We want to know all about your Lisp experiences; or at least, I would personally love to hear about them.
6,596 karma · joined February 20, 2007
To whomever that has read upto here: you hereby implicitly agree my EULA, in which you swear to enjoy each of your scientific pursuits with intensity and to your fullest degree; and sometimes even to a dangerous degree, if the mood carries you thus. Additionally, you agree to never allow an employer, family member, or any other authority to break your intrinsic spirit; for they have no means of dominating your spirit except that which you subconsciously allow them. You shall be true to yourself and to your own principles, regardless of society (though in privacy). You shall hereby refuse to believe any scientific statement as "true", however benign, except those in which you alone have proven to yourself to be true, by your own hand and evidence. (Though it doesn't hurt to check out what other people have to say on the subject, from time to time; in fact, it turns out to often be a more valuable course of action, for the careful analysis of a close friend can often reveal subtle flaws in your process and in your logic, while occasionally forcing you to re-evaluate your core reasoning for choosing that process in the first place, which always leads to the path of learning and thus improvement and satisfaction.) You agree to eventually die with no regrets. Let no one impose themselves upon your judgement without merit. You shall endeavor to enjoy life to the fullest extent of the law (where applicable), and to realize that money is merely a means, not an end unto itself. In your spare time, you shall research that which is impossible, but intriguing, in order to always have something to strive for, thereby improving your skill and your spirit. You shall follow your curiosity wherever it leads (but keep both eyes open for signs of danger).
Most importantly: thou shalt enjoy every week, else thou shalt fix your life's situation regardless of how immutable it may seem.
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We want to know all about your Lisp experiences; or at least, I would personally love to hear about them.
Sir. I have no idea what to say. You were my direct inspiration for a long time. I'm a gamedev (worked at a couple studios now) and I've wanted to integrate Lisp into gameplay for years. I even got a Franz CL evaluation. The discovery of GOAL/Crash Bandicoot further motivated my efforts.
Ultimately nothing came out of it; Lua and Python are just so much easier to integrate into a realtime C++ simulation (video game) and are nearly as effective. However, I became a better programmer for life. Discovering GOAL enabled me to think like "if Naughty Dog could do it, then so could I", which sparked me along a path of learning that profoundly impacted my sense of programming aesthetics and quality. Thank you.
It seems unlikely that the credit bureaus would listen to me over Cal Coast Credit (the collectors).
My health insurance denied my coverage for a Dr's appointment ("pre existing condition") a month or two after the appointment. I had moved by then, and apparently the mail didn't get forwarded or something. The dr's eventually turned me over to some California collection agency who then wrote letters to the same address, with the same result. They did leave an incoherent, mumbling voicemail once, which sounded like a telemarketer (hence I ignored it).
To my eternal horror, my credit score dropped from 762 to 630 in June. Over 130 points, over an $80 bill. This means I went from "higher score than 86% of Americans" to "higher than 24%".
It has utterly destroyed me. I have no credit anymore. I've been too scared to even apply for another credit card (I only have one), even though "you're supposed to every N years", for fear it would drop my score even further. I have a wife, and our credit prospects went from "could not be better" to "completely, utterly screwed. Good luck if your car dies. Also, good luck getting any kind of AT&T service, Internet service, etc etc when you move again."
They showed no remorse at my situation. The lady assigned to my case even directly hung up on me when I expressed annoyance about her not attempting to contact me more... Thoroughly... Before she decided to ruin my family's financial life. I immediately called back, which rang and rang until reaching her voicemail. I contacted her manager, who said that the lady assigned to me was the final authority on my case, and had not acted inappropriately by hanging up. Nor did they care that the mail hadn't reached me. The worst part was, I had the money the whole time. I would have paid.
Don't take bill collectors lightly. They'll break your family's financial knees over $80, as they did mine. (Edit, clarification: they will report your bill as "seriously past due 90 days / account in bad standing" or some such, which will destroy your score at all 3 of the credit bureaus; hence, the whole system will break your family's financial legs.)
I completely missed any recent news regarding Assange... do you mind expanding on your reasons? I'm really interested.
You have my undying respect for not quietly giving up, even after being dumped on for so very long. Cheers to you, and I hope your next business doesn't randomly combust, or something.
It's about mindset. Make sure that your expectations are aligned with your long-term goals. If you spend 100% of your time on training yourself in cs, then expect to be very shocked by the social dynamics of your first job. Conversely, if you spend 60% of your time focusing on becoming more social, then expect to have more friends, connections, and to connect with an overall larger number of interesting people during your lifetime.
So make sure you think about the answer to "What are my long-term goals?" and allocate your time proportionally. I didn't. I'd trade you my 10 years of advanced C++/graphics knowledge/gamedev industry experience for the college opportunity you have right now. And I wouldn't spend it by burying myself in studies.
