kareninoverseas

This is what I needed when I was writing my undergrad thesis. Would have saved me hours of time. Alas.

I have been looking at notebooks for so long that when I finally scrolled to Jupiter, I thought, "That's misspelled".

These are all good points but they feel very insensitive in tone given that OP has shared something personal; I'm not sure if you realise what you're doing

Hm. I didn't get identified as gifted until eighth grade and I don't think about it very hard these days. I still struggled to make friends after I was placed in a gifted program, and in hindsight wasn't being challenged in my courses. In college I envied students that went to more rigorous schools, partly because I struggled a lot more with my coursework. I think being labelled as gifted wasn't a very good thing for me, and that I should have been encouraged to pursue my interests more instead.

This is great! Thanks for sharing.

This is a lot to cover if it's a one year course (unsurprisingly).

I struggled with P/NP and that was in a 3rd year algorithms course.

Awesome! I had quite the experience setting up a react app workflow with a friend. If you don't get your versions of tools to all line up or you use a tool which is slightly unconventional, or sometimes if you're developing on not-Mac, things can go very wrong very quickly. Nice to have a post overviewing how to pick and choose (and why you shouldn't do that anyways).

Thanks, hacker news! Maybe now I can stop buying all of my clothes from Uniqlo!

Edit: who am i kidding

New programmers on a team eventually affect the quality of the code as they work, and thus the project conditions. Project conditions can also include how easy it is to work with others on your team, which depends both on the new dev and the existing team. So that definition misses a lot.

I notice that I intentionally try to avoid portraying myself as "smart" these days because it frees me from having to work to prove it externally. I've also started working on hobbies that others don't consider meaningful, but which I notice challenge me as much as anything else I've been called smart for.

The upshot is that a lot of people in the workplace /do/ judge you anyways, and people seem to assume that you (like them) are doing your darnedest to appear as impressive as possible. Then again, I am working in high finance.

I am probably somewhere on the spectrum.

I am probably also going to avoid actively going out and getting myself diagnosed, since as this article suggests, public and professional perception is such that it is extremely difficult to get someone to diagnose you, and that once diagnosed, people might not take the diagnosis seriously anyway.

I think that simply being aware that my brain runs on a different set of batteries--ones that make it easy for me to get hyperfocused on a task, and also ones that make me prone to overthinking--is one of the more useful outcomes of a formal diagnosis. Thankfully I can do that part by myself and with my close friends and family.

Unfortunately I feel that autism presenting in the way described in the article is simply too "loose" of a set of symptoms to have a formal diagnostic criterion which doesn't create a great number of false positives. Perhaps better time would be spent promoting awareness of the issue, as well as finding ways to thrive with a neuro-atypical brain (this is kind of in line with the article's message).

I have been making marked improvements in how I view myself and in how I talk with people. I wouldn't say I'm 100% there yet since I still relapse into less-healthy habits, like binge-watching tv or browsing HN or reddit instead of working on things which I find more personally meaningful. I think these habits are ways of self-medicating when my mind is psychologically weak.

Things that have really been helping me:

- Exercise! It's been said here before but I'm surprised by how it really is true. I don't consider myself athletic and for a couple of years my only form of exercise was walking from one end of campus to the other. When I started picking up running my heart would start pounding like mad within minutes of stepping onto the treadmill, which made me feel awful. But after a few weeks of this I started to feel better about myself and about how my body could keep up better, which improved my self-esteem a lot. There are peers who can run half-marathons but I'm happy that my body is able to do a 5K (at least for now!)

- Socializing: Making an effort to call up friends, and sending out invites and follow-ups to friends I normally hadn't spent much time with. I started making more friends /connecting with old ones in the last term of college. I consider myself to have moderate issues with anxiety and depression so this definitely wasn't easy at first. I realized that when I had more friends to talk to, I wouldn't have to rely on my closest friends in unhealthy, codependent ways. Prioritizing relationships over my work for the first time in my life has led me to doing better work overall, since my life is no longer caught up in a depressive hate-spiral as much.

- Exploring LGBT+ issues. This may be less applicable to you but at least some of my anxiety and depression stems from being in the LGBT+ community and not realizing it. Having a more honest outlook on myself, and coming out to my supportive (although not perfect) friends has been helpful.

Hope this helps you in your journey!

I was going to ask, this sounds overly dismissive, but then I read your last paragraph.

Also I know SciRep is fairly new but isn't it still under the Nature umbrella? ie. There's still some peer review; the study is likely to be legitimate.

The authors are pretty explicit about the weaknesses in their study and I think that the flaws are reasonable for a pilot study. I'm surprised the authors didn't say anything about their conflict of interest though.

Showing a link between autism and the gut microbiome would be incredible. Obviously more work needs to be done before anything is concluded but this is a really interesting result.

Ha, I do almost all my work on a 14' laptop. Plugging it into a spare monitor is just too much of a hassle, and I've grown used to the screen economy. The way I get around such a small screen size is to have multiple workspaces open on i3 -- one for the code editor, one for docs, one for messaging, and a bunch of other ones shelved around. Flipping between workspaces is pretty painless since it's just a keyboard shortcut but I wonder how much time I lose by getting distracted when I have too many workspaces open.

I think learning how to build habits is underrated. I'm naturally very curious but I also tend to be impatient and easily discouraged, so in the past I've hopped from project to project without really ever finishing anything.

Recently I've been taking to heart the idea that 'if something is worth doing, it's worth doing half-assed', which basically means picking up a new body of knowledge during my downtime and letting myself slowly progress. I have a lot more fun when I'm not pressuring myself for instant results and I've seen moderate gains for the things I've been picking up (going to the gym, learning Japanese).

Taking things more slowly also helps my brain digest ideas. Sometimes I'll go faster when I feel like it's a good day; it all depends on how my brain feels. Sometimes I think people forget the brain is a muscle; it also needs rest to recover from strenuous use and to make tangible gains.

This debate is exhausting.

I agree with some previous posters that women may be more favoured by formal systems now, while men remain more favoured by informal systems.

I think that part of the issue is that there are more ways to be male and a successful senior engineer or team lead than there are female.

We tend to look towards people who are similar to ourselves to see how we should advance. There are many fewer female role models than there are male ones. Many women who make it to leadership positions are encouraged to act masculine.

Women who make discrimination claims that later ring false are usually villainized. I think it might be useful to think about why these might be occurring. In particular, I think women as a whole still feel a great deal more insecurity WRT their positions in the workplace. The equality that's been won in the last few decades has been to some extent manufactured, so it feels a lot more fragile.

I don't think that a good reaction to this news article is to feel upset that men are now being discriminated against.