kleevr

Yeah I recently dumped my .net job and ran for the hills. Now I've got my slices /etc/host'd, and I can just sshfs in and gvim around to my hearts delight.

(I actually got reprimanded for using gvim at the last job, luckily we struck a compromise with vs+viemu.)

yyp

I used VS+VIemu at my last job (.net shop), and it started to feel kinda homey after a while.

What is this, distributed captcha hack?

a cheeky name for "god"... basically he wanted to pray, but felt silly saying 'God' so he came up with something he thought sounded more rational

Agreed. I don't respect a company that won't give a person two weeks to get the feet wet... i.e. set up dev station, learn the network topology, and bone up on the development stack.

By not letting someone acclimate to your tech environment, your potentially shoving them off on the wrong foot (not to mention stressing them the fuck out,,,which WILL kill their productivity). A mistake that could cost you months of 50% productivity because you didn't (as a company) empower your developers to do their best work.

When I see managers pulling some "whip them harder" management styles, I can't help but be left with the want to remind them about the french revolution. Pointy-haired bosses will soon figure these things when "their" work force becomes a bit too empowered.

> This reduces the risk for the employer while also giving the employee a chance to examine the company and be paid if the work is satisfactory.

How about a one week stipend. You're view point is too company-centric, I MUCH prefer to work for people-centered companies. Either way you need something a little more symmetric if you don't want to become standard laughing stock among developers. (Or maybe you and your-co are so badass you can't do wrong and developers intrinsically trust you so it doesn't matter.)

I like how it seems to tap into some preternatural intinct to guard, protect, and incur against other "theoretically" boundaries...

It's like you can see the player's minds working sometimes (maybe if I was better it would be more often), an interesting game to be sure.

I don't know if it's true, I could just be stealing a line from the movie Pi; but people in a movie once said that no two games are like, and thus the game serves as pseudo microcosm for the universe. Either way you should watch that movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/ , and give the game a whirl.

I've got the paper back. I read it back in highschool, and I'll recommend it.

One passage that stuck with me, was when he spoke about how he taught himself to write. The process was basically to read a page out of a "good book" several times, then close the book and try to reproduce their style... imitate, and iterate as necessary.

I tried to do this myself with Ralph "Where's Waldo" Emerson (I was a transcendentalist nut for a while); soon I found my sentences littered with semi-non-semi: colons everywhere. (The scattered use of parens came later.)

Also I liked his anecdote about beer delivery services while working in printing presses in Europe.

I've played both a little Reversi/Othello and Go. If you haven't tried Go I'd give it a shot. It is good to start by playing a little against a computer (and don't feel bad about using a handicap) until you the basics click. Then find other humans I guess...

[I always had trouble with chess, my "ADD" always got in my way. I'd end up making a mistake I had previously ruled out, because I had forgotten where I was at, felt rushed, and eventually just made a move.]

Especially when you want to change the battery and listen to music. Can you use as USB hub? Haven't tried it myself...

Good point, I'm woefully ignorant of Branson's history of success; perhaps I'll meander through some wiki pages today.

I did liked the notion Stephen Dubner added. Namely that the two schedule types aren't necessarily mutual exclusive to a personality type -- some/(all) can modally switch between them (within reason). Perhaps the Entreprenuer's Schedule is really some personal-proprietary blend of both. (I would like to think Branson as a "maker" on some level or another.)

Well if you consider the "makers" magical 5 minute window of extreme insight that he or she might have specked throughout their half-days, it appears to me that it is just as significant as a Branson's. Branson's leverage comes mostly from his wealth, or at least is vastly improved by his wealth by a super-scaler factor. So a "(very) successful entrepreneur" can exert an (exaggiteriously)-greater "leverage" by the good fortunes of their wealth -- seems almost tautological.

(For those 5 minutes of the day, the maker might as well be printing off $1000 bills -- of actual value creation, and not some monetary-network optimization, a fish more fit to be fried by some super rich Bransonian-figure.)

Ray Kurzweil's book: "The Singularity is Near"

My copy isn't so near, but I think my "intuitions" were informed somewhere in one of his "Reverse Engineering the Human Brain" sections. (Sorry I can't provide a more precise reference.)

His book is well footnoted, and if there are in fact scientific studies reinforcing what I claim to remember him having written, I'm sure they would be documented there.

