Mgccl's Ivory Towerso tired

I know this person, let's call her JJ. When ever I feel confident about myself, I talk to her.

It's a habit. If I don't talk to her, I would go
"Hey, I'm on the top of the wooooooorld~ MUHAHAHAHAHAHA,.. I'm so getting into a good graduate school..."

Some of the talks I remember, goes basically like this. due to my lame memory, I can't recite things word by word.
M = Me

(Talking about a USAMTS problem... the USAMTS t-shirt I have features that problem... if you see me wearing something black with cubes in the back, then you know that's the problem)
M: I don't see how that's possible.
J: flip this way so the face on cube one that's facing forward is now facing down, and then rotate the side facing forward 180° = =, apparently u don't play the rubiks cube..
M: orz

M: OMG there is a IMO gold and IMO silver in Stony Brook.
J: I know a IMO gold live right next door / I had lunch with a putnam fellow/ blah blah with IMO/Putnam people
M: orz

M: I took the Putnam today.
J: me too, a dozen people there are IMO gold or Putnam fellow.
M: orz

M: I'm thinking of doing independent study on analysis next semester.
J: I'm in this analysis class where half of the people have been to IMO. It's hard to stay above average.
M: orz

M: I'm in BNL this summer, I assume you are doing something with the same scale of awesomeness in MIT.
J: I'm in the AI lab, coding, working with Marvin Minsky, the FATHER of AI.
M: orz

My confidence crumbles every time xD. It is a good thing...

I'm in a place where people think I'm pretty good. I become modeled into thinking "Hey, I'm pretty good." It's a scary thought if I'm actually not that good. JJ can always help me adjust to the view I'm suppose to have. Since I will be competing(unsuccessfully...) with people with skills even beyond JJ in the future for positions in the academia, I can't stop short and think "Hey, I'm pretty good."

Thank you for all your support JJ. Also thank you for believing me that I can transfer to MIT when I don't even believe it myself. I will try my best.

For some unknown reason i discussed ADHD with my parents when they refuse to understand there are common disorders prevent people from learning.

While discussing it, I found striking similarity of ADHD's symptoms and what I have. I did some wikipedia and convinced I'm likely to have ADHD.

Predominantly inattentive type symptoms may include:
Be easily distracted, miss details, forget things, and frequently switch from one activity to another [YES, I found it impossible reading in a car, a train, a plane or anything where I feel I'm moving around. Or if I can see anything moving or hear any sound.]
Have difficulty focusing on one thing [YES]
Become bored with a task after only a few minutes, unless doing something enjoyable [YES, that's why I fail at everything except things I enjoy]
Have difficulty focusing attention on organizing and completing a task or learning something new [YES]
Have trouble completing or turning in homework assignments, often losing things (e.g., pencils, toys, assignments) needed to complete tasks or activities [YES, no pen can stay with me for more than 3 days unless I don't use that pen.]
Not seem to listen when spoken to [YES, ok this might be of some other reason, most people are boring]
Daydream, become easily confused, and move slowly [YES, but then again, it seems a lot of people are easily confused]
Have difficulty processing information as quickly and accurately as others [YES, especially in fields where I have no background]
Struggle to follow instructions. [YES, I epically fail at every lab class]
Predominantly hyperactive-impulsive type symptoms may include:
Fidget and squirm in their seats [YES, I can't hold one comfortable position during sitting, unless I'm asleep]
Talk nonstop [If I'm talking to you, then yes, else no. If I'm alone, I talk to myself, but that should be another kind of beast.]
Dash around, touching or playing with anything and everything in sight [NO]
Have trouble sitting still during dinner, school, and story time [YES]
Be constantly in motion [YES, unless I'm on my bed]
Have difficulty doing quiet tasks or activities. [NO]
and also these manifestations primarily of impulsivity:[34]
Be very impatient [YES]
Blurt out inappropriate comments, show their emotions without restraint, and act without regard for consequences [don't know, it only happen around people I know]
Have difficulty waiting for things they want or waiting their turns in games [YES, I have to beat this 4 year old in SOULCALIBER]

I have almost all symptoms.
These symptoms are general, I do feel normal people will have a few of them too. Having this many? it strike me as having a problem.

When i was young(elementary school level), I have been described by my parents and teachers as having hyperactivity. Non of them are doctors however. I like how my family have the culture of not seeing any doctors(unless it's FREE checkup). So they don't care if I might have hyperactivity disorder, it's not something that will kill me.

I also fall into my own world during class. Wondering stuff until I was called to answer some question the teacher asked. Ahh, lots of embarrassment.

