artlogic

I'd counter that NYC is not representative of the rest of the country. Most statistics I'm easily able to find say that the average hours worked per week in the US is closer to 35 than 60 or 65.

It's also worth noting that most of the people here don't spend 6 solid hours presenting to adversarial clients every day and then move on to 6 more hours of coding. In fact, most of us likely have jobs that allow us to take breaks whenever we'd like. That's a luxury teachers don't have for at least part of the day.

However, there is something to be said for the benefits and job security.

I did mention she was likely an outlier - closer to how the system should work than how it currently does.

Has anyone found any sort of a technical explanation of how this works or a privacy policy? I'm interested, but without some assurance my e-mail will remain private, there's no way I'm doing this.

This is highly variable. My wife was a high school teacher for two years. She was up and at school by 7:30AM each day, and worked until at least 6:00PM each night just to keep up with grading. Couple that with lesson planning and hard to grade assignments (like essays) and she was easily putting in 60 hours a week. At least half of that time was spent in front of students (who can be a fairly adversarial audience). At no time did I look at her and think she was having an easy time of it. Also, if you do the math, you'll notice that she worked -more- than the average professional, despite the 10 week break.

In the interest of full disclosure, this was a very good school that had high expectations of both its students and teachers.

It seems to me that if you replace "whom other" with "that" you end up with a similar meaning:

    people that people bully bully people

I've found it fairly common to hear people drop the "that" when speaking - so in this case:

    people people bully...

the first people refers to the people being bullied while the second people refers to the people doing the bullying. It's a bit clearer if you replace some of the nouns - for instance:

    dogs people bully bully cats

which I believe is a perfectly legal English sentence.

Dropbox handles this beautifully.

You've already got some experience which will help a lot. What I've found (and what worked for me about 10 years ago when I was almost in your exact position) was that the easiest way to get a gig programming is to find a good company that employs programmers and get a job doing something computer related there. I started in tech support which is as good a place as any. Work your ass off. Be as good at your job as you possibly can be. You may notice some opportunities for automation (they almost always exist). Use whatever tools you have available to fill the need you see - a lot of my early work was excel macros. Often times the programmers are too busy to fix one-off and niche problems. The idea is to develop a reputation as someone who can solve problems. Once you're hired, moving around inside of a company is much easier. Be your own evangelist. Make it clear you are good at programming and you want to do more of it. If management has a clue, they'll let you program, at least part time - but likely won't give you a raise... if you really love it - stick with it and get the experience, which is what really matters. You can always job hop once you've got experience.

Oh - and go to school - getting a CS degree will help you in ways you can't even understand. It took me 8 years to get mine because I worked full time (as a programmer) the entire time I was in school - still worth it - and since I was making money I was left with very little debt when it was all said and done.

It's wonderful that there's a free version of this available. I had to pay the ACM $10 for my copy - about $5/page.

They are very expensive compared to most other services. I was going to host with them, since I live in Lansing and am acquainted with the owner, but Linode is much cheaper (for VPS) and I found the support to be nearly as good. If you're hosting on Linux you may want to consider taking a look at Linode.

I can't speak for Drobo with a Mac - but mine works great with Linux. I was going to get a DroboShare, but then decided just to use an old server to network the storage. It's slow to spin up but fast until you start to fill the drives - once you get to about 95% usage things really start to slow down for some reason. I have not had noise issues either but have noticed the relatively quiet fan does come on fairly often. Combined with Tarsnap, I've basically stopped worrying about data.

I believe you can just make another dataset/drive - not the best solution, but you can use that extra space - just in another logical drive.

I believe I did say "and the bad parts". I agree - there are lots of bad parts to JS - I often wish it could be remade without the bad parts. However, a lot of these bad parts can be mitigated with sane conventions - that's what Crockford's "Good Parts" is all about. If you haven't read it, I highly suggest it.

I can't speak for Ruby, but in many ways JS is more powerful than Python, especially on the functional side of the house.

I'd argue that jQuery embraces a lot of ideas that new JS programmers often overlook - functions as objects for example. jQuery also gives you primitives to perform functional/set based operations.

For me, approaching JS as a functional language has been the key to writing good clean JS. jQuery helped me with this by allowing me to ignore all the psuedo OO stuff in JS and concentrate on the functional features.

I used to feel this way. The two people that changed my mind were John Resig and Douglas Crockford. Resig's jQuery project has been, for me, a guide to how JS should be written. Crockford's JS the Good Parts and JSLint have helped as well by providing some solid reference on what to do and, more importantly, what not to do.

