Hacker News Reader

dill_dayon On Elitism

  When you are content to be simply yourself
  and don't compare or compete,
  everybody will respect you.

-- Lao Tzu

dill_dayon What are you reading?

I just finished The Brothers Karamazov. It was excellent.

dill_dayon 'Reading Rainbow' Reaches Its Final Chapter

Sad. It was always a treat when the teacher would put one of these on in elementary school.

dill_dayon Ask HN: What are you working on?

I'm doing a NSF `Research Experiences for Undergraduates' thing at school... the project is trying to help out with an optimizing compiler for Linear Algebra kernels.

For a personal project I've been working on compiling Scheme to JVM bytecode; I'm fixing bugs in my syntax-rules implementation right now. My code isn't so great but I'm hopefully learning a lot!

dill_dayon Alan Turing: Codebreaker and AI Pioneer - Video Lecture by B. Jack Copeland

I really recommend Alan Turing: the Enigma by Andrew Hodges... this was a great read

dill_dayon Erik Naggum, 1965-2009 RIP

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErikNaggum

He contributed many patches to GNU Emacs from version 19.26 to 20.4. A fan of Common Lisp, he took Emacs Lisp in the direction of Common Lisp. He contributed early support for multiple character sets. He quit over the introduction of MULE to GNU Emacs and for a while maintained a “multi-byte survival kit” for Emacs 20 users who wanted Emacs 19 character set behaviour.

dill_dayon The night I met Einstein

You think he seems arrogant here? Maybe he didn't care that he was being a bit socially deviant! :-)

My impression is he was just too excited about "opening up yet another fragment of the frontier of beauty" to worry about adhering to the social standard!

Anyway, thanks dfield for posting, this was a fun read!

dill_dayon Facebook reverts Terms of Use

A couple of weeks ago, we posted an update to our Terms of Use that we hoped would clarify some parts of it for our users. Over the past couple of days, we have received a lot of questions and comments about these updated terms and what they mean for people and their information. Because of the feedback we received, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

dill_dayon Imagining College Without Grades

Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

-- Emerson

dill_dayon Hacker news directory - find hackers at your school

It looks like you can still view their pages.

For example the people above wanting to view NYU: http://www.hndir.com/index/school/view/14

dill_dayon How Difficult is it to Write a Compiler?

http://www.jython.org/Project/jythonc.html

dill_dayon Advice to Incoming Freshmen in Computer Science

hey brian this is erik... I went to LHS we used to play tennis and stuff. anyway yeah I'm in cs at cu now also and I definitely agree with everything you're saying!

dill_dayon Ask YC: How do you follow YC threads you enjoy?

I might be thinking of a different feature but I like how on LtU it says "13 comments | 5 new comments" for example

dill_dayon Ask HN: What's your philosophy?

To become united and in line with the beauty and vitality of Nature, and to become united with those we love - what other ultimate object in life is there? Surely all these other things, these games and examinations, these churches and chapels, these district councils and money markets, these top-hats and telephones and even the general necessity of earning one's living - if they are not ultimately for that, what are they for?

(Edward Carpenter)

dill_dayon 19 year old from Florida commits suicide on Justin.tv

http://blog.justin.tv/2008/11/moment-of-silence.html

Justin.tv staff would like to take a moment to recognize and reflect upon the tragedy that occurred within our community today. We respect the privacy of the broadcaster and his family during this challenging time.

Michael Seibel CEO, Justin.tv

dill_dayon A programmer's view of the Universe, part 1: The fish

Really good. I like this more than anything he's written for a while now.

dill_dayon In march, at the peak of Facebook popularity, I quit.

