skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The kind of understanding and appreciation you're talking about, where you "see" the math, can be hard to get to. For me I never found it until I started doing math in applied contexts such as physics or computer science.

My "eureka" moment was in a physics course where we were looking at the derivation of the differential equation for a damped harmonic oscillator. One moment the equation was something I had seen many times and knew how to solve problems with; the next, something "clicked" and I understood it, where the terms came from, why it all made sense, in a way that's hard to describe. Visualizing the oscillator and knowing the equation were the same thing in a weird way.

After that, and a couple more similar moments, I found it much much easier to understand and appreciate not only applied math but also purer concepts.
Take this as an opportunity to know yourself and how to hack yourself. You're at the front door right now; your agitation says that.

I suffer from a lot of the same problems -- ultimately, that feeling that you're phoning it in, and that you can't get yourself to stop doing it. Oh, BTW, I'm about 20 years your senior.

I have not entirely conquered this, but I understand myself a lot better than I did before I started trying. You can, too -- understand why it is you behave this way, and who this "other self" is that seems to be in control.

In all likelihood, the root of your problem is fear. It's the cause of many peoples' problems, and certainly is mine. You're probably afraid of failure, afraid of somehow breaking your in-born talent. These are needless fears, but I've got them, and I know how real they seem. One tool that has helped me identify my fears is Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers. The book is good, the audio is even better. She's a PhD, a psychologist who's spent her career figuring out how to overcome fear.

Another suggestion: start a light exercise program. Don't attempt anything heroic. Just a daily (six days per week) fast walk for 25 minutes will do. It's not just about losing weight -- in fact, that would just be a by-product. The main reason is that as a human being, you were born to run. Your mind will be healthier if you exercise your body, regularly. A great book on the science of this is Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, by John Ratey. The last 20 years of research in this area have shown an amazing connection.

Others here can help you with your long-term goals: create great things. I can't give much useful advice in that area, yet. What's important, though, is that you grow into self-awareness, in order to gain control over what I believe is probably a low-grade depression -- I'm not a psychologist, but I think I know it when I see it.

Where the mind goes, the body will follow. Conversely, where the body goes, the mind will follow. If you start behaving like someone who feels better than you do, you'll start feeling better. Your body can make your mind improve, and your mind can make your body improve. Trying a bit of both.
Maybe there is that link you assert. I'm not sure tho, what you are saying... I do enjoy the nature of getting more value for work, and I have a passing interest in entrepreneurship, in that it usually involves an interesting challenge. I am however, very unmotivated by money (and value as measured by it) as an end.

To me money is merely a means. The real goals are:

* Interesting problems
* Interesting people interactions
* adventures
* access to cool toys/equipment (and the actual need for it)
* changing environment

Money just pays the bills and puts food on the table. I personally have a long history of maximizing the points above (the money has been good enough to not be a problem too :)). Sure, I could work real hard, and get the money to enable the rest, but the net money and benefits would probably be the same, but for more work. Instead I build a way to get my goals into my environment.

Does this match what you were saying?
Maybe if enough people ask? Or the product is generally popular enough?

The iPod and the iPhone are only so popular because they embraced PC in all its ... glory. Hopefully they're already working on this.
Depression is not an all-or-nothing thing -- you can feel better in the morning vs. evening, or vice versa. Early to mid 20s is where conditions like bipolar (I or II) manifest themselves.

It's not uncommon for a situational event (like the ending of a relationship, transition from student to the working world) to trigger depression, especially when you're already under stress.

You don't mention anything about your day job, other than working as a developer at a Fortune 500 company. Could it be you are working at that job because you feel it is the "right" thing to do, rather than what you want to do? Maybe you should start looking for different work that is more in line with what you like to do. That's also a good way to see a salary increase -- in this economy it's not at all unusual to go 3 years without a salary increase. I'm in the same boat there.

In any event, keep seeing your therapist and perhaps even get a second opinion from another psychiatrist. If you are suffering from depression, you won't be able to "man up" or "try harder," or focus, because your body won't let you.
I am going to be brutally honest here. This seems to be a filler article. It is very light on content, and the point it pushes isn't exactly very well supported.

Saying "banks need IT reform", obviously raises questions. Why? How? What is the end game? This article fails to answer any questions raised adequately.
No, I think looking at Facebook's numbers, figuring roughly 2 pageviews/server, and then looking at reddits numbers (at roughly 10 pageviews/server) and saying "reddit's setup seems reasonable" makes it a good comparison. It's all just hand waving, but I don't mind using that comparison to put reddit's numbers in perspective.
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It is an expensive device - on the face of it, rather more so than a shiny new iPhone 4, and it doesn't even come with a free case.

