jkkramer

Sometimes I like watching videos precisely because it's slower: the delivery has nuance; I can ruminate a bit; things stick in my memory. A good speaker can really amplify the meaning and memorability of information.

Really, it depends on the situation. Speed isn't always the most important thing.

It's nice to see a level-headed assessment like this. Too many programmers rely on trends or religious convictions to make decisions. All choices involve trade-offs, so make yourself aware of them!

Apple and Jobs have actually been in favor of this for a while, but were prevented from doing it by the music industry. See http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

Quote: "The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. ... This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store."

We're not trying to explain how wheels move in a combustion engine. A functioning brain is not predicated upon qualia, which is why it's so mysterious. (See: zombies.)

I think the problem is that qualia don't have any place in existing models of our world. And yet we experience them (at least, I do). That's bizarre, and suggests our models aren't quite right.

I would be more inclined to do this if the book is non-technical. When you commit to reading a technical book, you're committing yourself to more than just the time spent reading: you're committing yourself to the time spent applying and fully understanding what you read -- installing tools, tinkering with syntax, coding, and so on. I've got enough of that now.

With non-technical books (literature, history, quality-of-life), most of the time will be invested into actual reading, with a bit of pondering and maybe discussing. We can have a conversation right away, and there's still knowledge and insight to be gained.

Here are some non-technical books I'd like to read:

* How to Read a Book - http://amazon.com/dp/0671212095

* Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - http://amazon.com/dp/006124189X

* Liar's Poker - http://amazon.com/dp/0140143459

* Growing a Business - http://amazon.com/dp/0671671642

Reading the comments, I'm confused by the apparent hate. When I saw the article, I thought, "Hey, isn't this a mostly-solo operation? That's impressive."

Am I missing something? Is it just that people think the site is low class?

Maybe he uses it for the same reason everyone else does? For fun and socializing? From what I've seen, Shaq is a pretty gregarious fellow.

1. Prevents typos (though bounced emails are not a big deal)

2. Makes it so you can't sign someone else up surreptitiously

3. Ensures the email they enter is real

Depending on the site, these may or may not be a concern. For some sites, the drop-off rate is worth the reduction in support hassle.

Nifty idea, but I doubt it will gain traction without some kind of industry-wide standard. Even then, business cards are easy to hand over (no lag) and you can write things on them.

While the quote is insightful and galvanizing, it's actually a paraphrase of Aristotle's ideas written by Will Durant. See:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aristotle#Misattributed

Even FCK occasionally has issues with pasting content from Word. Plus it's slow to load. It has improved over time, though, and is generally a reliable component. Considering the insane constraints rich text editors must operate under, it does an admirable job.

I tried creating a home-grown editor once. It was hard. Making one that's simple, predictable, and end-user friendly is nigh impossible.

Sounds like they only increased the speed of brute force attacks. Use a strong password and you'll be fine.

EDIT: That said, at least for me, the main reason I need wireless encryption is to prevent neighbors from using it. It would be silly to rely on wireless encryption to safeguard sensitive network activity. That's what SSH, SSL, etc. are for.

Don't think you have to quit being a geek to be happy or "normal". "Geek" and "normal" are just arbitrary labels.

I spent most of my high school and college years same as you. Then I made a slow, concerted effort to balance out (learned to dance, make friends, talk to girls).

Today I'm still a geek, but reasonably social and "normal" too -- as much as I care to be, anyway. At any given hour I'm a geek, a socialite, an artist, a dope, and so on. People are dynamic, not static; don't limit yourself. Have fun!

This thing makes the "complex" parts of the software I write seem trivial.

"Until the 18th century, no one north of the Tweed had ever seen a kilt"

This is misleading. As noted later in the article, highlanders wore plaids, which are basically kilts with an over-the-shoulder piece that can be used as a cloak (it's actually all one big piece of cloth). If you saw a plaid, you'd say, "that's a kilt." Go to a Renaissance Festival and you'll see them all over the place.

I'll toot my own horn and share my site, which started as a study tool for myself but that many people have also found useful (it's open source):

http://eidogo.com/

You can study joseki, search for board patterns in pro games, play GNU Go, etc. The board part is modular and can be embedded into any webpage. Like GoBase, it has a pro game archive, but does not require registration or payment to view.

I was going to post the same thing. Another plus is that the salsa community is filled with classy and smart people (it takes a surprising amount of brainpower to dance well -- many of the best leaders are techies).

You seem to be framing the issue as a rational rather than emotional problem -- i.e., not knowing the social conventions.

I don't buy it. Stick an extroverted people person and an introverted shy guy in an unfamiliar social situation (in a foreign country, say). The way they deal with it will differ greatly. The extrovert will plow ahead, not worry too much about making mistakes, and figure out how to play the social game pretty quickly. The introvert will probably be too scared of doing things wrong to even start.

Learning to play the social game is not hard: make eye contact, open your mouth, and start talking. Building the courage to actually do it is hard. That's crux for most shy people (as it was for me).

