scottw

The odds of nobody understanding probability is near-zero...

Additionally, because it's a self-test, participants largely see themselves as they want to be seen. INT*s value intelligence and self-reliance—seems like the HN crowd to a T.

There should be a bear holding the shark: http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/Bear_holding_a_Shark

For the same reason we still use text to communicate: iconography is insufficiently rich to express the degree of complexity required to abstract, describe, and solve hard problems.

I'll second Evernote. It's the best place for dumping anything: links, notes, photos, etc.

I'm not talking about writing the "clever code" that nobody understands (including the coder 6 months afterward)—that's a symptom of the hubris-laden self-proclaimed intelligent programmer the original author is confused about. A genuinely intelligent programmer might early in his career write that esoteric crap as well, but soon learns that nobody—including himself—can understand it after a while. And that is the difference: the intelligent programmer stops doing that immediately while the pseudo-intelligent guy can't stop himself, worlds without end.

I've been in a variety of shops over the past 20 years or so where new kids come in, thinking they're all that and a bag of chips, and systematically replace smart, well-engineered, and working modules with their new ones that will now take years to become as robust, and never be half as elegant.

They do this because they won't take an afternoon to spend the time to read and understand the original code.

Intelligence isn't wholly a matter of genetics—some of these earnest kids do eventually learn better in spite of their natures. They spend enough time with the real good guys to figure out they're not one of them, and then they start trying to figure out why. The fakes go on for years and years writing the worst stuff imaginable and even after shown direct evidence of their incompetency will refuse to reclassify themselves. They start getting defensive, paranoid, thinking they're the poor misunderstood artist. Whatever.

Coders who aren't willing to get into someone else's code to see the "whys" beyond the "hows" are the people I specifically exclude from my projects.

Agreed—I've known too many of the former, who undo years of quality work in a single, well-meaning but unintelligent rewrite.

I think the author is confusing the Real Thing with the hubris-laden, self-proclaimed intelligent programmer. Programming is one of the tiny handful of fields where real intelligence (plus hard work) puts you at a significant advantage over the eager-but-average-intelligence hard-workers.

Programming is like writing or other arts in so many ways: it's easy for those who are competent to immediately recognize another gifted thinker, but the have-nots will dismiss the gifted work as "unintelligible" simply because they don't have the skill or capacity to appreciate it yet (Dunning-Kruger Effect).

I'll endorse everything oldgregg said here PLUS one critical factor: be competent.

You shouldn't expect to jump into the pool with the big dogs unless you can swim. Good talk is one thing, but if you can't back it up with genuine competency (unless you're working solo) you'll be found out fast and nobody will like you. At all. And you can forget about referrals after that.

I've worked large contract jobs for several years and love it. There are a few of us who follow each other around in my industry and we can spot the fakes pretty quickly. If you can really deliver on the goods--i.e., you're as productive as 5 or 6 average programmers and can communicate effectively--you'll be able to ask for what you want and get it most of the time.

Agreed. We've used the "let them cry it out with increasing times between consoling visits" for all 4 of our kids and they hardly have any of the symptoms the author claims.

This is the kind of science I love: figuring out what's right for everyone by looking at averages.

Babies have different kinds of cries and parents have different needs. I'll say for myself and my wife that letting them cry it out seemed to help them learn to sleep alone in a far shorter time than any of our peers' kids. Sure, maybe our kids are different, but when I see the kind of entitlement parenting that often goes with the "cater to every cry" method, I'm less and less astonished at the self-centered attitude of the modern teen.

I backup entire disks using a towers of hanoi algorithm with (wait for it...) good old dump(8) to a second local hard drive. This method keeps 7 full days of backups (using an incremental diff, so it's fairly space efficient). I've used this method for almost 15 years and have used it dozens of times to recover missing things. dump has never failed me!

On my other servers I use rsync just to keep a current mirror around. I always ask myself, "How hard would this be to recover if I lost it?" and "Will I need to go back in time for some things?" Depending on the answer to those questions I make my backup strategy for the server in question.

