aba_sababa

But nine characters at a time? Is that really impressive? I thought the whole allure of the Infinite Monkey Theorem is that ONE monkey might reproduce an ENTIRE work, all by himself, in a single shot. That doesn't seem to be what's happening here...

Ha. I just made a hack about this at PennApps - http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com

Sigh. I really wish the media would start covering things like this. Imagine the nation panicking over caged science - no publisher would be able to withstand the onslaught. Instead, we're stuck with reality show politics.

How do you get the data? I assume none of these people have added rround; I also assume you don't have access to the Twitter firehose...

And hopefully something will, soon. We can't build or maintain a country with our history degrees, and my generation has yet to realize it. Say what you will about the value of the humanities, but I can't help but suppress a "you fool!" every time I hear one of my friends talking about their english, or poli sci, or art history degrees.

Don't get me wrong - I have a degree in philosophy myself. But I recognized that it would get me nowhere, so I picked up programming. I'm now looking forward to making recruiters drool. However, independent self-improvement is not the trend among my peers, as far as I can tell.

Really good writing. Read like a Hemingway story. Wish the Times gave us more of that.

Mmm, string looping!

In response to his accusations, I DO think that most classics probably ought not to be read. But that DOESN'T mean I'm anti-intellectual - rather, it means I believe that iteration is everything and we just need to upgrade our old firmware. Classics are, by and large, inefficient mediums of information. The fact that they are still around today is really just a function of the fact that they were still around yesterday. And what if every nugget of knowledge and insight that is contained in a classic could be transmitted in a much smaller package? We'd have trouble remembering and applying it all, sure, but not if they were a part of our collective consciousness - as many ideals found in the classics already are. Believe it or not, you already know most of what Kant, or Twain, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare has to tell you. They were all human, just like us, and we are more than capable of thinking what they thought without reviewing what they said first.

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< cowsay is the epitome of a unix tool. >

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This is very cool, but it was hard to concentrate on anything at all. I found myself clicking blindly.

These kinds of things can't be taught with the kind of discreteness that I think you'd like. You need that design sense first and foremost; once you have that, you can sniff out the fonts that suit your design. The best way to get that "sense" is just to copy what you love - go find the most beautiful site you can and gratuitously steal design ideas. Do this until you can create by yourself.

Or, just use Helvetica with big sizes and good contrast.

A favicon. I just want a favicon. Every single bookmark in my bar has an icon, and no words, and ALL I want is a favicon! Readability doesn't have it; neither does Readable. Makes things much uglier, no matter how pretty the text is. A golden star to whoever hacks it first.

I'm not sure that commoditization is a bad thing. I'd argue that education hasn't been commoditized enough. Imagine if all universities started running themselves like honest-to-god businesses by pleasing the consumer and creating great products. There would be competition, prices would go down, and the quality of the product would go up. Unfortunately, higher education is one product that paradoxically doesn't need to please its users.

just check out elance.com, there's lots of freelance work available instantly.

This is great advice for participants in the budding northeast hackathon scene. I've never done a startup, but from what I can gather, doing a hackathon isn't that far off. You code furiously and you try to win. You pivot if it's not working out. You make awesome shit, and fast. Hackathons are just a bit a shorter. I figure if I can win a hackathon, I'd a) be better prepared to win in startupland, and b) get noticed by the people who pull the strings. So far, it's working out well, and I'd recommend any budding programmer (read: student) to go to as many hackathons as possible.

"Magical thinking includes all systems of magic, as it includes the idea of mental causation, i.e. the possibility of the mind having an effect on the physical world directly."

We actually already do this. We all believe that our minds will have direct effects on the way we move, for example. Free will is just an instance mental causality. The problem is that while it's easy to not believe in magic, it's just so hard not to believe in free will.

David Foster Wallace is full of nuggets. Check out "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"

Collaborative? No one else seems to be in the rooms I get assigned to...

Sigh. Who's going to write the first good GUI for cross-browser CSS?

This is cute, but personally, I've never been a fan of password character requirements. Laissez-faire, and all that...the Internet has no business telling me how to secure my profiles!