careersuicide

This is precisely why I quit my job two jobs ago. The CEO yelled at one of my coworkers (for something petty) and made her cry in front of the entire company. I had a job interview scheduled for the next Monday before the end of the day. It took another 10 or so days before I actually quit, but they did not get a two weeks notice.

I think I paid $1.99 for this 5 or so years ago. Hands down the best $1.99 I've ever spent.

So, apparently everyone else in the entire world gets the "don't touch garage door springs" talk from a parent or other responsible adult as a child. I didn't (and my brother did!!!).

About six months after moving into my house I was fed up with the janky garage door opener that came with it so I went to Home Depot and bought a new one. I managed to assemble the new one myself with only a few hiccups. It then came time to remove the old garage door opener. I first took down the actual motor unit that was attached to the ceiling and got it set on the ground with the rail still attached. The end of the rail was attached to a metal bracket that formed a right angle with lots of holes for bolts to go through[0] which was then attached to the drywall above the garage door. I got up on a ladder and set to removing the bolts. The last bolt, unbeknownst to me, was attached to a piece of metal through which the garage door spring went [1].

What happened next all tool place within maybe 1/4 a second. As soon as I turned the socket wrench enough to loosen the bolt I heard a loud pop and felt something hit my hand. HARD. I looked down at my hand and saw blood. "No big deal, I cut myself on things all the time. We've got lots of bandages." Then I noticed the subcutaneous tissue (your hand doesn't have much, but there's still enough that deep cuts look different). "Okay this is gonna need stitches, I better get down and take care of this." And then I saw the bone. "ohfuckohfuckohfuck."

I hopped down off the ladder and ran inside and started screaming "CALL 911!!!" to my girlfriend who was upstairs. I made it to the kitchen where I got a dish towel, put my hand on the counter, and clamped down as hard as I could. The paramedics arrived about 5 minutes later (we live very close to a fire station). By then I'd calmed down but was so full of adrenaline I could barely hear or see anything. At one point I blanked out for maybe 30 seconds? I'm not entirely sure. The EMT said it was an adrenaline dump and that it was fairly normal. Of course when I got to the ER every single nurse who heard the story said I was lucky to be alive. If it had hit my head it would have caved in my skull (and I was on a ladder...). Apparently that happens more than you'd think.

They eventually hooked me up with a drip of hydromorphone. "This is the good stuff." one nurse said. Bullshit. I was in so much pain it barely did anything. It brought it from 10/10 to 9.5/10. That's using my new 10 point scale. I thought I'd experienced a 10 before when one time my dentist started drilling before the lidocaine had fully kicked in. I'd put that at about a 6 now. I really cannot describe in words how bad the pain that night and the following months was.

My hand is a lot better now though. The third surgery gave me back my mobility and the physical therapy got me back up to about 60% of the strength I had before. I'll never be able to point straight with my right index finger, but I can make a fist and type. As a programmer both are very important.

[0]: Exactly like this https://mobileimages.lowes.com/product/converted/040395/0403...

[1]: Basically this, except mine is shaped slightly different http://www.truetex.com/gar913.jpg

I think what's missed most in all of the talk about opiods lately is that there are people who need them just to function, and not for reasons of addiction.

In January of 2014 I broke my hand. Not just a fracture. I completely shattered my second metacarpal in my right hand (my dominant hand) and did extensive damage to the surrounding tendons, ligaments, and skin. The surgeon who put my hand back together said it looked like a gunshot exit wound without a corresponding entrance wound. The entire top of my hand had been flayed open. After the surgery I was given hydrocodone, enough for a week. The only reason I didn't just kill myself that week was because I had pain killers. When the dose would wear off the pain was unreal, blinding, and totally consuming. The only worse pain I've ever been in was the night I broke my hand.

Needless to say I had the prescription refilled weekly until my second surgery three months later to take out all of the pins. And again for three months after that until my third surgery to release the tendons so I could use my hand again. And for three months after that while I did thrice weekly physical therapy. I cannot emphasize enough how much I needed the pain killers just to get through life for those nine months. Even with them there were some nights I couldn't sleep because the pain in my hand was so severe. Of course, by the end of the nine months I was pretty well physically addicted, but, knowing my time was up I tapered off and haven't needed them since. For another six months I still needed frequent acetaminophen and ibuprofen to take the edge off of the throbbing in my hand.