Yesterday's Daring Fireball post on the same topic said it best: "Every hard drive in the world will eventually fail. Assume that yours are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It’s good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last."

Thank you; I noticed that but it must not have stuck.

Fwiw, the national student loan default rate for 2007 was only 6.7% (http://www2.ed.gov/offices/OSFAP/DCS/default.html and http://www2.ed.gov/offices/OSFAP/defaultmanagement/2007state... for per-state rates).

The low interest rates on Federal loans (hovering between 1.5% and 2.5% last I checked) make them far more attractive to the alternatives, especially since the vast majority of students pay off their loans. Scrapping Federal student loans entirely would only benefit the people who default.

Sorry for being dense, but how are student loans bad/worse than any other debt? My wife and I had maybe $15k worth of student loans. We paid them off in 7 or 8 years (the interest rates were ridiculously low, iirc) and got the monkey off our backs. It was a choice we made.

We could have taken on a lot more debt, but chose to work most of our way through college instead. Graduation took longer, we never went out to eat, and drove a crappy old car. Isn't that what "having no disposable income" is supposed to look like?

I was thinking to myself, "Only single people twitter their whereabouts?" I've got plenty of people left in the house when I leave. I don't think leaving the house is as great a risk as some might think.

You might want to consider that your brain has limits:

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/12/willpower.php

I don't want to say "you can't do it" but I remember from my school days hitting the wall and there was nothing I could do about it until I'd had time to rest and recharge.

Here are some interesting links about gumption I've collected over the past few months (mostly from HN):

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/burnout/ http://sivers.org/dont-fight-it http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006569.html

In short, 10 hours of mental work might be your limit. I know that if I can squeeze in 10 solid hours of good creative mental work, I've had an extremely good day. Most good days I'll eek out 6 hours. Average days are probably around 4.

You might look at options to reduce that 10 hours somehow. Some people drop out of school, some just skip a class a day, some drop a class from the schedule altogether, etc.

You also don't talk about what your 11th hour is. Finding something interesting to you, especially if you're out of gumption, will be critical.

When you're full of mental energy, you can do anything; when you're out mental energy, your choices of what you can do are limited to easy things that are interesting.

Good luck!

And fwiw, Ticket to Ride Europe is better designed than Ticket to Ride America, if you have a choice between the two.

For many this will be their first real-world test of their MBA skills: how do we market and sell something that provides little value to the customer?

Agreed—it also seems to unwittingly highlight the perils of judging someone by the aggregate data of their profession, rather than the individual's merits.

It was also discovered on Saturday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=979559

and again yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978074

I'll say "sort of."

If I'm a good manager, I'll take you for who you are and evaluate you individually. I know a handful of awesome coders over 50 who are awesome primarily because they a) work really hard, b) learn new stuff all the time, and c) have a ton of valuable experience.

However, most of the programmers over 50 I know aren't good because they occasionally lack a), but nearly always lack b).

If I'm a bad manager, I'll likely lump you in with the majority of codgers I know and not give you a fair shake. I'm sorry, but I think most managers are bad managers, and most of the time people are going to judge you before they know you.

If this were a few more years recent, I'd hope the author would revise section 2.5 to be "The virtues of UTF-8", as nearly all modern text editors handle UTF-8 well.

I have a short list of businesses that I absolutely adore because of how they treat me as a customer: L.L. Bean, Costco, Apple, and Pat Metheny (yes, yes, a musician, but he really delivers the goods). For me, all these follow one rule: make great things (and treat your customers well).

Amen. This should be titled "What's your level of formal educational attainment." I know more than a few people who never graduated from college and have far more education than I do.

HN readers are a vastly different audience than Joe Student. I would bet that over half (or more) are autodidacts, extremely capable learners with few mental obstacles to motivation or learning.

