HN user
Devpressed seems like a really good initiative! Looking at HN's submission history, and from personal experience, I believe such a forum is much needed. As a student or professional struggling with mental illness, having someone to speak to that knows your world, is extremely valuable. Keep up the good work!
I roughly agree with your sentiment, but your last sentence is IMO a bit too rough with the "resort to a bunch of drugs" part.
Any psychiatrist worth his salt, will primarly prescribe drugs as a means to help people cope, while working on the actual underlying causes. Indeed, in many cases, using drugs in the treatment may be the only option to make the patient's day-to-day life bearable. Drugs may also be essential for allowing the treatment team to examine, possibly very problematic, underlying issues.
Also, a SSRI, for instance, can of course not "treat" someone of a clinical depression; you will virtually always need professional cause-oriented therapy to get better. Most patients know this, or will realize it as they experience how their meds work.
Finally, there are some mental disorders, and many individual cases, that require constant medication, despite of the quality of the other treatment given. For example, full-fleged bi-polar disorder, where a manic or a depressive episode may have very severe consequences.
This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time! Amazing!
I'm using PyPy for real-world code every day, because it runs fast as^H^H^H^H, uhm, very fast! I regularly see 6-15X speedups compared to CPython.
That being said, if your code is mostly IO-bound or calls into foreign-language libraries, PyPy's speedup of the Python code of course won't help much with your wall time.
Nice!!
Well, xmonad is an excellent example :-)
It's hard to approximate how long time you'll use, since it depends so much on what ideas you are familiar with, but I'd say that SICP is generally a nice and "easy" read for a programmer with some experience. I don't mean to say that the material is "easy" -- far from it, there's a lot of challenges and brain-twisters -- but the writing is IMO very good, and the book builds up nicely. You should also complement your reading by watching some of the videos of Abelson and Sussman teaching 6.001 (especially Lecture 1A, and Sussman's lectures on meta-circular interpreters).
Also, yeah, read the entire thing! You could skip some sections, but I would advice you to mostly move linearly from the start.