jgg

Has anyone used both versions of the Happy Hacking keyboard? Is there really a huge difference in the feel of the membrane version and the mechanical version?

People like (and find it convenient) to split into tribes they identify with. Look at Usenet, Reddit, Facebook, IRC, etc. What if you took this niche-based grouping and applied it to a social network?

Imagine, for example, that I sign up with your site and join the "Lisp Hackers" group. I can private message other Lispers, I can pop open a chat window and talk live without having to open an IRC client, post code on our public discussion forum, view the profiles of the people in my group, look at their pictures, etc. The important thing would be to emphasize community-based subsites with a full suite of features for the members.

Facebook now works (to my understanding; I don't have an account) on the principle of "friending" everyone, and discovering some new people in "Groups" or "Fan Pages", which provide primitive utilities for talking with one another; at the end of the day, to get the full list of features, you have to add everyone to your giant "list o' friends." What would happen if you started with the idea of strict grouping instead?

I also enjoy Aphex Twin (all of the similar bands, like Boards of Canada and Autechre, not as much). I actually wrote one my of first web applications listening to "Selected Ambient Works 85-92". Ratatat is good. Finally, for some reason, I enjoy listening to the Conet Project ( http://www.archive.org/details/ird059 ) while coding.

In general though, I prefer to be in a spot where I don't have to use music to compensate for obnoxious background noise.

The one time I had coffee that I though was "good" was some sort of expensive French blend. I can't remember the name or taste, as it was a long time ago.

I stopped drinking coffee regularly a while ago, along with most soft drinks. I find that not being addled by caffeine/sugar rushes, while drinking lots of water, makes me fairly energetic for most of the day.

The dangerous threshold you cross is when you jump from extremely graphic, horrifying thoughts to physical activities that motion you on towards suicide. Once you, for example, start driving to a point where you want to jump off from or shopping for antihistamines to keep poison in your system, you're beyond the point where self-help can be effective.

I've been through this, and despite all the points where you tell yourself you're just going to do it, you reach a moment of mental clarity where you truly internalize the notion of suicide. You'll either push forward and decide to go on with it, or you'll realize that you just feel like shit and suicide is your pre-programmed pattern of thought for coping with it. If you decide on the former, stop and call emergency services so someone can save you from yourself.

This advice isn't pulled out my ass, either. I wake up every other day or so with the desire to crash my car into the local river or hang myself. But after thinking it through, I know it's because I have a shitty, non-relevant job and attend a crappy school in a backwater state in a country full of and run by ignorant loons. Just rationalizing my emotions removes the stinging pain that makes me want to kill myself, although I still feel the desire to bulldoze everyone in my local Wal-mart, so go figure. (-;

If you have a preferred contact method, let me know. I'd be happy to talk to you. Although I AM NOT A DOCTOR, NOR A DECENT SUBSTITUTE FOR ONE, I have been through something like this, so I may be able to provide more insight.

Take care.

Tortured genius, or lucky asshole with a lot of money? You decide.

What I pointed out above is that there are people who do this stuff in their development. (-:

It seems like we're caught in this cycle where every 2 or 3 years, a new framework comes out that everybody rushes to embrace. Someone is writing the code to build these frameworks, and I guarantee you someone had to worry about what made their algorithm O(n^2) instead of O(log(n))

I think the reason you're being downvoted though, isn't because you simply pointed out that some people don't need to know this stuff, because (although somewhat pointless to state), that's true. Rather, I think the problem was when you said

Mathematics gets way more attention than it deserves in computing

Because you made no attempt to back it up, producing only evidence of your particular situation.

For the specific topic of set theory, though, I haven't found one I like better than Paul Halmos: https://www.amazon.com/Naive-Theory-Undergraduate-Texts-Math...

If I could only find a number theory text that I like as much.

The Dunning-Kruger effect specifically talks about honest self-assessment, not artificial posturing to skew other's views of your intelligence.

and what that means in Dunning-Kruger effect's context.

I'm pretty sure you're trying to use Dunning and Kruger's work to assess things that weren't actually a part of the original study. There is little to no relevant self-assessment involved in making the neutral observation that people abuse the results of the studies to make themselves seem smarter (which, again, has nothing to do with the results of the original study).

I'm not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, I happen to think what Wikileaks is doing is important, and calling something "Collateral Murder" makes people pay attention to them. On the other, I wonder if there isn't anything else we can do to make people unwilling to read source documents do something other than herd themselves to and from each talking head who gets their attention. Is it sane, or even possible, to leak things in manner that contains no bias, and to choose what to actually leak with no bias, without becoming mostly useless noise? I honestly don't know.

But, Wikileaks does always release the full, unedited source of what they're leaking. If nothing else, it's a step above mainstream Western journalism.

More like the discussion about the research in general, but yes.

For example, if you know while, for, if/then and case statements you could think that's all you need to know about programming. But once you start getting into encryption and security, you realize there's a universe of knowledge out there and you're really dumb compared to that.

That's just it. If you've ever actually studied something (in order to really understand it, not just to pass a test), you already understand what goes on here. This whole discussion on competence and learning is stupid. For example, as I delve more into what's considered the "universe" of Lisp knowledge, I find more information and thus realize that there's more that I don't know than what I knew it was possible not to know. But I still know more than someone who's never studied Lisp at all.

In other words, there's not really much substance to a meme that's being perpetuated in blogs. Imagine that.

Oh dear god.

No, you're a prick.

It wasn't that particular comment I was referring to. But thanks for being patronizing!

Maybe we can all move to open-source platforms, so that we can fill the Blogosphere (tm) with self-righteous bullshit about Ubuntu before being swept up by the next commercial trend. Gee, it took a shiny user interface and a meticulously-engineered corporate image to sucker in that last batch, how low can be set the bar this time?

I hate humanity.

Did you go to school to get a piece of paper, or to learn something?

The analogy doesn't quite hold. You make it sound as if all educational quality is the same, and you're only paying for the name. That's just not true.

Most people judge a language by a) what the syntax looks like and b) what other people say about the language. If you have a formal understanding of programming languages, you can make an actual engineering decision about which language to use instead of being herded from trend to trend with your mouth agape at each marvelous reinvention of old CS concepts.