Lots of folks only see the DOM and the bad parts when working with JS - these two projects have shown me there's so much more.

I have to say I felt that Memento was only good for a single watching. This may be an oversimplification, but if you reorganized the movie with all the scenes in reverse it would just be a mediocre movie about a guy who can't remember anything and the people he interacts with. I guess I just felt it was gimmicky.

Primer, on the other hand doesn't use a single editing gimmick or plot twist, but rather does a deep drive in the mind bending situations that can occur when time travel becomes possible.

The first major purchase I made on eBay was a HP LaserJet 5P purchased in 2000 for $200. I still use that printer today, I think I've replaced the toner cartridge 3 times in the last 10 years. At $75/cartridge, it's been a bargain. On top of that, I purchased memory upgrades, the postscript SIM, and a used JetDirect external box for around $50. Now I have a network printer that doesn't even need drivers to work. On top of that, it's built like a tank. I'll be surprised if it breaks down in the next 10 years, given my relatively low usage.

Despite all the personal experience I have indicating a quality laser printer is a better long term deal, I still have yet to convince anyone else they should use this solution. Most folks believe color is too important. Even with the advent of cheap color lasers, most people aren't willing to make the upfront investment. Then they complain when their ink costs nearly $100 to replace.

If anything, one of the largest problems I've seen in modern society in the inability to think in the long term, and by extension make short term sacrifices for long term gain.

I recently (a week ago) converted my desk at my day job to a standing desk. It's easily the most ergonomic position I've ever worked in. I have noticed that just to keep my legs from getting stiff and my feet from getting sore I move a lot more throughout the day. At first this was slowing down my typing a bit, but I'm almost back up to speed. I also brought in a bar stool to lean on (not sit on) when my legs get a bit tired. I'd say I'm standing now for about 80-85% of the work day. I have noticed a bit of residual pain in my heels, but I just got a fatigue mat, and hopefully that will help. By and far the hardest thing to get used to had been minor lower back pain - which, from my research, is due to some core muscle weakness from - you guessed it - sitting too much.

One of the best things I've found about standing is that it keeps me more alert and awake throughout the day. This is by far the most immediate plus, for me.

The important thing to remember is to keep moving - change your position often. I have considered the manual treadmill route, but I'm a little concerned my co-workers wouldn't appreciate the noise. Walking in place seems to work just fine - but does earn me some odd looks.

You have to be careful about things like this. While Foosball and learning Clojure are both not work related, one looks a lot more like work. It's a lot easier to forget where you are and program something cool in Clojure for 2 hours than it is to accidentally play Foosball for 2 hours. Other than that - your breaks are your business (in most states).

I worked for EDS for 9 years... they were barely able to keep their own internal CRM running. It was a nightmare. I sometimes wondered how the sales staff were able to hide the internal dysfunction so well. Practice I guess.

Michigan is a strange place to be living right now. There's still work for skilled technology folks if you look hard enough. What we don't have is work for the thousands of jobless factory/industrial workers. Growing up in Michigan, there were still people saying "My parents work for GM in the factory, I'm going to get a job right out of highschool - 30 and out, retire at 48." Unfortunately, all these people are now learning exactly how wrong they were. The age of plentiful factory work for anyone with a highschool degree is over in Michigan, and the statistics reflect this. The state is in a painful transition period - the country is feeling the effects as well. It's the end of industrialization and the beginning of a society based on service and technology. Unfortunately, Michigan, until recently, wasn't willing to admit that things were changing. Many of the jobless are in denial - that's why we lead the nation in unemployment.

Ah - I see, essentially:

"Don't use a signed server certificates, etc... when you don't have to, instead use a RSA public key."

It was the OpenSSL thing that confused me. I forget that TLS is way more than RSA over TCP sometimes. Thanks for the clarification.

Can anyone explain:

"Client-server application security: Distribute the server's public RSA key with the client code, and do not use SSL."

It seems like the point of this is to make sure that when communication moves from the client, only the server with the proper private key can decrypt it - BUT, aren't you just going to use OpenSSL to implement this (via TLS)? Is there some other way to accomplish this I'm not aware of? What's he specifically warning us against?

Educational institutions aren't exactly the same as businesses. For instance, how many teenagers actually WANT to attend high school? Looking back I can honestly say I learned some important things in high school (but then again, I took every AP class available to me and then some).

