Q4273j3b

"Things happen to people by accident," she used to say. "A lot of nice accidents have happened to me. It just HAPPENED that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them. It just happened that I was born with a father who was beautiful and nice and clever, and could give me everything I liked. Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? I don't know"—looking quite serious—"how I shall ever find out whether I am really a nice child or a horrid one. Perhaps I'm a HIDEOUS child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials."

"Lavinia has no trials," said Ermengarde, stolidly, "and she is horrid enough."

- A Little Princess (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/146/146-h/146-h.htm). It's a kids book from 1901 about fortune of birth. One of the most interesting things I've ever read.

Freaky fast bare bones code editing with evil-mode (vim keybindings): http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

Do stuff in the terminal from inside emacs---I imagine this would be super good for coding C, you can change your code on one side and make/execute it in the other: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AnsiTerm

Light/dark solarized theme: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized

Timestamped notes, diaries, and todo lists with org-mode: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/index.html

Might not be relevant to you personally, but... set it up to be EXACTLY like RStudio (with knitR, etc.): http://ess.r-project.org/, http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ESSShiftEnter. (Emacs can be RStudio guys! EMACS CAN BE ANYTHING.)

In addition there's a lovely emacs blogosphere.

- Sacha Chua: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3968124/blog.html#sec-1-...

- http://emacsblog.org/

- EmacsWiki (not a blog but still---such great stuff on here): http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SiteMap

When a lot of my friends say "privacy" they really mean: "the barriers I put up around my content, which is of course online".

Then there's "privacy" in the sense of being a private person: you don't want your photos and conversations widely seen or read in the first place.

If Facebook and all the other data brokers could choose one of these definitions of "privacy" to lodge foremost in your brain, which would they pick?

Which definition would you call industrial, and which one cultural?

It sounds like you're just a private person, ancarda. By all means, carry on.

Have you considered that some of it is just mad cabin fever? Sounds like you've been in the same house for at least 6 yrs. Why don't you take a term or two off to work and travel, starting this Jan or next summer?

Let's suppose the equation is

(baseline commuter alienation)*(personal response factor) + (cabin fever) = ):

First term is difficult to change (moving on campus might not make financial sense or that much of a difference if it's still your hometown); but dealing with the second term can be super doable both logistically and financially. Just make sure you have a structured plan of what to do, that you'll be around other people, and that you have a fixed date & plan for coming back to college. You're not dropping out, just ducking in and out really quick for some air.

In addition, you might be surprised, 5 terms of college isn't necessarily too late to transfer. It just depends on the target school in question and how the credits work out.

Good luck, unknown internet buddy!

Even then (1) the users would have to be diligent & savvy enough to encrypt everything themselves before passing it to the service (remember Lavabit?), and (2) the service still hoovers up your metadata.

Eh. Idk siliconc0w, it just seems like a great way for people pretending to be Jason Bourne to get into trouble for destroying evidence. Average person doesn't need the computer equiv of a bug-out bag. Encrypted hard drive upon shutdown + encrypted backups is way more than enough for the average person doing average un-Bourne stuff.

Whoops, you're absolutely right about the 30k. I'm leaving my poor arithmetic up there for posterity.

So. So so so. First of all, I gotta say, you are very good at writing how you feel. Which is quite the nontrivial thing. People are gonna jump all over you for your very admirable tour de honesty. Don't let the turkeys get ya down (as my mom always said).

Second of all. It sounds like you are in a bona fide self-loathing free-floating ambition doom spiral. (I am no stranger to them myself.) And as though your usual way of caring for your soul in pain is to sit on it firmly until it stops screaming. So, speaking of souls, & their care and keeping, I think you should get a book called _Care Of The Soul_ by Thomas Moore and read chapters 3 and 9 in particular. Also if you can get your hands on _The Power Of Myth_by Joseph Campbell, that one's not bad one either.

Hang in there, unknown internet buddy. I believe you when you say it's not about the money. But---if you'll allow me to be a little crude, here---greatness is not some constipated stool than we can anger-push out of us. First we gotta linger for a little bit with the Dulcolax of philosophy.

