needle in whatever field he would have entered. I would have probably hung on just long enough to launch my own company anyway because that's just the way I'm wired. In the meantime, my one original contribution (live video on the web) has touched more lives than anything I would have done as a minor cog in some university.
In the end, what others think of your life or your decisions to fill it in one way or another doesn't matter. What matters is that you feel satisfaction at what you have achieved. You are your own harshest judge and what others say about what you've done is irrelevant. Colin has received more than his fair share of flak on HN for not chasing the $ as much as he could have. I think he's done things 'just right', enough commerce to get your hands free and spend your time on the things that you think matter most. That freedom is worth far more than being beholden to investors or partners in a business. Wished there more of him and fewer wanna-be-rich-guys.
When I made this sort of comparison myself, my day job didn't seem quite so bad. I've seen a few different studies into how academics spend their time. Seems that full professors spend about 9-10 hours per week doing research, and that's working around 55 to 60 hours week in total. (The numbers vary depending on which study you look at.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20180509023409/https://thebluere...
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/if-you-love-resear...
So, if you work 40 hours per week and then do 10 hours per week of research, in some sense you're doing better than someone who did things "right". As someone who just completed a PhD but was unable to get a research position, I'm keeping this in mind. (And, more importantly, I'm doing vauable research that would be hard to do in academia.)
Well, I'm now 39, and still stutter when I'm nervous, but I'm slightly less socially awkward. I'm still diabetic -- no cure for that yet, sadly -- and overweight, but I've been getting more exercise and am somewhat more fit.
The biggest change since I wrote that almost 5 years ago, however, is that I found a wonderful woman who somehow manages to put up with me, and we got married in June. :-)
Here's how I started and lost 10kg in under a year, and more than that in fat but didn't measure fat, but belt holes showed it even when I stagnated in weight. Not diabetic so this is just my personal experience should consider your own body.
1) Lifting adjustable dumbbells at home. Done right before taking shower anyway. So avoiding transition time to exercise and avoiding taking extra shower and drying time can go back to computer right after shower. For beginners maximal muscle growth is 3 exercise sessions per week to have enough recovery between sessions, and single well done set is enough stimulation per muscle, it doesn't grow during exercise but during recover from exercise. I had my exercise sessions on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to be in constantly in a state that if I eat slightly too much it goes to growing muscle instead of fat. Not because maximizing muscle growth, but just to avoid gaining fat at random times. I just had random bodybuilding dumbbell program moves that I thought would hit every muscle and learned those from a book. I didn't have any body weight exercises since moving my weight would of put strain on joints. The time recommendation for that would be more when learning the moves and doing them slowly and checking correct way of doing them and after a while under 30 minutes per session, but keep minimum 10-15 minutes. Now healthy muscles with about a hour per week after initial investment, and not feeling as tired definitely worth doing.
2) Slowly reducing sugar consumption, and my taste buds eventually adjusted to the change.
3) Random eating habits based on if I'm too concentrated on something to miss a meal. If I eat too little I loose fat, if I eat too much I gain muscle.
4) Once I was healthier I spend some of my thinking time just walking outside thinking the problem before returning to computer for actual implementation. Worked since there was quiet forest path near by.
Now my mistake. I upgraded to going gym trying to gain more muscle after my dumbbells became too small. It increased time requirements for each exercise session. After a while I got so busy that "I'll exercise next week", and it stayed that way for a year. And once the habit was broken it was really hard to get back.
1) Just like you, I started to work out, but I have one more recommendation: a weighted vest. An absolutely great tool for plankings, push-ups etc. If you want your body core to get really tough, weighted vest is a great tool.
2) This, plus intermittent fasting. Got my blood pressure back into the normal range, I am no longer on medication which I took for 17 years, hooray.
3) See 2), it seems that eating/fasting time matters a lot, not just total calories. Constant snacking is probably really bad for us. (The pancreas is forced to produce too much insulin too often).
4) Absence of civilizational noise is definitely something that has healing effects.
