locrelite's comments

Regulating task memory to spatial memory.

If I have to pick up six things at the grocery store, three at the drug store, and tell two things to the vet, I visualize picking each thing up, or having each conversation with as much visual context as I can muster. Maybe mapping a route through a familiar store, or picturing the phone on the vet desk while ticking off whatever damn things my idiot cat threw up that morning.

Then I just have to remember to go to three places. It's moderately recursive too: map another route from an unusual subway stop, all I have to remember is to get out at that stop on the way home from work, and the rest just comes to me as I arrive at each location.

Like Kickstarter almost ready or Python 3 almost ready?

George Clooney doesn't exactly phone it in, but we've seen this Act 1 before, and the plot eventually, and mercifully, ends on an unlikely emotional beat that neither satisfies nor offends his uncritical fans. 4/10.

1) Find context to make this statement on reddit. 2) PM me. 3) Enjoy gold.

<Pedantry>Doesn't take into account neck deformation when string tension changes.</Pedantry>

Diagnosed, strapped to a gurney, and popped in the system for a couple of months. It was almost two decades ago, I'm fine. But having seen and thought most of the things people describe in these experiences, I find post facto attempts to elevate them (usually based on a few coincidences) wishful thinking.

Already wrote my own, I'm covered.

Been there.

I refer to it as "losing my fucking mind" but each to his own.

Right?

Oh, don't get me wrong, I want to live to 4398 at the very least. But us 30-somethings mark the age our parents were when we moved out as the point when we would stop having to explain ourselves to anyone because we had ostensibly done our job.

Basically, I'm an alcoholic. I'm in my mid 30s. I started drinking when I was told I couldn't smoke pot anymore, and kept at it after a number of friends committed suicide and a few others died of cancer.

The thing is, when I am drinking, I can manage the pain of things that will never be okay, even though I must endure them. I don't advocate alcohol, but waking up screaming every morning isn't always an option. And I get to say "basically an alcoholic" because that's a euphemism for "functional alcoholic" which is a euphemism for "alcoholic," but because I can still do my job around people in their 20s, nobody complains, so I don't have to begin the regime of psychoactive drugs that don't guarantee any less liver damage than the alcohol. I can only hope I make it to my 50s, and in my 50s, I will not give one thought to what anyone thinks, because making it to 50 means I survived remembering my dead loved ones for 30 years, and that's good enough.

It sounds like it's not an issue for your business if he's killing code three sheets to Moby Dick and you can't spare a salaried employee to walk him home. If you care for him, as my family cares for me, you will do what they do, and say, "Are you okay? I wondered because you're drinking a lot," and he might say, "No, I'll never be okay, but if it's a problem I can work on it." Or he might say, "Yeah, I'm fine," even though he's not. Point is it doesn't sound like it's a professional issue, since you haven't fired him for drinking on the job, so his ability to code is a moot point. The question is not "How do I approach a talented employee who seems superhumanly talented when he's drunk but then we have to use unpaid company resources to manage him after hours?" The question is "How do I approach someone managing pain in a potentially long-term and self-destructive way?"

And that's not an HN question.

This is like the third time I've been accused of being fictional.

Just a brief note: bot sophistication is off the hook. I worked at an ad network where one of the clients demanded we prove that the mouse had moved prior to "clicking" on one of their ads. No problem, we said, and most of the traffic passed the test. The traffic had referrers, legit user agents, javascript, and they were triggering the mousemove and click events. Out of curiosity, we sent a fraction of traffic to a test page, wherein the actual page was displayed in a full window iframe, then blocked access until the user clicked, and tracked their mouse movements. Easy enough; annoying for a user, but not a deal breaker for most.

The user movement maps we ended up with were straight lines of randomly spaced dots with sudden acute corners. A human could not replicate the pattern with a ruler and a pen pad, and we certainly didn't expect 90% of our human users going for that client's sites to be sitting around with rulers and pen pads drawing lines of randomly spaced dots. We checked the testing code and ran a dozen tests, and we couldn't figure out how a human could replicate it on any browsing device. Our conclusion is that somebody bothered to program a bot that would replicate mouse movement and we accidentally broke it by blocking programmatic access to the page, so it couldn't find a link to click and went crazy.

agha.st - no idea, just wanted to snap it up pleasedontcall.us - IT sob stories 55-0.org - eventually a simple site for gay rights awareness, after the Argentina 55 to 0 vote in favor of the Gender Identity Law (it's a progressive law; I know it sounds like it could be either).