If I read all that right:

- you are making $60k/year post-tax off non-angel investments

- your yearly expenditures are about $2.5k * 12 = $60k

- you are about to quit your job (or already have) and anticipate an even lower expenditure next year (<$60k)

Dude/dudette, forget switching careers---if this is really and truly your financial situation (no debt, etc.), you could just go ahead and retire. You don't have to go back to your old job that you hated. You don't have to go back to any job. You are pressure- and fancy-free.

If web development is what you want to do in your first year of retirement, well, go for it. Financially speaking, you have nothing to lose. You could just as easily become a fly fisherman in Montana.

High five yourself! And go read http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/.

Look up evil-mode. It puts vim keybindings into emacs, and it works nicely alongside org-mode. You can edit and navigate vim-style but you still get all the org-mode commands (collapse/uncollapse headers with TAB, put in timestamps with C-u C-c . RETURN, etc.)

Someone posted this link to an explanation a few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6492366 It looks like that blogger will be writing more on Urbit soon. At the very least the comments on that blog post are informative & opinionated: look for the one by "StephenH".

Basically, Urbit's thesis is that "the internet is broken"---that it's a square peg document delivery system hammered viciously into a round distributed applications hole---and that UNIX is overpowered / for sysadmins. Urbit's goal is to replace your C-based OS and your HTML-based web with a unified, typed functional, VM-ish "thing". (Source: what I remember from the presentation video.)

To summarize: fix broken web, fix broken OS, create the developer's idea of a decent functional language. I think he knows he's being quixotic, but his morale is good and he's having a nice time of it.

Anybody at all please go ahead and correct me if I got anything wrong---I'm absolutely not an expert on any of this.

Haven't bought one yet, but I really want to get a Rite in the Rain pocket notebook for $4.25 and see if the legends are true / how much water damage it can stand.

http://www.riteintherain.com/. They make waterproof paper. So cool.

Surprisingly simple math (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5854593), the data you just described, and also IP addresses. I wouldn't be surprised if they also use browsing habits (search history on LinkedIn, profiles visited on LinkedIn). So they might guess the friend's name from the data, but not know which exact profile out of several identically-named profiles represents the person you know.

Nice! Yeah, I think it's really important not to be intimidated by stats & data science. I mean, as ihnorton said, if you want a career in academia, you need an academic degree. Period. You want to enter a v sophisticated field, like quantitative finance or Google search or whatever, that degree is really going to help. But if you just want to surround yourself with good data, good questions, data-loving friends, then I believe you can teach yourself. Absolutely.

Why do I think this? Because (1) the day-to-day of "data science" is more of a craft than a science. Before you run complicated analyses, you are just cleaning the data, visualizing it, trying to see what questions it could answer. It feels a lot like playing in the woods to me... you're just knocking about, seeing what cool stuff is in there, building a fort out of scatterplots. And a truly wise data analyst will know when to not run tests at all. Also (2) it would surprise you how many academics are themselves kinda self-taught. They get into research because of their interest in a specific topic, and only come around to learning stats later. Think about it! The MCAT does not test prob/stats, even though doctors end up reading reams of statistical studies for work. I'm not saying these doctors are ignorant, not at all... just that after undergrad, they (and a bunch of PhD candidates) find themselves in the exact same position you're in. They teach themselves, or they squeeze into stat dept courses, and they all turn out OK.

I would just look for the data that's already around you. Cool data being produced at work? Ask if you can make some charts in R/Python/Julia to show your team. The internship suggestion was a great idea. Or you can take on some cool longish-term project and blog your way through it online. You'll do the next thing, then the next thing, and so long as you keep the awe, you'll end up somewhere neat!

Basic prob & stats:

1. _Stats: Data and Models_ by De Veaux, Velleman & Bock

2. _Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability with Solutions_ by Mosteller

3. http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

Basic data analysis:

1. _Python for Data Analysis_ by Wes McKinney

2. http://camdavidsonpilon.github.io/Probabilistic-Programming-...