All of the good research I've read on online learning is done with self-selected groups of adults who would probably learn well regardless of their modality. All of the research I've read on K-12 studies suggest that computer use in the classroom lowers students' scores (though computer use as a supplement outside of the classroom can improve scores).

Besides that, this ethereal "software that provides a personalized learning experience just right for their abilities" doesn't exist.

I'd really really love for there to be some magical software that can figure out what a child needs and start from there, and we could probably hit a decent percentage of the population, especially those children created in our own (autodidactical) image, but if you spend any time in K-12 schools (I'm a founder and currently on the board of our local charter school and have 4 kids of my own), you'll notice that children have vastly different learning abilities, interests, needs, etc.

I would guess that more than half of what a K-12 teacher does doesn't have anything to do with teaching facts, but teaching about life and how to motivate, how to behave, how to stop flicking boogers on your friends, how to deal with disappointment when you can't "get it", etc. Learning for children is much different than learning for adults. And we're not even addressing more subjective education such as creativity, synthesis, and higher-order thinking skills. These don't translate well to computers because they require direct human judgement and some subjective evaluation.

My never-fail recourse: sitting down in an uncomfortable chair for a few hours at a local smoothie shop with lousy background music and telling my self I can't leave until something good comes out of me.

You'll want to check out dotfiles.com also, btw. I considered putting this in a separate link, but thought that since you asked, it wouldn't be too terrible to post here. There are a few things I include in every .emacs file I have across multiple shell accounts, and this is more or less the entirety of it:

  ;; how emacs behaves generally
  (setq scroll-step 1)
  (setq next-line-add-newlines nil)
  (setq search-highlight t)
  (setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)

  ;; some niceties on the status bar
  (display-time)
  (setq column-number-mode t)
  (setq line-number-mode t)

  ;; other shortcuts
  (global-set-key "\C-^" 'enlarge-window)
  (global-set-key "\C-c\C-w" 'compare-windows)

  ;; fix broken backspace
  (global-set-key "\b" 'backward-delete-char)
  (global-set-key "\C-xt" 'term)

  ;; UTF-8 goodness
  (set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
  (set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
  (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)

  ;; I'm into Perl, but prefer cperl-mode over the default
  (defun modify-alist (alist-symbol key value &optional search-cdr)
    (let ((alist (symbol-value alist-symbol)))
      (while alist
        (if (eq (if search-cdr
                    (cdr (car alist))
                  (car (car alist))) key)
            (setcdr (car alist) value)
          (setq alist (cdr alist))))))
    
  (modify-alist 'interpreter-mode-alist 'perl-mode 'cperl-mode t)
  (modify-alist 'auto-mode-alist        'perl-mode 'cperl-mode t)

  ;; the one true indentation level
  (setq cperl-indent-level 4)

Ditto. I've found keeping a pair of nailclippers in all of the locations where I sit regularly (work office, home office, next to my bed, etc.) helps a lot. Nail trimmings everywhere is my next challenge.

fetchmail/procmail/mutt. All of my addresses forward to a single imap account (some via gmail for spam filtering).

It was a UPS failure, yes, but this was in the late 90s when the UPS industry wasn't as robust as it is now. Competency is what you get when you learn from your incompetency. We learned something valuable from it (and our UPS people did too).

I also learned to cut people (and some companies) a little slack when I've been down the road they're on. We had a lot of customers who didn't cut us any slack, took their refund and left, which was their prerogative to do so, but found out for themselves that no company has 100% uptime (many came back, lucky for us).

I foresee a sharp drop in July profits... unless they weasel out of it by differentiating between "uptime" (i.e., does the CPU have power) and "reachability" (i.e., "Our network died! Sorry about that, but no soup for you").

Well, in this case because the power never went out (the UPS only thought it did), none of our usual "the freakin' power is out—send out the diesel trucks and keep the tank full" alarms went off.

It was truly an unexpected case (which was quickly fixed in the UPS hardware), but you know, life is one unexpected case after another, often coming in waves and in bizarre combinations. I don't believe in 100% uptime anymore :)