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menloparkbum

4,223 karma · joined April 12, 2007

I love downvoting!
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menloparkbum··on Thumbs Down for Clojure
Yeah, you're being unfair, especially if you've used both Python and Java and consider them equivalent in terms of laborious configuration details. When I say CLASSPATH hell I mean the whole configuration mess that is maintaining a java environment. If you have any tips on making this not suck in Clojure it would be great to hear them, otherwise I am switching back to Python.
menloparkbum··on Thumbs Down for Clojure
This guy is insane, everything he writes is a lame rant about how life sucks since the demise of Symbolics.

However, I will have to say that I was initially excited about Clojure and each day become more disappointed because it really does carry with it all the baggage of Java. I had vowed to avoid CLASSPATH hell the rest of my programming days and Clojure often makes me feel like I'm lying to myself.

menloparkbum··on Time Wastes Too Fast
Each week it seems they have to put out x words and this somehow hurts the quality. I've found they tend to talk about internet/new technology from an outside point of view (heavy use of jargon to try and fit in, quick to sensationalise the negative impact of anything new).

An ex girlfriend is a tech "journalist" for a new-world tech blog. What you've described is exactly how the new media outlets work.

menloparkbum··on Mapping OKCupid answer data: rape fantasies and hygiene by state
The Bay Area is hands down the worst place I have ever lived for dating.
menloparkbum··on Where do I find cheap places to live for a month in New York?
There are tons of sublets for that price on craig's list. Maybe put up an ad saying you are looking for a space, it worked for me.
menloparkbum··on Ask HN: Should I give up?
I would think that even in SF or NY you could squeeze more out of that kind of money

Good luck.

  studio apartment, best deal in the city: $1000
  1 burrito per day (or equivalent)         $150
  1 coffee per day                           $45
  2 beers per week                           $30
  health insurance                          $250
  muni pass                                  $45
  cell phone                                 $70
  cable modem                                $50
  stuff like soap toilet paper, laundry      $30
  github                                     $7
  hosted slice                               $40
  subtotal                                 $1717
Note that in SF or NY renting a room in an apartment is often more than $1000. Renting your own studio is usually at LEAST $1300. I have a special situation, I don't have to pay utilities. Everywhere else you will have to pay utilities on top of rent.

NYC will cost at least 30% more than this.

It's very easy to spend $2000 living a "cheap" lifestyle. I don't know what I'd cut out here. Aside from coffee and the beer, I don't really do anything a normal adult single male would do. That budget contains no dates, no movies, no restaurants, no books from the book store, etc. If I do any of those things a couple times a month I'm hitting $2K.

Moving to the east bay doesn't save much money unless you move far, far away. The nearby nice parts are not cheaper, the nearby bad parts are sketchy, and the far away parts require a car or else hours on the bus.

menloparkbum··on HP releases iPhone versions of classic calculators
you lose even more money developing an application that costs more than $2.99 - because nobody buys them.
menloparkbum··on Where do I find cheap places to live for a month in New York?
Your problem is that "cheap place" and New York are incompatible. How much do you consider cheap? I'm moving to New York and I haven't seen an apartment for less than $1800/m. I don't think you'll even find a share for less than $1000 a month and if you do, it's going to be way out in deep brooklyn, or up in the bronx, or weird (sharing a bed with two albanian guys) or random luck.

Also, craigslist is really the only way to do it.

airbnb.com has good places to crash.

maybe consider new jersey if cost is the biggest issue.

menloparkbum··on RIP Michael Jackson
Kudos for the first ever Cat Fancy reference on Hacker News.
menloparkbum··on Company tries to scam iphone developer, claiming they own public data
NextBus isn't the company harassing the Routesy guy, "NextBus Informaion Systems" (NBIS) is. Reading between the lines, it appears that NBIS is run by a crafty fellow who got NextBus to grant NBIS exclusive rights to collect license fees for their data, without NextBus knowing the full scope of what they were getting into. (hence their "we cannot comment" stance)
menloparkbum··on Company tries to scam iphone developer, claiming they own public data
The link is heavily editorialized. The actual title of the article is: "Does A Private Company Own Your Muni Arrival Times?"
menloparkbum··on Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius
Hm. When I look at UIC's tuition calculator, it's giving me $6757 per semester for undergrad engineering tuition and fees per semester. Over 8 semesters, that's ~54K. Other departments are slightly cheaper but all were over $6K/semester.

http://www.uic.edu/depts/oar/undergrad/tuition_undergrad.htm...

