kibbleble

If you have sound mental health and are extremely driven, are able to focus despite the courseload and competition, and you are confident you'll graduate on time, then pick MIT. You minimize debt by graduating as soon as possible.

Average folk may take 5-6 years to graduate with an engineering degree because it's that difficult. Gotta retake classes and work part time, haha.

Regardless of college, what you do outside of classes is more important (networking). There are smart people everywhere, so you're not missing much if you skip MIT.

I will say though, the MIT campus is right by the river and has a serene feeling. Are you able to visit the place, and do you like the idea of being there for the next 4 years? If you have a mental health issue like seasonal affective disorder, you'll be miserable at MIT due to the geography, and no amount of justifying a bad location will save you.

Having some extra money means you can afford to study abroad. Picking up a new language may become your passion.

Either way, I don't think there's a wrong choice. You'll have to weigh and rank your desires accordingly.

Meanwhile I love the word "deliverable." Sometimes it's hard to think of an umbrella word for all the things you produce. It can be anything from a stack of pamphlets coming hot off the printing press, or those pin buttons that are given away during fundraisers but no one wears, or those custom printed stickers, or those table menu trifolds, or a laminated portfolio that you deliver to a client.

Not OP but I also looked into it and agree: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnint.2019.0001...

Technical writer looking for contract or part time opportunities

Location: UTC-5 (NYC)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies: Elbow grease

Résumé/CV: https://ceruulean.github.io/cvage/

Email: diana.asap(at)gmail.com

Of interest: open access, blockchain

I think it's helpful to distinguish between "authors" and "publishers." We can see this play out in the traditional publishing industry.

Authors are supposed to submit a manuscript with the least amount of formatting. Images are given in a separate folder and only referenced in the manuscript, maybe with a couple notes on alignment. Markdown precisely forces the author to follow this contract. Just write the content and organize the chapters.

Ultimately it's the publishing house's job to format and create the final rendition, insert and design the fancy tables that you see in, for example, a chemistry textbook. In the corporate world, their publishing houses are called technical writers/content strategy/learning development/marketing departments.

So the idea of not using Markdown is both right and wrong. It's totally unfair to expect contributors and authors to understand everything about formatting and publishing. But, Markdown is only the first step in an entire toolchain. If people cannot tell what part of the process they fall on (authoring vs publishing) then it's going to be confusing.

Here's a Pocket article explaining it: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-irs-already-has-all-y...

Consequently, of the more than 100 million taxpayers eligible for free help, 35% end up paying for tax preparation and 60% never even visit the free websites. Instead of 70% of Americans receiving free tax preparation, commercial companies whittled that percentage down to 3%.

BTW the US Treasury has been trying to get corporations to comply for years (since 2009). Here's a link to their report: https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2020reports/2020...

A relevant essay: "No More Creepy Crawlies" by Anthony Pearce

https://reckoning.press/no-more-creepy-crawlies/

The magazine also has a lot of cli-fi stories posted for free, so I recommend checking it out.

I think it's really funny that fantasy and DnD artists draw taverns as spacious inns with tons of rooms, when in reality most ancient people were sleeping together in the same room, peeing together in the same bathroom, and generally never alone except if you had the money to afford such a luxury, or you gave yourself alone time by running off into the forest.

According to this article, if you get accidentally declared dead in the US, companies and institutions make their own copies of the death records and they aren't kept in sync with the governments. So even after you become alive again, at any moment, someone might switch the bit on their database, and you become dead to few companies again.

https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/01/how-exactly...

Kind of interesting how this HN post shows that transparency is important, because fixing an error like erroneous death in other countries isn't as bad as it is in the US.

Anyway I ended up writing about it as a use case for crypto, because the blockchain part of a transparent ledger is important for being a companion to the public memory: your birth, your marriage, your relationships with relatives, and your death.

https://www.dyingtowrite.com/posts/2021/33_crypto-isnt-what-...

For prep work, you can store pizza dough as little balls, or pre-flatten them and put them on racks, freezing many more pizza doughs than bread doughs. Preparing a pizza crust is as easy as using a press, but to make consistent bread you need a complicated machine that's annoying to clean. Bread also needs a proofer if you're serious about mass producing it, hence needing more space. Otherwise you can enjoy handcrafting your bread and cultivating yeast, which is another art and science all to itself.