To this, I would add
5) Some supplementation is useful, if not outright necessary. Lots of people are vitamin D deficient, for example. 4000 IU a day should help a lot. It seems that vitamin D is even more important for us than we thought. (Specifically, D3).
6) People who like the entire anti-aging and longevity field, can horse around with things like resveratrol and NMN, or perhaps senolytics like fisetin. I like to do that, so far the only visible difference is that my eyesight got a lot better (unexpectedly so for someone who looks into screens all day long). But there is a risk that you are wasting money on "producing expensive urine".
It wasn't completely without civilization noise, but it was something where I could actually think better when walking outside than when sitting still in front of computer. It was quiet enough that fresh air and walking actually helped me to think.
My blood pressure definitely responds to fasting. I went from 150/100 to 115/75 within months. IDK if this can happen in other people, we are a fairly diverse lot.
Food eaten during the eating window matters. Fats (avocado, olive oil, bone broth) will carry you longer than carbs. But one of the things I enjoy about IF is that I no longer have to watch my food intake too strictly. An occasional treat is OK.
As for resources, I believe that Jason Fung, a Canadian doctor, is a good start. He has a lot of videos on YouTube and a few books out. His main idea is that you need to keep your insulin level fairly low in order to avoid metabolic disease, and that IF helps with that a lot.
Also, the r/intermittentfasting subreddit has a lot of veterans.
Eat animal products, avoid processed/sugars/carbs/grains etc
Stick to low FODMAP vegetables, and cook/ferment them when you can.
If it's type 1, then no.
I don't know which kind of diabetes you have. Did you know that some people with type 2 diabetes are cured with weight loss?
https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/news/20180917/lose-weight-rev...
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12549482/what-is-new-nhs-type-...
I've tried losing weight many times with varying success. The only time I've had full control over my appetite was after attending a silent meditation course (the free Goenka one). For 5 weeks after the course, I meditated twice a day for about 30 mins each time and resisted eating sweets. I lost 10 lbs. Then I ate some cake at a friend's birthday party and fell off the wagon. Maybe meditation would work for you?
Most of us spend our lives chasing the creation of transactions (with employers or the market, whether grants, purchases, or contracts) and maximizing the benefit we receive from those transactions. While I appreciate that this holds us to producing in ways that others adversarially agree is valuable and can incentivize efficiency... It also holds us in competition against rather than cooperation with. It focuses us on transaction creation, not on life improvement. If something would make everyone better off but that value can't be captured it often isn't done. If something should efficiently make us all happier but costs the decision maker any money it often isn't done.
These are necessarily generalizations. Instances of it being otherwise occur. Some contexts, like families and collectives allow for contradictions to my statements. These rarely scale.
I think of the dynamic that children will happily help out the family and do chores. Many parents find that when compensation for chores is offered the children become less helpful. They switch from joyfully (or at least meaningfully) participating in the family endeavor that supported and supports their growth and well being (and if lucky showered them with love). They switch to demanding compensation for everything and end up doing less to help.
If this describes our economic engagement, how much more could we all be happily accomplishing at greater efficiency with our time and energy?
I recognize this could sound like it would depend on some idealistic prosocial world. What assumptions hold that in place? What if the little supports we give and the forgone advantages were noted to our credit? What if our game theoretic strategies for engagement influenced the rules under which we labored and the willingness of others to interact with us? How do we better optimize?
I think the town would need these things to be successful:
- All land in the town is owned by a non-profit. The non-profit's board is elected by the town. It's private property, like a university.
- Businesses in the town are owned by non-profits. The non-profit's boards are elected by the town. The non-profits also provide venture capital and mentorship for new businesses.
- Everyone receives the same monthly income. Everyone must work at least 10 months a year, 35-hours a week. Folks who can work but refuse to work must choose between staying in a mental clinic and leaving the town.
- There are strong barriers to using outside money. For example, rent may only be paid from one's town-paid monthly income.
- Health care, education, and child care are free.