+1 for taking a cheap shot at Apple.
It's pretty interesting to see Gamestop do this deal. In the industry, the consensus seems to be that in 5-8 years Gamestop is going to get killed as we move towards digital distribution platforms.

So the question is, what do you do in the meantime? I don't think keeping brick and mortar stores around but changing the revenue mix will make a big difference. There isn't anything left to really change to. Hollywood Video had some success with Game Crazy (a Gamestop competitor). But now the gaming biz is set to go away too.

I see it as two options:

A. Go out and do deals (Gamestop is debt free and has hundreds of millions in cash) -- Gamestop appears to be doing this with the Kongregate deal

B. Start releasing cash back via dividends and buybacks. Game Group in the UK (similar to Gamestop) pays out a big 7% dividend.

I'm interested in seeing which one ultimately works out. Gamestop could make (A) work, but only if they do more deals, make the right hires, and give them the kind of autonomy and support that is needed to build out an entirely new business from within a dying one.
I agree with a lot of these responses. If you're on a 50 mile hike, focus on the end point and you will be constantly discouraged. Focus on the next step, the next viewpoint, and the journey, and you will enjoy yourself and get there in no time.

Learn to meditate and don't watch tv. Take fish oil, eat healthy, get exercise, ....
I wonder:

* If it will be Inkwell compatible someday if not now: http://www.apple.com/accessibility/macosx/physical.html

* If it will BT pair with iPhone like the BT keyboard.
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When mouse/trackpad dies, you don't want to stop working for 2 hours until internal battery charges.

AA batteries are cheap and common, so people will have spares to swap.

OTOH laptop batteries are much more expensive and non-standard, so less users are going to have spares. It makes sense to cater to majority of users who never buy & carry extra battery.
Does anyone know if this will have some sort of way to trigger a "middle click", like when one clicks on the scroll wheel? As far as I've seen with Apple mice, they've never had support for middle click.
He envisions a bunch of languages in the future, all of which are similar enough to use the exact same data model? Surely, if we really need different languages, they will be different enough to have different data models, and an encoding of the data from one language will be required for interoperability. For example, a dynamic language can be encoded into a more static language by passing along extra meta-data. And BTW, this has performance benefits over his idea of making the underlying VM as dynamic as the lowest common denominator language. Good luck with that idea if you have IO in your language stack.

I also disagree with the apparently widely held belief that we really need to have many different full languages in use. Such a state of affairs may be useful for competition, but the overhead of interoperability hurts productivity. It's analogous to the situation with Buffalo. Here, let me switch to Navajo to make the analogy, since it has better words for Buffalo. BIH TA-ZI-KWA-I-BE-KA-DI COH-NAI-ALI-BAHN-SI ALTH-AH-A-TEH TKAL-CLA-YI-YAH.
Read this and then http://shareable.net/blog/the-guy-who-worked-for-money and then come back and let us know what the future looks like.
EVA is an example of an airline that I would specifically choose due to quality, where I normally optimize based on price because I sleep the entire flight.

They have a lot of direct flights. From Toronto-Taipei that means the difference between a 20+ hour flight and having to get off the plane and a 15 hour flight. They specifically offer many direct flights.

Their planes are new, spacious and have high quality entertainment systems.

They have the premium class you mention with larger seats.

They have these infant sections where a soft crib hangs off the wall. That was amazing. I had two babies in the rows right in front of me and I didn't hear a single noise from them the entire flight. They easily slept and then during turbulence they were standing up playing with toys.

Anyways, a few airlines can go the extra mile and make me specifically choose them. But for the majority of flights, I am going completely on cost.
Scientifically, that seems to be a tough question to answer. But it's probably better if your body makes it because it will be more easily usable. You only need 15 mins of direct sun exposure to produce more than enough for your daily requirements. The problem is my body has stopped producing Vitamin D. We've tried kick starting the system with the 50,000 IU dose and it barely moved my levels.

Of course, the sun is also free (unless you worry that 15 mins/day can cause cancer) while if you buy supplements you'd want the high quality ones and preferably in a fatty medium for easier absorption. The D3 form is more easily converted by the body into an active form.
You can't compare content sites to aggregators. Even if you could, the Gawker properties have really good demographics (as far as advertisers are concerned).
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I realized that people who stand around the window watching the construction workers are not actually doing anything useful

That's an interesting point of view. Certainly in office situations some of the most useful and enlightening conversations I have happen in a "water cooler" type setting. Cigarette break perhaps. Indeed, when I gave up smoking, I changed to chewing gum in the smoking area. The people who meet in random places spark new ideas, bring parts of a business (or community) together who ordinarily would have no reason to meet.

