I hope you will answer the question here from @dataflow about whether, without the borrow checker, compiler optimizations will emit incorrect code. Did you have to make further modifications to disable those optimizations?

Must not be a vim user.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42713978

Points: 2

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16049930

Points: 1

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I thought I'd get a lot more out of grad school if I financed it by working at a job that requires no thought or creativity. Ideally, my subconscious creative churning could continue while working at the job, and stay focused on my research. (Doing good teaching in grad school goes completely unrewarded.)

And then I thought, well, why bother with grad school at all, if what I want to do is learn interesting stuff and do research? If I had a subsistence-level job that didn't suck out my brains, I could pretty much spend every waking moment either letting the subconscious creative process run, or actually building stuff, researching stuff, and writing papers.

How could one be very productive for only a few hours a week--enough to genuinely earn US$24,000 a year?

Is it Timothy Ferris or nothing? Has anyone gotten his "Four-Hour Work Week" to work?

Some friends of mine long ago have done this. I don't know what the money is like these days (does anyone here know?), but I expect it's bad. The advantage is: you actually get to work on your laptop or notebook or whatever you like most of the time. Mostly what a security guard does is let truckers sign in when they make deliveries. Between deliveries, all you need to do is be there.

Has anyone here tried this?

By "easiest", I mean in terms of time and attention. The idea is to have lots of time to work on projects that you enjoy. That time has to be good "maker time", not time when you're mentally exhausted from working at a job that consumes you. Think Einstein working at the patent office.

By "make a living", I mean enough money to pay the rent on a modest apartment, eat cheap food, and occasionally buy nice toys. US$24,000/year is probably the minimum.

Inheritance, sugar daddy, and living off your parents are amusing cheap-shot answers, but that's not what I'm asking about. I'm thinking that since technology has made us all so productive, it ought to be possible to work very few hours to make a passable living, and thus enjoy much more leisure time. Most people don't do that, though. People in the U.S. seem to be working harder than ever, but not getting much enjoyable leisure time. What might we find if we looked seriously at how to earn a living in a way that leaves the most time available for person projects that probably don't make money? Such projects could be anything from taking care of your kids to painting pictures to proving theorems.

Example: An entrepreneur friend of mine works four days a week as a cab driver, and spends his remaining time working on two small businesses. The money from cab driving is terrible ($60/day, with a lot of variance), but it gives him time and freedom, and he enjoys cab-driving. But let's not limit this to "Ways to finance your start-up." Just, ways to pay your rent, long-term, while you work on whatever you like, regardless of financial return.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1210226

Points: 11

# Comments: 16

I imagine that a politician who ran on a platform of, "I'm going to do nothing: these kinds of pains are how an economy gets back into adjustment," would have a hard time getting votes. But, I've never been to Japan, and indeed, in the U.S., such a platform would not make you an instant laughingstock.

Folklore: The Manager is a reflective, systematic planner. The evidence on this issue is overwhelming, but not a shred of it supports this statement.

Fact: Study after study has shows that managers work at an unrelenting pace, that their activities are characterized by brevity, variety, and discontinuity, and that they are strongly oriented to actions and dislike reflective activities.

Consider this evidence:

- Half the activities engaged in by the five chief executives of my study lasted less than nine minutes, and only 10% exceeded one hour.

- A study of 56 U.S. foremen found that they averaged 583 activities per eight-hour shift, an average of 1 every 48 seconds.

I'm not saying that you have to consciously play status ("decide to play"). I'm saying that when you interact with someone else, you are playing a certain level of status in relation to them, whether you are aware of it or not.

Engaging in some phony behavior will, of course, make people perceive you as a phony, with all the loss of respect that that entails. Respect, of course, is a big part of status. When you don't respect someone, you tend to play higher status toward them.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1089238

Points: 13

# Comments: 5

The main reason an actor needs to learn about status is to be able to make scenes realistic. When the characters don't have a status relationship, a scene looks wooden and fake.

BTW, playing high status is not necessarily better. People who relentlessly play high status in every situation are commonly called "assholes". (Usually behind their backs.)

Now that I'm back in college, this time assistant-teaching as well as taking grad-level classes and sneaking in time for research, I am more amazed than ever by how wasteful the academic world is. They chop up your day into many context-switches (one of the worst things a knowledge-worker can do), they focus on lectures and exams instead of mentoring and experiences that bring about learning, they require useless courses, they emphasize grades relentlessly (known to decrease learning), and they present material out of context (so it's hard to retain or apply).

I think good teaching can be done in the academic world (I have seen some), and of course it's the place to go to do scientific research. But overall, the academic world is just not very good at what it does (except arguing about minutiae and winning research grants and endowments). The basis of its strong market position is subsidies and prestige. It's ripe for competition from savvy entrepreneurs.

About truant officers: One day, walking along the sidewalk at 10:00 a.m. or so, I saw a truant officer walking along the sidewalk, too, in the opposite direction. He spotted a different teenager, also walking along, and arrested him. I think the truant officers ignored me for two reasons: because I didn't look like a truant, and because I lived near a college campus. I didn't have a computer of my own, so I went to the college campus and wrote code there every day. I probably looked like a "precocious" college student (I was 15, and probably appeared 13).

BTW, I never saw any difficulty later in life due to dropping out of high school. I've never seen anyone look at anyone's grades on a résumé or job application, never had anyone give a damn about my lack of credentials.

And now I'm a Ph.D. student.

I am now assistant-teaching a college course in low-level computer programming. It's an excellent course: the students reprogram a children's toy robot that uses the ARM processor. http://www.amazon.com/Little-Tikes-Giggles-Remote-Control/dp... They're getting up to speed very quickly on how to get hardware to actually do stuff.

Yes, I actually left Silicon Valley to do grad school. I haven't given up the principle of "do real stuff, see real results", though. I'm looking to design a couple fairly small homework assignments consisting of optimizing some ARM code. I want the examples to be real. Now mulling over which to do...