- Immigration to the town uses a lottery system, with buckets for various socio-economic and ethnic groups, so the people in the town represent the people in the country. The town charter specifies quarterly immigration quotas up to a target population (50% growth per year, from 50 people to 500k in 25 years).
- Voting is mandatory, ranked-choice, without districts, and without propositions. Elected leaders must be women and may serve only one term. All election candidates must take a knowledge exam and their answers are published for voters to scrutinize.
- Personal motor vehicles are not allowed inside the town. Everyone moves by walking, bicycles, and subway. Zoning is high-density mixed-use, like many cities in Europe and Asia.
- Products are transported between buildings via underground automated systems, like airport luggage delivery systems, in standardized crates. Trash, compost, and recyclables go in sealed crates. There are multiple delivery companies with rails/tracks stacked in the under-street corridors. Large items can be delivered by small electric trucks driving slowly on the roads.
Safe, quiet, and clean. Cozy.
I think of this nearly every day.
One of the biggest factors is that the Kibbutz is a business: it has income and expenses. If it doesn't produce enough income, it will fail, and indeed a successful Kibbutz is one that has a successful factory or other, producing goods or services that are sold to outside customers.
The big difficulty of traditional cooperatives is that they are subject to local markets for necessities: housing, health care, energy, transportation, and food. By starting a cooperative as a town, we can save big on many of these things.
For example, a cooperative in San Francisco has huge capital costs for each resident for housing. The cost per resident in major cities is dominated by housing. A cooperative built in a rural area has negligible housing costs. But building in a rural area brings some interesting problems.
Health care is also a large cost. The town will have its own clinic to save on that. If the town can grow fast enough, it can build its own hospital and save enormous amounts on health care. The hospital can also earn money by treating people from the surrounding area. I wish to retire in a town with a hospital.
Much modern housing is built without energy efficient options. This is because buyers are either ignorant or they prioritize short-term costs over long-term costs. An extra $200/mo in energy bills isn't so much when you're paying $1000/mo in mortgage. But once the mortgage is paid off, that $200/mo feels like a lot and they regret the decision to skip the architect consultation, triple-pane windows, and heat-recovery ventilators. A cooperative can have the expertise and foresight to optimize for long-term housing energy efficiency. This is good for the environment, the residents, and the cooperative's finances.
Cars use lots of energy. They wear out and depreciate. Accidents destroy quality of life and waste tons of money on medical bills. Roads are extremely expensive to build and maintain. Road damage is proportional to the fourth power of vehicle weight. A town without cars and trucks won't have these costs.
In my understanding, a cult is hard to leave. For the town I want to start, anyone can walk out at any time. They can to take a chunk of money with them, determined by what jobs they worked and how long.
Cooperative communities exist in USA and around the world and can be nice places to live. Most are based on religion or ideologies like permaculture or veganism. I want to live in a secular cooperative community that prioritizes quality of life. It's how I imagine human societies could be 200 years in the future. We already have a post-scarcity economy, it's just unequally distributed.
Many people give up the ability to walk to live in suburbs. I'm willing to give up the ability to be rich to live in a nice city.
Since Colin thinks kivaloo is more useful, but I've not heard of it, in going to look at that right now...
[edit]
I don't really have a use for a high performance, durable, KV store right now, so not convinced on kivaloo
PS: fully understand that you might have just written it for fun, but if you want it to grow, this is the kind of information I am looking for as a database user. :)
I don't say that to preclude it from continuing to have an advantage over WireGuard, but I haven't used it (spiped) so couldn't comment.
Things I like about it off the top of my head:
- I will often start out with a single box, then say "well the DB should really be on a different machine" and just setup an spiped between them and I'm done. The actual application configuration changes not at all since it's still connecting to localhost.
- My dev machines can be configured to spiped to the non-production database and I can run tests just like I would in production, since everything internal connects to ports on localhost; I literally can't accidentally mess up the production DB in a dev environment because the only place the hostname for the DB is is in the service file that starts spiped.