I doubt any of them considered I have attention deficit disorder. Not many kids can follow orders when they are young. Therefore I have no idea such thing even existed, until I'm in my 11th grade in US. I even doubt such disorder is not something people made up so they can take it easy on school work.

Even if I have ADHD, I can still live out a normal life. My grades are better than average, and if I didn't do well at something, clearly I wasn't working hard enough. There should be no reason for anyone to even assume I might have a disorder. I must have a brain that perform above average, and I just don't use them in things like English, History and stuff, how else can the huge gap between my math and English grade be explained?

I didn't spend much time on the courses I suck at, fits the description "Become bored with a task after only a few minutes". Self disciplines issue? It must be.

Maybe not.

Concentration have always been a problem. I can read a book and mind drift away into something else by one keyword. and when I finish drifting, I already turned the page, everything in between is lost. This is SCARY. I read a book and not remember what I have read, most of the time. How do I learn at all? Read a paragraph k times until I think I have read it. The GEB took me a month to complete, and now i can only remember the main themes. All the details are lost.

This prevent me enjoy fictions. I have stopped reading fictions 5 years ago.(Ok i lied, I read 3 pages of twilight for reasons I don't want to disclose). Things jump around, nothing makes sense. I forget things I read in the beginning. And I start read plot summaries instead on wikipedia because that's about the attention span I can handle.

Of course, this could also be a memory problem.

Concentration are related to boredom. If I can't concentrate on doing one thing, and keep getting distracted by thoughts that appear to be more interesting, of course I found what I'm doing bored.

What about math? I do find it boring to read textbooks. I'm glad in math, you read and understand a few sentences, the rest can be done by pure thought experiments. In high school, I come up with formulas and solutions during the exam.
So is the CS classes I took in college, it's ALL theory classes. It's not that I have read a lot more texts, I just remember some points and try to figure things out in small chunks when I'm reading texts on how language unite people during ESL classes. Wow, epic distractions.

I can't just do thought experiment and suddenly knows what happens in 1800's art culture. These are the kind of knowledge where I must gather though intense text intakes. Not able to concentrate greatly decreases my desire to know.

I never thought this was a problem at all. I thought it applies to everyone. The idea of "learning is not easy" circles around. Then I went to college and see people crunch though dense texts(they don't even like) like nothing. Hearing someone complete John Hull's Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives in a week. (she got a phd in physics from caltech, so this is not a good example of normal person, but it still affects me psychologically). Something must be wrong with me, or I'm just surrounded by people who are way too brilliant in feeding on knowledge(If that's true then I must be a elitist who only make friends with really brilliant people... not a good thing either).

During the summer research, I have even more doubts in my ability. I can code fast, grasp new concepts really quickly and work hard enough that my mentor want me to intern with him during this fall. Except I can't learn well because I can't concentrate. You will see me moving in and out from the office 5 times more frequent than the other 2 people in my room combined. I observe the differences between me and the other researcher, they are not easily distracted. I even get distracted by my own thought during group meetings. It's not they are knowledgeably septate them from me, it's the power to concentrate.

This remind me how the year before, I have hard time reading a book on radiation detection. The mind slips I walks into makes learning a dense topic almost impossible.

During coding I always miss some small stuff, it's hard to write a program that compiles the first time(usually I need to compile k/10 times to make it work, where k is the amount of lines). Finding mistake in my own code is difficult because I always forget my definition of the variable(like what is this variable v correspond to?). People who do programming competitions totally owns me in this category. IDK if I'm better than a normal programmer.

I can IM with someone and forgot I'm IMing someone and start doing something else. Usually it's when I receive a message, and forgot to turn to the window right away, and forgets about it. That certainly get people mad. Later I developed the skill to switch between tasks periodically as soon as a task become non urgent. It greatly decreases my response time, but still, not good enough. This is the reason I decided to stopped using all IM systems a few days ago. Back to good old email.

If it is indeed true that I had ADHD all my life, then I can change for the better. To make myself having the power or a normal human! How awesome is that? The power of owning GRE and get into a good graduate school. mmmmm, normal human ability rocks.

Get diagnosed by doctors in China is cheaper than the US. Hmmmm...

After using Elinks on POJ. I'm very amazed with how POJ turned out. It looks super elegant!
See the image here
I think simplicity is the key to design.
I'm no designer, but I would be perfectly happy if every website can be accessed in elinks style I showed.
So what should the style look like?
Everything have the same fixed size font. It's possible to have bold fonts for strong characters or something. At most 16 colors can be used. Too many colors doesn't help bring up the contents.
Minimum CSS for layout. In fact, there should only be layout for simple positions. It should have 1 column layout because it's awesome.
What about sidebars? you might ask.
Sidebar is overrated. When is the last time I looked at the sidebar? If one need to see list of recent comments, recent blog post and stuff, they should go to a special page that show stuff like this. Most sidebar items are not useful content at all.