When I revisited UMN, it is $4200/semester... but that seems to be without fees.

http://onestop.umn.edu/finances/costs_and_tuition/tuition_an...

I first saw the UMN tuition on this site, which calculates it for the year:

http://www.getreadyforcollege.org/sPagesGR/TuitionChart.cfm?...

That's more time than I really wanted to spend on this topic, but I do find it interesting that even state schools can cost way more than I would have suspected.

menloparkbum··on US Patent 5255452 (or: Why Michael Jackson was a Hacker)
he did what he loved

But was he really doing what he loved, or was he partially an automaton doing what his parents engineered him to do, eventually becoming the only things he knew how to do? It seems like he almost had no choice in the matter, and all his eccentricities were his way of coping with destiny.

menloparkbum··on I've met very very few IT workers who are happy with their jobs
My comments are specific to the Joel on Software forums.

IT can be a crappy job and complaining from time to time is a good way to blow off steam. But consistently venting about the exact same thing for 6 years is pathological. It also set a pretty lame tone at the JoS forums. Certain people would show up in nearly every thread about anything to snipe it down and remind everyone that life sucks and then you die, that's just the way it is kiddo, you picked the wrong job and there ain't nothin' you can do about it now. We just don't get any respect! It was like a Rodney Dangerfield sketch on repeat, except it wasn't supposed to be funny.

One of my theories is that in addition to providing an alternative to sites like ExpertsExchange, Joel Spolsky joined up with Jeff Atwood to start Stack Overflow partially because his own forums got spoiled by a bunch of bad apples who wouldn't leave.

menloparkbum··on Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius
Are you sure? I thought this, too, but just checked out my home state's University (Minnesota). It's a typical big state school and tuition and fees for 4 years are pushing $45K. I was surprised because I assumed total tuition was closer to $30K.
menloparkbum··on How to hack your brain - Part I: Sleep
I've always wondered if the polyphasic sleep hackers have girlfriends or wives. It seems like you'd either have to be chaste, or else have a very odd relationship with your significant other. I can't imagine having sex, then taking a 20 minute nap, then getting right back to SEO strategy or whatever it is the polyphasic crowd needs all that extra time for.

The other thing is that I've never heard of a woman trying polyphasic sleep or even being mildly interested in trying it. It seems to be one of those things that only guys with blogs care about.

menloparkbum··on I've met very very few IT workers who are happy with their jobs
I used to read the Joel On Software forums. The awful life of an IT drone was a common theme, it would show up about twice a week. The sad thing is that I recognize some of the posters' names and it's the same people who were posting the same complaints 6 years ago. If you're still complaining about your career after six years, the problem is you, not your job.

I would rather not draw that crowd over here, or have their stories reposted, or even links to that forum. That sort of negativity is boring at best and poisonous at worst.

menloparkbum··on Buffett: Apple Withheld "Material Fact" On Steve Jobs Health
What? What part of what I wrote is wrong? That's exactly how it works.

I have liver problems. It's not liver transplant liver problems but it's a problem nonetheless. Here is how I found out about it: I felt vaguely crappy for 6 months but just thought I was fatigued because I stay up late and don't have a very good diet. I finally went to the doctor for something else, they did some tests which initially signaled some problems that could be related to my liver or could be from something else. Then they do some more tests and I waited 3 weeks and they say "yeah it's your liver."

So Jobs loses weight through 2008, he goes to the doctor in January and they say "whoa initial tests show you are messed up, you need more tests." They make that announcement to the press. Then he gets more test results, he announces a week later that the problem is way worse than he thought, he needs a transplant, time for a leave of absence.

Of course if you're the kind of ghoul who plays death pool games it's more fun to imagine corporate conspiracy theories hiding his problem for months or years to keep the short sellers at bay. However, Occam's Razor would suggest that a typical male relationship pattern with the doctor's office is a more likely explanation.

menloparkbum··on Buffett: Apple Withheld "Material Fact" On Steve Jobs Health
So you think in a span of 6 months, they conducted more tests, waited for the results, analyzed them, concluded Steve needed a new liver, put in the papers for the liver, received it, and finally gave him the transplant?

