News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

doubleplus

Re:Non-Hacker News on Tuesday September 23, 2008 @03:14AM (#312175)
Yeah, people totally take them "personally"and start "useless wars."
Re:David Foster Wallace. Dead at 46. on Sunday September 14, 2008 @06:30PM (#304089)
And here's DFW's turn on Charlie Rose 11 years ago: http://www.charlierose.com/guests/david-wallace

And a great commencement speech from Kenyon U. three years ago: http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

fwiw: "This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. "

Re:David Foster Wallace, Postmodern Writer Is Found Dead at Home on Sunday September 14, 2008 @02:43PM (#303933)
I just found this after trying to post the same link. I know it's not a hacking topic, but I figure more than a few people here are fans of his.
Re:The second Seinfeld and Gates Microsoft ad on Friday September 12, 2008 @04:07AM (#302233)
I heard there was a back door.
Re:Be life savvy: my new non-programming blog on Sunday July 20, 2008 @01:45PM (#251516)
It's about time someone created a blog like this. I've been saying for a long time that mastering some aspect of technology has the secondary value of making valuable insights of one's opinions on everyday life. I've been wondering what the Top 12 Myths About Sleeping were, and I've been needing 8 Great Ideas To Get You Inspired, and I hope you'll be able to address these and other topics you as you proceed.
I just like books with post-colonic explanatory subtitles, but it looks like I'll be taken care of as well.

Yes, I made that word up.

Re:Ask HN: Where did you top out in math classes? on Monday June 02, 2008 @02:04AM (#206498)
Would you happen to have any links or book references to this "recent evidence"? While most of success comes from effort and discipline, I've always been under the impression that only the naturally gifted (who also have discipline and drive) can/have achieve/achieved certain things. The dwarf down the street from me will never be a professional football player, and someone with a 100 IQ will never be an astronaut. I've always felt the you-can-always-achieve-whatever-you-want-no-matter-what-if-you-want-it-bad-enough approach to be more than a little cliched and misguided. If recent scientific evidence has disproved this stance of mine, I'm open to changing it.
Re:How Many Friends Do You Have? on Tuesday May 27, 2008 @03:30AM (#200766)
"podcasts that chronicles the news of the web" s/b "chronicle"

"Devorak" s/b "Dvorak"

This blog is pure filler, yet every entry makes the front page here. The bad poems written by the random 17 year old goth girl I added on livejournal three years ago have more insights than these posts. Is the maintainer a HN member? Someone almost-famous? I don't get it.

Neat. I've had those clips bookmarked for a long time now... I rewatch every month or two. <3 Ira Glass... religious TAL listener.

I also watch this interview with Nick Cave on the creative process every once in a while: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgHatnzQ9ZM Semi-related, theme-wise.

Re:Ask YC: What are the going rates for consulting gigs? on Tuesday May 06, 2008 @10:08PM (#183077)
I agree, but I'm not at all surprised.
Re:Google Me the Movie on Sunday April 27, 2008 @11:30PM (#175273)
What an original, innovative idea. Oh, wait, it was already done four years ago http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436754/
Re:What Programming Languages Should You Know? on Sunday April 27, 2008 @06:40PM (#175088)
I'm glad someone finally wrote a post on this topic.
Re:How Do You Deal With Stress? on Thursday April 24, 2008 @02:12AM (#172268)
How do you maintain a hit centered blog?

We've all run into this problem at some point: We sincerely want to put something out on the web that people will link to, helping us generate ad revenue. But not all of us have something useful or meaningful to say. This is something you can overcome if you just put a little pluck and perserverance into it. Here's what some others had to say...

howtosplitanatom.com - "A good approach for me has been to identify a universal problem and get my friends to relay truisms about said problem. If they're not available, I can Google up a list in less than 10 minutes!"

zenhabits.net - "Pasting universal truisms is great, but I like to throw a little twist in by enumerating them."

And remember to make sure to network with other vacuous blogs so you can upvote each other and downvote the competition on social sites. Happy po$ting!