[edit]
Totally forgot the best feature: it can proxy between unix domain socket and TCP, which is something I think it had before SSH (it certainly had it before the ssh on my machine could do it).
It also will re-lookup hostnames at a configurable interval, so new connections can be sent to a different machine just by configuring DNS.
General practice is often incremental improvement, research is supposed to produce paradigm shifts. This is why PhDs are worth something to all the FAANG employers -- they can get by just hiring smart people without worrying if they can write good code or not, because it's way easier to find someone who can write you the code to implement the algorithm created by someone who's steeped their brain in a problem for 5+ years.
I have no agency over my own life at work or home - I hate it. I will make no meaningful contributions to society in my life.
Comparatively, you’ve had an incredible impact and driven change in the world.
(I think that’s accurate)
Sounds like you are not happy with the way your wife is treating you. Something will snap if you don't sort that out.
She refuses to learn how to do most chores, like shopping or cooking. She doesn't have the technical mindset/background for others, such as handyman, mechanic, or yardwork stuff.
She consistently ruins the seasoning on the cast iron because she insists on using scotch-brite on everything (plastic, glass, enamel, etc). She asks me to do the laundry if there are stains or if I need to pre soak the whites. Otherwise she always does it cold water with soap only and they come out dull or still dirty. And she insists on using the 2" vacuum cleaner tube to do the vinyl floor. It would be sooo much more efficient to just run it over the floor normally (won't hurt this floor).
She also has a tendency to break things and expect me to fix them - like it's not her problem. I even have to tell her stuff like keep the dog on a leash. Now I have to take care of a bunch of legal stuff for her (side not is that the officer wrote it up incorrectly or it would just be a fine).
Isn't one of the points of getting married to work as a team and make each other's lives easier? In my opinion she makes my life more difficult. I swear I'm the only adult in the house.
You sound like a huge pushover.
I made a really cool dependency manager that I thought was groundbreaking but not a lot of people use it and those that do are strangers. I found a lot more meaning in my life comes from gardening and helping around the house. Real people who depend on me need that.
Lately I found something to look forward to in knitting and listening to a book on tape at the same time at night. Just 45 minutes or so every night after my chores really helps me feel like I can get up the next morning.
With all of Collin's many accomplishments, I'm sure he still feels that the best thing that ever happened to him was his family, in this case his new wife.
I am sorry for your situation. The treadmill truly sucks, and I hope you find a way to discuss your situation with your wife in a constructive manner.
Sometimes the best we can do is be kind to others and work at getting to a good place ourselves. I've worn the mask more than once myself.
Start off by putting 24*7 hours on an Excel sheet, fill them in with your sleep and obligations and necessary rest, then work out whether you have 60 minutes a week for you. If you do, start from there.
In those 60 minutes of your time, figure out how you can increase it to 120 minutes a week. Maybe you say NO to that unpaid overtime, or let some of those chores slip, or ask your wife to do 1 particular chore.
Then slowly build out from there. Once you are at 8 hours a week you can possibly consider a bigger thing, for example learning new tech or passing interviews that could land you a job that you love, that you do less hours. Or seeing if you can be a digital nomad and plan that out for after covid.
And then let it snowball.
Eventually you will not feel like "I have no agency over my own life".
What you do with your marriage - then that's up to you but you'll be in a better place to answer it.
The fact that you have to resort to an excel spreadsheet implies that you have no agency over your life. People with actual agency over their lives don't have to squeeze a few minutes for themselves no more than a wealthy person has to search between the cushions for pocket change.
I think we as entrepreneur types want to dismiss academia. But there's something to be said for the institution. It's one of the only ways to "infect the world with a thought virus."
Besides, which research problems has Tarsnap solved? At least, solved in a way that can be reused by the world?
I have been in academia and industry. I suffer from 'grass-is-greener' syndrome right now in industry, and am pining for more research. But I don't know if I would have felt the same way if I were stuck on a postdoc-to-postdoc treadmill.
I figure that my my readers probably know what Tarsnap is by this point; or if they don't, they know how to use Google.
and too generous for not naming the HN user who insulted him.
