As part of my job, I often have to convince business folks that they don't need to buy a fucking private blockchain (from IBM of course, because they're old enough to think that no one ever got fired for buying IBM). This is very close to the arguments I make, and adds some excellent, articulate points!
This is happening at both of my companies now. I'm almost to the point of telling them to buy it just so they can tell their golf buddies they're using blockchain too.
Pro-tip: do an "experiment" with blockchain (built in house to keep it cheap) so they can tell their golf buddies they're looking into it. Make sure it's compared to a sane solution, because then they can feel superior for having "insider knowledge" that it's pointless.
Having been addicted to prescription pills, and currently being prescribed (and presumably dependent on) antidepressants, I think there are a few points that make the distinction abundantly clear:
1. When I consider stopping antidepressants, I'm not filled with anything like the dread I was when I thought about giving up the addictive pills.
2. I forget to take my antidepressants sometimes. I forget to refill the prescription sometimes.
3. I have never had any desire to take more than the prescribed dose of my antidepressants.
It's an important distinction, and unfortunately one that folks in the recovery community sometimes miss. In my experience the above characterization usually brings it home much better than some heavily medicalized description of addiction vs dependency.
I believe it's supposed to be variadic. I thought it original meant 3-arg functions, but I can see in one of the examples it calls a 3-arg function. The TODO file however says "var args" still needs to be implemented.
So it is about variadic arguments. The reason is time, that is I still didn't take the time to make it work, but it does not seem to have big issues doing it!
You sure you're not me? I got into coding seriously in college after I started to take adderall to help study, and ended up making a career of it. I was absolutely terrified of quitting, because I felt like I couldn't do the one thing I was good at without it. I tried quitting and lost jobs over it, several times. It got to a point where I couldn't function as a human without it - I'd just sit in bed and feel sorry for myself. My addiction progressed to needing more than I could convince any doctor to prescribe, so I started getting more in various illegal ways.
I've been off the stuff for about 4 years, and I don't miss it at all. I'm actually a much better programmer without it - I don't get sucked into unimportant details, I have a more realistic sense of what I can and can't accomplish, and I'm more creative. More to the point, I have a life outside of a little bottle of pills now.
I got off of it after talking to some people who'd also gotten off - this helped alleviate my fears that I would have to give up my sweet programming career, and re-framed the problem as a matter of underused and atrophied motivation and willpower. It wasn't easy, but with a lot of love and support I managed to quit for good.
Hit me up if you want to talk - jonathan dot j dot mason, gmail.
Very good points. I do notice while on it, that it's extremely easy to get sucked down into rabbit holes, losing sense of time and of what's important.
I've also run into the same problem you described, of running out of adderall due to more and more tolerance. In desperation it even led me once to get some darknet speed pills off the internet, containing what I later found out to be meth... all due to a lack of available prescription alternatives. (I quickly learned methamphetamine is a completely different animal -- far more addictive, dangerously euphoric, and seriously neurotoxic. I learned to never do that again.).
I'm now experiencing my first health wake up call, which I'm convinced is linked to adderall use: just in the last few months, while using my iPhone I started to notice a very slight shaking in my fingers. Turns out: I have a family history of essential tremors and Parkinsons (caused by accumulated damage to dopamine receptors)... with ALS as a possible risk factor. That's right: A L fucking S.
And I'm only in my late 20's.
Terrifying. The illusion of my own invincibility has been shattered. For the first time in my life, it's abundantly clear that my problem with adderall is no longer just psychological: it's physical. That if I don't make changes soon... things could start going downhill for me -- fast.
I may take you up on that offer when I can muster up the courage. Thank you.
> I may take you up on that offer when I can muster up the courage. Thank you.
Please do - it's always a pleasure to help someone out of a bad situation that I've been in. And remember, fear is a prison without walls - you just have to make a decision to walk through that fear, and you're free.
I'm with you 100% that this is silly, show-off-y code golf at its worst. The fact that its purporting to generate something a bit sensitive (why else would you use the awkward `crypto.getRandomValues` interface?) is especially troublesome - sensitive code should be clear at all costs.
