ecuzzillo

Yes, I am. Thus the fanboyism. Although, the fanboyism preceded (and caused) me being his student.

I've been investigating how to program my new HTC Incredible lately, and have therefore finally had to interact nontrivially with Java.

And, since I instinctively refused to look at Eclipse, I've been learning about Ant, which turns out to be almost completely isomorphic to a not-extremely-well-thought-out set of Lisp macros to form a build system.

So, since XML syntax bugs me, I figured I'd write a thing that took a Lisp-syntax file and spit out an XML-syntax file, which led me to google for 'ant lisp,' which led me to this document.

Me too. A choice video for the curious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGmihF97XIA

Agree. I'm about to graduate from CMU, and their OS class was an extremely rewarding experience. I've heard similar things about their compilers class.

The required intro classes are also pretty rigorous, although I didn't take them personally. I'd bet that any CMU CS (note that engineering is a very separate program at CMU) grad would at least somewhat know how to program, and will have programmed in assembly and ML, along with the usual Java and C. Obviously you have to check whether they got C's in the big rigorous classes or not, but it's basically a good bar. It would be impossible to graduate and then fail FizzBuzz, for example, which to my understanding is not true of most CS programs.

The one main complaint I had with it was that the required freshman theory course (251), which is supposed to be this great legendary weed-out thing, was just a hodgepodge of badly specified discrete math, and still is, to my knowledge. It was hard, but in my opinion not in a good way. Maybe it works as a weed-out but not as an educational tool. The later required algorithms course, 451, was much better.

Probably most can do something with their hands, even if it doesn't involve lots of strength. The thing about the guy who wrote the book about switching from being some kind of knowledge worker to a motorcycle repairman has circulated here a few times, which is presumably less physically taxing than lumbering.

Recentness of roasting is key for coffee not tasting like gasoline.

Basically, I've heard that Starbucks does way over-roast their beans, but the main problem with them, and with most coffee places, is that they don't use freshly roasted beans. Beans go rancid within 7-10 days of roasting, and after that almost invariably produce that overpowering gasoline flavor.

Using freshly roasted beans is terrible for inventory and horribly inconvenient (transportation, etc), and people don't understand that straight coffee isn't supposed to taste like gasoline, so they do fine.

Use http://espressomap.com to find places with coffee that actually tastes good (as opposed to milk and sugar that tastes good).

(On top of this, brewing espresso is really tricky, and requires constant readjustment of grind, brew time, brew temperature, brew pressure, and brew volume (these are coupled, so not quite that many degrees of freedom) based on flavor, texture, and volume of the resulting shot. Baristas at good espresso places pull shots and taste them regularly throughout the day to recalibrate.)

So you want to have to apply to the government to see whether you're worthy to rent an apartment?

Except when you have pdfs that use certain funny image-compression things that make it look fantastic in Acrobat and xpdf-based viewers; Preview does horribly on those. I agree in general about Preview, though. (It might be jpeg2000; I just know that when my dad scans a book, it looks good in acroread and xpdf, but in Preview it's very slow and pixelated.)

Don't they mean debt? I thought deficit was net increase in debt per year.

As I said to him in an email, the code for papers being released along with the papers is a big one for me.

Interviews with more programmers than just the notable ones in Coders at Work, and also particular domain sections.

If I did something particularly cool with robots, I could publish a paper in an academic journal and have it be all hoidy-toidy and mathy and shit, and then publish the code and all the "yeah there was the math but I really just tweaked the config files" stories in GQ.

It could be the same with all the interesting implementation research, like graphics.

Thank you for telling me that.

The poor and lower-middle-class people I know don't do that. They just don't have the education or expertise that offers a job that pays more than 30k a year. There isn't much to save on 30k a year after mortgage/rent/car/insurance/kid-college-loan-payments/food, even if you're very thrifty. And God help you if you end up in that situation with an outstanding credit card balance or two.

Yeah, you can say they should have gotten the education or the expertise, and I or they or both might agree with you, but spending isn't usually the main issue.

If you're frying or baking them, you salt them before they set, rather than after they go on the plate. If you're poaching, you salt the water. If you're doing the crazy poach-in-the-shell stuff, I imagine you do something with the shell porousness, like the sibling comment.

Actually, I do make French Laundry food at home sometimes. From the original cookbook, anyway.

I would think you still need something vaguely vacuum-sealer-like, since as the Baldwin guide says any air pockets will expand and insulate half the object.

