bkovitz

Thanks for explaining why you made Rust--! I figured it was just whimsical play, and I find it delightful. I'm especially delighted to hear that it wasn't even hard to disable the borrow checker.

I hope you will answer the question here from @dataflow about whether, without the borrow checker, compiler optimizations will emit incorrect code. Did you have to make further modifications to disable those optimizations?

Your editor can’t help you out as you write it.

Must not be a vim user.

Google Translate is not good for this sort of thing, since it has no clue what words mean or why they're used. Vide: https://latin.stackexchange.com/a/4352/118

Funny that you mention this. The inspiration for submitting this question was my frustration with teaching while in grad school. Each of my four semesters so far, I've taught or assistant-taught a class. Each time, it consumed my mind, to the point where I found it difficult to think about anything else. My subconscious creativity was all spent on things like: how do I get the students to see X, how do I convince the prof not to obscure X, what would be a good homework assignment, how can I set up the homework so I can grade it super-efficiently.

I thought I'd get a lot more out of grad school if I financed it by working at a job that requires no thought or creativity. Ideally, my subconscious creative churning could continue while working at the job, and stay focused on my research. (Doing good teaching in grad school goes completely unrewarded.)

And then I thought, well, why bother with grad school at all, if what I want to do is learn interesting stuff and do research? If I had a subsistence-level job that didn't suck out my brains, I could pretty much spend every waking moment either letting the subconscious creative process run, or actually building stuff, researching stuff, and writing papers.

It seems strange that there have (so far) been so few ideas that leverage the high productivity that ought to be possible with technology and the highly interconnected economy. (So far, day-trading is the only one like that.)

How could one be very productive for only a few hours a week--enough to genuinely earn US$24,000 a year?

Is it Timothy Ferris or nothing? Has anyone gotten his "Four-Hour Work Week" to work?

Unarmed security guard.

Some friends of mine long ago have done this. I don't know what the money is like these days (does anyone here know?), but I expect it's bad. The advantage is: you actually get to work on your laptop or notebook or whatever you like most of the time. Mostly what a security guard does is let truckers sign in when they make deliveries. Between deliveries, all you need to do is be there.

Has anyone here tried this?

Interesting that you don't need a lot of winning bets to make a living. What about losing bets, though? Isn't this a pretty high-risk way to make a living? Also, doesn't it require a fair amount of capital to get started?

I always thought management looked like a job I'd hate. Now I'm completely sure.

Doing nothing seems so counterintuitive a solution that people almost never seem to consider it. Lately, I've been seeing this in college. "What, the students are making mistakes and asking questions? I'd better lecture more and write longer explanations in the assignments."

I imagine that a politician who ran on a platform of, "I'm going to do nothing: these kinds of pains are how an economy gets back into adjustment," would have a hard time getting votes. But, I've never been to Japan, and indeed, in the U.S., such a platform would not make you an instant laughingstock.

An excerpt, describing the fragmentation of managers' time:

Folklore: The Manager is a reflective, systematic planner. The evidence on this issue is overwhelming, but not a shred of it supports this statement.

Fact: Study after study has shows that managers work at an unrelenting pace, that their activities are characterized by brevity, variety, and discontinuity, and that they are strongly oriented to actions and dislike reflective activities.

Consider this evidence:

- Half the activities engaged in by the five chief executives of my study lasted less than nine minutes, and only 10% exceeded one hour.

- A study of 56 U.S. foremen found that they averaged 583 activities per eight-hour shift, an average of 1 every 48 seconds.

I wonder if we're having a Violent Agreement.

I'm not saying that you have to consciously play status ("decide to play"). I'm saying that when you interact with someone else, you are playing a certain level of status in relation to them, whether you are aware of it or not.

Engaging in some phony behavior will, of course, make people perceive you as a phony, with all the loss of respect that that entails. Respect, of course, is a big part of status. When you don't respect someone, you tend to play higher status toward them.

Actually, status (as described on that page) is something you play, moment to moment. You are giving off a signal of "don't come near me, I bite" or "don't bite me, I'm not worth the trouble" or something somewhere in between, every second that you interact in person with someone else. Unlike stupid tricks like "mirroring", giving off status signals is not something you can stop doing. What you can do, though, is become more aware of it, better able to modulate it. Socially adept people are very good at varying their status moment by moment. For many of them, it's probably not even conscious.

The main reason an actor needs to learn about status is to be able to make scenes realistic. When the characters don't have a status relationship, a scene looks wooden and fake.

BTW, playing high status is not necessarily better. People who relentlessly play high status in every situation are commonly called "assholes". (Usually behind their backs.)

Wow, so this is where this new influx of traffic to my wiki came from!

I would say maybe 20% (for me).

