athom

See, experience is cheap. All it takes is time. Skill is harder, but really only requires hard work — a lot of people can get that. But attitude. You either have it, or you don’t.

So, what he's saying is, experience is cheap, hard work is cheap (seriously???), but attitude, now that's worth something? I think I see the point about his programmers beating up everyone else's.

I say, let him have all the attitude he can choke on. I'll settle for the hard work and experience, thankuveddymuch!

Exactly what that contributes to programming or expense reports is anyone's guess.

One respondent, the heir to an enormous fortune, says that what matters most to him is his Christianity, and that his greatest aspiration is “to love the Lord, my family, and my friends.” He also reports that he wouldn’t feel financially secure until he had $1 billion in the bank.

I think this guy needs to crack open his Bible, and read a bit of Matthew 19:20-22...

[20]The young man said, "I have obeyed all of these. What else must I do? [21]Jesus replied, "If you want to be perfect, go sell everything you own! Give the money to the poor, and you will have riches in Heaven. Then come and be my follower." [22]When the young man heard this, he was sad, because he was very rich.

I can't think of anything more to say. I just hope I didn't just start a religeous flame war.

Technically, it should be possible to filter out uranium. Thorium, too. Both are heavy enough, it should be possible to centrifuge them out of just about any mixture, unless the compounds they're in are too tightly bound with lighter molecules by intermolecular forces. Even then, I would expect them to find their way "down", even if they had to drag some of the nonradioactive portion with them.

The amount of energy you get out of the coal or the uranium is a function of not only the amount of energy in each, but their relative quantity, as well. If there's not enough uranium present to extract a significant portion, I'd have to wonder if there's really enough to put out as much energy as the coal's total output.

Taking it a little further, if there isn't enough to extract, is there really enough to pose a significant health risk? We're exposed to a certain amount of background radiation on a daily basis already. How much more does the uranium in coal add to this? Again, I'm tempted to doubt it's significant, if there's not enough to be extracted.

So, do we have reliable numbers on this?

Possibly amusing note: I checked Google for references to this port, and got a link to another HN thread, which turns out to be another item from scripting.com: How to blow up a server in one mouse click (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1763840), which also involved this port number.

So, now I'm really curious. Why is it trying to hit this port on MY machine??

Such is the art of management.

The American midwest may not be earthquake central, but it has its faults. New Madrid, in particular:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone

I remember the noise around Iben Browning's 1989/90 prediction, but it looks like nothing major has happened there since. Yet.

http://www.archive.org/details/Penguicon_2.0_Terry_Pratchett...

He starts talking about playing with the ZX-81 about two and a half minutes in, and at a little after five minutes, starts talking about making one "that can see things." This so impressed fellow guest Eric S. Raymond, that he came charging out of the banquet hall after the speeches to demand to hear more!

I had something of a front row seat to this conversation, as I'd already approached Mr. Pratchett to ask about how he'd wound up too radioactive to enter a nuclear facility (also mentioned in the speech, but kind of glossed over). So there I am on the inside of a crowd of onlookers as Terry's elaborating on the radiation story, with a flabbergasted ESR staring in disbelief, and each of us standing not much more than a meter from each other.

It was... an interesting experience.

I do wholeheartedly recommend that speech. Terry Pratchett is every bit as funny at the podium as he is on paper. He had us rolling!

The help says as much, in fact. Actually, what it says is, "Returns the sum of a sequence of numbers (NOT strings)," which I think is meant to imply it won't parse numbers out of strings, but in theory, sum should be able to concatenate strings as easily as it does lists, with the right start argument. Instead:

  >>> sum([['room315'], ['room2']], [])
  ['room315', 'room2']

  >>> sum(['room315', 'room2'], '')
  TypeError: sum() can't sum strings [use ''.join(seq) instead]

I'm not sure, but I think sum is specifically watching for strings, and throwing a TypeError if it finds one. Otherwise, if it's simply using the + operator internally, as its list-handling behabior seems to imply, it should mash strings together just as happily! Oh, well. The join function is the right one for that job. It just seems a bit of wasted effort, to me.