Yeah, that is how it usually works...

menloparkbum··on Ask HN: Math for hackers.
Trig class in grade school (or high school) sucks, in a major way.

However, I worked as a math tutor for 4 years in college. I tutored both college students and in an after school program for east african immigrants.

What I observed in that experience was that people with good trig backgrounds did very well with the mechanical formula manipulation stuff in Calc. They were mostly having issues with proof structure, etc.

The students who had a sketchy trig background had problems with proof structure and also had a lot of issues simply doing mechanical symbol manipulation problems.

I majored in math and focused on abstract algebra. I don't think rings, groups and fields are very useful to general programming or even computer science. I actually have the exact opposite opinion on the matter. Unless you're going into crypto algorithm research you don't need to know that stuff, you just use a pre-existing library. On the other hand, trig establishes a foundation for stuff like robotics, DSP, computer graphics, computational physics and so forth. Almost anything falling into the traditional "applied math" bin requires you to have gotten trig down cold at some point.

However, arguing this is sort of a moot point because I can't think of any elementary or secondary school math sequence where you just skip over trig and take group theory instead. Trig is usually required somewhere along the way and abstract algebra is usually not available in high school unless you're going to a specialized math and science school. Indeed, it's usually not even available in college unless you're a math major.

If you have a sketchy trig background and need more practice and inspiration, I recommend:

Trigonometric Delights by Eli Maor, for inspiration.

Trigonometry Refresher by A. Albert Klaf for practice problems

Advanced Trigonometry by C.V. Durell and A.Robson for examples of advanced applications

Statistics is very important and totally overlooked by most hackers and even math majors (including myself.) If you have the opportunity to take a good stats class in high school or university, do so. I do not have any good recommendations on self study, but it seems like books on things like Biostatistics often lay the basics out more clearly than general stats textbooks.

menloparkbum··on Mob Wars CEO: Twitter Is Run by Hippies
His comments don't even make sense. He calls twitter hippies because they aren't starting a virtual currency business that his company can glom onto. If his company is so loaded, why doesn't he start his own virtual currency business? Oh right, because starting a virtual currency is hugely risky, full of regulatory hassle and not very interesting. If anyone should start a virtual currency, it is the game company that is going to use the virtual currency! (Like you know, MMORPGS already do...)
menloparkbum··on Work smart, not hard: The seven habits of highly effective slackers
slackers wear flannel shirts and loose jeans.

hipsters wear flannel shirts and tight jeans.

slackers drink Grain Belt Premium.

hipsters drink PBR.

slackers smoke marlboros.

hipsters smoke parliament lights.

slackers listen to pavement.

hipsters listen to MGMT remixes.

slackers have jobs but don't do any work.

hipsters don't have jobs at all.

by definition if you have an engineering degree and are working on your startup or at google you aren't a slacker or a hipster.

get it straight.

menloparkbum··on AOL's AIM iPhone App Is Getting Awesome, Disruptive To AT&T
Good point. I average about 1 text message per day, so I don't know.
menloparkbum··on AOL's AIM iPhone App Is Getting Awesome, Disruptive To AT&T
I don't know if it's the push notifications or the AIM app itself. All I know is that I was beta testing the new AIM with push and my phone would always be dead by about 2 pm, and I don't feel like I talk to very many people. Maybe about 5 people.

My guess is that it was because my phone is always in vibrate mode and every time someone sent me a message my phone would vibrate.

menloparkbum··on AOL's AIM iPhone App Is Getting Awesome, Disruptive To AT&T
It also reduces battery life to about 4 hours.
menloparkbum··on [dead]
Flags are supposed to make the article go away. You end up with a dead thread with your comment, which is just noise.
menloparkbum··on [dead]
"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

menloparkbum··on Best Way to Check Someone's References
You always meet them again.
menloparkbum··on HN: How does one get feedback on comments?
What do you think?

I think your idea has already been implemented by Slashdot and if you like seeing labels like "+5, Insightful" you could go participate there, instead.

menloparkbum··on What Helps New Ph.D.s Land Jobs in Academia? A Passport
Isn't the situation actually worse for PhDs in science? I.e. not only can't you get a job in the USA because of foreign competition, you can't get a job overseas either (because the grad students can just go home)?
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