nwhitehead

If you love programming there's no reason to let unhelpful online responses get you down. Keep looking for good people that can help you online, they do exist. And keep trying to improve the way you learn and the way you get information from others. Eric Raymond's "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" might be helpful [1].

[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Nice looking site!

I'm a professional programmer just getting started with indie game development (it's so much fun!). The biggest thing I want out of a game hosting site apart from actual sales is insight into the potential players/customers. I want to know which categories are popular, whether free demos are increasing paid sales, which platforms are selling, where are viewers coming from. I want to see what people are saying about my game, what they are rating it and why. It's not hard for me to put up a quick page with a paypal link to a file download, but you can add lots of value with good analytics and things like comments and ratings.

Talking to your children in an honest way as independent people, working with them to come up with innovative solutions to problems, being inspired by their peers who have managed to overcome the same problem (the deviants) sounds like an EXCELLENT idea. I don't object at all.

Very nice! I worked through all the levels you have and everything worked great, it was a lot of fun.

Some notes: I "cheated" and used cherry-pick before it was introduced, not sure if that should or should not be allowed. Sometimes I was frustrated because my graph looked like the goal except for "ghosted" nodes, had to go back and figure out a different way to solve the level the right way. I wished I had an "undo" feature to take back moves rather than resetting everything. Lots more hints would be good, this stuff is hard.

Honestly I learned more git in the last 10 minutes than I've learned in a year of using git, or from several hours reading git tutorials.

This thread and patch are silly, but running out of entropy can be a real performance problem sometimes. I've seen it on embedded Linux systems that I've set up to be headless servers. After turning off lots of device drivers, I noticed that SSH was incredibly slow sometimes. The problem was a lack of entropy, causing reads to /dev/random to block. Like in the article, the quick hack is to redirect /dev/urandom to /dev/random, but that isn't a real fix because of the security implications. The right fix was digging through the available devices and figuring out where entropy could be legitimately captured.

These are the problems you want to have.

> As I understand it, that was the original spec, which both Knuth and McIlroy wrote to. I agree that it is limited as you say.

My new opinion is that great programmers will go beyond the spec and make their software handle Unicode in cases like this. It's the right thing to do. If the spec didn't require units tests does that mean you don't write unit tests? No, you do it anyway because it's the right way to do things. BTW I'm still working on being a great programmer myself.

Actually some subjects on YouTube do have high-brow discussion, they're just not the millions-of-views kinds of subjects. I did a bunch of videos on quantitative finance, the discussions on those often involve talking about calculus, questions about assumptions in financial models, etc. The comments actually add a lot of value to the videos.

One nice thing is that the anonymity means that real finance people can comment without worrying about their employer finding their comments. All the best financial discussion areas have to have good anonymity for participants to get people from industry involved.

At my college (Whitman College) you can get a degree in Mathematics-Physics. That is the "combined major". It is about as difficult as either a degree in mathematics or a degree in physics, the requirements are a mix of both.

The alternative is a "double major". That is where you meet the requirements of both the math major and the physics major. This is harder than just meeting the requirements of either one individually. Your degree is listed as a "B.A. in Mathematics and Physics" for the double major as opposed to a "B.A. in Mathematics-Physics" for the combined major.

I worked hard for my "and" instead of a "-", dammit.

You should put the name "patio11" on the landing page. I saw the page, thought "maybe, not sure". After I saw the comments and realized this was you (patio11) I thought "heck yeah!" and signed up as fast as I could.

This is explicitly against YouTube's terms of service.

The article doesn't suggest only using 48kHz for recording and mixing. I don't think the author would disagree that recording triangles is difficult. He would argue that once you've decided what final audible frequencies you want to present to the listener, the best way to distribute them is at 16-bit 44.1/48kHz. It's a compelling case.

Nathan here - just chiming in that I'm willing to answer questions here as well as on email.

It's not your job to decide if you are competent enough to be an asset to the team, it is the company's job. If you want the internship, apply. Let them do the work of figuring out if they want you.

It's interesting that in this older essay pg suggests focusing on number of users as a good metric for adding value. Nowadays this is called a vanity metric and everyone is looking for actionable metrics based on cohort analysis etc. It shows how fast the best practices for startups are evolving.