  sum([ range(n,n+5) for n in range(5) ])

  sum([ range(n,n+5) for n in range(5) ], [])

  [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

I'd been wanting a way to join multiple lists without having to write another ugly little function! Anyone know if this particular trick is common practice?

http://leftoversoup.com/archive.php?num=34

and you can play the game online at an older site, here: http://tailsteak.com/archive.php?num=198

Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to have come up with a computer player engine that I've seen, so you're stuck playing against yourself. Maybe if someone's looking for a challenge... ;)

Now that I think of it, this guy should get more attention here. The creator of webcomic 1/0 (http://www.undefined.net/1/0/) is a man of many interesting ideas in a variety of fields, well worth a moment of the young entrepreneur's time.

Go check him out!

[EDIT: Before anyone asks, NO! He is NOT me!]

If you read it, you'll notice that story didn't really lead to much beyond a cool experience impressing a couple of guys who ought to know their stuff. It didn't look like Jacques got much in the way of referrals or anything out of it.

It also didn't sound like they took much convincing. If anything, they were probably pleased as punch to show off their cool project to someone interested enough to ask about it.

As for unfamiliar code, you can probably find a terabyte of it online, and most of it probably has something, somewhere, that could be written a little better, if you want the practice. No, you won't likely have the golden experience of the author watching you work on it, but that could be as much a blessing as a curse (Or is it the other way 'round...?)

If you do want to get involved with people working on cutting-edge technology, your best bet is probably hanging around some university's engineering department. If you're nice about it, and don't get in the way a lot, they might not even chase you out! ;) Seriously, though, just go where they are, and as long as you're not intrusive, you can probably make some connections.

Start with the beginning: "When I was 17 and a high school drop-out..."

followed by the (near) ending: "I was 22 at the time and making roughly twice what she was..."

So there's about five years in between the high school dropout and twice his mom's income stages. Success, but not what I'd call overnight. In between, we have...

   - "Burning the midnight oil..."

   - "...I got turned down again and again and again."

   - "After 18 months of me beating down the doors of the HR department..."

   - "Another 9 months and I got a call."

   - "...apply for *every* programming job in the last 2 1/2 years"

I have to say, I leaned a little more in Max' direction when I first read it, but give it a little thought, and the real message is, don't give up hope! Getting and running your own company isn't going to be easy. You'd be crazy to think it is! BUT, if you're willing to work your ass off for it, you can get there.

Even if it takes five years.

Hell, it could take ten, or even longer, but if that's enough to stop you, it'll probably take forever, so why worry?

As for the talentless hack, you might want to look a little closer at his story, too. He might not be so talentless, himself. The guy you describe apparently knows enough to:

   - Program (even if it IS VB6)

   - Reimplement existing software(?)
       (Not so easy to do without the source, and if he *had* it, then he could...)

   - Read other people's code (which could be even harder?!)

   - Talk someone in the right position at a big company into investing in it
       (and as if that weren't hard enough...)

   - Talk said someone into investing *a lot* of money in it!

So, yeah, you can do it. You'll have to work your ass off. You'll have to keep your eyes open, and you'll probably need a boatload of patience.

But don't let that stop you.

[edited for formatting]

Depth in graphic adventures may be tough, but it's doable.

Not to be pedantic, but I don't seem to recall Windows "dominating" anything until version 3.1 came out. At that time, you still had a lot of software running in text mode, or firing up its own graphical environment from DOS. Berkeley Softworks' GeoWorks was out, then, too, and looking like pretty decent competition at the time. Windows' ultimate dominance may have been inevitable, but I don't recall it looking that way before '92.

Glad to see it caught a few knowing eyes, after all!

Actually, I've long been of the opinion that such taxes can lead to a "dependency on the dependency." That is, while a government may intend to discourage the "undesirable" activity it's taxing, it may in the long run grow to depend on the revenue that tax generates, which may in turn reduce incentive to discourage that activity in more effective ways, like anti-smoking or anti-drinking campaigns. After all, do you really want to discourage the activities that build up your revenue?