...with four swift clicks of the mouse, I canceled my account. Gone was the entire online persona I had created for myself – profile pictures, interests and activities, work history, friends acquired

Maybe! But all of those pictures, interests and activities, work history, and friends are still sitting there on Facebook's database waiting to be made visible again with another 4 quick clicks of the mouse...

dill_dayon [dead]

I'm sort of confused as well it was kind of cool and amusing but I don't really understand why it has had so many votes all day...

dill_dayon Free Trip to Boulder, Colorado For Developers

I'm currently a cs undergrad in Boulder. Had an internship at a late stage startup this summer, it's a great place to be!!

dill_dayon A Modest Proposal

For anyone who doesn't: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

Had to read this in high school, I liked it

dill_dayon Why Python?

I didn't finish it. I browsed the author's website a little. He seems grossly arrogant.

dill_dayon Poll: Which programming language do you plan on learning next?

Haskell

dill_dayon Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

Not that one is the first to see something new, but that one sees as new what is old, long, familiar, seen and overlooked by everybody, is what distinguishes truly original minds. The first discoverer is ordinarily that wholly common creature, devoid of spirit and addicted to fantasy - accident. (Nietzsche)

dill_dayon A million lines of Lisp

eval(compile("print 'Hello macro!'",'macro','exec'))

dill_dayon Done, and Gets Things Smart

This reminds me of Socrates:

I went to one of those reputed to be wise... and when I conversed with him... it seemed to me that this man seemed to be wise, both to many other human beings and most of all to himself, but that he was not.

I reasoned with regard to myself: I am wiser than this human being. For probably neither of us knows anything noble and good, but he supposes he knows something when he does not know, while I, just as I do not know, do not even suppose that I do.

dill_dayon An Interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter

I say, if you're going to read Hofstadter, read GEB! It's not really a "commitment" if you're interested in what he's talking about. The dialogs in particular are just brilliant and fun to read.

Otherwise I also recommend his "Metamagical Themas" - a collection of all his essays from Scientific American. Here you can skip around, pick out things that sound interesting, and not have to embark on the ~750page journey that is GEB if you don't want to.

I Am A Strange Loop is good, but I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as some of his other work.

dill_dayon JK Rowling's Commencement speech at Harvard

"They'll grow up," says 1983 graduate David Epstein. "They'll have a broader worldview and they'll understand that there are many, many ways to contribute. You know what they say — the freshman bring so much, and the seniors take away so little."

dill_dayon Poll: Hacker News (Myers-Briggs) Personality Types

  I am interested to see how much we differ from the average
  population. The average #s appear in parenthesis after the
  choices, and were copied from 
  http://www.geocities.com/lifexplore/stats.htm

dill_dayon Don't Be Afraid of Special Cases

"...ugly is when a program displays "1 files deleted" (or even "1 file(s) deleted")..."

This bugs me sometimes also... or when a timer is counting down - I know it's small but it just seems lazy to leave off the half-line or whatever it takes to conditionally add the "s" when != 1

dill_dayon PG: Disconnecting Distraction

In high school I started doing something that has worked really well for me and helped me to create good habits for college and work in general.

What I would do is keep a notebook by the side of my bed. Every night I would think of ~5 things, 'goals' maybe, that I wanted to do for the next day. Maybe they're school related, work related, or related to something else, social perhaps, whatever. If there was something bugging me that I had been putting it off, I would plan out a timeline or schedule, and come up with a reasonable 'goal' for what I thought I could - should - accomplish the next day.

Then, the next night, I would review my day and 'check off' what I had done, maybe write down comments to myself or revise my plan if I needed. But I would either feel happy and pleased with myself if I had done what I thought I needed to do, or I would feel disappointed and frustrated with myself if I hadn't.

Of course, everyone is different, but this worked for me. I don't like the idea of setting up firefox tools, different computers, whatever, to try to trick myself or punish myself or block myself from the Internet or some other 'time sink'. It seems too easy to simply flip a switch, turn that all off, and slip back into a bad habit.

Instead of even thinking about wasting time online, in front of the TV, whatever it is you waste time on - stop yourself and save it for later. Just do it. As it happens, for me anyway, if I can do this, then by the end of the day I don't really even care too much for those time wasting activities - they really aren't all that entertaining. (-: