semisight

In my experience it took around 1-2 months to become fully "fluent" in Colemak.

It does, to a Qwerty typist, or to one who switches between for whatever reason. Quite a few keys in Colemak are preserved between it and Qwerty (like zxcv), making it both easier to learn and easier to jump back and forth.

Personally, when I play the occasional video game, I'll do so in Qwerty instead of redefining every key. For typing and programming (aka daily life), I use Colemak.

4: I've found nothing substitutes for a good teacher. Maybe try Coursera or something of the like?

On 6: You may want to write an interpreter as a first step. Google "bootstrap scheme" for a guy who implemented a scheme-like language in 22 steps. It's pretty cool, I'm following it right now.

If you're looking Look into LLVM. It's a great backend and is practical knowledge if you like what you're doing.

Adding onto languages, if you want the esoteric stuff, look at Factor, or Smalltalk (for more image based programming). Different paradigms are cool.

I can't imagine working in an environment like this. If the core idea is that all employees fall on a bell curve in their overall value, what about small sample sizes? In what dimension do you measure them--what is "performance" even? And to do this every six months?

Is there something I'm not seeing here? How is this still considered a viable management strategy?

I really want to do this at some point, but I'm still in college, and the schedule never lines up with when school starts and ends. Have any college students attended hacker school/what do you guys think about college students attending? (I'm a Comp Eng major btw).

I tried that back when I was learning Clojure. I ended up ditching Emacs to use a more immediately familiar environment (Eclipse w/CounterClockwise plugin).

I wouldn't say never learn two things at once, but I'd be aware of the extra mental load you're creating for yourself. It definitely makes things more challenging.

I respectfully disagree. I think it adds to the art of it for him to not come out and tell his followers exactly what it means. 'Time' is more about the emotion of the comic than a rational explanation, or a joke (like 'nerd sniping').

Why can't you distribute them? Apple's Darwin is mostly under the APSL, which you can edit and distribute, just not under a different license. Likewise, RHEL is open--the trademark is not.

Forgive my ignorance, but why isn't CAP applicable here?

Would you consider having a summer intern?

If not more ambitious, considering the small, unfriendly nature of laptop hardware. Good luck to OP!

Was this not what Spore was intended to be? You evolve a life form into a civilization. It seems as though the OP is going for something a little more open (and therefore ambitious) than Spore's rigid 5 stage structure.

Good luck! You're going to need it. If this game gets finished, I'll be first in line.

This isn't singularity material. While this may not be a bog standard neural network, it has no feedback. It cannot think, because thinking requires reflection. It is trained by adjusting the weights of the connections after the fact using an equation.

Is it cool, and perhaps even useful? Yes. But don't confuse this research project for a precursor to skynet.

I would very much like to try XMonad honestly. I use OS X because I wanted the portability/power/battery life of a Macbook Air. I tried installing Ubuntu (as a starting point), but I wasn't able to get it to work.

I've been thinking about trying to write something similar (a very small subset) of XMonad that will do the same style of tiled WM on top of cocoa, but I'm not sure where to start.

As a college student, I can identify. I don't use foursquare or twitter even though my generation tends to, because I feel as though they're not necessary.

I think maybe part of this is the community (HN/the startup world) you're a part of. Speaking for myself, I love the ideas that people present here, but often it feels like each website is just another toy. I see no reason to commit to them.

I've always been something of a minimalist though, so maybe it is just me.

Really? It feels fairly well directed to me. The 'no internet' guy (who's name I've made a point to forget) was really egotistical about it. He even started an IAmA thread on reddit about it (link: http://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/t14p6/table_iama_tec...).

This is a very neat idea. A couple of questions come to mind:

Do you rely on an outside source for picture identification? If so, what's your plan if/when it fails? If not, do you plan to build your own in-house system?

Have you tested whether your code has any impact in page load speed (Y-Slow and company)?

Related to Q1, if you have your own in-house system, will you have your own database of pictures for feature extraction/matching, and how do you plan to make it large enough (and grow it fast enough) to accomodate the wide variety of pictures that people take and post?

I think that if you implement this well, you potentially have a real winner here. Best of luck to you!

Why don't you just leave a program like Ommwriter running every night before you close your laptop? (Assuming you have a mac--I'm sure there are other fullscreen no-frills writing programs for linux/windows).

I wish I had a professor like you. When I asked why there was no compiler class, the answer I was given was: "compilers are a solved problem; there's no point in teaching them anymore."

Maybe it's just my school though.

If we're talking over-designing, I agree. Design without function is worthless.

At the same time, function without design is an ugly cement cube with no windows for a house; sure, it does the trick, but I'd much rather live under the stars than in that.

I was waiting for someone to say this. The Dieter Rams philosophy has picked up steam, but people would be mistaken to conclude that good design will always be a sort of zen minimalism. The best design is whatever most clearly communicates the message.

When I took a graphic design class a while back, my teacher used the example of a pizza flyer. By any standards, they're not minimalist. They're full of garish colors and crowded with pictures--and yet, they work. Personally, I can say that I'm much more likely to buy from a place with that type of ad than one with a "minimal" ad.

I've found that programming can be as theoretical as you make it, when you do it as a hobby. Professionally, you may have to look a bit harder. Most "standard" coding that I've done involves finding the right library and wiring together with another, and then building the application between the two.

As always, your milage may vary. Speed is still a very real concern, especially in fields like data analysis. And even wiring libraries together you may find that eventually you may have to write your own implementation of something theory based.

"'Competitors can't join together and make agreements on price,' she says in an interview. 'We're going to stop that.'"

Yes, I would think so...

If they come through with this I may just buy a Kindle.

My first thoughts too. If you go to the dev site (http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Android+Support), however, you'll see that Android support is actually one of their core issues (well, it's under the 'core' list) right now.

Not excusing the editor/writer of the article for anything; that was a low trick to get readers.

That was a really great read. It's always good to see the other side of the coin; whereas Y-combinator promotes a build big and fast (hare) environment, there are definitely advantages to being the tortoise, especially if you consider that you aren't even running the same race.

I disagree with most of this. "Always assume the worst case." That's terrible advice! The worst case doesn't always happen, that's why it is called "worst." It should be "keep it in mind." Following a list of absolutes like this will hurt as much as it helps.

As someone who has been in the same place, I agree completely. My reaction to SSRIs was first a minor euphoria (just bubbly but a bit numb) and ever since then I have been, well, normal.

Zak, what you're saying is true, up to a certain point. Life has lows, because sometimes, it just fucking sucks. However, you don't and can't see the difference between a low and depression. They are worlds apart. Please, please, give medicine another chance.

The first batch was limited to 10K units. Their logic was probably that the most devoted fans would take the time to get up early, and the rest would buy from the subsequent batches.

If I had the money...

They do, and a healthy bass boost. They isolate like no other though. The only other IEMs that I've used that come close are Shures.