I used to work on desktop apps doing interesting stuff with large and/or soft-realtime data. Now I am working on a Ph.D. in CS. I decided I would not be happy in the long term unless I'm doing research-level work. Even though I was developing products much more interesting than the typical CRUD app, I was still spending lots of time on GUIs, undo systems, file IO, etc. I want to avoid that kind of work as much as possible in the future.
A very insightful post. I'm not a Hacker Schooler, but I find myself afflicted by these "failure modes" at various times. I can especially identify with the "too much task-switching" problem. I'm often unable to identify my priority, and when I thought I would just pick something to learn out of a list of things that seem interesting/valuable, I'd have doubt about my choice almost immediately. I wonder what the solution to this would be?
My dad has had trouble sleeping the past few years, and I attribute part of it due to comfort. Your mattress seems promising. However, (although it may be affordable for other) $400 queen-size is a heavy investment for us, so I would like to clear up some concerns first:
1. What do you think is main thing (comfort-wise) that distinguishes your product from the $200 queen-size foam mattress on amazon? What sort of feedbacks have you received in this regard?
2. You have a 30-days return policy. From my understanding, returning something like a mattress is extremely inconvenient. What are others' experience in returning your item?
If by calculus you meant Calculus 1, 2, or 3 as taught in the first year or two of college, they are a far cry from subjects like number theory and differential geometry. If you meant something like real analysis, then I seriously doubt that you had an easy time.
Anyway, I just read the paragraph with the sentence quoted by geoka9 (it's in the "How I Stopped Eating Food" post), and I call BS on it, too.
Is there a video of a blind person programming somewhere? Even though I see the description, I still don't understand how someone can possibly program without being able to see.
> Do mathematical formulas have to use Greek letters rather than useful variable names like "distance" or "speed"?
I feel that using "useful variable names" like you describe would actually make it less useful because they overlap with common language and writing them out in say, formula, would make them too long (and thus less readable).
I find that for any common topics, there's a subset of "default" variable names that are used so often that when you see it, you pretty much instantly recognize what it's meant to represent anyway. Using Greek letters is no problem as you get used to it eventually, and they make things stand out more than simply using the 26-characters Latin alphabet.
Also depending on the discipline you're working in you can make very confident assumptions about what a random mathematical object is depending on which language it is typeset in. In the context of programming language type systems, for example, a Greek letter is almost always an ML style type variable (think Haskell type a -> b -> a stuff) whereas Roman type is almost always a ground object (int, bool, whatever). Vectors are boldface, groups are capitals, fields are blackboard bold, lowercase letters in a group context are almost certainly group elements... In some contexts you're actually reaching for new alphabets (e.g. the Hebrew letters that are used for infinite cardinals) to be even more distinctive.
https://smmry.com