I certainly hear your point about addictiveness of comment ratings, but I think the value of randomly mediated conversation is huge. (As an aside, I started putting together a business presentation on how watching who talks to each other on a smoke break, water cooler run, etc. has valuable lessons for where communication lines may be missing in your organisation. Not always, sure, but there's hints there)
Speaking from personal experience, we found out our daughter was vitamin D deficient about a year ago, and she has subsequently been diagnosed with Type-1 Diabetes, as well as celiac disease. If it's possible that vitamin D deficiency and Type-1 Diabetes (and other autoimmune disorders) are linked, then I urge everyone to supplement their and their children's diets.
You Have 10 Seconds
All the other professions are high-risk and require significant physical strength. Men are generally more comfortable with high-risk, high-reward jobs, and have a physical strength advantage over women.

Computer Science is not high-risk and does not require significant physical strength.
I wonder why it is that people are so hesitant to simply accept the fact that men and women are fundamentally different. Is it so offensive to say that most women choose not to enter CS programs because females have different interests than males?

I think we all see this in our daily lives. I haven't conducted any scientific studies, but few women I know are interested in the internal functioning of things as compared to men.

If a female did show interest in learning how computers work, and somebody told her that she's not going to be as good as a male, then there would be something to complain about.
Pick one thing you want to accomplish and fucking do it. Stop being a wuss.

I'm not trying to be a jerk by phrasing it that way, I just feel like you need to be tougher on yourself to reach your goals.
I don't have anything useful to add what others have not said before, but this I deeply recognize:

"It's not enough for me to just exist. I feel a deep desire to build, to create, to learn, to teach, and as the weeks and months drag by with no discernible progress made on many of these fronts, my agitation grows."

I suggest you read Symposium by Plato, especially the part where Socrates has his word. Although it was only a small part of the many things that helped me get over this, it is one of the most concrete things I can suggest.
And I strongly suspect that you actually don't know what you're talking about. (How far did you get in math?)
I used to get symptoms associated with Seasonal Affective Disorder every winter. Now for two winters straight the Vitamin D supplements have minimized those symptoms.
I'm going to play devil's advocate and say that you should listen to your teachers.

I've seen plenty of students "diagnose" themselves, only to neither mindlessly crunch questions nor appreciate the beauty of mathematics.
thanks for the idea - we will be there and set up our homebase at Mr. Glänzer's HQ
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we had some good talks here but we will resheudle the most meetings to the next time in UK
How do you right-click?
If there was ever a field where the current, male dominated, population wanted women in it, it's CS. I've never met a male CS person that wasn't genuinely happy to have a woman in the room doing CS as well.

I think the issues of men in CS relate more to it being a uniquely problem solving discipline, not prone to the kind of social interactions women want it to be. (I know I'm at risk of stereotyping here, but I think the concept is valid).

I've met some really fine women Computer Scientists, and I never saw or heard from them that they'd ever been materially discriminated against for being female. Anecdotal I'm sure, here's another. My group of college friends all formed out of people in the CS program at my school. We were pretty evenly split along male/female lines. Now, many years later, of our group, none of the women have stayed in pure CS (or some branch like InfoSec), opting to go work in different fields, like requirements management, or managing personnel doing CS type work. When asked why they left? All of them say that the relentless focus on pure problem solving eventually just wore them down and that they craved more human interaction. Sitting in cubes all day hacking out code just wasn't what they wanted to do with their life.

Now, this kind of experience may not be true everywhere, I'm sure there are places where there is rampant sexism. But if a woman wants to do CS, she's more than welcome to do it, and based on my experience, barriers to her presence in the field will not be because of sexism. Similarly, you see lots of thinking about "why so few women in CS?" but you don't see any for construction/garbage handling/music composition/long-haul truck driving/<insert list of traditionally male dominated fields>.

I think if you really want to understand the CS question, you have to understand the others. For some of the fields, it's pretty easy to chalk it up to the physical side of the job. But why so few women in music composition? There are absurdly few women in any kind of music composition. I don't mean "song writing" as in lyrics -- there's tons of women crooners. I mean putting notes on a page, or spinning and beat matching discs, or whatever. The demands of the profession are really no different than CS, yet I think representation is very similar.
thx we try to set up a meeting - lets see if it works :)
I love how ridiculous this statement is. Someone owns a domain name and then another person creates a company and files for a trademark and the original person is the squatter. Violating their intellectual property. I call bullshit.

To get that domain through UDRP they shouldn't stand a chance if registration date of the domain is before trademark or use. It couldn't be registered in bad faith no matter what they were using it for. Of course, there are all sorts of terrible judges on UDRP panels and it's like russian roulette.
If you consider high speed rail as a replacement for air travel, local transport is actually a smaller issue than with air travel. Airports are usually far away from city centers, whereas train stations are located in city centers, where there is a higher probability of an established local transport system.
The iPod didn't support Windows when it was released. Maybe Apple are doing the same thing here; I'm sure by not supporting Windows, they're able to get a better product out much quicker.
I guess you don't live in Scotland. We'd call 5 to 10 minutes of sun 2 or 3 times a week a heatwave.
Actually, there's a fairly hefty argument that fighting terrorism motivates and recruits terrorists, bolstering the "us vs them" narrative of terrorist leaders, radicalizes communities, and generally plays into their hands.

