thisisforyou's comments

Article mentions seizure of red mercury (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury) which suggests that either the writer is incredibly misinformed or this is an intentional disinfo piece.

I built a GraphQL API earlier this year. The learning curve can be a little awkward coming from REST, but once you get the hang of it GraphQL is super fun. Can't recommend it enough. Enjoy!

'The Woman in the Dunes' by Kobo Abe: Sometimes called the Japanese Kafka. Looks at a Japanese salaryman who is imprisoned in the bottom of a sand pit with a woman he does not know and is forced to remove the sand in order to protect a nearby village. Creepy and ripe for symbolic analysis.

Before that:

'Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps' by Robert Conquest. A nice, short overview of the Kolyma Region with a special focus on the especially brutal years of 1937-1938. Has some great eyewitness accounts as well as some semi-rigorous historical analysis (as well as appendices of camps, administrative regions at c.)

The graduation rate is irrelevant, as a very selective bootcamp that works hard to make sure everyone learns and has a 100% grad rate will put out higher quality folks than a dev-mill that doesn't care what folks do and has a 75% grad rate. The base fact is bootcamps vary in quality. As a hiring manager it would be in your best interest to take a day to visit the bootcamps you see on resumes and get a sense for what goes on there, you will get a very quick sense of which ones are legit and which ones are not. (I say this only as a graduate of a bootcamp)

This is obviously not true. I'm a bootcamp grad, I got a great job right out of my program and it has been an uphill struggle ever since. If you read the answers from the other bootcamp grad devs here you will see nearly all of them mention how hard this is, and these are the successful people. As is mentioned over and over, you probably aren't hearing from the folks that dropped out, gave up or just couldn't do it (of which there are certainly a good deal). More than anything the rate of bootcamp grad hiring just demonstrates the massive demand for developers right now and the understanding that you can generally learn this stuff as you go along. Most bootcamp devs get hired to do the most basic front end work and (maybe) move to more complex stuff from there.

Good point.

It need not be stated that McCarthy's work is some of the most powerful and well crafted fiction of the twentieth century, but this article came off as a little strange and underdone. He has a few insights, but he jumps between ideas without connecting them and doesn't provide much backing for his arguments. The conclusion too is terribly weak: McCarthy presents his central idea (that the unconscious isn't used to language so it speaks in symbols), he mentioned it to someone he respects, the listener responded favorably, case closed. Really? Its a fresh viewpoint but there seems like so much more to explore here, so many more questions raised by the conclusion than those addressed. For once his art of omission has worked against him.

I don't think there is any reason to believe that the brain is like a computer in any meaningful way. Both the brain and an electronic computer are able to operate on information, but beyond that the differences between the two far outweigh the similarities on pretty much every level. Even neural nets (that is, the machine learning algorithm) are just general, very simplified, models of how some parts of the brain are constructed. True, neural nets can do things similar to things that the brain can do (like describing images) but this is really only a facile similarity, to my understanding.

There don't happen to be any recordings of the lectures are there?

This small Japanese village is attracting young tech workers to support their aging, agrarian population. Are their any towns pursuing a similar strategy in the US? If not, could something similar be encouraged in the US to simultaneously stem the erosion of small town life and the alleviate the staggering housing prices in tech rich cities?

Original articla: http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp201744...

I'm pretty ashamed to see this sort of stuff making the front page of HN. If an argument for a similarly archaic and backwards explanation was posted about some other topic (this sort of stuff is on par with heliocentrism, creationism and homeopathy, at best) it would be ignored, but for some reason (it's hard for me to pin down exactly, but perhaps because it has to do with mental illness?) it is given a free pass.

You do raise an interesting point: would there be any value in emulating (some of) the subjective effects of a psychedelic to 'increase' blinding. Perhaps have all study participants wear VR headsets piping in video from their surroundings, then randomly assign a 'trippy' filter across groups so that some of the placebo group might (mistakenly) think that they were tripping?

> "So if I am reading this right, LSD reduced fearful reactions. I initially mis-read it as a correlation between LSD and fear."

Not really, the results were a bit more subtle and technical than that. They just found that there was a (fairly small) negative correlation on left amygdalar BOLD signal in the active group. They did not measure subjective fear, nor did they make any explicit claims about it. Just because blood oxygen levels changed does not mean the participants necessarily experienced less fear or anything different from the placebo group (in terms of fear at least).

The authors also mention toward the end of the paper that this was a fairly small dose, and that larger doses would likely induce more anxiety than placebo:

"Third, we can only provide data about one moderate dose. Higher doses of psychedelics are possibly difficult to use with fMRI, because they are more likely to induce anxiety,45 although the overall effects are still described as positive in the higher doses investigated.2, 45 The observed anxiolytic effect probably also depends on personal and environmental factors and might thus be different in the mentally ill or in uncontrolled settings."

The paper includes a caveat at the end: "Our study has several limitations. First, although the trial was formally double-blinded, assignment to placebo or LSD was unavoidably unblinded by the obvious psychedelic effects caused by the dose used."

Taking for granted most of the other answers here ('make sure she has tried and likes coding' et c.): Have her look up reviews of the program on https://www.coursereport.com/ and www.switchup.org. Have her visit local meetups and conferences, there will surely be students/grads there that she can talk to and can get eyewitness reports from. Have her ask around to disinterested third parties that have had contact with the program and see what their appraisal of the program is. Have her contact the program and see if they will provide contacts to grads that she can talk to (while they may be biased, a 'yes' is much better that a 'no'). (Full disclosure: I went to a bootcamp and got a good job very soon afterwards which I have had for a year. True, some programs are shady, but these seem to shut down quickly. A bit of research seems like all that needs to be done to make a decision and if it works for her there is no reason to worry.)

-Alarm goes off at 5:30. Hit snooze once.

-Alarm goes off at 5:35. Depending on how sleepy I am I may lay in bed for 1-10 minutes, usually petting the cat.

-Put on clothes in dark.

-Get out of bed, fill up a large jar of water and sit in living room. One pillow behind back, one pillow on lap, laptop on lap pillow.

-Put computer on airplane mode, open word doc of current novel manuscript.

-Write at least 500 words in manuscript (generally finish by 6:15).

-Get back in bed until partner's alarm goes off at 6:35.

-Get up, put on hot water. Eat cereal and read Harper's.

-Off to work at 7am.

-Spend first 30-45 minutes at work reading HN, ArsTechnica.

Nice! Recommend 'Hard Boiled Wonderland' as well. His most tightly plotted and laid out book, if you like that part of his work. His non-fic is great as well. IQ84 is a bit long winded and sort of a 'b-side' IMO, might want to save that for last.

Curious if you have read other Murakami?