ecuzzillo

Accidental downmod; your post was at 2, wanted to upmod it to 3. Sorry.

Or they're doing programming in a domain that involves a math a fair amount of the time.

(Like robots.)

No, I think we found out today; it's hard drives. Hard drives are the new tape decks.

After that it's unclear.

s/hoplessly/hopelessly/

Edit: If someone who downmodded feels like explaining, please do, because I thought it was a nice thing to do to correct typos in someone's essay.

Sure, but they're not putting any really bad shit in the atmosphere, which is something.

It's true it's hard to find good programmers. Two reasons, I think:

1. Norvig's learn to program in ten years. Even if there's lots of demand now, people can't just say oh, there's lots of demand, let's go program now. They have to spend ten years becoming a good programmer first.

2. You can only tell if someone's a good programmer if you've worked with them (and sometimes not even then), and so you pretty much have to get a referral from someone you trust who has worked with them, which limits your pool of definitely good candidates to a very small number.

Do you use and like it, then?

I've been pissed off at my HTC incredible not being updated with Froyo, and being UI-ily inconsistent (why when I hit the Home button when I'm already at the Home screen does it proceed to give me a zoomed-out view of all my desktops? Why do I even have multiple desktops on a phone?), and being excessively carrier-branded, and Google lost the not-evil designation with the net neutrality thing.

And, I've been impressed with the iPhone 4's physical and software shininess (and yes, I'm willing to not hold it that way), so much so I was leaning in the iPhone direction for the next round of phone, assuming they did a deal with Verizon (big if), but this now has me reminded of the sucky elements: namely, no Google Voice, bad notifications, and the potential to get hurt, rather than helped, by OS updates.

Well, maybe they're expecting 1/100 of 1% or less, which would still net them several million, which is a lot more than Google's counteroffer.

That this is #1 is heartwarming evidence that HN has not even approached the general vicinity of the proverbial shark, let alone jumped it.

1) Do you really think the web browser was the only reason the iPhone took off? There were no other ways it failed to suck that all previous phones had sucked?

2) Actually, the pattern fits better if you compare smartphones before 2007 to tablets before the iPad. In both cases, the category contained shitty products that relatively few people used. In both cases, Apple got a bunch of different things right that made the entire category suddenly seem like it wasn't a bad idea anymore.

3) The comparison in TFA was to netbooks, not laptops. Netbooks were not fantastically widely used, and they did have problems.

Global net fluff might only grow, but there is a long and illustrious history of pumping entropy out of a non-closed system, and therefore keeping the bit you care about (kitchens, online communities) cool and contentful.

The place has kept fluff nearly constant for a long time now, ostensibly by explicitly pumping it away. This fluff is no fluffier than the fluff of last year, or the year before that.

All right. Where was I wrong? Does sealage matter? Does CO2 release matter?

I don't know about circumventing the freshness problem, but I do know that if you introduce chicory to the brewing process and then add milk, it becomes fantastic. See iced coffee here:

http://www.bluebottlecoffee.net/coffee/preparation-guide/

That's also probably the best guide on the internet for coffee preparation, and one of the better places in the world to buy coffee in any form.

I don't think so. Month-old beans are certainly better than beans older than that, so it's something, but I can certainly taste coffee being noticeably worse after about 10 days from the roast date.

I'm not a huge expert, but my impression is that coffee gets stale mainly by exhaling CO2, not by oxidation (although it may oxidize as well), and so you can seal them as well as you want and they'll still go bad after 10-14 days, although not as fast as if you leave them out.

I believe this is why when you pour hot water over freshly-ground, recently-roasted coffee, you see foam come to the top (especially visible in espresso, which they call crema). CO2 emissions.

I don't personally believe in roasting beans myself, since I think real-people roasters are more consistent and accurate than I could ever be, and also I don't think it helps very much to go from 2-8-day-old beans to 5-minute-old beans.

Another idea that would make this work even better might be to have any changes in your blocking settings only take effect a week after you make the changes. It's hard to have discipline about settings for right now, but it's easy to have discipline about settings next week.

It is cold. It's not any more dangerous than anywhere else; it does have neighborhoods that aren't great, but they aren't like the worst parts of LA.

It's not horribly post-industrial anymore, although there is a significant contingent of mildly hickish people left over.

General legal question: If you're a judge, you presumably think you're right, and so you'd want your rulings to be upheld. So, if it's harder to appeal after-trial rulings than summary rulings, why not just make up your mind beforehand, but let the trial go through, and then rule afterward, and then it's easier to uphold? It's horrible for everybody else, but you aren't paying the legal fees.

(Not that I think judges should do this, just wondering about the incentives.)

The profile of how I read a paper newspaper and an online one is drastically different. The first bit of each story in a paper newspaper requires zero activation energy or decision-making on my part to read, so I end up reading the first bits of most of the stories on the front page until and unless I find something sufficiently interesting to warrant flailing and fighting and folding the paper back and forth until I get the rest of it.