While less pizzas fit in a pizza oven than bread may fit in a bread oven, it's easier to prepare pizzas, easier to hire for, and people pay more for them.

Yeah, everyone conveniently forgets what is the second sin of Adam from the Bible (if they're subscribed to that belief system)

This is awesome. I wished they taught something like this in high school instead of God knows what's being taught nowadays.

First of all, there's plenty of whores if you think sex is a human right. Prostitution is the oldest profession. If we normalize sex work, people can meet demand without getting shamed. Who's trying to do that? Mostly feminists if you ask me.

Monero is so underrrated. It's always "bitcoin this, bitcoin that" as if that's the only currency which matters.

For now, since fiat onramps are pretty obvious, people report their taxes like normal. Record each transaction until it's good enough, give or take some under-the-table cash.

Here's an interesting project that's trying to encourage crypto adoption: https://cryptoforthehomeless.org/

There's a time and place for visuals. Geometry is a form of visual math, but how do you "visualize" models that go beyond the 3rd dimension...?

For most people, trigonometry is enough to build stuff with. And for many ideas, a diagram communicates better than talking or writing it into an excel sheet.

How is email more accessible than Usenet? Grandma isn't doing SMTP

Just because your friend misunderstood and jumped on a bandwagon doesn't mean that they're wrong. They have the right idea. Even non-technical people understand that cryptocurrency can solve real problems. However, not all implementations will be executed properly. Any new technology will have more failures than successes, and nobody can say which ones will come out on top until after hindsight. It's risky, it's business.

The article makes good points about how stories are the best way to hold people's attention. The beginning advice about not explaining the history is a little unclear. I think it would be better to say "stick to a central topic and don't go off on tangents, unless you are going to relate them back to the central topic." What if I am interested in the history of the washing machine or the chemistry of detergent? There isn't just one type of explanation. What's the difference between tutorial instructions and conceptual coverage?

Now this is why I don't feel like buying new hardware

Bitcoin is a 1.0, a beta version that caught on. Anybody who knows better wouldn't use Bitcoin as money, that's true. They've moved on to Monero.

It can't be much worse than relatives claiming you as dead so they can have your house, and then every government system denies you any service because you're "dead"

It's inertia. Why would an "account" be any different from a "wallet?" Or an "secret key" from "routing number?"

And yeah the UX is not quite there yet. It gets better depending on the project. Crypto.com for example has a partnership with Visa and lets you have a prepaid card tied to your portfolio. But their app is centralized and there's a lot of shiny terms and if you don't have a friend or good resources to learn, most people give up quickly. Just like how kids need to be taught financial literacy, it's not like we learned how to use credit cards out of the blue.

And since crypto is volatile, it has the same "oh I don't touch stock market stuff because I always lose money" and people think crypto overall is a scam not worth the hassle.

You don't invest your life savings, just enough to where you can let it sit. Convert small increments to fiat when it's high, or purchase using crypto directly.

I think there was a study that showed psychopaths don't get addicted to drugs. Something something brain reward centers something. Or maybe it's anecdotal, a drug dealer's one customer who's "like a machine" and can quit whenever he wants.

I can't remember where I heard about this, but isn't there some kind of "surgeon model" where you have one star player do the majority of work, and everyone else is support staff? It's a pattern that emerges, and not a bad thing to encourage, as long as it's acknowledged. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. But in college, usually everyone has to be graded equally (akin to everyone being paid equally). Administrative and support work is still important, because without it, a surgery or a project won't succeed. Kinda like the 10x dev thing, but for group dynamics in general.

Write good, unbloated code that doesn't wear out parts faster, so that people don't feel like throwing away their perfectly fine laptops because it's gotten "too slow"

I have a writing blog.

https://www.dyingtowrite.com/

You want to tip people on Twitter with BTC and have your address exposed to everyone? You want people to be able to trace how much you have in that wallet? Why not let people see the transactions going through your checking account? You got nothing to hide, right?

I hope that attitude changes. Buying new hardware every 5 years should not be the norm.

I remember reading that the Zodiac Killer's cryptic messages were decoded by private citizens. Seems more niche/enthusiast but hey.