I can make things go more than 10 times faster in assembly. My main job is as manager/entrepreneur but I could read-write assembly as a result of my experience and I help-guide other people easily.
In the real world 10 times faster is nothing. You should spend the time understanding the problem in a mathematical way, and VERY IMPORTANT, documenting your work using images, text, voice and video.
This way you could make things go 100, 1000, 10000 times faster as most algorithms could be indexed, ordered in some way as to make it extremely fast, like doing log() operations instead of n squared or cubic or to the elevated to four or five(when you manage several dimensions like 3D with time or video analysis or medical tomography).
More important than that, 10 years from now it will continue working in new devices or OSs and will be something that supports the company instead of being a debt burden because the original developer is not here now(or you don't have the slightest idea of what you did so far away in the past and did not document).
The main problem is that people is not self aware that they forget things. And your brilliant idea that makes everything go 3 times faster is nuts if it makes everything way harder to understand, or if it could be forgotten even by you.
I wouldn't call it "investment money". Have you seen the graphs going down(tech bubble burst 2001 and 2008).
I will call it "Money press printing money", or
"let's save those that make poor decisions in the past so they don't bankrupt" money,
"let's give this people free public money at 0% interest rates so they can lend to the public at high interest rates" money.
"privatizing the profit, making public the loses" money.
Those people had basically sh#t as assets, but the central banks bought their sh#t with good money so they do not collapse the economy. The bailouts mean the public is underwater now and revolutions are coming all around the planet.
The problems are not solved, those that make bad investments have been rewarded taking money from those that create wealth.
But everything has a limit, Japan is paying 56% of their taxes in debt payment and growing. China bubble is bursting soon.
Am I the only one that looking at what the kids are doing in the pictures consider it totally normal?
In Spain we used to do way more dangerous things than those.
And it was risky, one of our friends died in the river jumping over a slippery stone and hitting his neck with a stone while falling backwards. I have to say he was pretty nuts and was in constant danger everywhere.
Another friend is in wheelchair after jumping badly from a big 20 meters high rock to the Mediterranean sea. We all jumped the rock. It was funny, but you need to know what you are doing.
But those are two cases over hundreds of people I knew well over my life.
We learned to do bunny hops and do jumps and go downhill. Skiing over rocks outside official circuit.
You leaned early on how to manage risks and how to say no when your friends want you into doing stupid things(or you are not skilled enough for the task). I really appreciate those memories(and continue doing risky things like BASE jumping).
I have to say that my friends doing risky things now that we are adults never had significant problems. They became experts managing risk and some of them even teach it.
So in my opinion total freedom has its drawbacks and is not a pie in the Sky, but it is worth it.
I had backed hundreds of projects. Next year I would make a thousand or so.
How many scams I got into?
Zero.
It is pretty easy to spot who is serious and who is not, who will deliver and who wont. The great thing about capitalism is being left to carry the risk yourself.
Your sexual habits. Haw many partners you have , how, where, when you have sex with them. Facebook and google log your mobile phone GPS coords.
Your political views.
What your friends thing about you better than you do(They control and store all of their private communications, including phone calls with Skype or Whasapp).
All your family and friends experiences and meetings.
Then they store this info and give it to the powerful companies and governments on demand, like we know via Snowden . For me it is creepy as hell.
In my opinion, everything that facebook says is true, today, but could be different tomorrow.
Like a marriage, when you are young and life is good is very different from when you get older, and life gets tough.
Today facebook is incredible rich because they convinced millions of people to buy shares of the company. They promised a good return from their investment.
Being rich they could buy Whassapp, Instagram and respect them like in when you are in love everything is seen with rose colored glasses.
Now, when investors get nervous because facebook profit does not grow enough, their market sinks, the Federal Reserve stops pumping the stock market, or the good people inside starts cashing out their money and leaving.... then suddenly life becomes different.
This has lots of useful applications. E.g Do you know those graphics about a submarine of the WW2, or a Spanish galleon in which you could see what is inside, like in the book "incredible cross sections"?
With your tech you could make this but dynamic and alive!! peering what you are interested in. While most of the scene is static, you could move some things a little and make it alive.
You should contact one of those amazing artist and show them what you have. There is no way they would resist an offer of working on something like this.
You are not the first human to become addicted, nor will be the only one. There are people out there that have been in a worse situation than you and that have gone out of addictions.
You should find those people, meet them and get out of drinking. Over years you made a path that you have to undo. This will take years, like it took you to create it.
Your wife and kids did the right thing: to stop supporting your addiction. It is time for you to take steps.
I have studied a lot of psychology but I can't help you because it would be like trying to explain quantum physics before learning basic math. But there is people out there that really know what steps you could take for getting out and doing great things with your life.
"who have no idea how to run a multi-million-dollar business, can turn on a dime and start slinging vitriol at the person they claimed to idolize just a day earlier."
As someone who does run a multi million dollar business and that supported the Oculus Rift buying ten of those in a kickstarter I would tell you something:
Nobody idolized Mr Palmer, they loved the vision, not the man. The vision is way more important than the person.
Specially when they asked for your support, and you support them, and then they change their vision, you have the right to complain, like I do.
Me too. We created a group for competing breaking protections on commercial programs.