Online, I scan headlines until I find one sufficiently interesting to click on, and then I read the whole article.

The result is that the paper newspaper is a better survey of what's going on, since reporters are good at getting the high bits of the story in the part on the front page.

That doesn't mean I'd subscribe to a paper paper, though.

Are you sure you didn't have the tasting, rather than the tour?

If not, I'm confused, since the tour is $225, and then the wines are said to be nearly as much as the meal, so with tip, that would put it just about at $500 a person. Even with zero wine, it'd be $270 with service.

Also, I may spontaneously combust with envy.

Usually 12 or 13.

They did say they didn't want to test Amazon's capacity. Also, presumably, running on their own servers is cheaper.

You're missing the point. Stanford being like the Army doesn't mean anything about any particular individual. It means that institutionally, [the engineering department at] Stanford consciously or unconsciously balances hardcore engineering fundamentals with making graduates industry-friendly, whether that means being Java/C++ heavy (which Stanford is), or encouraging spinoffs with IP policies, or whatever else. MIT (the OP thinks, and I find plausible) doesn't really institutionally pay attention to that in the same way. That doesn't mean that there are no hardcore fundamental Stanford people, or that MIT people can't go into industry.

If you scroll up to the other posts in that thread, it turns out to be a wider discussion about the role of MIT in research and the technology world overall, and in particular the claim that MIT was instrumental in solving a lot of the fundamental technical problems necessary for the Internet to work right, and that furthermore MIT was neutered in its ability to do such huge things by the cutoff of blue-sky DARPA funding in the early and mid 00's. And that, furthermore, a lot of the late-90's Internet boom in SV was dependent on MIT having solved these big fundamental problems, and that we should be worried that MIT is no longer doing things like this.

Rather outlandish, I'd say, but interesting, and at least worth talking about.

Carnegie Mellon University is quite good at what you want, especially if you maximize the courses you take and the research you do in that direction, but it's still good for that even if you don't. There are a lot of really good hardcore coding classes, and also a lot of really good applications classes.

My impression is that most of the top-ranked CS programs also do this, although at some of them it's more optional than others (i.e. you can get a CS degree without necessarily having written very much code). CMU is arguably the biggest in terms of number of pure CS faculty, and one of the only ones with a CS "School" with subdepartments (including CS (aka "misc"), machine learning, robotics, language technologies, software engineering, and some others I forget).

Basically everywhere I've heard of that's an actual university does let undergrads touch research. But, if you're interested in jumping straight to industry, research may or may not be what you're after; you might be better off with internships each summer and then your own side projects.

Also, the Java/C++ thing is more about employers complaining that they see people coming out of random universities with CS degrees but no ability to code. There are probably a fair number of universities that will let you graduate with only a JavaSchool coding level, but most places also allow you to get a vastly deeper education if you don't dodge all the good coding courses.

TL;DR: Yeah, go to a good CS program, it'll be worth it, and you'll be a lot better at life, programming, and thinking afterward.

I'm thoroughly addicted to coffee by now, and I'm not sure it's so bad, as long as the experience of buying-making-drinking the coffee is a good one, involving fresh beans, happy, independent coffee purveyors, zen coffee-making, and good-tasting coffee.

Proven startup veterans tend to be rich enough not to need seed funding.

Heh. If you have a procedure that's that simple, please blog about it.

Here's what I had to do: - Download the lein script and put it in my PATH

- Download package.el and put it in my .emacs load-path

- lein self-install

- make a project directory, and 'lein new projname .' inside it

- modify the resulting project.clj to add :dev-dependencies [[leiningen/lein-swank "1.1.0"] [swank-clojure "1.2.1"]]

- lein deps in said directory

- Install package.el, and then install slime, clojure-mode, slime-repl, and swank-clojure with it (and fight with it and get confused about why it didn't know about slime-repl until I installed it several times but then noticed it when I restarted Aquamacs)

- lein swank in said directory

- M-x slime-connect from Aquamacs

Am I doin it rong?

I'm about to try that (in the middle of trying another thing at the moment), and this isn't to you in particular, but as a general complaint, why do I have to have a project.clj file to get a nice repl in emacs?

Yeah, yesterday I decided I wanted to do something with Lisp again, and I figured that Clojure was the hot new kid on the block, so I should use that, and now it's tonight and I still don't have SLIME hooked up to Clojure, presumably because there's no actual guide to anything, and any howto that anybody made is guaranteed to be out of date almost before they post it.

Clojure is really appealing otherwise, though, as lisps go.

Edit (2x): I had a statement here of my particular problem at the moment, but then it changed, so I deleted it.

Not yet, but I haven't looked that hard. Offhand, it also seems like it'd be easy and fun to write, so I may write one anyway.