Terrorism doesn't work nearly as well if terrorist acts are treated as crimes rather than war offensives. Terrorism works by provoking a reaction out of proportion to the initial attack, which acts as a force multiplier for radicals, who are almost always tiny minorities in whatever country or society ends up being attacked in revenge.

As I understand it, Al Qaida was initially motivated by its opposition to the ruling Saudi family of Arabia, who have a close alliance with the US. By attacking the US with Saudi Arabian terrorists, they hoped to create doubt over that linkage, provoke an extreme reaction, radicalize the Muslim world, and thereby come closer to power.
Totally agree on the abandoning of goals (and the rest of your comment is also gold).

People here tend to be too goal oriented, and that's perfect when you have a goal that you want to attain in an area that you love working. But the truth is that it seems that having all the basic needs fulfilled you don't find enough attraction to the higher needs (in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs) that you have in mind. It probably is because the goals you've set aren't really the ones you crave for.

I was, more or less, like you, high twenties, nor happy neither sad, bored with everything. Now, mid thirties, I'm full of energy and will to live to the fullest with the things I love to do. What I did was to start doing activities after work, stuck with the ones I liked (longer the more I liked them) and discarded the ones I didn't like much.

Different martial arts, guitar playing, vegetarian dishes, ... I started to do whatever I felt the desire to do and could be done in a short course (3 months of 1 weekly hour). Until I found my passion (dancing). Now I devote most of my free time to it, I even have left WoW because I have no time for it.

Try things, in a short time scale (i.e.: 7D RPG, NaNoWriMo, weekend kayaking, ...) , and keep with what you have the most fun. Life is worth living, don't waste it all on external goals or in doing things because they will look good on your resumé (unless that's what you love to do, of course).
No middle click irked me for a while, but the two-finger tap, followed by a quick movement and single finger tap can be so quick and natural I don't notice this anymore.
I was wondering when Apple would get around to doing that. I want Apple's version of this - http://www.google.com/products/catalog?&cid=102343875510... - Keyboard + trackpoint/pad, and make an external usb keyboard out of it.
A priceless quote:
"Never in the history of man has a software developer said "I'm stuck doing Ruby for my day job but I'm really hoping to find a job in .NET or Java.""
Governments have to learn that obscurity is not the same as security just as much as the IT world had to come to terms with it.

You can't 'hide' stuff and assume that it won't come back to bite you any longer. So stuff that you could get away with and sweep under the rug in the past now has the nasty habit of surfacing.

Wikileaks does not threaten transparency at all, it - or its successor - will enable a society that will either simply act more responsible and will deal with living in this new nice glass house or there will be a series of scandals. The genie is as likely to go back in to the bottle as the file sharing one.

The public is getting a rare taste of what their government is up to and so far secret really does seem to equate with 'can't stand the light of day'.

If secret was only 'will hurt our society if known' then wikileaks wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
Aside from the part about "bitch", I agree with pretty much everything zackattack said. Key points:

1. On your second exposure, things will make MUCH more sense. It's just how I've found the mind works. The first time you read something, you're reaction is: what??? Come back to it in a few days and you feel more comfortable with it.

2. When I first started reading proofs, I felt so clueless as to _why_ they were doing the steps that they were. Basically, I felt like I was trying to scale a sheer cliff that was smooth as glass, with no handholds. I had no idea where to _start_ if I wanted to prove something. However, after reading a lot of proofs, you start to understand some tricks, concepts, and approaches on how to tackle them.

3. Going from concrete --> abstract (i.e. generalizing) is the way to go. As zackattack said, always try to work out cases in lower dimensions, or even "trivial" cases. After doing one or two of those, it's a lot easier to guess at the general form and verify that, than to derive the general form from the get-go. Also, doing the lower-dimension case will help you build _intuition_. Mathematics is all about formalizing intuition. The symbols and equations will often obscure that, but always try to understand the concept behind what the equation means. That will make most proofs much more amenable to understanding.
Is there any chance of this pairing with a non-Apple desktop? I'd dearly love to join in the multitouch trackpad fun, but my main workstations are Ubuntu.
Do you live on the beach?

Seriously, I can't think of any of my friends who regularly spend time outside with their shirt off each week, which I'm pretty sure is what is meant by "minimal clothing."
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Nudist colony FTW.
The problem with trackpads are that you have to move your hand - great for normal browsing I suppose, but it sucks when you are writing code or typing.