It was more than patching things with NOPs(), but correcting checksums and so on.
We never released the programs once without protection. It was fun.
()for people that are not into this, just replacing opcodes alone does not work as the OS checks that the executable has not been modified, and the program could do it too itself in very sophisticated ways.
I personally won't follow the new rules. I prefer not to comment anymore.
I was one of the early users of HN, this alone made me have enormous karma and influence out of nothing.
I forgot the password several times and created new accounts. Now my comments were worth nothing just because I was new.
One of the reasons I write anonymous is that I don't want to carry my real life reputation with everything I say, call it the Feyman effect: when he got the Nobel price everybody started considering everything he said like God words, even if he wanted to just do a funny stupid remark.
I don't want my comments to be judged by gatekeepers, or to be the gatekeeper myself.
Probably, given the size of HN this is necessary, like Reddit we just have to find a smaller community that cares about science and start over again.
"Imagine for a moment you could colonize space. What problem would that solve, really? "
Very interesting. Do you realize that people said exactly those same words about the microscope?
They said : What problem would seeing the same things that we already see bigger are going to solve?
It was called a "toy" with no real use. If you have a microscope you know how hard is to see something.
The fact is that we don't know what we don't know.
Just traveling to the moon changed everything. We discovered isotopes on moon surface that are not created on earth because of earth atmosphere. The same materials where not eroded by fluids behave very different.
It is one of the very few metals that do not oxide in normal conditions, this makes :
Any metal very good electrical contact: just putting a single layer of gold over any metal will make the metal a fantastic electrical contact without the oxide layer that any metal will develop over time. This application alone is of great use in anything that plugs, just look around and you see gold in any electronic device.
You can make the best quality IR reflectors with it.
You can cover plastic with a very small layer of it and make mylar that in used in everything from refrigerators to accident blankets.
Gold (and platinum)is one of the the most used metals in any electronic, chemistry, biochemistry or physics laboratory as not being dissolved or attacked from most chemicals makes the extremely useful.
It is also great value because:
It is very dense.
It could be divided ad infinitum without (oxidation)damages.
It is easy to know it is gold and not something different.
It is beautiful.
It is very rare and appreciated, because of its aesthetic and its industrial properties.
Which makes it one of the best material for exchanging goods possible. It is also the preferred way to store wealth around the world when US of America does not threat with its weapons(guess what are China, Rusia, Iran or Brasil using to exchange goods between them as they have a military army on their on).
Gold reserves has been the first thing the US has sto... errr has taken from Ukraine in order to "protect" it. Let me tell you when the gold is coming back:never.
Yeah, given that they have most of the code already done for drawing the browser screen(text, buttons, icons...), it probably makes sense for them to do so.
With Qt they will depend on a different company with different interest in mind.
"Are there any ways by which I could motivate myself to study more?"
You told us, the answer is no.
You already dedicate your time to programming, because you need it. I also needed it when I was your age.
In my case I started programming while also studying engineering in Europe. I made a company with the code I accumulated over this time, with the knowledge of programming being really useful to manage other people(and identifying who is really good or not at it and so on).
People consider me rich now(there is always someone else with more money, but I have more than what my family needs), but I went through very hard times before it(my family wanted me to get a good job instead of risking so much).
If you force yourself to study more, you will regret it.
My advice:
Focus on learning to study more efficiently, the idea is to use the time you already use to study faster and get better grades while also giving time to programming.
Learn from the masters, read the Audiobook "The Now habit", learn aabout mindmaps and mnemonics, and always go for the best.
Do you realize that this talks more about yourself than about other people?
I watched the entire video and not a single sexual thought came out out it, far from it, just the thought that it could be useful for my kids.
I found also very interesting how she frame adding publicity of her cause in HN as useful advice, because it is useful advice!!. I have a company on my own so I know a little about marketting.
And protesters being shot in Ukraine seems kinda trivial when you consider what is happening on Syria, Iraq, or in lots of African countries.
Here we have(Spain) a refugee from Africa that was forced to kill his parents as a kid, his sisters were raped in front of him and then he never saw them again. Now the war is over on the paper, but it is not for the population.
I for one welcome Kit Kat trivial stories. There is a problem about news, we focus only on the worse news of the world, so the only "approved behavior" is to live chronically depressed(there will always be bad news).
I can make things go more than 10 times faster in assembly. My main job is as manager/entrepreneur but I could read-write assembly as a result of my experience and I help-guide other people easily.
In the real world 10 times faster is nothing. You should spend the time understanding the problem in a mathematical way, and VERY IMPORTANT, documenting your work using images, text, voice and video.
This way you could make things go 100, 1000, 10000 times faster as most algorithms could be indexed, ordered in some way as to make it extremely fast, like doing log() operations instead of n squared or cubic or to the elevated to four or five(when you manage several dimensions like 3D with time or video analysis or medical tomography).
More important than that, 10 years from now it will continue working in new devices or OSs and will be something that supports the company instead of being a debt burden because the original developer is not here now(or you don't have the slightest idea of what you did so far away in the past and did not document).
The main problem is that people is not self aware that they forget things. And your brilliant idea that makes everything go 3 times faster is nuts if it makes everything way harder to understand, or if it could be forgotten even by you.