Thanks, my mistake. I’ve corrected it. In my initial draft, I wanted to convey a sense of "enduring innovation" so I used that term symbolically as a placeholder. It went right past me during the final edits.
Maybe it's the youth in me, but I wholly and fully agree with PG here, and I strive to live by it. However, there's another fascinating school of thought that I read about back when I was an undergrad. It comes from Richard Muller, who used to be quite active on Quora back in the day:
> “Follow your passion” or the similar “Follow your dreams.” I’ve seen this advice lead people into paths in which they could not have productive lives or support themselves or families.
> With this advice, many kids will choose to become professional athletes, and then fail. My daughter (Elizabeth Muller) once wanted to become a professional dancer. I think she is very glad now that she instead went to UC San Diego, majored in math and literature, and got a masters degree in international management. (She is now the CEO of our non-profit BerkeleyEarth.org.) One of her friends, in contrast, decided to become a professional bicycle racer (encouraged by her parents) and she now supports herself by selling and repairing bicycles. Nothing wrong with that, but I don’t think it was what she envisioned when she took this career path.
> I suggest to children that before they set out on a career path, they consider what will happen if they are the 1000th best in the field. If your field is boxing, you will either be completely out of work, be a sparring partner, or (if you are lucky) be running your own gym. (Or, maybe, you’ll be an enforcer for some mob.) If you are a ballet dancer, it is unlikely that you will be performing; you will probably be teaching children how to dance ballet. If your field is physics or math, you will have very good income, have the respect of your neighbors (maybe they’ll think you are a genius), and a good diverse and productive life.
> I suggest instead that you teach children to try to plan their future lives, to design their futures. They should approach it as they would a challenging homework problem. Learn more about possible careers, and what they are like. Don’t choose too early, since many careers (running Berkeley Earth?) are not obvious to a youngster. Get a broad education, and do a good job at it. Study hard and learn. Get familiar with the world. Beware of childhood passions; they are based on a limited experience, and may not be a good choice for a career.
Does a bike shop owner make comparable money to an EE in a large company? How about medical insurance for themselves and the family? As a bike shop owner, what do you do when a customer brings clearly a stolen bike?
It's nice to theorize about an idyllic life if you only think about the idyllic surface of it, from inside of a less idyllic but better-off life.
Along similar lines, I never really pictured what being a software engineer would be like.
I like solving problems and working with smart people, but sitting inside all day at a computer just isn’t for me.
Sunny outside? Sit inside all day.
Snowing? Sit inside.
Stunning fall colours? Sit inside.
After a few years I had to stop. That is not the life I wanted. Now I adventure around the world, write books and sell stories freelance to magazines. I have way less money, and I am way happier.
Could you elaborate more on what it is you do? I'm a current college student studying math. I enjoy what I study a lot, but don't think I could cut it as a mathematician. At the end of the day, I don't care much for money on its own, but I do accept that it is needed to enjoy the true freedom and enjoyment of life you describe. But, as such, I've had to look at jobs that seem kind of bleak to me, but do pay nicely like software engineering(I know that there are some very very interesting software engineering positions, but these are far and few and I'm personally not interested in AI). If I could skip this intermediate step, that would be awesome, so naturally I'm really curious what you do/how you started?
After working for a few years as a software engineer I just didn’t want to sit inside for my life.
So I saved for two years, then quit and spent two years driving from Alaska to Argentina. Hiking, camping, exploring. Basically doing whatever I wanted everyday. It was incredible adventure and changed my life. I started really thinking about how I could make that my life.
A few years later I spent three years driving right around Africa, then later 18 months exploring all the wild parts of Australia. I’m in Iceland for 3 months now, heading to Europe and beyond soon.
Once you leave the rat race you meet all kinds of people living similar lives of adventure. See all of these people I bumped into on the west coast of Africa [1]
These days I sell articles and photos to adventure magazines about what I’m doing, I’ve self-published a few books (more on the way), I have a YouTube channel, I speak at events and shows teaching people how do to what I’ve done. I’ll probably soon have some audio books, an online store and maybe some online courses.
Rather than doing one big thing to support my life that takes too much time I do a bunch of little things.
I am my own boss. I set my own hours, I work as little as possible to live the life I want to live. As I said I have way less money, but I decided a long time ago I don’t want more money, I want more time to do the things I want to do in my life.
Lots of people will tell you it’s not possible or that I must have a trust fund. They just don’t know what they’re talking about because it’s a life that scares them.
You absolutely can if you want, and you’ll meet many thousands of people doing the same.
> One of her friends, in contrast, decided to become a professional bicycle racer (encouraged by her parents) and she now supports herself by selling and repairing bicycles. Nothing wrong with that, but I don’t think it was what she envisioned when she took this career path.
This can happen even if you're literally #1 in the world at one point. Floyd Landis now runs a bicycle shop.
That PDF doesn't look like the source for an operating system, but rather a 2 pass compiler. There are references to data types (including Complex) on p.6 and various hand written comments, such as "procedure" on p.2 and "return to pass 2" on p.19. The following page looks like a lexer table and might be the reserved words. Then on line 1658 (lost track of page #) "const expression, like (2^40-1) are evaluated at compile time". Based on how the later comments are written, I think they were added by someone trying to understand the compiler.
Do you think Google is worried about a link exodus if something happens to the Internet Archive (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41447758)? I started maintaining a blog and a corresponding link log in 2019, and I've already seen links disappearing, relying on the Wayback Machine for them. I've found scanned versions of obscure magazines and research papers on the IA that are impossible to find anywhere else on the web. If they do end up shutting down, I am worried that the exodus is going to be real. I'm not sure what the contingency plan is.
From what I've seen of the people involved with IA and the related communities, I feel confident that in the very unlikely case of IA having to shut down, the data would be backed up elsewhere in its entirety.
Fascinating. I am curious, what other games do you all think this could be extended to and still remains fun? Connect Four seems like a natural extension to me. I'd love to see some of these dynamics in Battleship.
I have a funny little habit that probably stems from a certain degree of paranoia when working on a decent-sized change. I like to keep a local patch of it, as follows: "git diff > works.patch"
Later on, you can apply it if necessary with "git apply works.patch".
You could use stash for just that use case (even multiple times to make multiple "patches").
For a more robuts method, you could also just commit (without pushing of course). Then, you can do "git reset --hard HEAD~1", and you have a pre-patch env ready for more work. When you need to re-do your commit, you can check reflog to get the ID.
Either way is, to me, an easier way to achieve the same result as patches.
Yes, it can be nice as an archival thing. Keep a directory filled with experimental patches you made to certain parts of your code. Maybe branches are better for certain use cases.
I use stash too, but for different purposes. For instance, when I'd like to quickly change branches to fix a bug/issue and then come back to my stuff. Sometimes, I use stash for resolving potentially complicated pre-commit merges as well.