I don't buy it. Looking at college-educated versus high-school educated people is the wrong comparison when advising people whether to go to college or not. The relevant populations are people like you who went to college and people like you who decided against college.

At UIUC some of my friends did a startup related to memory architectures. IBM pretty quickly shut them down with threats of patent suits. So I know it happens, not sure how common it is though.

I'm not a fan of wrist supports for everyday use. My strategy:

1) Kinesis keyboard 2) trackball on left and right side of keyboard, to balance mousing 3) lift weights 3 times/week 4) fish oil supplements once a day (mild anti-inflammatory) 5) standing desk

Having trackballs on both sides of the keyboard while standing lets you CODE LIKE A BOSS.

(Creator here) Ha, yeah JSLint really provokes strong emotions.

Before I added in JSLint, if you misplaced one semicolon or forgot a parentheses, none of the tests would run and it would just say "program failed". That was incredibly frustrating to me. I figured that if I was getting frustrated, and I was the creator of the tests, then random users would be REALLY frustrated. So I added in JSLint. Now you get line and column numbers for exactly where the syntax broke down.

I'm actually happy following all of JSLint's suggestions. But my first test user, my wife, had other thoughts. She filled out her first answer, saw the whitespace errors, and said "hells no". So I turned off the whitespace checking. She seemed OK with it after that.

Which checks in particular are annoying? I can change the default parameters of JSLint to be less strict about some things. But I don't want to give up syntax checking entirely.

Simpson's paradox is amazing, it's worth reading all the examples in the article and really understanding it.

Another good source is Martin Gardner's "Aha! Gotcha" book. He presents the paradox as a woman trying to find eligible bachelors at a party. In room 1 her odds are better if she goes for guys with mustaches. In room 2 her odds are also better if she goes for guys with mustaches. But when everyone goes into one room, her odds are better for guys without mustaches. It's incredible.

I'll reword it, I agree that it is confusing still.

Most journals now have an explicit policy that putting up your preprints online is OK. You can check the status of any particular journal or publisher here: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

I just put up an interactive javascript tutorial. It starts simple then builds up to passing around functions, closures, continuations. Give it a try and let me know what you think. http://nathansjslessons.appspot.com/

Just put this online, try it out and let me know if you see any problems. Kudos to whoever finishes first!

Sounds cool! I'm excited to see how it works out.

Some notes from the video I saw on YouTube. Needs better audio quality. Bigger fonts for the computer typing would be nicer, the existing size was just legible. It would be nice to see the diagram and code on screen at the same time rather than switching back and forth. I liked the 5 minute length, that is just long enough.

Start doing them as soon as you get them. Never spend too long on any one assignment or question. If one question is taking too long, ask for help as soon as you can. Practice getting and giving help, these are crucial skills. If necessary, cut your losses (but always turn in your best current attempt for every problem, never miss anything).

Every time I did these I got 98% or higher. I only got worse grades when I didn't have time to do all these things because of how many classes I was taking simultaneously.

Top hacks: 1) Buy books, learn material before class starts. Then review each section before each class, with notes and questions. You know you are doing it right when everything is boringly obvious by the time you officially get to it. 2) Practice doing problems as fast as possible. During exams, do all problems quickly, keep doing passes through all the questions to fix mistakes until time is up. 3) Explain what you learn to others. This is where you actually start understanding.

One issue with PRNGs used for lotteries like this is the seed size. For example, the law might say that every combination of 12 eligible people is equally likely to be selected for a jury. But the number of possible sets of 12 people can be very large, say 2^1024 for some population. If the initial seed of the PRNG only takes 320 bits, then it violates the law. There can only be 2^320 different combinations of 12 people selected, this means that by definition not all possible sets of the 2^1024 are equally likely (many have probability 0).

If the law had said instead that each PERSON must be equally likely to be selected for the jury, then the PRNG would have been fine since the number of people is much lower than the seed space.

I don't believe this was the issue here, but it's interesting.

Reference with more examples: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=769827

The IEEE problems are actually specific to x87 and the fact that x87 has extended precision in registers and single/double precision in memory. So your result can depend on whether the compiler spilled intermediate calculations to memory or kept them in registers. Luckily SSE doesn't have this issue. You get single or double precision consistently.

IEEE actually gives a consistent functional specification for arithmetic that fits purely functional programming pretty well.