pangram

I also found overview.txt (link below) in the documentation useful for getting a picture of the project, which if I had to summarize in three words would be "git-like content-addressable filesystem." Some of the things they're talking about for synchronization are neat and could open up some really interesting possibilities.

http://camlistore.org/code/?p=camlistore.git;f=doc;hb=master

So if I write "Starbucks sells burnt sludge in place of real coffee," Starbucks will get to advertise right by my statement?

I can't think of a natural language equivalent for the comma operator, other than (maybe) incredibly awkward and confusing uses of parenthetical statements

I agree with you about the classpath being a pain in the JVM, but Leiningen (https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen) does make the classpath much less painful.

I've seen lots of high quality blogs that have AdSense just to pay the traffic costs -- you would potentially be filtering out a lot of good content. (Not to mention the fact that since Google makes money off AdSense, you'd be asking Google to essentially cut off its own foot).

Ditto. I have tried four or five and iSSH seems the best (but substantially better on the iPad then on the iPhone)

... but there aren't many ordering problems with one button.

Daring Fireball has some good discussion on this; he thinks that the rumors of removing the Home Button are false (due to difficulty of discoverability and one handed-use).

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/01/12/gestures-home-bu...

Yeah, it's a neat idea. It has now become 100x easier to submit source patches than changes to Wikipedia!

Programming is probably as challenging as any other intellectually demanding task, but it does have one advantage to other skills: it can be done fairly cheaply. It doesn't require any sort of capital investment other than a cheap netbook (or someone could probably even learn on machines in the library), there are tons of high quality tools and tutorials out there that are completely free, and there is a large community of people that are very accessible and actually like helping other people.

Yeah, I thought that one was interesting. I can't imagine hiring or not hiring a candidate based on whether they sent a thank you note, and I certainly don't expect a handwritten note! However, if a candidate follows up in email with some answers / examples / code / whatnot for questions that came up in the interview, that would be a good sign.

There are four active competitions going on right now -- you could try one of those. Good luck!

Agree 100% -- ubiquitous tablets will cause some really interesting changes in society. It's illuminating watching a novice user use an iPad; I've seen both young kids and senior citizens become proficient with it in an amazingly short amount of time. You can take pry my terminals and Emacs windows away from my cold dead fingers, but for 90%+ of the population, something like an iPad / Android tablet (with perhaps an optional keyboard for writing) is really just about perfect.

Oh, clever idea, but probably wouldn't work. First off, it's labor intensive (you have to go to the airport and check in, it's not like you can speculatively buy 500 tickets), and the amount you could potentially make is bound not only by the ticket price but by the fact that you can probably only reliably make a profit during rush times (i.e., Thanksgiving, December). Also, if you guess wrong and a popular flight did not fill up -- you have to take the flights!

Picolisp, although I suspect you can make a stub for most Lisps to get them to be usable in a shell script. Also, have you considered taking a look at SCSH, a Scheme shell? There's even a topic for it on the HN front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2070891

Perhaps this is a problem that the Snazzy Napper folks should jump on!

Either Python or Ruby will put you in good hands -- I suspect Ruby is probably better overall if web development is your main focus, but I have to admit that I prefer Python, just due to its amazing infrastructure (scipy / numpy, SAGE, NLTK, so on and so forth). Spend a couple of days working through tutorials in either language, and then just pick one or the other based on your gut; you really can't go wrong and you can always learn the other one later. Linode is what I recommend to set up Python hosting, but it means you have to get your hands a bit dirty with installing packages and the like, which you may or may not be interested in doing. You can also just download Virtualbox and set up a VM locally and experiment for free.

It's a bit cleaner than that -- it gets the decryption key from the reader with the Windows debugging APIs, and then removes the DRM. You're left with the original ebook.