I'm not saying at all that there isn't a problem big with opiod addiction. But recent conversations I've seen about opiods leave me with the impression that most people just don't get it. They think that either people just need to deal with pain or that some sort of non-medicine alternative is what's needed for most people on opiods. And that may be true for some. But unless you've been in the kind of pain that makes you seriously consider killing yourself I don't really think you can appreciate just how important opiod pain killers are to some people. I'm afraid we're going to lose something that helps a great deal of people all because we have this idea that addiction is somehow a moral failing and we've structured drug policies around that belief.

Perhaps it would look like this: https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language...

As others have said; Rust is very stable now.

I started trying to learn Rust at 0.7 (maybe a bit earlier, I can only find references to 0.7 in a few projects of mine). Boy howdy did that feel like an exercise in futility. I would set it aside for 3 weeks, revisit it, and find entire language constructs had been removed. I complained about this and Steve Klabnik graciously reminded me that it was a work in progress and that the work was being done out in the open intentionally. I really can't thank him enough for that since it caused me to go from frustrated to sympathetic. As a result I decided to not write the language off. And I'm glad I didn't. After things slowed down around the betas for 1.0 it became clear that Rust was worth learning. I haven't had a chance to use it professionally, but for personal projects I find myself reaching for Rust for problems that would have caused me to have reached for C in the past.

Also, Google has gotten significantly better about returning current and up to date information on Rust as well. Around 2013-2014 my biggest gripe was that I'd search for how to do something only to find advice that was woefully out of date. I haven't had that experience in well over a year now.

The same thing happened to me about 4 months ago except it was deadlifts. I think I somehow let my back rotate a bit when I was on my way down. An MRI revealed a slightly bulging/dehydrated L4/L5 disc. My leg days have since been infrequent and very light with no deadlifts at all. My chest is looking better than ever though...

The sad thing is I haven't been doing a powerlifting routine at all. I decided a couple of years ago when I started lifting that I'd rather look good than be able to lift super heavy weight. I was only deadlifting about 1.2 times my body weight.

I saw the title and immediately said to myself (out loud even), "Yeah, but at what temperature?"

Without also requiring bikes to come with speedometers* I think this is absurd. The whole reason speed limits for motor vehicles is a reasonable concept (regardless of the speed limit itself being reasonable) is that all motor vehicles made since about 1910 have had them a speedometer. Of course you can tell if you're moving 30 MPH versus 15 MPH, but speeds marginally faster than 15 MPH just don't feel significantly faster. Without the ability to see your speed, and more importantly, the expectation that everyone on the trail can know their own speed accurately, this smells of an easy cash grab by law enforcement. I'm not even saying I think speeding on a bike on a mountain trail is safe or a good idea. I just think it's unfair to enforce something like this if your average person isn't going to be able to make sure they're complying like your average driver of a car can. If no one mountain bikes without a speedometer then I suppose my point is moot, but I'm not a mountain biker so I wouldn't know.

*A quick search on Amazon reveals many for less than $20, but I've never seen a bike sold with one attached.

"Do squats when you're young so you can stand up from the toilet on your own when you're old."

Personally I'd recommend "Don't Break the Oath"[0] or "Melissa"[1]. But really their whole LP discography can be listened to in an afternoon. King Diamond as a solo artist has been a bit more prolific though.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpk1wJ62CrQ

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_PjBUcbzqY

An aunt of mine had two (or three?) miscarriages before having her first child. Each time she was absolutely devastated. Honestly I'm pretty surprised that anyone would find that hard to understand. I'm not really big on children (and am childless myself) but trying hard to intentionally get pregnant* , anticipating a child for months, preparing yourself emotionally, and even making space in your home for a child, only to have a miscarriage has got to be one of the most traumatic things I can imagine. Short of losing an already born child or a spouse. In the case of my aunt she went through a really rough time where she blamed herself and later God for her suffering. I don't think that's cultural at all. I think that's just part of being human.

As someone who isn't really interested in having kids it's easy to forget that some people really want them. It is baked into our DNA and has been since before we as a species walked the Earth. If the pregnancy wasn't an accident then it's no wonder people mourn over a miscarriage. As far as they were concerned it was their future child. And I say that as someone who is very much not pro-life.

* Conception is not as easy as abstinence-only education would have you believe. Some perfectly fertile couples try for years before successfully conceiving.

This is what I get for scanning for the quoted part, finding it, and assuming that was all that was said. I take back what I said.

On that note: I consider "Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult" by Dayal Patterson a must read for any fan of black metal. Patterson went straight to the sources as much as possible and managed to paint a complete and (perhaps more importantly) non-sensationalist picture of the genre from just before it became a discrete thing up to the around the time the book was published in 2014.