I saw no insult. I omitted the users's name because thought the question was interesting independent of the person who asked it.
If you have faith in yourself, and follow your spirit, you can be successful and not accountable to anyone--complete intellectual and creative freedom. However, it does require some nerve to stand against the corporate machine.
However, I feel that there is academia and academia. I am lucky enough to: a) work with a supervisor that, during my PhD, encouraged me to ignore, and sometimes even challenge, the consensus view of the research community on the topic, believing that there's always more than one way to do things.; b) live in a country were universities are still mostly state-founded and so I do not need to constantly be hunting for grants.
Of course, there are compromises. I do have to spend some of my time on projects/papers that I hardly believe will ever have an impact outside of the academic world but that is pretty much the same as having to manage servers and customers, as long as it leaves me enough time to work on projects/papers that I enjoy.
Finally, I do believe that "small incremental improvements" is not the only way to do earn a living in academia. Being curiosity-driven, I consider myself more of a "generalist" rather than a "specialist" and I've been investigating rather diverse topics (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22678471 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24361852). As I only have been doing this for a few years I have no idea whether my work will eventually be considered relevant enough to earn me a permanent position, but so far it has been quite well received by the academic community and I had no troubles in publishing it.
Anyway, this guy walks the walk. But how did he do on the Putnam?
They don't announce the ranks of the top 6 because they want to just say that all the Putnam Fellows won without drawing distinctions between them.
While he answers his question, I want to point out that posing this question implicitly ties "contribution to society" with "use of a life". The utilitarianism makes sense to me, but I don't think everyone would agree that that is the right metric (for example, average or total happiness might be alternatives).
Is this a serious question? I feel like anyone with a conscious can safely answer this with a resounding "Yes!".
Considering historical structures I would argue that we currently live in a world much more open to various contributions. In the past you might have been locked down in a village doing fieldwork with no one even giving you the possibility of higher education. In some parts of the world this is still true. There is no way to tell how many hidden talents we lose right now to just toiling away with daily chores.
In the western society I think things are much better. The problem we are facing is that if you want and have talent to contribute to a niche is "just" the question of who will finance you. This is indeed for many a showstopper but also many have found a way to push through.
Then, after you have made the contribution, the problem is to convince others of the value. How many great ideas are lost to obscurity because some powers that be are stopping them? IMHO this is the bigger problem and perhaps this is what you are referring to?
I would still say that the contribution had been made by then and, with time and a bit of optimism, those powers that be also erode and a contribution can come to life. Or, if it applies, launch a startup and disrupt the powers by yourself ;)
I'm not sure HN comments (intentional or not) should ever put someone else in a position of feeling they need to explain the impact of their life.
The fundamental issue with this comment is that it assumes that solving millennium problems is obviously a high impact thing to do. It ignores the complexity and unpredictability of the world.
The TarSnap developer's story is a great example of this -- how "working on backups" led to impactful work that he probably didn't predict when he started it.
I often see people fall into the trap of moralizing about what "good" work is. Ironically, that prevents them from ultimately having the most impact that they could have.
I find it stunning at how little people understand the role of incentives in basically any sort of human-driven activity.
- academia’s bureaucracy not understanding the incentives they’re creating and the positive and negative consequences
- the OP not understanding the intentional incentives and outcomes created by the academic bureaucracy
"Well, I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther."
If you hang around Oxford and Cambridge, you find these old buildings that look impressive. Then you study there for a bit and you find out a lot of the places seem to be divided up, as if there was once a time when each member had much more space than they did when I got there.
Same goes with the common areas, they somehow seem like they were meant to be used by fewer people.
Of course there are also new building there, but they're all of the cramped office variety, lending further credence to the theory.
Thankfully I'm a nihilist and don't have any expectation that my life will be meaningful. I happily work on things that most people would consider pointless and a waste of time.
People in industry deliver a product and feel the impact. But sometimes they forget that there is several centuries of innovation in math and physics that has enabled that product.