Now, let's consider the payroll and income taxes Mr. Frank laments for discouraging job creation and investment. While this may be true, maybe our government could develop campaigns or programs to encourage these activities, and so counter the discouraging effects of taxation. I don't know off the top of my head what such a program might look like, so I can't say how feasible it would be. If nothing else, though, the potential for even greater revenue from increasing desirable activity sounds like a fairly strong incentive to me.

I'm no economist, so maybe this "addiction to addiction" hypothesis is just another crackpot theory. I'd be interested to hear if anyone competent has actually explored this?

[slight edit for grammar]

Many would, perhaps. I think most, however, would simply let it go, and save their attention for the items that rise to general attention more or less on their own. What the aggregator does, by dredging up any articles it deems potentially interesting, is to encourage the user to read more articles he might have otherwise missed or skipped, thereby spending more time reading; more even, perhaps, than he would have spent searching.

Now, it might be argued that such aggregators serve the user by alerting them to important articles before they become Big News. Although it's really beside the point, the fact is that most articles simply aren't going to rise to that level of importance. The user ultimately has to decide whether it's worth the effort to read them all; or how much time to spend deciding what to read, on top of the time spent reading. It all adds up to time spent on the aggregator's results, that might never have spent at all without them.

I really don't think Facebook is meant to simplify communication at all! It certainly hasn't been my experience. It's made it easier to find and contact other people, after a fashion, but then you've got to deal with all of those connections! Whose stuff do you actually want to see on your wall? (HINT: NOT every friend you've got, if you've got more than five!) What do you do about all those "gifts" and "invitations" to storm yet another castle? Can you just ignore them, or do you have to worry about somebody's feelings if you turn them down? Then, if you do take the gift, you get your turn to send your own! And, if you think for a moment, you might consider the quandary you just faced, and wonder if you really want to put other "friends" through the same thing? Now, maybe I'm just overthinking all of this, but to me, this doesn't sound like simplified communication. If that's what Facebook really meant to achieve, I think they've been doing it wrong.

This is before we even get to Jordan's point: the extra ad-riddled pages. To tell the truth, annoying as the ads can be, they really haven't seemed that much of a problem to me. Facebook doesn't even shove them in my face, just tucks them off to the right, where I can easily ignore them. In fact, what's annoyed me the most about advertisements is that they're all for about the same five different things! Seriously, if I'm going to have to look at fifty different ads, could they try to find at least twenty-five good products to promote? I probably still won't buy anything, but at least I could not-buy more stuff!

Anyway, that brings us to Jordan's solution: paid accounts, if I'm reading correctly. Pay to get rid of the ads, pay for fewer pages to click through, pay for less of whatever annoys you? I don't know. It seems to me I could save a lot of money, and a lot of time with a completely different solution: ditch the service entirely. I never needed Facebook in the first place, and only got in after receiving invitations from two different friends (as in people I actually know and like), one of whom had all but ditched the service himself by the time I finally took them up. I just might be the sociable type who benefits from a service like Facebook, but then I have to wonder: does someone who's actually sociable need an app to help them in that department? Keeping track of your contacts, sure, it can be helpful. Finding lost friends? Almost amazingly good! Actually being sociable? Eh, pick up the phone. Or email, whatever.

How likely might Facebook try to monetize its 'assets' by charging users for its privacy protections? Maybe they'd start offering to close/scrub accounts... for a fee? It reminds me the old joke about the school band's free concert. Admission costs nothing, but you'll pay ten bucks to get out!

Given

Of course, I guess that wouldn't work if everyone did it that way...

Well, I'd never heard of it before, anyway.

[1] http://chandlerproject.org/ Looks like they finally made it to a version 1.

[2] http://www.dreamingincode.com/

Presumably, the course of Firefox will run a little less bloody. =)