The paper on KSplice attached at the end is also really neat if you're into this stuff. It describes the design and implementation of a tool for applying binary patches based on normal source code diffs.
It's a bit extreme to say that it "exists for the sole purpose" of that, since if you look at the post categories, the Facebook-related material only encompasses a small portion of the total posts made.
Regardless of the author's bias towards Facebook, it's possible that they are telling the truth and wall posts that they "deleted" were suddenly made available again due to a flag being unset in the backend or something similar. This is something to keep in mind when creating content on Facebook.
Another Trello CLI which I thought was really neat is "wrk" (https://github.com/blangel/wrk). It abbreviates the output from its commands into shortcut tags, which makes chaining operations together pretty fluid.
The acknowledging and showing imperfection part is very difficult for me, not for my family, who have been very supportive and understanding along the way.
I'm sincerely very grateful for all the advice. I wrote this out of frustration less so with my grades, despite the tone of the piece, and more so with the way I had been treating my friends as of late, in particular my girlfriend, because of my grades versus theirs. I have been a jerk to the ones that I love without reason, and that irritates me. I will definitely keep in mind what's been said here, though.
For what it is worth, I also do not believe that I suffer from depression. Although I am harsh on myself, and always have been harsh on myself, I have always managed to work through and overcome my fears, usually by venting like this, although until now I did it privately.
I also don't think that I have ADD, since there are stretches of time where I can focus intensely, such as at hackathons or when I'm more relaxed over school.
Returning to my computer after posting this was really a shock, I didn't expect this much of a response to what I had initially perceived as an immature outburst. Thank you all so much.
ADD doesn't mean you can't focus. It just means you usually only focus on things that interest you. At least, until they no longer hold your interest.
There is a certain anxiety that comes when you know you have to do something you really don't want to do. For example, a class holds no interest, you know what needs to be done but you have no inclination to do it, so you don't. Besides you can always do it later and later sounds great. The deadline draws near and you must complete tasks (final projects, prepare for the exam, etc) or risk taking the class over again. You know you need to perform but you just can't bring yourself to do it. The anxiety of missing the deadline sets in and the thought of doing something over again that you detested doing in the first place begins to eat away at you. The tasks really aren't all that difficult or time-consuming. The real barrier to success is just you and your own stubborn will. Now there's anguish from the self-inflicted pain. Then you get depressed because you realize that you did this to yourself.
If they are true friends, they will forgive you for your behavior. An apology will probably help smooth over any discord that you might have prepared. After that, don't worry about what you've done in the past: you can't change it, all you can do is change how you move forward.
Thank you for posting this. It was an eye-opening read, and hit pretty close to home.
Your experience resonated with my first year of college (~12 years ago). I came from a relatively small pond, and found myself similarly outclassed when I got to college.
What I read in your story is that you are attributing the success of others and your failure to intrinsic qualities in them and yourself. This is a bad mindset; from this point of view at best your successes are realizations of a predetermined destiny, and at worst every failure is a personal reflection on you. In this worldview, it is emotionally safer to not try at all, and to pin your failures on a lack of interest or lack of effort. In the long run this is an incredibly destructive way to think, as you never accumulate the experience necessary to ultimately succeed.
You wrote:
"The students who obtain top grades in classes have an ability to focus like no other... It was an insult for me to think that I was ever anything like them"
It is possible that some rare people possess this ability from birth. Most of us have had to learn it. There is a way to gain this skill, and that way is by trying, failing, then trying again.
By your own account, you have not been trying until very recently. You should not expect to succeed on your first attempt or perform at the level of individuals that have been working at it for years. The good news is that your failure is not a reflection of anything intrinsic to your being, it is a reflection on the way people learn good study skills and work habits.
It sounds like you are arriving at this conclusion on your own, and I strongly encourage you to adopt a learning mindset where intelligence and achievement are things gained through practice and gradual improvement rather than characteristics engrained from birth.
There are good studies on the value of this mindset from the field of developmental psychology. A quick scan of the literature turns up a few. I didn't look very hard here, but you may find them worth a quick scan and a starting point for further investigation:
Some of those are not available in their entirety on the public internet, though it sounds like you're at university and may have access to them through the campus network.
My closing advice is to stay focused on incremental achievement and do your best to learn from your failures. You are starting at a disadvantage, but you can close the gap with time and effort.
You did a great job summarizing those topics concisely, but I have some quibbles about the P and NP stuff:
1. NP isn't the set of problems that can't be solved in a polynomial amount of time, but rather the set of problems that can be solved non-deterministically in polynomial time. This distinction is important, since this means by definition that P is a subset of NP, and furthermore means that uncomputable problems such as the Halting Problem do not belong in NP.
2. Your definitions for NP-completeness seem mixed up -- the polytime reduction property you're mentioning is the definition of an NP-hard problem, and you've said it backwards. If a problem is NP-hard, every problem in NP can be reduced to it in polynomial time (i.e. it is just as "hard" as every problem in NP). NP-completeness requires in addition to this the property that the problem itself is in NP. For example, although the Halting Problem is NP-hard, it is not NP-complete, since it is not in NP. NP-hardness of a problem can be shown by polytime reducing any NP-complete problem to it, since any problem in NP can be polytime reduced to the NP-complete problem.
Disclaimer: Stack Exchange moderator(mind you, on one of the other sites, not SO).