On cryptography, you need people like DJB who invent algorithms, you need thousands of pages of crypto analysis to make sense of it, you need guarantees, you need to think of quantum computers 50 years in the future, etc etc. For instance, you need Salsa20 and those hash algorithms developed by others. These components each depend on other building blocks developed earlier. I encourage you to see the broader scientific and technological enterprise.
The vast majority of long term research takes place still in academia.
It's good that he has dedicated a big part of time to just one thing: backups (and things related to backups). And that's why he is best at it and has billion dollar companies like Stripe giving him testimonials. Had he spent his time on 20 different things, chances you wouldn't think of tarsnap when you think backups.
This I feel is also a very common trap of entrepreneurship (especially for solo people).
In academia, though, there's a whole host of obstacles to doing anything useful and interesting that have nothing to do with "the problem at hand". So while you can be more confident in the relative novelty of what you're doing, as well as the broad applicability of said work (since the whole point is publishing) the scope of things you actually can work on is incredibly limited until late in your career.
Pure math though, sucks and is total blackhole for talent. Definitely agree there.
Let's take the most archetypal genius: Einstein. First, he was here at the right time. Relativity was begging to be discovered, at the time we had observations good enough to invalidate the previous theories and fit the new ones. The mathematical groundwork was here, all that was needed was a spark of genius, which Einstein had, but I'm quite many others had it too. But maybe the others chose a topic other than physics, had a different education, or were born too early or too late...
Furthermore, Einstein essentially took 10 years to revolutionize physics. And then, not much. By not much, I mean he was still a top class physicist, but he couldn't restart the spark of genius, or he simply didn't have fuel for it.
So what if after finishing his work on general relativity, he just died, or pursued a career in management, or something like that. Many people would have probably said he would have discovered all the secrets of the universe, when in reality, it wouldn't have made much of a dent in history.
So don't worry and live your life as you want to, and don't expect too much of others. Things will get discovered eventually, and just because someone did great things in the past doesn't mean they will in the future, and vice versa.
I would say a Picasso or a Da Vinci is much more likely to create something meaningful given the track record at the height of their career, than some random person off the street.
I think you’re underestimating the amount of effort it takes to master a given field, and the subsequent dividends that are paid when you achieve mastery.
Picasso is famous for reinventing himself and abandoning cubism (which he invented) to study and pursue classical painting.
He abandoned cubism in his 20s or so. He afterwards had 50+ years of more boring work with less re-invention.
Additionally, I think the "inevitability of discovery" is more true now than it has ever been. In the early 1830s there were relatively few young naturalists and geologists looking at the islands and species of the south Pacific that were well positioned to develop a theory of evolution by natural selection. Today, looking at comparable questions, there are a great deal more young scientists competing to answer those questions.
One thing that I think the original comment and this response both point out is that we as a society could still do a much better job of encouraging young thinkers towards challenging and meaningful problems, despite the fact that we do a much better job of it relative to the early 1830s. This encouragement influences not whether the problems get solved, but how quickly.
It's like any job -- we don't need all of the available workers, but we do need some. And in creative work, we need multiple perspectives to help improve the idea.
In other words, by the time he had proven himself for academia, it was too late to fund him. You are proving the OPs point that academia isn't the place to do novel research in.
That's exactly what is being pointed out.
His famous work wasn't funded, so perhaps funding at that point would have resulted in even more work at that level of insight and impact, or perhaps the we would have had the special and general theories of relativity sooner.
Conversely, by the time he was famous and therefore well-funded, he was no longer producing work at that level.
So, the idea is that funding doesn't go where and when it would do the most good.
Personally I think generalizing from one famous person's track record isn't such a great idea, but there is certainly data that suggests that committees aren't particularly good at choosing which grant proposals to fund[0][1][2], and that it would be a good idea to choose at least some proposals randomly[3] (as long as they meet a minimal threshold of quality/sanity), if only to shift the incentives away from trying to game the system.
