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PieSquaredon 11th grade

Thanks for the response, I appreciate it. I guess you get a wider perspective as you age, and I don't really have much of an idea about what I'll think later.

Though I might disagree with you on specifics, I agree that it's important not to restrict yourself to a limited set of things. I guess I was slightly annoyed mainly due to the fact that a few of my school admins sound very similar, except they don't bother to take the time to explain their views in a less condescending sounding way.

PieSquaredon 11th grade

Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but you seem to think that high-school kids who are reading this are arrogant and stupid. I'd be willing to bet that most aren't, and most know that the long-term gains of staying in high school will outweigh the short term losses due to boredom.

As for learning things you won't "use in real life"? I agree, it's good. But I'm sorry, some classes don't just teach you things you won't use - they just don't teach you. How much good will it do you to analyze dozens of books in essays about their arbitrary qualities, eh? Not that much. Maybe English would be more useful if the high schools didn't have to cater to the lowest common denominator. But public schools have to, and the end result is that many classes are slow-paced, repetitive, and thus, boring.

And please. Please, please, please, can you stop considering high school nerds as anti-intellectual, narrow-minded, arrogant idiots? The amount of people who share your view make tolerating being one very difficult at times, especially when your administrators or teachers refuse to comprehend the idea that maybe it is possible for people to learn things on their own and not have to repeat them in class.

I'm sorry if this response sounds feels overly acrid or acidic, but honestly, as a "self-professed nerd", I find your comment extremely insulting, probably because I've had to deal with many people who base their entire opinions of me on such ideas.

PieSquaredon 11th grade

I tend to do all the homework I have a as far in advance as I can, then have a week or two of near-no-homework in which I can code, both for personal projects and a part-time job. (10th grade).

PieSquaredon IronPython 2.0 is released

Hah... I am amused by the 4+ thousand percent difference with TryExcept... why is that? (Ipy is slower by 40 times?)

PieSquaredon Evernote + Eye-Fi = Instant Photographic Memory

This reminds me of the Livescribe smartpens. As someone in this thread already said... these things really make me feel like I am living in the future.

PieSquaredon Multi-threaded Emacs discussion

  * cue editor war *

PieSquaredon Ask YC: Best music/online radio to listen to when coding at 2 AM?

http://www.pandora.com while it still exists. (What happened to that court case anyway?)

PieSquaredon The iPod? It's bound to fail (and the other predictions the experts would rather forget)

"What Bill Gates can't deny is providing the following nugget of perspicacity to the 2004 World Economic Forum. "Two years from now," the father of modern information technology said, "spam will be solved". As anyone with an email account can testify, the avalanche shows no sign of receding."

Spam may not be solved... but in some ways - and for me - it is. I don't think I've seen a single spam message in the two or three years since I've started using gMail, and I am always quite amused when my family talks about how much spam it gets... (Nor do gmail filters mark things I want as spam).

PieSquaredon Java is Dead; Long Live Python

No... Is it Pascal? Because that would be pretty weird. I always assumed it was C++.

PieSquaredon Freezing cold, no Internet, boring: it's a French web 2.0 conference

Yup, that's true... Such as this: Go to google, type in "french military victories", and press I'm feeling lucky. It takes you to a french parody site, suggesting that you meant "french military defeats".

PieSquaredon Ask HN: Clients are gone, lots of debt, what would you do?

I haven't been in such a situation... but you said, "Sell any other assets you don't need for work (e.g. television, videogames, other non-essential and time-wasting items), use the money for food and debt service."

Is the $500 you're going to get for selling a TV and a video game system going to help that much? It seems that you should keep anything you actually use, to me - you're in enough stress as it is, you don't need to make yourself feel desperately poor.

Or am I missing something?

PieSquaredon At Long Last, Physicists Calculate the Proton's Mass

Heh... Interesting writing style... "Like a troubled teenager, the proton is a mess inside and just about impossible to figure out."

I think I'll go now and learn as much as I can about the strong force. Sounds like something I won't learn about in school much.

PieSquaredon LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer

Is there any way to have it display the rendered page as-you-type? That would make taking notes much easier, since you could see the equations or such that you were writing as your wrote them.

(Disclaimer: I have no experience with LaTeX, and I'm not yet in college so I can't take notes using a laptop... I'm just being curious here.)

PieSquaredon Ask HN: Do social sites with karma need a decay function?

Agreed. Karma might not be the best system for encouraging good behavior... But does anyone have any other ideas?

It's also slightly more difficult because what constitutes good behavior isn't always black and white and isn't even always agreed upon.