Re:SICP - summary of 10 months working through the entire book on Saturday April 19, 2008 @04:59AM (#167953)
I meant just blogging my experience working through it.
Ha! I was going to do the exact same thing. Maybe I'll do it for TAOCP instead if I ever get around to it.
Re:Ask YC: Who are YOUR heroes? on Saturday April 05, 2008 @04:36AM (#155569)
Nietzsche

David Foster Wallace

Ted Kaczynski

Re:Ask YC: (&lt; (/ signal noise) too-low) on Sunday March 30, 2008 @04:22AM (#149991)
My 2 cents: I think you're overreacting and being a bit melodramatic by "leaving" and going out of your way to make a post about it instead of, say, just not voting up or reading posts you aren't interested in (or just leaving). It's not like your sentiment isn't expressed in some way already several times a week. The only thing more annoying to me than noise is noise about noise. Yes, I see the irony in my saying that.
Re:XKCD: Large Hadron Collider on Wednesday March 26, 2008 @03:18AM (#146647)
Every new xkcd gets posted and voted up here... even the bad ones. Maybe s/he doesn't like the hero worship and voted down the comments because there's no way to vote down the post. Kinda cheap, but there you go.
I was on BBS's whenever I wasn't in high school in the early 90's. Met my first 2 girlfriends on there. 619 a/c - San Diego.
hm... okay i typed a few more into the same link and it picked up a couple... i just figured it was only proper nouns b/c those worked every time. thanks...
Halfway across the visible universe, not the entire universe, which is 90+ billion light years across. Sorry to nitpick. :)
Re:Ask: OK, I've got my Web 2.0 website. How do I promote it? on Saturday March 22, 2008 @11:56PM (#143775)
I know you're not asking for advice, and I figure you're still working on it, but I'd be more likely to use something like this if it didn't only search for capitalized proper nouns. i.e., If "san antonio" or "set theory" generated links too. I wouldn't mind waiting a little longer for the script to do the extra work. http://www.golimojo.com/proxy.html?christiansands.livejourna...
Thanks a bunch for that dhamma.org link. I was just bitching the other day about how charging $200 for weekend retreats keeps Buddhism on the fringes here.
The Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton
Re:Ask YC: Best Hacking Music? on Tuesday March 18, 2008 @03:38PM (#140101)
Trance! (Again!) http://www.di.fm/trance/ !
Re:Ask YC: Any newbie coders? on Tuesday March 18, 2008 @01:29PM (#139980)
I asked a freelancer friend of mine a few months ago: "If I want to work for myself, what language would I learn to reach that point in the quickest fashion?" He told me to learn JavaScript/Ajax. Of course I see now that nothing is so simple... I've had to catch up on how to utilize other tools I'd rarely touched before (like CSS), and I feel compelled to learn PHP, MySQL, etc at the same time. So while I was hoping to reach some level of employable proficiency by summer, it's looking more like it'll be the end of the year.

I'm at work so I don't have time to read the other comments, but I'm sure someone's mentioned SICP and various videocasts, and yeah Python is supposed to be a good learning language. I've heard starting with JS might not be so great b/c of its idiosyncracies. No, still working on apps/sites, nothing finished.

Re:The REAL reason we use Linux on Sunday March 16, 2008 @07:35PM (#138509)
I actually do use it because it's more secure, and free (as in speech). I don't exactly think it's fun, nor do I particularly enjoy using the command line.
Re:Ask YC: How do you read YC? on Sunday March 16, 2008 @05:15PM (#138420)
I check the front page for topics I'm interested in (webdev, Jennifer Connolly, artificial intelligence, amateur hardcore pornography, general programming, etc). If I'm really bored, I'll look to see which entries have 20+ comments and read those. If I'm really, really bored, I'll look at the newest comments. I'm usually really, really bored.
Re:Ask YC: What are the top 3 websites you frequently visit? on Saturday March 15, 2008 @04:54PM (#137705)
Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Gmail

[edit: Never mind... corrected!]

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