3. _Exploratory Data Analysis_ by Tukey

4. _The Visual Display of Quantitative Information_ by Tufte

Tools:

- R & ggplot2 & (Sweave | knitR)

- Python & numpy & pandas

- UNIX tools (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6046682, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6412190)

- basic SQL (https://schemaverse.com/tutorial/tutorial.php)

- data visualization: (R & ggplot2) | (Python & matplotlib) | d3.js

- OPTIONAL: C/C++/Java for hardcore Bayesian stuff, Julia for being cool, Fortran for specific academic domains

On getting people to take you seriously: If you knew the stuff up there, I would take you very seriously, even without the STEM degree. You can pick this stuff up outside the classroom (in fact it might be hard to find uni classes that cover this stuff). So if you did self-study, and blogged about it or something, people would take you seriously (esp. if you got good at something "hot" like d3.js or Bayesian). In fact, given your background in web / software / business, you could be considered even more valuable (by web / software / business people).

What are you interested in specifically? Where do you want to end up?

Yes, absolutely!

Are you thinking a curated list of curators, or a social network where anyone can be an expert? Or something in between?

It's great you're tackling the whole learning frontier

I'd love to read the YA novel of this. Larry Wall teaches Hermione archery and Scheme...

But I wonder if this will ever happen in real life? It has been 7 years and while there are lots of structured decentralized experiences online, and a few coding camps (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6123937) and HS classes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6111375), we don't yet have anything that both (a) is a real live centralized landed integral substitute for traditional HS/college and (b) rivals HYP/Stanford/Oxbridge/etc for prestige. Prestige (b) would be the tricky part...

Seems PG once said something about why K-12 "Hacker School" wouldn't work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44896. (Click parent link for context.)

Thank you for posting this! I am inspired. If I get to homeschool my kids, I am definitely putting Unix/C/Lisp on the curriculum now.

Yes! Games are great.

A fun easy framework for game-making is LÖVE. https://love2d.org/ You can show the kid some games made using LÖVE (https://www.love2d.org/wiki/Category:Games), do some of these tutorials (https://www.love2d.org/wiki/Category:Tutorials)...

Even if you don't know Lua, it's so easy to pick up (http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/lua/). And figuring out a new language with the 8 yr old could be cool too.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I assumed the lag was because DDG doesn't let result pages know what search terms you used to find them, and was sending you through some generic middle page to hide that info?

I think you're right about speed, though. DDG just keeps getting better.

Did you know if the mouse is hovering over a DDG result, you can press o to to open it? And I think there's a way to navigate through results using only keys... I forgot how though...

I mean, how "extremely difficult" are we talking? So long as it isn't esoteric, it can't be so difficult... otherwise no one would learn it, and it would become by definition esoteric...

I guess "real hard but still non-esoteric" could include * Functional ones like OCaml or Haskell (so I hear... "What are these monads you speak of?") * Super legit ones like C/C++ for systems programming * Rare and majestic ones like Lisp * Ones that require outside math knowledge like Julia or Fortran * Really new ones that don't have many packages / docs / community members yet

After an actual desire to learn (which several others here have mentioned), the biggest obstacle to learning is bad teachers. I don't want my teacher to be a vast self-curated backwater of internet tutorials and apps. I don't even want options to customize my learning. I want an opinionated, sassy domain expert who inspires me, pushes me, and clearly delights in the subject.

Examples: http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html (thanks tokenadult) http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.asp... http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/index.html

If you had a learning website built around teachers rather than subjects, I would definitely check that out.

I don't know, I kind of liked it. Is it poking fun at how these loosely-allied movements (Bayesian rationalism, transhumanism, etc.) are actually quite been-there, done-that, in an intellectual history sense? Here's what I noticed in the poem...

- Eliezer Yudkowsky as singularity-prophet / writer of sacred texts - Claiming all sorts of famous people are allied with / inspired your movement, when in reality, they wouldn't have had any idea what you were on about (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriation_%28sociology%29) - Intellectual bias as original sin - Anticipating a new world order (millenarianist movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millenarianism) - The celebration of the lone genius(es) vs a society that doesn't understand (which is from 19th century romanticism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism) - And of course, more specifically, Nietzsche's Übermensch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch), a possibly embarrassing idea to be caught in historical dialogue with

The more I overthink this poem-parody, the more I enjoy it. Thanks for posting.