I take extreme exception to their characterization of the beginnings of black metal. Not just because of the unfortunate dismissal of technical ability. Rather, anything that doesn't start off by mentioning Venom and Bathory and instead jumps to what is arguably the second wave totally outs itself as not having actually listened to what the larger names in the genre have themselves said. If you read interviews with the members of bands who started in the late 80's and early 90's they all have the same influences in common (with few exceptions): Kiss, Mercyful Fate, Venom, Bathory, and Celtic Frost. Skipping ahead a decade kinda misses how the aesthetic was established. Which as you mentioned was very much intentional.

I realize the topic says "book" not "books" but I've got two:

"Hard-Core: Life of My Own" by Harley Flanagan

I've been a huge fan of the Cro-Mags for a long long time. I've had the extreme pleasure of seeing them about eight times now. But never with Harley. And until I read this book I never really knew why he wasn't there. I mean, you hear people talk, but they weren't there, they don't know what went down. This book is an absolute must read for anyone who has even a passing interest in punk. It's a look into the life of one of the most colorful and talented musicians the genre has produced. It's written in a very casual conversational style and consists mostly of string of anecdotes told from Harley's point of view as he's remembering his life from his toddler years up until early 2016. Even if New York Hardcore isn't really your thing I still highly recommend it. He manages to capture in a very raw and visceral way the NYHC era he is largely responsible for ushering in. And if you've never heard "The Age of Quarrel" pause whatever you're listening to now and go find it on YouTube or something.

"The Dark Forest" by Cixin Liu

I would include the first book in this series, "The Three-Body Problem", but I read that in December of 2015. All I want to say about this series of books is that you should go into them without knowing anything. Don't read a plot synopsis. Don't even read the little blurb on Amazon product page. Someone recommended I go into it blind, only telling me "It's good.", and I'm so glad I did just that. The moment you find out what the title is referring to gave me goosebumps.

Crystal started out as being more or less "compiled Ruby" (it's changed a bit since I first came across it). As such that means it uses "nil" just like Ruby does. And Ruby, being heavily inspired by Smalltalk, took "nil" from Smalltalk. You'd probably have to ask Alan Kay to get to the bottom of this.

It's not JavaScript easy, but it's not too hard once you wrap your head around Cell, RefCell, Rc, and friends.

Here's an example using GTK that does something vaguely useful, I have no idea if it's considered idiomatic, but it works as intended: https://github.com/seaneshbaugh/image_viewer/blob/master/src...

The closures themselves are trivial, it's manipulating the stuff outside the closure that's tricky (for a Rust neophyte like me).

The relevant definitions are

  let area = Rc::new(RefCell::new(DrawingArea::new()));

and

  let scale = Rc::new(Cell::new(1.0));

Rather than just define things as usual they need to be wrapped in a Cell (for value types) or RefCell (for reference types) and then wrapped in an Rc so we can keep track of reference counts at run time.

  {
      let scale = scale.clone();

      let area = area.clone();

      window.connect_key_release_event(move |_, key_event| {
          let mut s = scale.get();

          let key = key_event.get_keyval() as i32;

          if key == gdk_sys::GDK_KEY_plus {
              s += 0.1;
          } else {
              if key == gdk_sys::GDK_KEY_minus {
                  s -= 0.1;
              }
          }

          scale.set(s);

          area.borrow().queue_draw();

          Inhibit(false)
      });
  }

Inside the new scope (which is very important) scale and area are cloned which increments their count, then inside the close scale.get() is used to get a copy of scale (which is possible since it's a float) and then after doing stuff to it based on the key that is pressed it's set using scale.set(). For area it's a bit trickier, it has to first be borrow()'ed before anything can be done with it.

I've always had a problem with Chesterton's Fence precisely because it is a sort of status quo bias that can be (and is) used as an argument in favor of backwards social norms and traditions. It's one thing to say "Don't touch that piece of code you don't understand." It's totally different to apply that line of reasoning to norms and laws that actively hurt people. Sometimes there's a reason for the way things are and the reason is just plain stupid and cruel.

Any discussion of interstellar trade deserves a mention of the fantastic Charles Stross book "Neptune's Brood". I went into it expecting more or less a sequel to "Saturn's Children" but what I got was a treatise on monetary policy for economies that span multiple star systems. The concept of slow and fast money and its implications is utterly fascinating and the book is worth reading just for its explorations of the topic (the plot isn't too bad either).