PieSquaredon Ask HN: Do social sites with karma need a decay function?

I think a good idea would be to treat karma the same way that tennis rankings are counted: Only the past 52 weeks are counted. So if you gain 1000 karma in a year, then don't participate, your karma will be 0.

That will encourage continual good behavior.

PieSquaredon Ask YC: What would you tell your younger self?

And there's an even finer line between immature and just fun-loving...

PieSquaredon Compile C/C++ to Flash - Adobe Alchemy

Well, Clojure has access to any JVM library. And thus has nice threading (as well as a model of it's own, as I understand; I haven't used it that much.) That's why it's getting so much attention.

Also, running a VM on a VM was definitely a joke. It'd be a horrible idea beyond belief.

PieSquaredon Compile C/C++ to Flash - Adobe Alchemy

A dream come true! Thank the lord! I can now have Clojure, running on the JVM, running on the Flash VM!

Lisp has finally come to the internet scene. Beware, PHP, beware, Javascript! Your time is over.

PieSquaredon Newsweek's Dan Lyons quits blogging -- includes the full text of his five deleted posts

How true. Realize that, and you'll be a much happier person overall...

PieSquaredon 5 Reasons Why I Want Digg for Girls

I personally know one person who enjoys Digg more than Reddit or HN, and when asked why, he just said, "Well, it's funny." You get my point.

PieSquaredon Ask HN : Which should I learn : C# or Java

Yup, you'll never look back! ...unless you need to get a job, of course...

Though Python is used more and more now, you can definitely get jobs in languages other than Java and C# and such... But sadly, not Lisp or Ocaml though, at least not easily.

PieSquaredon Ubuntu's #1 Bug: Microsoft has a majority market share

Would I be using Ubuntu if it was as popular as Mac OS X? I don't think so. Part of the allure is the geekiness.

PieSquaredon How people really use the iPhone

Sorry for the off topic comment but I have to say... I love middle-click-to-paste in X Windows! Hooray geekery.

PieSquaredon How people really use the iPhone

Does anyone know of alternative PDF viewers which deal well with large images? Because I know Acrobat, Foxit, and Evince all aren't great and slightly choke up.

PieSquaredon How To Be Fucking Awesome

And be sure to avoid confusion 'natural abilities' with talents. I agree with aneesh that you shouldn't focus on something that you are inferior at genetically - obviously a seven foot tall guy will be better at basketball and a normal sized person if both play professionally - but make sure you don't give up by saying, "I can't seem to do very well at this one thing. Eh, I suppose it's just not a natural ability."

PieSquaredon Change.gov

"Obviously compulsory volunteerism won't actually be mandated."

As I said earlier in the thread somewhere, it already is in some places at least. In my county you need 75 hours of community service (fluffed 'Social Service Learning Hours') to graduate high school. I'm not whining, because you have 7 years to do it, but I'm just saying: "This is America" won't get you that far.

PieSquaredon Change.gov

1 or 2 weeks off from high school isn't really an option, if you're the type that cares about grades. A friend of mine got stuck in India after a vacation (passport troubles) for nearly 2 weeks, and had a rather difficult time afterwards.

However, I'm one of the lucky few here. :) I'll manage to get the community service hours by being a sysop for my school, i.e. managing the Ubuntu server that runs a significant part of the school technology infrastructure.

PieSquaredon Change.gov

Ack... That makes me cringe. In my school district (in MD) you are required to have 75 hours of community service hours to graduate high school. It's also nearly impossible to earn them doing something interesting - most people resort to sorting books or working at a library or something.

100 hours of community service in college every year? That'd really sucks. It may not seem like a lot, but it is if they're spent on drudgery...

PieSquaredon Election maps

Heh. Anyone notice any similarities between the two pages?

"Wyoming, for instance, has approximately doubled in size, precisely because of the bias in favor of small states. "

PieSquaredon "Healthy lifestyle.."

I have to agree. Both skiing (and snowboarding, which tends to have a bad reputation among older folk, sometimes for good reason) are something that everyone should experience at some point in their life. Going 6 to 8 hours without seeing a computer screen, just you and the snow, is amazing. Those who haven't tried it - I strongly suggest you do! If you want fast results, try snowboarding. Snowboarding tends to be faster to learn initially, and harder to improve once you're good, while skiing is rather difficult at first but then is easier once you're past a certain point.

Disclaimer: These are, of course, just my opinions. I've been skiing for 10 or 11 years and snowboarding for 4 or 5 years.