Colleges and universities have an interesting niche to fill. A broad-based liberal arts education isn't just a tradition - it's actually a useful tool that can help with whatever your main task is in life. I am a computer scientist by trade and by degree. My degree taught me very little I wasn't already aware of as far as computer science is concerned. The most mind blowing thing was learning Scheme, which led me to learn CL, and start looking at other functional languages. However, my degree also taught me about art (very important for a CS person IMHO), literature, history, philosophy, biology, mathematics, physics, and more... I have hobbies outside of CS mostly because of my degree. Most importantly, I can draw inspiration from other disciplines, because I understand the basics of many disciplines.

Too many people expect colleges to provide only directly relevant instructional material. This is not what college is for. If you only want to learn a specific trade, go to trade school. College isn't going to get you a job, it isn't going to feel immediately useful, especially when you are young. I had the advantage of slowly getting a degree over 8 years while working full time. It was hard, and the first few years I whined like everyone else - but then I started to see how becoming more intellectual gave me a leg up in business and in CS.

Colleges don't give the students what they want, because most of them haven't a clue what they want or need to prosper in the long term. College isn't job training.

Global data can be bad, but a function instance variable isn't global - it's simply public. Using closures to simulate private variables has always seemed like overkill to me, but I tend to prefer Python's approach to private variables. Also, being able to manipulate the cache from outside the function could be helpful in certain cases where a full fledged cache object would be overkill.

I do agree that namespace collision is certainly an issue, but it's traditionally resolved by mild name mangling (again, see Python).

In my opinion, the advantages of a less clever (read easily understood) public implementation outweigh the disadvantages.

It's a neat approach, but I can anyone give explicit reasons as to why using a function instance variable is "bad"?

I actually remember reading about this in old issues of Nibble Magazine I was reading in the late 80s/early 90s. The first time I watched the movie I was looking for it.

My first computer was an Apple //c as well - I learned BASIC and assembly on it out of nibble magazine. I still have everything and I have dreams of setting it up as a terminal and using it to code in emacs.

I miss the days of magazines with code in them and computer with BASIC and assemblers/disassemblers in the ROM.

This isn't really news:

http://wiki.getdropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/HostWebsites

Dropbox itself has been suggesting you do this since at least mid-march, if not earlier. I wouldn't use it for your business' website, but it would probably be great for sharing information/photos/videos amongst friends.

A more interesting idea is mentioned here:

http://wiki.getdropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/WebPublishingSoluti...

This basically suggests using Dropbox to manage publishing and basic version control of a web application's source code. I will definitely be using this as soon as selective synching is enabled (hopefully soon - hint hint).

Last year after trying a bunch of different things fitness options, I got into cycling. I now commute by bike whenever I can and participate in long (50+ mile) weekend rides. In the summer I am riding on average 10 miles a day, but that drops to maybe 10 miles a week for the winter months.

One great thing about cycling is that the community is very hacker-esque. Once you learn the talk, you'll feel right at home.

Another wonderful thing about cycling is that a stressful 15 minute car ride can turn into a peaceful 30 minute bike ride, giving your mind a rest. I find that after a quick ride I am more likely to come up with good ideas and be productive/creative.

I've been using BeautifulSoup on a project and noticed the exact problems he's mentioning. I actually ended up filtering the source with a regexp to remove script tags and their contents prior to parsing because of the HTMLParser weirdness. It wasn't a pleasant experience. The whole time I was doing this, I kept looking at my nice Firebug element tree and wondering "Why am I even going to this trouble?"

Does anyone else wonder why we're writing all these parsers when both Mozilla and WebKit have reliable, robust parsers that are actively maintained? How difficult would it be to package up the existing code and distribute it with wrappers for python, ruby, etc... I assume there's something I don't know, because not only has it not been done, but no one seems to want to talk about it.

My suggestion to you is simple: if you want to do artificial intelligence research then do it. Make a website. Self-publish. Promote yourself. If you are truly brilliant (as you seem to think you are) then you will be noticed. There are always positions for hard working brilliant people.

It's also worth saying that the majority of groundbreaking research being done these days is being done in the private sector. These people care less about degrees than results. Prove you can produce and you won't find it difficult to obtain employment.

While you research you can work just about anywhere - you don't need access to much to do research - a library, a computer, a notebook. Being poor is actually a good thing for research - money causes distraction. Most grad students are dirt poor.

As a side note, I think we're all a bit confused by your story. What is the "crap" you are tolerating? If you really know all of it already, shouldn't it all be easy? I think that perhaps some of the issues you are experiencing may have something to do with poor communication more than anything else. Most professors are willing to work with you on a more challenging project if the given project is elementary and boring to you.