The main reason this was closed is because determining what or what does not constitute a hidden feature is highly subjective. Depending on the audience, some features that are considered common knowledge could be considered hidden features. We generally want to focus on the domain of questions that have solid, objective answers, or rather, that solve a clear problem that people have, whereas this question is more focused on trivia.
Furthermore, "List of <X>" questions, as we dub them, generally aren't well-suited for the Stack Exchange format, especially when the question is as popular as this one. Note that navigating the list without OP's quick-link breakdown is a pain because of the way that each individual's answer is separated.
I can accept that questions of this type are a little messy, but there's absolutely no need to apply real-world metaphors of messiness to the web. We don't need to clean these things up. They're fine just sitting there. We're not running out of bits.
I'm sure there's some personally type that experiences a deep need to organize and delete (and it's probably over-represented in the SO community), but that's all this is. I find it highly unlikely that deleting these posts is having any effect on the quality of new questions asked.
This isn't about running out of bits. The primary reason for creating Stack Overflow was to increase the signal/noise ratio for programming information on the Web. If we don't reduce the noise, then search engines have a harder time trying to find the signal. So in this sense, the metaphor of messiness does apply to the Web.
Also, this particular post is locked, not deleted. Google will still find it.
> If we don't reduce the noise, then search engines have a harder time trying to find the signal.
Let the search engines figure that out! It's their job!
Is there any evidence whatsoever that deleting/closing questions like these make SO a better place and improves the rate with which people can find answers through search engines?
Search engines tend to place Wikipedia high for almost every relevant query. This happens despite the amount of useless crap on Wikipedia. Hell, how often is Yahoo Answers on the first page of results. "Noise" won't stop you from getting listed if you've got enough page rank.
> If we don't reduce the noise, then search engines have a harder time trying to find the signal.
That's very nice, except much of the discussion here indicates clearly that deleted posts are not noise but are useful, valuable resources to the participants. So the "must reduce noise" explanation doesn't work here.
How has that been made clear at all? I've only seen one link to an actual question here, and that one wasn't deleted, but locked (by me) to prevent it from being deleted. Raise your standard of proof.
Yes, locked by you. You're not exactly an impartial observer in all this. You have comments throughout this thread attacking everyone who disagrees with you, and obstinately refusing to see anyone else's point of view. I don't know you, but based on your behavior, you've confirmed that the moderators are the problem.
I locked the question because it was deleted by community vote. If I hadn't undeleted and locked, it wouldn't be visible at all. Just proves you don't know what you're talking about. I haven't attacked anyone here.
What about a "Stack Exhume" site where all of the deleted stuff gets moved to? In terms of finding good answers to specific questions, they are noise, but it is actually interesting information in another context. It could be used to gauge the general interests of site users.
If they were to actually manage to take down the root DNS servers, then DNS lookups would fail, so for the average user who doesn't know what an IP address is, let alone what one to use or how to enter it, the internet would be taken down.
There are a large number of cavets to this exercise though.
Firstly, none of those nameservers are actually servers. The IPs point to dozens and dozens and dozens of machines each (keep in mind all of these are queried for most internet traffic in the world.) Billions upon billons of lookups preformed regularly. To overwhelm something of this magnitude would take a lot of effort.
Secondly, there is DNS caching done locally, at the local network level, and the ISP level.ISPs generally only cache for a few hours at most, usually much much less. They would have to have a sustained attack to outlive this caching in order to be effective.
Thirdly, if this even comes close to happening, some of the smartest people in the networking world will step forward to fix it (remember Slammer, or the network issues when the middle east cables were cut?)
Possible? Yep.
Plausible? It just depends on how much force they are putting behind it.
Not even a little bit, the whole thing was written by someone who has no idea how the internet works. Even if they somehow managed to get all 13 DNS root servers offline at once, most people would never notice since there are several layers of caching between you and the root DNS servers. The vast majority of DNS queries never hit the root servers.
The whole time I was reading this article I was thinking exactly that: with the amount of caching present, no one would even notice.
Considering the fact that they don't understand this basic principle, I doubt they'll come close to taking down 13 DNS servers at once. You can't easily DDoS them (I'm guessing its the only tool they have in their toolbelts).
Since the landing page point has been beaten to death, here are a few things I think about the app itself after messing around: the keyboard shortcuts are awesome and just make the application fun to use, but the amount of real screen estate being wasted is criminal. With the window maximized on a 1920x1080, the taskbar is crammed to the left side while the rest of my screen is simply a gaping gray hole.
On the task management side of things, I tried to add a task for both members of a team using "$ @all task description" but it seemed to just go to my shortlist. It was difficult to distinguish, as a result, between different shortlists and the team shortlist. I was also confused by the presence of a lightning bolt icon next to one of my tasks that I might have accidentally added when messing around with keyboard shortcuts. The icon seemed to have no clear meaning and there was no helpful tooltip waiting for me when I hovered over it. I also wish there was some way to rank my tasks based on their priority.
That being said, this actually looks really cool, and I'd love to support it as the kinks get worked out.
&! user here. Try it as a Fluid app if you have a Mac, then size the window to fit the app so it takes up the space of a slightly larger IM window. I actually zoom it out using Fluid so it takes up a little less space. &! sends Growl notifications for tasks and directed chat through Fluid which I like as it lets me background the app and still use it.
