Jim Carey gave a commencement speech that went viral a couple years ago, he said the same thing most successful people say (deeply paraphrased here): You have to work really hard and go for it. However, working hard is a necessary condition but it's not a sufficient condition. For every Jim Carey there are countless failed comedians who worked just as hard. I'm not saying he doesn't deserve it, but we labor under the delusion that the free market always rewards hard work and if you don't reach your goals it's because you didn't work hard enough. Of course you can't reach hard goals without working hard, but working hard doesn't always get you there. You can do everything right and still not catch a break.
I said I didn't want to make presumptions specifically about the parent post's personal situation. I do not think there are only two issues. I did say the categories are hard to define. First paragraph of Wikipedia's Narcotic entry: "In the United States, it has since become associated with opiates and opioids, commonly morphine and heroin...". If you would give my point some charity, I think narcotics could fall into the broader opiate category I was talking about. Perhaps there is a better word for this category, I don't care what we call it, but the distinction is worth making that the drugs in these separate categories are dangerous is unlike ways. Every drug is a different issue. Widespread LSD use would cause a change in society, widespread heroin use would cause a collapse in society.
If you mean they fried their brain then sure, that's bad and that's definitely one of the risks. But if it's just the Steve Jobs style "I see the world differently now" then to me it seems okay for the PhD to realign their goals because their values have changed. Of course, you can make the same argument that a heroin addicts values have changed, but the LSD isn't going to make you rob your family for your next hit.
I don't want to make presumptions about your experience so I'll try to speak broadly, and if this contradicts your experience I'd be happy to have you expand my view.
I think there's two categories of drugs and it's harmful to ignore the distinction. I don't know enough about the specifics of all drugs to nail down the definitions precisely but a description will suffice. One category is "psychedelic", the other is opiate. Marijuana is a federal schedule 1 drug in the US, right next to heroin. If we don't train society to differentiate between these two then unsuspecting young people who experiment with marijuana illicitly will say "all those warnings were over something harmless. I'll try heroin next." The war on drugs is perpetuating weed as a gateway to more dangerous drugs. The THC and psilocybin family has its risks in the same way that alcohol and nicotine have their risks; the opiate and methamphetamine family should not be confused or taken lightly by anybody.
I don't want to start a distro ware here but... Ubuntu is really opinionated about the UX and if you want to change or fix anything you have to get kind of hacky. Sometimes when I woke my computer of from sleep it would ignore the keyboard and you had to use the mouse to click and slide the screen upward as if it were a tablet. Multiple workspaces only worked on the main monitor, side monitors would only show Workspace 1. There was a workaround for this, but it was a little bit buggy. When I want to drag a window, exit a window, or minimize, I usually just slam my cursor into the top of the screen. On Ubuntu there's a thin black status bar at the top of the screen, so you have to aim your cursor carefully instead of gesturing your mouse upwards, and it was a huge pain to try to remove that.
I started a new job and my boss installed Linux Mint on my work laptop because that's what he was using; after a month I installed Mint on my home desktop. The defaults are sensible, there's tons of customization options, and I don't have to hack my way into really simple and obvious changes.
The difference between charisma and narcissism may be in the eye of the beholder. However, I can think of a few people in my life that are personable and incredibly genuine; the kind of person that seems to draw the best out in others. I wouldn't be happy to hear them described as narcissistic.
The Cold War forced US and Russia into a technological arms race that pushed us leaps and bounds into the future. An absolutely reckless use of resources sent humans into space and to the moon way earlier than our technological timeline should have allowed for, as evidenced by our lack of return visit. The spy technology that Americans and Russians came up with in this time is like something out of fiction. Here's an interesting one I learned about on HN: The Great Bug Seal (aka The Thing)
I began thinking of grit and will power as muscles that get stronger with exercise. I don't know if it's actually true but I'm okay with placeboing myself on this one. You exercise it anytime you face being uncomfortable with resilience. When I go for long runs and I reach the point where I'm not enjoying it any more and I just want to be done I think to myself, "this is the best part, this is the part where I'm getting stronger." It affects every other part of my life, it's training my default mental mode to be "I can do this" even when things look hard.
I think this is a cool project, but yeah of course they're stretching the definition a little bit. "Backpack powered laminar flow propane torch" doesn't get you 12mil views on youtube.
I'm absolutely blown away by some of the games they managed to make in under 13kb. This video "How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes" is an interesting illustration of just how small these games are.
I experimented with putting replacing some of the number row, I replaced 9 with backspace. It never occurred to me to put the ctrl/alt/shift family up there though, that's really genius.
The grandparent to my post was talking about politics, not repetition. I shouldn't have strayed and conceded that it's repetitive because this is my point: hacker-politics is on topic here.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. The Julian Assange saga is about hacking, privacy, three-letter-agency overreach in the tech sphere, etc. I think it's the "hacker" half of the "hacker-politics" that makes it on topic here. The story is developing over time; sure some non-newsworthy Assange articles get posted here sometimes but in general I don't think it's incongruous with HN.
I studied classical guitar in university, Randy Rhoads was a favorite amongst the metal guys who turned classical because he played classical guitar too. The Van Halen brothers are both multi instrumentalists, both of them took piano lessons from a young age.