I spent a bit longer than 30 seconds looking at it though, and I think the 8 is actually significant - according to the RFC,
> "Set the two most significant bits (bits 6 and 7) of the clock_seq_hi_and_reserved to zero and one, respectively."
The right shift by `c / 4` seems to be taking care of this, at least if JavaScript's shift operator works the way I think it does.
The `1`s are to facilitate the goofy string creation trick.
The fact that there's some discussion around the meaning of the code on HN is a bad thing, of course!
Looking at it either from a machine learning or statistical point of view, using such a small sample is problematic.
This is the chronic issue with fMRI studies, since administering an fMRI is extremely expensive, and has led to some very difficult to reproduce results in the field.
People love the "n=XX is far too little data!" argument, yet it's more complicated than that. Sometimes 600,000 is too little, yet sometimes 17 is enough.
Example: you believe a newly found plant species is toxic. You give it to 17 "grad students volunteers", while giving a placebo to 17 others. All in the first group die aa gruesome death within 20 hours. None of the others do.
Result: yes significance. (also: tenure!)
I'm not saying that this study is significant (the statistics seem to be slightly beyond my event horizon), and your criticism also stops short of an outright dismissal of the research. But sample size alone makes for a bad measure of quality. Yes, even p-values are better.
I think that a small sample size is mostly an indicator that one needs to treat the results with far greater caution.
Effect size is very important in this. To continue your grad student murder example, it's completely trivial to determine which plant a student was given, based on whether they are dead or not. It becomes trickier if you measured something a bit less cut-and-dry, such as the incidence of headaches, or variance in a few voxels of a noisy MRI.
I believe some pretty fundamental fMRI spatial autocorrelation functions have been called into question as well (1). Sounds a bit like PowerPoint's autocontent wizard.
I got massively addicted to drugs and alcohol in college. Flunked out and bounced around through various stages of homelessness and unemployment, putting my programming skills to use to score a few bucks when I could stay sober long enough, then typically getting fired. I spent most of my 20s falling to deeper and deeper bottoms before I started to take recovery seriously. I finally "got it" by diving head first into 12-step programs (not for everyone, YMMV, etc).
Tomorrow I'll have 3 years clean and sober. I have a sick job (even by HN standards), wonderful relationships, more money than I know what to do with, a credit score that's slowly recovering, friends who actually give a fuck about me, and all that good stuff that I think a lot of us take for granted.
Congrats on 3 years! If I don't pick up a drink by Jan I'll have two years myself.
At the end of my twenties the floor literally dropped out from under me. I had a good job as a software dev at fairly large media company, had nice apartment, ambitions etc. But I had deep dark secrets that I kept hidden and throughout my twenties I drank and used drugs (coke/pills) over. I considered my upbringing to be pretty normal in a middle-class neighborhood on the West Cost, and I started drinking and partying in high school like everyone else. However I found myself drinking progressively more towards the end of my twenties and no longer a party it was more to cope with stress, anxiety, and life in general.
I ended up losing multiple high-paying jobs, flying around the country trying to restart, going to about 6 rehabs in ~2 years, losing my mind, losing all hope, wanting to die. I almost died a few separate times from acute alcohol withdrawal. I was fired from one job with an internationally recognized media company the morning after I had seizures from coming off alcohol in a rehab. It got to the point where every time I drank alcohol, I ended up detoxing in a hospital. Finally somewhere in that dark period I was able to get honest with a therapist for the first time in my life about some sexual abuse that had happened when I was younger, and about the other addictions like pornography that plagued my life in my twenties. I got sober for 1.5 years and relapsed one more time, this time it was the final wake up call I needed.
Fast forward and I'm the ceo of a startup company prepping to launch an amazing product, I've been a successful consultant helping build another product that is currently in operational use processing millions of dollars in financial transactions, I feel completely resurrected in mind, body and soul. I have a mens meeting I go to weekly, I go to AA, I workout 4-5 days a week, I eat healthier than ever in my life, and I get regular sleep.
The urge to drink or use drugs has completely left my body and mind. I have traveled all over, spent some of the best time with my friends and family, started my life in a new city, made amends, and found tools to help deal with life on lifes terms.