Now that I'm back in college, this time assistant-teaching as well as taking grad-level classes and sneaking in time for research, I am more amazed than ever by how wasteful the academic world is. They chop up your day into many context-switches (one of the worst things a knowledge-worker can do), they focus on lectures and exams instead of mentoring and experiences that bring about learning, they require useless courses, they emphasize grades relentlessly (known to decrease learning), and they present material out of context (so it's hard to retain or apply).

I think good teaching can be done in the academic world (I have seen some), and of course it's the place to go to do scientific research. But overall, the academic world is just not very good at what it does (except arguing about minutiae and winning research grants and endowments). The basis of its strong market position is subsidies and prestige. It's ripe for competition from savvy entrepreneurs.

I also dropped out of high school. I just stopped showing up, and spent my days writing code. Way better education than classes.

About truant officers: One day, walking along the sidewalk at 10:00 a.m. or so, I saw a truant officer walking along the sidewalk, too, in the opposite direction. He spotted a different teenager, also walking along, and arrested him. I think the truant officers ignored me for two reasons: because I didn't look like a truant, and because I lived near a college campus. I didn't have a computer of my own, so I went to the college campus and wrote code there every day. I probably looked like a "precocious" college student (I was 15, and probably appeared 13).

BTW, I never saw any difficulty later in life due to dropping out of high school. I've never seen anyone look at anyone's grades on a résumé or job application, never had anyone give a damn about my lack of credentials.

And now I'm a Ph.D. student.

Thanks to all for the many informed and detailed replies!

I am now assistant-teaching a college course in low-level computer programming. It's an excellent course: the students reprogram a children's toy robot that uses the ARM processor. http://www.amazon.com/Little-Tikes-Giggles-Remote-Control/dp... They're getting up to speed very quickly on how to get hardware to actually do stuff.

Yes, I actually left Silicon Valley to do grad school. I haven't given up the principle of "do real stuff, see real results", though. I'm looking to design a couple fairly small homework assignments consisting of optimizing some ARM code. I want the examples to be real. Now mulling over which to do...

Testify!

15 years ago, I did Intel-style assembly--and loved it even with all its clumsiness. But I just dove into ARM a few weeks ago, and am loving it even more. Such sweet pleasure to code so close to such a beautiful and simple machine!

Thanks! Especially for the numbers. I had not even heard of RTL simulation before. Wow, extremely cool.

The first rule of programming is indeed "don't program". But that's not because buying off-the-shelf code makes you more productive than writing code yourself. It's because software solutions are usually worse than manual solutions.

Here's a typical example, one I just ran into today. For a course, I need to enter some data into some system that stores grades. It doesn't just store grades, though, it tries to calculate grades--by various rules and heuristics, which you are likely to misunderstand. They have written a lot of code for the import process, to, you know, take the burden off the poor teacher, by calculating the grades.

Of course, it's such a pain, and so error-prone, the much easier solution would be to just make a spreadsheet containing the grades and upload it, and have the program do nothing but display the results or whatever actually needs to be done. That would remove 95% of the code written for this thing. And make it work better.

Another one, which I ran into a few weeks ago. I needed to add a class. The professor needed to approve it. The software was so confusing, the prof couldn't figure it out (he is a world-renowned professor of computer science, BTW). After a couple weeks of this, I finally got a sheet of paper and had him sign it. I brought that sheet to the expert in operating the mysterious System, and that finally got the job done.

Some software does obviously help the university run better. Every line of code after that makes it run worse.

"tangible"?

Thanks, Val. From http://www.petersons.com/collegeprofiles/Profile.aspx?inunid..., it looks like Gallatin only does master's degrees, but this shows that someone has been exploring in this direction.

Well, obviously there are. I had that when I was an employee a few times. A friend of mine is studying organ in a master's program. She practices organ 2-4 hours a day, early every morning. She spends a month or two (or more) getting good at a really hard piece, really getting to know it, mastering it. I envy the day-to-day continuity that she has. Other stuff during the day is OK, like easy classes, but not something else that occupies the subconscious "workspace".

Could that day-to-day continuity be achieved in a scientific/mathematical grad program? In a solo business?

Here's another idea: Instead of getting good at context-switching, are there ways to set up your life so you get to stay focused (and still pay the rent)?

You know, I think you've pegged it. Keeping it in my head is probably the main factor.

I write down lots of thoughts and tiny tasks in a notebook as I'm working, and check off the tasks as I go, but that's not really setting up for context-switching. When I'm writing code, I'm following inspiration: playing out the idea in my head, or rather, using the act of writing code to cause the idea to become clarified and completed. While ramping up and while coding, the idea is taking shape.

Maintaining notes designed to enable context-switching sounds like something I could try. This is probably the key. This would enable working in smaller chunks of time, too.

Weird: Right at this moment, the thought terrifies me. I wonder if I'd have to completely change my creative process to make such notes.

Hmm.

More than subtly.