I'm not saying that it doesn't exist anywhere, but if I had an earthquake interrupt my scribing I would probably just throw the page away. It would be novel to me, not historical.
When they asked for webcam permission I instinctively checked to make sure my webcam was unplugged. Having an algorithm compliment your face is like having a horoscope tell you "You're loyal to fault and you're the kind of person that has tons of friends but you value your closest relationships the most..." etc.
I was introduced to this from reading Moonkwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, and there's a few communities online you can find with a little searching. Here's an example:
The technique is known as PAO (Person, Action, Object). Each 2 digit number has a unique Person/Action/Object combo. At the time wrote my own PAO I was entrenched in a foreign language that puts the verb at the end of the sentence, so I forever think Person/Object/Action for this system now but that's not a big deal, you could conceivably use any order you want as long as you're consistent.
An example: the number 23 makes me think of Michael Jordan, so I assigned Michael Jordan/Basketball/Slam Dunk to the number 23. 84 is Winston Smith/Pen/Write in a Diary. 01 is Frodo/the One Ring/Become invisible.
To remember the number 842301 you parse the number into 2 digit strings 84/23/01 and you replace them with your POA to create a memorable mnemonic. Winston Smith putting a basketball on his finger and turning invisible. This one mnemonic is information dense, it has 6 digits. Create 17 of these and put them in your memory palace and you've memorized the first 102 digits of pi.
To memorize populations of countries I replaced the Person part of the mnemonic with some person from that country. For Russia it was Putin, for Mexico it was a Mexican friend of mine. My goal was to remember how many millions of people; the only exceptions on the list were China and India which had billions but that was easy enough to remember without a uniform mnemonic.
Russia has 146 million people. Putin/1/46. My number 01 is Frodo, 46 is the Hulk. Putin using the one ring to "hulk smash" St. Basil's Cathedral. Because the memory palace is ordinal it was also easy for me to rattle off things like "Russia's the 9th most populated country in the world".
I came here to say the language part. Sometimes no dictionary will translate the thing that you want, you have to use Wikipedia to translate it. It's also great for language study, hopping back and forth between your target language to see how similar ideas are expressed differently.
When I learned the memory palace technique I practiced it by memorizing decks of cards. My fastest memorize & recall time was about 10 minutes, which isn't very fast compared to a lot who use this technique. I also memorized the population of each country, which makes me seem more knowledgable than I am about geo-politics. It's a good brain exercise, and mental walks through these memory palaces are in my opinion a great use of my idle time when I'm stuck waiting in line or something. Much better than draining my life energy into internet novelty on my phone these days.
I'm sure mileage may vary, but I'm lucky to be at a company where the dev team has a great relationship with QA. I think you're right, having a good culture around it is important. I'm more impressed than I am annoyed when QA finds an obscure bug before things hit production.
I'm using Bitwarden and all of my passwords are long, complex, and unique. Am I at risk? I understand that this is not good, but if my passwords are unique then the only thing that can happen is losing the credentials to the one account that got leaked, right? I don't think my bank's website has an unsecure subdomain that I have to worry about. Should I remove Bitwarden from my browser until this is fixed?
I didn't know why a mouse on a volcano would break some kind of record, and as my brain rapid fired possible parses to the sentence it did occur to me that this is a technology board and it could be a computer mouse. Neither one seemed more feasible for world records at face value.
Is it possible to use a VR headset as a daily-driver desktop environment? I'm interested in programming inside a VR desktop; not programming for VR, but putting on a VR headset and writing code in a text editor inside a VR environment. This is too nuanced for a search engine to return any meaningful results. I was never that interested in VR until this idea occurred to me, so I don't know if the technology is there yet. Surely somebody must have tried this already?
In this case "brand loyalty" is just the chrysalis of vendor lock. At first you use it because it's convenient, then the model changes and your digital ecosystem is held hostage. Microsoft did this with my generation and Office, Google is capturing the next generation with Docs and Chromebooks in every school. Amazon microphones endeavor to be brand-synonymous with smart homes of the future. The more they can integrate with your Amazon account, phone, tablet, Smart-TV, HVAC, security, grocery list, etc., the more "brand loyal" you will be.
> Similarly, in the Ancient Greek world, one was meant to focus in on a close knowledge of just two books: Homer’s Odyssey and his Iliad
Can anybody on HN verify if this is true? I thought the Iliad and Odyssey were only two of Homer's works, the rest of them lost. Why would the Ancient Greek focus on those two and not any of Homer's not-yet-lost works? Did the Ancient Greek person really read these as fervently as a modern religious person reads their holy book? I know classicists debate these things all the time, but it seems like the author is just riffing "shout out to people who know these classics." I'll gladly be corrected on this point, but when I read this I began to suspect the author has no idea what they're talking about.
In my opinion the issue is path dependency. Everybody in my generation grew up with Microsoft Office free on every installation of Windows, and teaching everyone new efficiency software is costly. It looks like Google is trying to win the next generation and Chromebooks are taking over the classroom. When today's youth grow up I wouldn't be surprised to Google Docs as the new standard.