I hated 12 steps and tried everything possible including drinking to work around it but in the end I'm thankful it's there and I go to meetings regularly.
The most shocking thing to me now is both when I think about how far I've come, and how lucky I am to be alive.
No one ever tells you when you're young that you can live a perfectly normal, fulfilling, and happy life without using drugs or alcohol!
thanks for the hope because I can completely relate.
So glad I asked this question here, I have no reason to feel like a fuck up because there is still time to change. I am 27 and improving each day/week/month, I just get hung up on 'what if' sometimes.
thanks for the hope, congrats on 3 years! thats over 1000 days. I can relate to your story a lot. I have started to take recovery very seriously for the first time and so far at 114 days without drinking or pot. about 2 months without meat. 10 days without buying a pack of cigs. almost debt free. I go to a 12-step group and also a recovery-based meditation group.
Moved back home at the end of May to focus on recovery. I was out in Utah for a coding bootcamp, got kicked out halfway through for smoking weed when my roommate told on me because he didn't like that I was doing well there (he went through my room while I was in Moab and told the police where I kept my weed), got a full refund because I still got a job without their help. Worked at a sketchy startup for a few months, learned a lot about what I wanted and shattered a lot of my misconceptions about the tech industry. Started working as a developer at a hosting company after but the company laid off 1000 people including me right after I signed a lease. They fired me before I got any severance because I came in hungover one day. Led to more drinking and smoking, really fucked me up inside feeling like a recurring fuck up.
Using everything I learned in Utah to start an agency. Got a few quality clients now ranging from a film composer in Hollywood, a fitness model from Miami, a dog clothing company, a Native American photographer. Going to AZ to see the Grand Canyon next week, then Colombia for an ayahuasca retreat in October to heal from PTSD from childhood trauma.
Saving up for an SUV, better camping gear, and going to work remotely next year as I explore North America. Going to be a 'creative developer' and nature photographer at the same time.
TL;DR; tooling is improving rapidly, and while this AI boom will someday end, we'll be left with tools to incorporate the things that do work in our everyday work.
Working for a "digital innovation lab" where a big part of my job is sorting out things that developers can actually use to make cool products from Gartner report buzzword hell, I have a few thoughts about this.
Historically, AI has seen boom and bust cycles. AI, unlike other buzzword technologies, has a large cultural mythos about it - Asimov didn't write "I, EC2 Instance", after all. Thus, non-technical people have very strong and often unrealistic set of expectations around AI, so every time there are technological advances, people expect that general AI is right around the corner, and are disappointed when it doesn't materialize. Right now, we're experiencing a boom cycle as a result of the emergence of deep learning techniques. After every boom, funding dries up and investors loose interest, but the techniques that really work stick around and become part of a developers everyday toolkit.
Like all "black sorcery" technologies, AI has a ways to go in terms of building convenient tooling. Tensorflow is a huge improvement over writing low level CUDA code, but it's still too low level for folks without a strong background in mathematics and machine learning. That said, it's been improving in usability, documentation, and tooling, and just a couple of weeks I was part of a hackathon where we turned their pet recognition demo[1] into software to detect objects of interest to my company in satellite images.
At an even higher level are a number of startups (such as Clarifai[2]) that offer AI-as-a-service. In Clarifai's case, you can train your own image recognition models and apply them with a few lines in your favorite programming language (yeah, yeah, I'm shilling them a bit, but I really like their product ;-).
So at the end of the day, I think we'll all be building various kinds of AI into our products in the not-so-distant future, but you won't really need to go deep into tensorflow and similarly low level tools to do so.
Very interesting. But often it seems that AI is an alias for image or voice recognition, would love to see more of those AI-as-a-service for different use cases. Or more tutorial on some behaviour patterns for example :)
Thermal regulation is the most important difference, followed by low depth of discharge.
There are also some (rather weak) reports that if you take the individual 18650 cells out of a tesla battery they last significantly longer than the NCA 18650s you can actually buy from Panasonic, which indicates that they might made to better manufacturing tolerances or something, but it's really all about Tesla's treating the batteries much better during use.