If you're out there talking to people and still can't find shared context, then you're not shy, you're just talking to the wrong people. Time to seek out different social gatherings.

For those that have difficulty learning from social interactions (autistic spectrum folks), things may admittedly be different. This is outside my experience so I can't speak to it.

Looking forward to this. I've put off learning Django in-depth until 1.0 because the APIs for fundamental things like forms keep changing. I don't want to invest in learning obsolete methods or port code to newer versions. And much of the documentation is full of version-related caveats. Having a canonical, consistent API to build on will be great.

For one thing, the function returned by createFramesetReal() seems to be using the undefined variable 'b'.

Loopt mentioned at 10:35. More here, with pic:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080609-ars-at-wwdc-08...

I use a simple coding challenge as a weeder question. It requires basic use of recursion (without explicitly saying so) -- no math, no big-O, no gotchas, just writing a simple recursive function to process a small tree. It takes decent coders a few minutes to complete. Less-than-decent coders really struggle with it.

This is only a wheat/chaff separator, though. If possible, I like to see code from actual projects they've worked on to get a feel for the bigger picture (tip: open source your personal projects and obsess a bit over the code, so you have something to show off). Plus there's all the other non-code aspects to the interview.

Many of the submissions seem to have code with lines a mile long. Maybe it's less of an issue nowadays with high-res, widescreen monitors, but I find code that stays within around 80-100 columns to be most readable. Plus it's easier to peruse when you end up seeing the code in other, non-editor environments (terminal, source control, browser).

Does anyone actually prefer longer (100+) lines over LOC? Maybe it's a Windows thing. I know I started to become stricter about line length when I moved to OS X (and started using the command-line more often).

Intuition is one tool to use when the complexity of a situation overwhelms your logical faculties.

Intuition isn't a baseless, emotional thing. Proper intuition is your mind giving you hints based on the patterns of past experience. It's knee-jerk wisdom.

If your mind isn't giving you any hints, you probably need more experience. There are many stories of mathematicians and theoretical physicists that steep themselves in theorems and test results and then, during a break, a eureka moment happens and they cross the inductive gap. But it couldn't have happened without the massive amount of mental preparation.

Another example is what Go players do: they don't just guess at the right move, they have a feeling about the right move based on vast experience of many patterns. Then they back up their intuition with reading (for the non-Go realm, research and evidence).

I guess with startups, the thing to do is just keep at it, try to make the right decisions and reflect on their effectiveness as you go along. Eventually your intuition and judgment will start to become more reliable.

I realize you asked about instinct, not intuition, but they're related. Instinct I think is more reactive and less reflective than intuition. You're probably looking to improve the latter.

I find if I gorge on carbs or rich foods during work time, I'll start to feel sluggish and want a nap. If I eat a small to medium portion of veggies and fruits, I'll be able to maintain (elevate even) my focus without the "food-ludes".

I don't know if it's age (in my late 20s) or an increased interest in being attuned to my body, but food management has become critical to my daily productivity.

So yeah, I get into the coding zone with grapes.

Your use of "vegetarian" and "animal protein" are unconventional. "Vegetarian" generally refers to someone that does not eat meat but does eat eggs and dairy, so when you said "vegetarian kids need animal protein", it implies they need meat. But meat is not essential for development; B12 is, and can be got from milk or eggs.

It's true anyone raising their child vegan ought to be aware of B12 deficiency. Time was when B12 could be got from dirt on vegetables pulled from the ground, but nowadays we're pretty finicky about cleanliness.

Cite? I've never seen any evidence that kids need animal protein to develop. I was raised vegetarian from birth and have no mental or physical defects to speak of. I have siblings and cousins and friends that are the same.

Vitamin B12 is the only thing that can be a challenge to get from non-animal sources, but that's only a concern if you're vegan. The whole "vegetarians don't get enough protein" thing is an overblown myth.

I've noticed that forums I frequent that have high signal-to-noise ratios fall into two camps (with some overlap):

1. Niche topic. For example, I frequent forums about Go and salsa dancing that have next to zero noise. The trick I think is keeping the focus narrow: the programming reddit has worked rather well, technology-in-general forums have become cess pools.

2. Strictly moderated. It seems the only way to maintain a non-niche forum is to aggressively counteract unthinking contributions ("me too" posts, Internet memes) and trolls. Having a sanctioned area to vent and flame in, to keep the main area focused on serious (or at least on-topic) discussion may also help. The Ars Technica forums and The Straight Dope Message Board come to mind.

The dynamic on social news sites is a bit different than a traditional forum, however. Different tactics may be required to keep things in check.

New Onion headline? "Area man constantly bringing up how overhyped Facebook is"

You don't need to deal with setting up proper security, which can be a little tricky with git. Plus the social aspects. Plus the pretty interface. Plus it's free for most purposes.

I don't use it for work, but I use it for personal projects.