dantle

Not the first time I've seen a reference to D.M. and pivotal work.[0] Is giving a shout out to D.M. some sort of Microsoft meme?

[0] https://github.com/netmf/llilum

I try these challenges often! As a corporate worker, I can usually fit self-directed routines into my life without much trouble. "Don't break the chain" psychology also works well on me.

When I was a scrawny 25 year old, I started doing a 7-minutes-per-day fitness challenge with help from an app.[0] This was easy enough to do before jumping into the shower in the morning, and the privacy was nice since the amount of push-ups I could do without visibly struggling was truly shameful. After a few months I felt I was able to do these basic bodyweight exercises very easily, and I was ready to join a strength training group at the gym. I finished the 7 months anyway, even though I outpaced it when I started using weights. Nowadays I just hit the gym two or three times a week, and have been doing this for a couple years.

I also use Duolingo[1] and have streaked into the hundreds of days a few times. It's fun and easy to do, but unfortunately requires an Internet connection. No, I didn't become fluent from Duolingo. I also don't think it helped me learn new words. The examples just aren't that memorable! However, it does provide a place to practice and corrects your errors.

I tried another system of language learning[2], also involving daily practice, which has gotten me to the conversational level in the past 8 months. This has exceeded my expectations! I was never conversational even after 3 years of Spanish classes in high school. This takes far less time, and I think my memory for Spanish words is quite good nowadays! Some flash cards I've made to remember idioms have been useful in conversation, and certainly surprised folks I speak to in Spanish!

Many years ago I did a special diet called Bulletproof[3] on a whim after reading about it while surfing HN. I ended up sticking with it for almost a year. It's tough because you basically can't eat any sugar. I got really lean, which was interesting, but not a good look for me. The coffee recipe is excellent. It's a very interesting experience. It's obvious that but by far the most challenging. My body was very different by the end of it; drinking half of a PBR would make me very drunk and very sick.

[0] http://perigee.se/apps/seven/

[1] https://www.duolingo.com/

[2] https://fluent-forever.com/

[3] https://blog.bulletproof.com/start-the-bulletproof-diet/

Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips.

Explains a lot of recent mass-market innovations that keep the semiconductor manufacturing industry rolling, and goes into detail about the many tricks used to ensure scaling down to the 22nm node.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4

I believe it's free for everyone.

> RemObjects Silver is absolutely free of charge to use, both during the current beta period, and once we release the shipping version.

You may have a low risk profile and good health, but if you ever need medical care you'll be spending less money on it if you have insurance. Theoretically insurance companies operate by charging you a rate around (or slightly higher than, to buffer for business overhead and risk) your expected cost. Unfortunately in America, insurance is an unusually "good deal" for consumers because it gives you access to the insurance company's price leveraging. Meaning, the bottom line cost of the procedure (at "insurance rate") will be significantly discounted from what you'd pay with cash. Thus, companies grant insurance based on the rates they pay.

Here's a more thorough explanation.

https://alecstapp.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/should-bill-gates...

- I'd like to specify how much money I'm willing to spend, or at least be shown a number of dollar signs in the app.

- The blurry pictures don't seem very useful, but the subtle parallax effect is nice.

- If the value-add on top of Yelp is supposed to be AI, how does it work? Seems like it's just a filter that may or may not remember what you searched; I have no indication of what is going on, and no feedback if it's working.

Wrote an app[1] to help Windows tablet users operate push-to-talk apps (like Ventrilo, Mumble, or TeamSpeak) without external hardware.

My first time playing with old Win32 GUI stuff, and my first blog entry!

[1] http://blog.dantler.us/2013/12/23/using-push-to-talk-ventril...

I didn't know UNIX won't allow kernel exception handling. Source?

Of course exceptions are suboptimal; bad performance compared to "goto" can have unintended side effects depending upon the OS (scheduling work may be triggered off of the additional interrupt).

(C/OS developer spiel)

I'm sick of these app developers assuming that using "goto" is bad practice. The fact is that "goto" is used plenty in great production code you're probably running right now.[1] I'd like to know a cleaner way to abort a function into its cleanup phase when a function call returns an error. And "goto" statements are extremely simple to handle for even the most naive of compilers.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle (see chapter 7)

You're right, FULL_NO_HZ isn't mentioned in the blog I linked. It's more similar to CONFIG_NO_HZ.

Windows 8 pushes out the tick. See "Idle Hygiene" here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/11/08/building-a-pow...

Ha ha, yes, how bad those schools must be. They are wholly dependent upon Germans to answer the tough questions, like what is the square of 25, and what's your best guess for the square root of 21.

One only needs to remember a simple algorithm to compute any square by hand, and realistically a computer is always a better choice. I can't understand why you think memorizing more squares provides a better math education.

Me neither. No restaurant can afford 2.75% per transaction going to Square versus the 1.64% which goes to Visa/Mastercard/Discover[1]. Fortunately for Starbucks, people are willing to pay much more for their cup of coffee than it costs them to make.

[1] http://payments.intuit.com/pricing/

I actually wonder if the brogrammer faces more discrimination than the female programmer. Who would want to hire a loud drunk frat boy to program for their Fortune 500 company?

When I first saw this was open source, I downloaded it immediately. Was pretty sure you were gonna take it to become a billionaire, so I wanted to have it as a reference for my own projects. Glad to see I can still get the updates. :)

The trick is to create a circle of people you want to follow, and then click that circle on the left side of the stream page to see only what they think. I submitted a request for a main stream editor but I doubt they'll implement it.

If you're ever wondering if Intel invented something related to transistors, the answer is probably yes.

I would never hire a highschooler to do a real demanding coding job, and I would imagine that it's all a startup would have to offer. "A little bit of programming" is what a lot of your peers entering college have, and they're not jumping on the startup bandwagon or being recruited by tech companies. College is a necessary hurdle to weed out the people who suck. If at the end of the day the startup fails (and most do), then at least you still have your degree. I doubt admissions officers are really going to understand why you took a year off; after all, they're not going to be engineers.

Also, college is a terrific formative experience. I can't think of a better way to spend my time between 18 and 22. As an engineer you can pay for it by doing coops, which are usually $15-25/hr and you do it for six months (and get overtime pay). I have some friends that did two and were able to make payments on their cars and handily pay their tuition and housing.

Can you give an example of removing some backwards compatibility with C that would make C++ cleaner?

As it turns out, a history of IBM is basically the history of computers. Ever hear the phrase "everything thats worth inventing already has been at IBM?" They created RISC and out-of-order, superscalar processing, relational databases, TCM, magnetic hard discs, DRAM, etc. You can bet there's a lot that didn't make it into that video.

Can you clarify why you think parents not giving a damn about what their daughters do with their careers is worse?

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&t...;

So much for Simple English wikipedia!

Agreed. The purpose of most communities is to grow. Certainly Digg and Reddit wanted growth; it's their business. Communities don't have to operate that way. Surely they can be designed for optimal quality; or as you said, modified so that any nonconstructive growth is curbed after a threshold.

The first book I read was Beating The Street by Peter Lynch. It's well written and helped me get some confidence and the right mindset.

fuckin nice. now I feel like a doofus for using ruby, when I thought it was straightforward.

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

Explains an ethical viewpoint in a very clear style. Changed the way I think about human progress.