Yeah, the GED is the way to go, if you want to get into college. That's how I did it. The GED is so retarded, you're pretty much guaranteed to score in the top percentiles. College are required to treat these high GED scores as equivalent to an A average (per subject).

Your state might have a regulation forbidding taking the GED to graduate ahead of your classmates. I got my GED in a different state when I was 17.

> I've been having issues lately trying to motivate myself to do mundane, or at the very least "unappealing", work (namely, [high]school work). It's not that I'm lazy — actually I'm afraid I'm a workaholic sometimes — but that I always find myself giving priority to another project or hobby I enjoy doing and find more worthwhile. I personally find I have one of two reactions to tasks I have to do: either I'm completely engrossed in my work and won't sleep, eat, etc. until it's finished, or it is the last thing I would ever possibly want to do with my time and I will do everything but that task

Amen, brother. Same here.

Here are some things I've done about this, with some success:

1. "Pair" on it, even if it's not programming. Just doing the job with someone else often makes it a lot easier. Maybe it's theoretically not as efficient a use of time, but, bottom line, the unpleasant task gets done.

2. Find a way to not do it. That is, instead of procrastinating, cancel the task. This approach calls for creativity: you might redefine your goal so the icky task isn't necessary, or you might pay someone to do it (this is how my kitchen stays so clean), or you might abandon the larger goal that's driving the boring task (e.g. drop out of college), or who knows.

3. If the problem is simply lack of momentum rather than true revulsion toward the task, the 5M method ramps up momentum without too much pain. http://false-epiphany.com/2009/04/incompletion-causes-and-so... I usually find that it takes me about two to three days to ramp up momentum so I'm merrily humming along and don't need to play any more mind games with myself. Kinda slow, but it does work. A variation: Wait until the deadline, and rush; or do a rush job right now, with a fairly short time limit, after which you have a hard commitment to go do something fun with someone, somewhere else.

4. Pause and theorize about the task. Why does it arise? What social/physical/mathematical givens and relationships explain its existence? Why these tools? What other tools could do it? What change in the broader world could make it obsolete, or change the way it's done? What is the absolute minimum you could do and still get the benefits? What is the most efficient way to do it? Optimizing is "bad", but it's also fun, and it gets your mind immersed in the task. Devise the most efficient method you can for doing it, and test your method/skill by measuring your results.

5. Just fucking do it. Sometimes ya gotta suck it in and deal with it. For inspiration, read what Paul Graham says about determination. http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html Take pride in your will of iron, and taste the sweet fruit at the end of a forced march, when your sweat has dried and the Sun hangs low in the sky. However, if your whole life is sucking in and dealing with, it's time to make a systemic change. Don't turn into G. Gordon Liddy or something.

I have found #1 to be the most effective by far, but it's very hard to find a good pair partner for crud like writing a meaningless paper for some stupid class. I have also found #5 surprisingly effective. It's usually been my last resort, but empirically, that weird attitude shift, the resulting commitment, and all-out expenditure of energy actually feel good. You might do a couple "forced marches" and take notes on your own emotional state, to see if the same is true for you. (This is actually a form of #4.)

Someone tell me if this is right (it's just guesswork):

Decades ago, there was a clear distinction between colleges and vocational schools (or "trade schools"). The purpose of colleges was to bring you into a certain culture and tradition: the culture of educated people. The purpose of vocational schools was practical job training, nothing more.

Attending "college" was more prestigious, but also of little interest to most people. (Most people are basically practical.) Social initiatives to bring poorer people into the educated world put money into colleges, not vocational schools. But most people don't want to learn about Keats and the Magna Carta and that sort of thing, they just want to get skills to do a job to make more money than they could without those skills.

Over time, the purpose of colleges became confused. People today see colleges as intended to provide job training, and just doing a lousy job of it. Colleges, with their state funding, grabbed much of the market from vocational schools, killing off most of them.

So today, we have many colleges, with vast numbers of students. Most of the students mostly jump through useless bureaucratic hoops for four or five years, don't learn the things educated people know, and don't get job skills, either.

That's not what I took from the article. A summary of this article will distort it terribly, but here's an attempt:

1. A person's entire life story contains ups, downs, and complexity, of a sort that can't be disentangled, and are unique to each person, though you can find patterns, too. For example, hitting rock bottom fuels some people to great fulfillment and happiness in the future, but of course that's not the only way, and hitting rock bottom is no guarantee of future happiness.

2. Many things make people happy, but the top factor is which kinds of mechanisms you use to deal with adversity.

3. Many things make people happy, but the top factor is quality of social relationships.

I feel your pain. Most articles on the Internet could use a summary to help the reader make a decision about whether they're worth reading. Most of them would also be a lot better if they just got to their point. And skipped the other stuff.

But this article is very hard to summarize. And it wanders. It's also quite good.