If you haven't read it, and your looking for some hyper-tech sort of inspiration, I highly recommend it. It is maybe a bit exhaustive for the casual reader, but well worth it considering it's detail and scope.

(And my apologies to RayK if I'm entirely mistaken in my understanding.)

What about the parts of the (human) brain that are just some wet-wired differential processing grid. Though their phenotype is ultimately prescribed in DNA (granted a list), I wouldn't be surprised to find that many of those "moving parts" are more efficiently approximated/realized by things like 'hashes' (etc) as opposed to lists.

(My apologies if I'm out of my depth here.)

I have included emitted UML (from running code) into my end documentation (from c#/VS world). But for any work I've ever done, there is a unordered heap of back of envelope artifacts that I fear only make sense to me.

It is hard to capture certain details in prose, and a (nearly zero effort) emitted UML diagram can do the trick. Or at least convincingly make it look like you did the trick...

But start from UML? I think I'd rather spend that time polishing my cv.

I don't know how you feel about counter histories; but, based on the keyword density of your post, I'll go ahead and recommend "The Shock Doctrine, the rise of disaster capitalism" (by Naomi Klien).

Sometimes I'll play trance ambient just loud enough to smooth over the environmental noise while coding: http://www.hbr1.com/perl/apax.cgi?run=jorbis&station=

My bad, the Nausea hit the night before.

It's funny, I wasn't crazy about the fade-out feature (Though, I did find it witty as hell.), but after pulling a ctrl-a on the above... well I'm actually a huge fan of it these days! ;)

tl;dr: too drunk to even care; so be it HN, I think I'm almost done here;

feels like a fair mention, so I'll push the point and a-void your convention.

Maybe instead of cardinals, you could have:

(Up Arrow) "?", "!" (not necessarily mutually exclusive) (Down Arrow)

But what would be more interesting is to not force any meaning on them whatsoever. And wait and see if some sort of meaning emerges from the community.

edit: yeah, I'm pretty sure I agree too, I'm not sure why I wrote so much...

I think strict Up-Down voting ultimately regresses to a Boo/Yay judgement; despite whatever benevolent community coercion exists to color the vote along some more complex institutional axis. (In so far as we're talking about a free public forum... substitute virtually any conception of "free" you like. e.g. if this were a pay-for community we could probably implicitly afford to have a higher expectation for the "respect" for institutional rules.)

I think the concept of providing additional axis of voting could lead to very interesting community conversations. I think having a voting system that was usably different would drive adoption of the additional institutional rules (e.g. voting via the four cardinals would be interesting enough to be "forthwhile" somewhere on the web) .

something like: ( ) I liked this comment. YAY! ( ) I'd like this comment to get a response. YAY for conversation! ( ) I do not think this comment needs a response. BOO for conversation! ( ) I disliked this comment. BOO!

* Though I'm not sure what to make of the third one. These may not be great exemplars.

"The harvest is great, but the laborers are few"

Or, perhaps you could define 'merit' as continously compounding interest with their average karma density (votes/items).

Taking the interest forumula "Pe^(tr)", and substituting might yield something like:

P = 1, -1, it is the single up/down vote

t = user life span in years

r = karma/submissions (karma_density)

for (user:item.voters) item.merit += (sign_of_vote)e^((user.life_span/12)(user.karma/user.submissions))

As a programmer in this day in age, you might as well be a free mason from the middle ages. You can move virtually anywhere in the world and make at least enough money to comfortably cover for your human conditions barring a complete collapse of the information economy/society as we now know it.

I'm 24. No college degree. And I haven't been out of work since I was twelve. Buck up. You picked the right sort of degree/profession.

As a simple heuristic, it's an elegant solution.

Could the front page 'merit' be more or less ~accurately~ described via continuous function?

for (User user : item.up_voters) merit += user.life_span_in_months/12;

for (User user : item.down_voters) merit -= user.life_span_in_months/12;

as an every-guy, who only at various times has "suffered" mild OCD fits: I can see the value to be had by the clinically compulsive.

That's why I use a second iPhone to take pictures of the first iPhone taking said pictures...

Just to offer a different perspective. As a guy currently from Oklahoma(whose just about to fly the coop for even better reasons); if I was still in school and had a weak CV, I would still jump on something like this. In fact, if I wasn't concerned about ethical implications, I would recommend that some of our talented interns take a shot at the much bigger leagues. I'm positive they would learn more there by accident than they could on purpose in Norman, OK.

Thanks! How apt.