adenverd

I think most of us would be sad or depressed if our lives were like his. But it seems like he has intentionally conformed the rest of his life to the things that matter most to him (his work, company, personal productivity) rather than what you or I think of as happiness or a good life. I certainly wouldn't want to be him, but if he's living how he wants to live, who am I to judge.

I might be a little biased though, WolframAlpha got me through countless hours of college homework assignments.

Philosphize This! is excellent.

You can audit the course.

The suspected mechanism for caffeine withdrawal headaches is that more blood is flowing to your brain than it's accustomed to [1]. Caffeine works as a vasoconstrictor, reducing cerebral blood flow (CBF) by an average of 27% across users with varying levels of dependency. [2] When you reduce or eliminate caffeine, CBF spikes, causing "weekend" headaches and migraines.

In my personal experience, weaning yourself off caffeine over the course of a couple of weeks is drastically easier than attempting to quit cold turkey. My preferred method of reducing or eliminating caffeine dependence is to reduce intake by 25% every 3-4 days. Once you're down below 50mg per day, you can switch to tea or quit without any physical side effects.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9170342 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19219847

In my experience, work before play is the most productive strategy. Two things that I think might help your situation:

1) Pomodoro technique - I modify this to be 45-60 minutes of work, 10-15 minute breaks. I do six of these throughout the day. When I'm in the work phase, no news/social media/any distractions, focus is important. Do whatever you want in your breaks. And stick to the timers, don't go over on either your work periods or your break periods.

2) If you're doing client work 8am-12pm, stop at 12pm, regardless of whether you've accomplished what you were hoping to. Stopping when you say you'll stop makes it a lot easier to stay mentally focused when you first pick it back up the next day: even if you don't like what you're working on, you know you only have to focus on it until lunchtime, and then you get to work on the fun stuff.

Well-written, props. Some architecture questions you might want to think about:

- Why only one elasticsearch shard (+replica) per index? You run some major risks of write-time hotspotting here, especially if you ever have to completely rebuild your indices from scratch (pro tip: plan for it now). If you have any basic metric of a discord server's size prior to index creation, you can pre-optimize the number of shards in its index to ensure that writes are distributed across the cluster.

- What happens when one server's index grows too large to fit on one (elasticsearch) shard? Practical shard size limit in ES is ~50GB due to concerns related to reallocation and recovery. You could also theoretically hit the 32GB memory limit.

Also, as another poster mentioned, consider dedicated master nodes. You're going to lose data nodes from time to time, don't let it cost you consistency by bringing down a master with it.

100M? Of course you'd scale an RDBMS for that, especially if you want searchability and analytics. It's way easier than a Hadoop -> Elasticsearch pipeline (or pick your flavor).

NoSQL databases are for BIG data. As in, billions of rows big.

No, Lyons is drastically exaggerating and overstating. Perhaps that's what it was like at HubSpot, but I've worked for four different tech startups and only one of them has exhibited even an inkling of Lyons' description. Even there, I would never compare it to a frat house, kindergarten, or Scientology. More like management makes kool-aid and a handful of people think it's wine.

Arkansas has the same: Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts (asmsa.org).