GrangalanJr

As someone who has started studying programming and CS recently, avoiding becoming a guy who "glues APIs together" has been one of my goals. I want to learn the underlying principles, not just the surface-level implementations that change every few years.

Sure, but can anybody post from Lulzsec's Twitter account?

Here are some nice introductory ones:

Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction (Tim Gowers): http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Short-Introduction-Timothy...

The Language of Mathematics: Making the Invisible Visible (Keith Devlin): http://www.amazon.com/Language-Mathematics-Making-Invisible-...

What is Mathematics?: An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods (Richard Courant): http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Elementary-Approach-Ideas-...

They give brief but interesting glimpses into several areas of higher math, so they could help you decide what you want to pursue in more depth.

And the kind of education that offers real financial benefit is often technical or mathematical in nature.

So there is something I wonder about: is there an IQ "floor" below which very few people will be able to benefit from or even complete this sort of education? What percentage of the population falls under this floor? And what will they be doing in the future as both the "service" and manual labor sectors, the traditional absorbers of people with no degrees or impractical "soft" degrees, dwindle in the number of people employed?

I am retraining myself, too. By inclination I am a liberal artsy guy with only a slight interest in technical stuff, but I've seen the writing on the wall and am learning to program. Turns out that it can be quite fun anyway. :-)

I noticed that the Ruby pages link to files that end in ".rb.html", but if you remove the ".html" from the end, it leads you right to the Ruby files.

Good question. I'm not sure what the recent momentum is about, but I remember two widely-linked stories about "hipsters" and "hipsterdom" back in 2007 and 2008:

http://newyork.timeout.com/things-to-do/this-week-in-new-yor...

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

It's interesting to note that "hipster" really started ramping up after "emo" had started sliding downward:

http://trends.google.com/trends?q=emo%2C+hipster&ctab=0&...

I compare the two because they are both subcultural labels that have become terms of abuse in fairly recent years.

I do this, too, even sometimes writing out code in a notebook. For example, I gained a clearer understanding of recursive algorithms after I "expanded" a few examples by hand.

Most very poor people are not young, athletic, with good physical and mental health, no dependents, and the background security of being able to leave their circumstances immediately any time they want.

The book is "Scratch Beginnings" by Adam Shepard, btw.

What distinguishes "true geeks" from the pretenders?

"People (even scientists) tend to overestimate the "deepness" of technological advancement and underestimate the "wideness"."

Very interesting thought, that our predictions have a bias toward "vertical" advancement -- vast improvements in areas addressed by tech that we already have -- rather than the "horizontal" creation and filling of new niches in demand.

"Our lives look a lot more interesting when they're filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery."

Is the filtering process people use on Facebook really so different from the ordinary "filtering" of our life stories that happens when we tell people about ourselves in any other context? Sure, when talking to people we don't know so well yet, most of us don't open up immediately about our flaws and vulnerabilities and fears -- on Facebook or anywhere else. But I don't see why that is particularly problematic.

"I did this not without significant resistance, because it's very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool."

Is having a passion really "uncool?" Maybe some people think bird watching in particular is dorky, but I don't think you can generalize from just that.

Apple and Google are interesting comparisons. Some significant part of Apple's success lies in becoming identified with "cool": its products are stylish and fashionable in addition to being useful. Google's success, on the other hand, rests very little on that; it started out as pure utility (search), something people used not because they had lots of friends using it or because it was "cool" to use it, but because they tried it and it got them the results they wanted. And even if Google has become known recently as something of a "cool" company, I don't think that its individual products are identified as "cool" in the same way Apple's are.

So it may be worth asking: is Facebook more like Google, or more like Apple? Or in other words: would Facebook survive a demotion from "cool, trendy place to be" to "utility?" Is such a "demotion" happening as we speak?

Holder of a useless non-technical degree here. Tens of thousands of dollars spent on education, and now I work an entry-level retail job. But I do count myself fortunate that I have no debt from my (perhaps mostly pointless) university experience.

Using my spare time to teach myself programming and some math. :-)

I've noticed this, too. Once I step out of the shower and dry off, I actually feel unusually warm, perhaps because the cold water forced my body's internal heating mechanisms to start working harder.

Not officially, anyway.

And that may be even worse when it comes to a potential "crackdown": if it is just one group of hackers running amok, putting them down solves the problem, or at least the public discourse can pretend so. But if we come to have two, three, four, or even more groups on the loose, then there is an "epidemic" that will "require" a broader, more draconian response.

Three digits: http://i.imgur.com/kQSGr.png

And two: http://i.imgur.com/OaynE.png

Made a visualization: x coordinate is the initial numbers, y coordinates are the "intermediate" numbers hit on the way to 6174. Diagonal is obviously the plot of the starting numbers. :-)

http://i.imgur.com/DfxRB.png

Yes. All 45,000,000,000 of them. :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drE5cHe6c3s

Those who have lived longer do have one advantage of perspective: they have years of experience pursuing many "prime of life" impulses / goals / desires, and are therefore able to look back on and judge the (negative and positive) results of such pursuit. Of course, the experiences and feelings of one person or a handful of people cannot generalize to everyone, but I definitely think there is some value in considering the assessments of those who have "been there, done that."

I don't ordinarily sleep a lot, so I doubt that I could be getting too much sleep on a regular basis. And my mood doesn't ordinarily seem to be affected by how much I sleep or when I go to sleep.

The best way I can describe the effect is that for me it's like hitting a "reset" button in my brain. At first there's the tiredness and irritability that always go with not sleeping, but eventually I get a "second wind" and I feel normal, calm, and content. This generally lasts the whole rest of the day, until I fall asleep again.

The sleep deprivation treatment for depression used by some doctors in the '70s involved either total deprivation or waking the patients up around midnight, so that they slept only a few hours. I think I read that both worked equally well, but I have only tried the former. And as far as I know, nobody has figured out why it works for so many people.

I have used total sleep deprivation to kick myself out of persistent low mood. So far it has worked every time.

Not a method to use too often, of course.

In Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher, he describes exactly this habit as the thing that impressed him most about Karl Popper.

I think some fear that giving an opposing position (X) the best possible interpretation, or responding to the smartest supporters of X, might make their own position (Y) look weaker by comparison, perhaps so much so that some readers will decide to buy into X rather than Y after all! "Strawmanning" is the easier route, as it saves one the bother of having to come up with powerful or detailed counterarguments.