Adapting the unix philosophy on content presentation.

"Write a site that show one thing and show it well"

被zmc启发.

人类写作常常是线性的. 也就是一篇文章从头读到尾, 根据一定的逻辑一层一层的走入下一步. 每一段话都有自己存在的意义. 顺序常常是不可以调换的.

可能主题和主题之间的关系在作者脑子里是个有向无环图吧. 写作也就是将一些概念的结构编码为人类文字. 有意思的是,每一个人脑子里有一个不同的解码器和编码器.

有向无环图拓扑排序后写出来. 如果某个东西很久以前写的需要利用到,提一下让人自己去前面看(比如"第一章第二节有论述").

如果是棵树.直接DFS.按照DFS的顺序写.教科书都是这样的.

对于有环图咋办? 这其实不少见, 有的时候作者叫人直接跳过某一章,过一会儿再回来看. 因为不管什么顺序都是会有某个东西可以先看也可以后看的.

一般的短文章都是一个很基本的树.

这个文章有两个主题,一点关系都没有. 现在开始第二个主题...

zmc今天写了一霸气文,可以看我的分享. 其中很有意思的一段写出了我的心声阿.

而现在高中语文的议论文写作简直就是在愚民

开头+3个左右事例+结尾

这样就能argue出结论？

举事例就是扯谈，要是能举例论证还要数学归纳法来做什么。如果说事例具有统计意义，那也需要大大大量的事例，800字那肯定说不完了。

握手.

我曾经看过一本书. How to win every argument: the use and abuse of logic. 书中指出,对于任意一个论点,攻击的人都可以找到少数特例作为论据"推翻"这个论点.(就连我这句话也不例外, 肯定有人能找到特例说人找不到特例). 我的逻辑课都教过的简单例子. "鸟会飞,tom是个鸟,所以tom会飞." "错,因为tom是[没有翅膀的,企鹅,鸵鸟,死的].". 这本书教人除了识破其他人的论诉漏洞以外,还教人怎么自己也用这些论诉漏洞. 正是因为并不是每一个人都是逻辑严谨无比的个体, 所以可以用任何论诉漏洞让其他的人接近自己一方. 适当的使用逻辑漏洞愚昧一般人是有实践意义的. 不仅仅在中国,全世界都用这东西.

科学严谨多了(数学/CS就更严谨了)

大多数网站是没有service这个概念的. 输入都是一些HTML form, URL之类的浏览器里面发出的指令. 回复的也都是HTML页面.

CMS没有service的概念建立在内核中. 而是需要插件之类的东西才能expose这些功能. 就算是安装了这些插件. 这些插件也都巨大无比, 代码量令人发指. 因为要把整个系统里面很多功能要expose. 需要大量的documentation,然后每个功能还要写n行脚本. 常常这些CMS本身的功能要远远大于这些service的功能. 导致最后还是有些东西不上浏览器就是搞定不了.

局限用户在一个interface里面, 不让他们自由利用这些数据. 有意思么? 有的.

某些网站害怕expose所有功能,很可能更容易的被hack. 所以网站常常只expose一些基本的似乎干不了啥事的service在外面让人用.

更有可能的是,网站不希望你高效率获取可以让计算机利用的信息的能力. 如果用户可以自己写个脚本大面积copy自己的所有日志. 岂不成功的做到了数据备份么? 哪个公司会愿意把"你自己的信息"被放到其他网站上去呢, 它的市场岂不就消失了? 如果一个程序可以更优美的显示给你看人人网. 去掉所有广告,去掉所有无聊的消息... 谁还上人人? 都用这个工具去了.

真正敢open一切的就是Twitter和Google了.

Twitter的open API夸张到极限的. 强大到了你利用Twitter官网能干啥,服务公开的API就能做啥.

Google, 你看下就知道了...哪一个产品没有一个强大无比的API在后面支撑.

关于开放有啥好处我不需要怎么说,因为网上类似文章很多,请Google.

如何创建一个的CMS,让它刚开始就可以成为一个开放的CMS呢?

建立CMS在一个API上面. 公开这个API. 这个API应该就是一个content和permission的一个抽象层. API的输出都应该是流通的数据格式(如JSON). 要成功的做到这个API无法辨别CMS的调用和用户之间调用的区别.

不仅CMS如此,未来的站点也都应该如此!

本人想做个建立在MongoDB上的CMS