But I suppose I'll try the $40 vacuum sealer.

Heh. The local butcher whose very happy meat I ate actually was in the Ferry Plaza in SF.

But really, I don't know if the goodness in non-Giant-Eagle meat has anything to do with the meat packing industry. I just was trying to convince ars that food people aren't being totally dumb when they say that local is often better than GEagle equivalents.

Empirically, Giant Eagle (the crap chain supermarket in PA) beef tastes like crap, and local butcher beef tastes really good. Locality is a good proxy for people caring about food tasting good, and for not going through enormous horrible disease-ridden meat-packing plants. The latter tends to produce meat that tastes bad and periodically makes you sick.

I really want to do sous vide, but basically everything I've read says you get bad results unless you have a serious-dude vacuum chamber packer sealer $4000 thing, which seems mildly impractical.

Especially, you can't do the spectacular compressed stuff without one of those.

You can get sous-vide-like results sometimes without said equipment, though; Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home book contains a lot of unstated backports from sous vide techniques. For instance, he has you blowtorch a big prime rib roast and then cook it at very low temperature in the oven (275 F) for two hours. It reliably comes out with the uniform-pink-almost-all-the-way-to-the-edges effect. Presumably not quite as close.

Salting things a while beforehand so the salt penetrates it is a good idea in general. You're supposed to do that to basically any savory food, including chicken, meat, eggs. For big things, like prime rib roasts, you salt it a whole day ahead.

So, this guy compared wrongly-salted expensive steak to correctly-but-very-heavily-salted cheap steak. Unfair.

Also, in general, expensive steak isn't expensive because it's aged. Aged steak is expensive, but the difference between cheap and expensive is more commonly just which part of the cow it is. Filet mignon is a happy tender fatty underused part of the cow. Also, not very much of it per cow.

A good recipe for chicken:

Turn your oven on high (450 if you have ventilation, 425 if not). Coat a 3- or 4-pound chicken with coarse kosher salt so that you have an appealing crust of salt (a tablespoon or so). Put the chicken in a pan, stick a lemon or some onion or any fruit or vegetable you have on hand into the cavity. Put the chicken in the oven. Go away for an hour. Watch some TV, play with the kids, read, have a cocktail, have sex. When an hour has passed, take the chicken out of the oven and put it on the stove top or on a trivet for 15 more minutes. Finito.

From http://blog.ruhlman.com

But it's really entertaining.

Bing cache (Google didn't have one): http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http+gigaom+com+2010+02+01+...

The latter proposal is just punting on the problem of what math to teach when. You're going to teach some subset of math first. You might disagree with the particular ordering that is mainstream now, but calling it 'year 1' and 'year 2' just begs the question. Yes, focus on problem solving is good. Yes, these problems are dumb. But people still are going to learn what a cosine is sooner or later, and you have to decide when, and you're probably going to put in the course description that yeah, you learn what a cosine is this year.

Has anyone checked the cottage?

Oh, you never know. They release a lot of the not-business-specific infrastructure they improve, which an editor undoubtedly is.

I'd argue their secret sauce, and the parts they wouldn't want to release, are - the insane scaling stuff - all the intelligent things they do with the insane amount of data they have, and the insane rate at which they can process it

Are you talking about only the web-startup domain, or life in general? I think there exist domains where you can't get something worth talking about done in a few months.

Yeah, but if Hindu men like ice cream, and I don't want Hindu men, I might not like men who like ice cream either because a) it's what Hindu men do, or b) I don't like people who like ice cream to begin with, and I don't like Hindu men for that reason.

So it's not totally unrelated.

Maybe, but the identified harm was adding fluff in order to persuade. If you subtract mostly irrelevant if colorful anecdotes, you keep the point and the concision, basically making it more persuasive for free.

That is, unless you're like everybody who actually plays the lottery, and you derive utility from the hope it gives you.

Michael Lewis showed that big-league baseball coaches and general managers are nearly all idiots (or at least were until he wrote his book exposing them, at which point a few non-idiots got hired, but most idiots kept their jobs), so it's not necessarily totally implausible that NBA coaches are all idiots.

Out of curiosity, since I don't know anything about basketball, how do you beat a full-court press, and why isn't it a good idea to at least try to stop people from getting down the court?

What happens if the court subpoenas the contents of the filesystem? If you don't supply the key, don't you go to jail?

By Michael Lewis.