[0] https://elifesciences.org/articles/13323
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/12/2952
One of the crazy things that I have found as a senior engineer, I focus much more on growing people in the space I created. Afterall, if the space I create can't be occupied by people, then I failed.
For Einstein, how much of his time was dedicated towards the education of ideas versus trying to solve new problems. I don't know, but it is worth considering what the purpose of tenure. Is the idea of tenure to encourage people to find new results, or to continue teaching their ideas?
Whether that academic freedom is intended to enable teaching or further research probably varies by institution and subject/department, and maybe individually as well.
"In short, academic institutions systemically promote exactly the sort of short-term optimization of which, ironically, the private sector is often accused".
Not ironically. Deliberately and consciously. In recent decades, there has been a push to evaluate public services in private sector terms, i.e., basically, economic profitability (and in particular, short-term profitability). At least in my country, this is quite explicit, but I suppose it happens everywhere to a greater or lesser extent. There is a lot of public discourse that academia cannot be an ivory tower, it has to constantly be evaluated and provide proof that what it's doing is useful. It's difficult to obtain funding for basic science, you need to promise immediate practical applications to obtain grants. Papers are increasingly shunned in favor of patents, the academic that "only publishes papers that other academics read" is now a figure of parody or derision. There are even research grants whose main or sole evaluation criterion is "amount of research income generated in the last X months".
So to sum up, the capitalistic mindset of looking at everything in terms of short-term profitability has harmed, and continues harming, academia. But this is not a paradox, it's something quite explicit and deliberate.
If that were a thing, I would have actually wanted to go to college. I was fortunate enough to have some high school teachers lay it out plainly for me given my interests and desires, and concluded much the same things as Colin has stated in the article.
Not going turned into the first large risky thing I did in my life that really, _really_ paid off in later years. There was no incentive otherwise to go for the same reasons described in this article.
> In 2005, I made the first publication of the use of shared caches in multi-threaded CPUs as a cryptographic side channel...
As far as I know, the first publication about cache side channel attacks was [1] by Dan Page in 2002.
Completely agree. And the cache crypto example is a good example.
Especially in computing. There's so much red tape in the academic world that doesn't make sense when you're basically thinking or writing about code (ok, I know CS is not only about code, but what I'm saying also makes sense for things like big-O analysis, crypto, etc).
Academia is disapointing, I had the opportunity to discover it soon enough to avoid wasting too many years.
If you're attracted by deep work on novel subjects, especially in Computer Science, academia is one of the most soul crushing place to be, unfortunately.
The author convinced me here - he's not "wasting his time". He's owning it.
Interesting read nonetheless.
Quote:
Dr. Colin Percival studied mathematics at Simon Fraser University, entering at age 13, before going on to a doctorate in Computing at Oxford University, where his thesis covered problems in string matching, data compression, and file synchronization.
In January 2004, Colin became a FreeBSD committer and a member of the FreeBSD Security Team; he became the Security Officer for FreeBSD in August 2005, a position which he held until May 2012. Aside from his work as FreeBSD Security Officer, he is probably best known in the FreeBSD community for his work on FreeBSD Update and Portsnap.
In addition to direct experience handling security issues via his experience as FreeBSD Security Officer, Dr. Percival has published several research papers in areas ranging from numerical analysis to cryptography, including the first published cryptographic attack against shared caches in Intel's "HyperThreaded" processors.
Could you elaborate? You take two naps at night in lieu of 7+ solid hours? Is this sufficient? Why?
Then I sleep 3.30am or so to 8.30am, am cranky for the whole morning, but that is okay since I can do my work in autopilot most of the time.
The end result is I am definitely getting a solid few hours each day for my studies, whilst maintaining a job.
Also I feel like I am personally a better talker then doer, so I always get a bit of internal backlash within myself when I spend time talking about what I am doing vs doing it. In a similar vein, I need to reduce my addiction to Hacker News and use the time to study theorem proofs ;) But I think we all suffer from something similar :)
"You are a product of your environment" --Clement Stone
I clearly don't know what's going on but is this sort of stuff normal on here?