The first step would be to answer, "What is the name of the Macaroni factory Milner bought?" (Answer: "Extra M JSC". Source: http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=196698.0 )
The next step might be to figure out the size of that Extra M deal, in order to gauge its then-profitability. (Even though that has no bearing on its profitability afterwards, it is at least a starting point.)
Some sparse Extra M performance information from 2007: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/julia-malofeeva/5/98a/39a
Financial information about the Consumer Goods sector: http://biz.yahoo.com/p/3conameu.html
This is little bizarre: http://search.appliances-china.com/Look.php?ID=CaoGP4TW%2F%2... ... Extra M "company details" reads as follows: "We are international purchaser of Machinery & Industrial products for long time." It's proving difficult to find much info about Extra M.
Here's some company backround: http://enc.ex.ru/cgi-bin/n1firm.pl?lang=2&f=1143
I don't suppose your router happens to be a blue-and-gray El Cheapo Walmart Linksys, like mine...? Haha. It's so ghetto; I can only forward 10 port ranges total, for example.
Out of curiosity, does uploading/seeding work correctly when you torrent?
I reach maximum download speed (1.5MB/sec in my case), and after a few minutes of sustained speed, all internet traffic suddenly halts. It's as if the modem were unplugged. Between 1-5 min later, internet suddenly starts back up. Rinse and repeat.
As far as I can tell, this has never happened with any other program. Not once! Only uTorrent seems to trigger it. Sometimes I can torrent for about an hour before experiencing the throttling; but it always eventually happens.
I'm actually glad they throttle me, since I don't feel bad about hogging bandwidth anymore! But that's just a personal quirk... =)
There is one other interesting aspect to the throttling: during the download, my upload speed is capped to 0.5kb/sec. (that is not a typo.) And when the torrent finishes downloading, the upload speed immediately drops to zero.
In other words, Charter seems to be entirely blocking all Bittorrent seeding. My little conspiracy theory is that the 0.5kb/sec are "keepalive" packets, which trick the Bittorrent protocol into allowing me to download without seeding at all. If true, then that's very crafty of Charter... And no one complains, because no one tends to notice/care about upload speed. (and if they did notice, they probably say "yay, that's cool, torrenting without saturating my upload!". But I feel greedy.
There's probably a mundane explanation; maybe our Linksys router is misconfigured somehow? But then why does my download speed work correctly at 1.5MBs, with upload speed capped to 0.5kbs? And when a download completes, why does the 0.5kbs drop to zero?
To me, it seems like there's a mystery there. But I'm likely just stupid. =)
Where do you find the fnlist + manpage? Is it possible to search for "foo <at most 3 words> bar"? Aka "around(3), but order matters".
- "Surely You're Joking"
- "What Do You Care What Other People Think"
- http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm "Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle" (Challenger disaster report)
- Also, consider torrenting videos of his "Messenger Lectures". The youtube snippets do not nearly do them justice. They're some of the most intellectually interesting things you'll ever watch:
Richard_Feynman_Messenger_Lectures_at_Cornell_-_The.Character.of.Physical.Law_-_Part_1_The_Law_of_Gravitation
Part_2_The_Relation_of_Mathematics_to_Physics
Part_3_The_Great_Conservation_Principles
Part_4_Symmetry_in_Physical_Law
Part_5_The_Distinction_of_Past_and_Future
Part_6_Probability_and_Uncertainty
Part_7_Seeking_New_Laws
The layout in fact could not be more perfect on an iPhone.
Tell us whatever you did, so that we can refer other people to do the same, please!
The iPhone is designed to view webpages. So make it a standard webpage. No special casing. =)
But... Really, just strip out the meta stuff for now. It's unusable on iPhone at the moment.
So frustrating. Patio's massive face drowns out all the content. =)
I deeply respect the judgement, wisdom, and mental strength that comes to a person only by experiencing four dozen years. The person who mentored me in my first professional programming capacity was almost 50, and I learned so very much from him.
That said, it is a unique personal decision: I have decided (when I was 21) that I personally only "plan" on living until 50. It seems the safest course. Maybe it's playing it safe. I have more thoughts, but I don't wish to accidentally offend anyone; they're merely my own.
What I mean is, I would personally be OK with myself if I were 285lbs.
Ok, this comment isn't really coming across very well. What I'm saying is, at worst, being fat would only shave ~20 years off my life expectancy. Since I don't want to live until I'm 70 anyway, I'd personally be happy with a ~50 year total life expectancy.
I don't care what other people think of me.
I don't need to run, ever.
If I'm hungry, I eat. Thus I enjoy life.
So I just don't understand why fat people have this desire to be skinny. Does it really just come down to... well, wanting people to think of you as attractive? (Caring what other people think of you.)
I'm asking an honest question here, so I hope people won't skewer me for it. But since it's an interesting question, I'll eat the inevitable karma loss.