A quick Google search brought me to this post by Krugman[0]:

  I’m reading an advance copy of Charlie Stross’s Neptune’s Brood. (Hey, I have connections!)
  And it is the best thing by far written on the subject to date, partly because it is, as far
  as I know, the only thing written on the subject to date.

0: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of-in...

Whataburger > *, just sayin'.

A few years ago I started reading "The Wheel of Time" by Robert Jordan. I had somehow timed it so that the week I finished the thirteenth book "Towers of Midnight" the fourteenth book "A Memory of Light" came out. I blew through the first chunk of the book and then got to a chapter that was over a hundred pages long, maybe even longer, Google says it was over fifty thousand words. It was the last battle, the moment the previous four million words had been leading up to. I read a few pages and then set it down. For six months. It was obvious the series was going to end in a way that was bittersweet (as all good stories end) but I just couldn't bear the thought of there being nothing left.

By putting it down I was freezing the moment I had left it in time. When I returned to finish the book I felt that familiar sense of sadness. A period of my life (fourteen months!) was over. I'll probably re-read the books someday, but I know it won't be the same. I often get that feeling when I finish a work of fiction I enjoyed greatly. But there was something about "The Wheel of Time' that made it much more profound.

Any medium that can tell a story that people find intense and immersive will produce that same feeling. Why would VR be any different?

I'm absolutely not qualified to address this definitively, but my understanding is that Hiragana is typically used for verb conjugations, adjective inflections, particles (like "の" for indication of possession for example), some natively Japanese words where no one really uses the Kanji for whatever reason, and some other stuff that's similar in nature. Katakana is typically used for writing foreign words so that they use the pronunciation rules of Japanese (like "コカ・コーラ" for Coca-Cola for example) and onomatopoeias.

It likes my dog so much I got an achievement for it: https://keegan.regaind.io/p/g4bTVKBlRlK03OADh4SXog

10. The Chandrasekhar limit (and also the TOV limit), you could argue this is a subset of the limits imposed by relativity, but I think it's interesting and important enough to warrant being listed separately.

The analysis notes that full-time users of Nim are tend to be working on very large projects. Any chance you were able to get examples of such projects? Even if they're closed source it would be interesting to know who is using Nim for serious business and in what specific ways.

This is really cool! I took some OCaml code I'd written a while ago and pasted it in and the output was shockingly legible even with the calls to functions in stuff like Caml_int32 and Pervasives. Very impressive!

If you haven't read the code for how Elixir handles Unicode support [0] I highly recommend doing so. At compile time it reads from several Unicode Character Database text files [1] and then defines a whole slew of functions using the contents of the files that take advantage of pattern matching via unquoting. I already knew all about pattern matching before I came across this but I was still absolutely floored by how awesome this is. In the past when working with C I've needed to do something similar but it required running an external tool whose output was a .c file. It worked but it was hardly elegant.

[0]: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/master/lib/elixir...

[1]: http://www.unicode.org/Public/8.0.0/ucd/

> risks offending users of a "higher" or competing brand

I strongly suspect that I am not alone in the stubbornness of my toothpaste preference. I will grudgingly use a different shampoo if I have to as most shampoos don't have too strong of a smell. In any given day I use probably 3 to 6 different soaps, with only the one in my house being my preference (mmmmmmmm coconut ginger) so using some random soap at a hotel is no big deal. But I will be buried deep in the ground before I subject myself to using anything but my usual toothpaste.

It took me years to find a flavor of mint that I honestly enjoy using. Nothing else has ever felt quite right; it even has the right texture! Using another flavor for even one brushing would make me want to gag. Taste, in both senses of the word, is a very personal thing I suppose.

Bandcamp has been heavily used by many hardcore punk bands for a few years now. The ability to charge a reasonable price for high quality downloads or give them away for free and also sell physical media like records and tapes is a huge deal for lots of punks. There's been several ways of digital distribution of music before Bandcamp, but few of them offered an easy means of getting up and running and monetizing the music in multiple ways (if desired, that you don't have to at all is super important here). It's really the convergence of features rather than any one in particular.

I think for punk bands that might not even be on a label being able to get your music out there without a big upfront investment is more important than artists on larger labels because in that case distribution is usually at least partially handled. That's why the hardcore punk scene has been somewhat of an early adopter of Bandcamp when compared to more mainstream artists.

Also, the band the article mentions in the first paragraph, Mace, is totally worth a listen. Definitely one of my favorite bands coming out of the Midwest right now. If you can get your hands on volume 2 the "No Friends" zine it comes with a flexi that has them and some other great stuff on it.