dr42

My comment was really pretty clear, and easy to follow, ST doesn't have a code formatter, you know, like textmate and eclipse do. It's a feature that lets you take poorly aligned code that is difficult to read, and fix up the alignment a la K&R et al. Hope that's clear enough for you :)

If you want to find out if someone is a newcomer, you can click on their profile and see pretty easily.

I know you're new here, but a little reminder about etiquette, even if you haven't gotten laid in a while, the community here is based on people being helpful rather than trying to be superior. The problem with that attitude is that it backfires and just makes you look insecure.

The all-caps thing was just the times, terminals were in transition and people were learning how to use the types of services that today have a highly developed etiquette expectation.

If you want to get yourself fucked up then you're most likely quite happy to have the rest of society bear the burden of your subsequent health care, ditto for your diabetes care etc. I'm sure you get what I'm trying to say.

None of us live on an island, our actions impact others and when it does so (as Spock said) the needs of the many outweigh the needs if the few.

This country (America) is already being financially crippled by health care costs so reducing sugar and fat and car accidents seems to make perfect sense, even at the cost of a few's peoples' adrenaline fixes.

I don't disagree with you on Spanish flu (50m people died), or on the corrupt financial system, but that's a fragile house of cards. Economics is a complex system and it's all based on a mutual agreement in the value of little pieces of paper. It's a social contract that is holding together the fabric of capitalism. While that night not be the perfect system, it's so far the least bad that we've found.

"why do you need to be productive" - maybe I came across as being a little self righteous (which is far from the truth), I was just trying to say that one persons fun is very often a ton is work for the rest of society, those that scrape up the parts after a motorcycle accident, those that provide health care and those of us (all of us) that pay for it in our insurance premiums. Why should I, someone who is fit and healthy pay for everyone else's indulgence in fat and sugars that bought about heart disease and diabetes. The answer of course is that same one that is the reason why fixing cars safety is important, because the individual sometimes has to sacrifice something for the success of the rest of society.

I was referring to the person that commented, reading hacker news probably means this person is both aware and capable of downloading it.

It's just a waste of resources.

* edited for autocorrect errors

What you're not realizing is that it's often not the person causing the accident that gets hurt, the idea of making something as tedious as driving automated is that it's safer for everyone.

Drugs already are banned. The ones you're most likely talking about are anyway. And the reason is because they fuck people up.

How about people do something productive with their lives instead of taking drugs, developing diabetes from sugar, overweight from fat, and kill people with large heavy steel motorized machines?

You can try to belittle 30,000 people but if you stop cleaning your guns to think about it long enough you might actually appreciate that all those people probably didn't want to die from theirs and other people's driving mistakes.

free food in tech startups isn't free at all. You (as the employee) are just donating more time & money to the employer.

I'm fortunate enough to work for a company that has a fabulous suite of cafeterias that host a huge variety of foods, but in the startup world, free food just felt like the NYC power lunches of the 80's

While you offer locating the memcachier product within some datacenters this is such a narrow offering, and for something that's already mind numbingly simple to automate anyway.

While 'cloud' anything is hot right now, this just doesn't solve a real problem.

I think you're rushing into building something, without looking at the market and what problem you're trying to solve for customers.

If you'd had a good mentor they would have saved you a lot of hours wasting time in ideas that are obviously doomed, they neither solved a problem, nor provided entertainment.

Except one you discarded, the celebrity photos from twitter. With a great front end, and preferably an iPhone app that served up celebrity photos in a magazine style format might very well have legs. People seem to love celebrities, and they seem to love looking at what they are getting up to. This app would have the advantage of twitter's speed at disseminating information, and people like knowing first so they can send the photo to their friends and show how cool they are.

Forget the tech for a moment, think about psychology - what human need are you targeting, then think about the business, the market, how you'll reach them and finally the tech. I hope this helps.

*edited for spelling and typos.

The direction appears to be cheap upgrades, and merging feature sets between IOS and OSX so eventually there's one operating system that changes in unison.

I intended my words to mean the exact opposite of that. Unix for development gets my vote every day.

Also, dev's don't use store bought computer operating systems, they install the best one for the job, which back then was NT. OS/2 was good but nobody else was running it, except Lotus Notes shops.

*edited for typos

I maintain an XP partition for when the corp I work for require mandatory training (ethics, insider trading, workplace safety etc) but there's no way I'd ever consider using it over Ubuntu for development. I suppose if you're coding in python then the underlying os makes little difference, the abstraction level is so high. Personally even in python missing the unix toolset is a primary reason to stick to unix-like operating systems. I couldn't imagine not having sed, awk, grep, vim, wc etc. I am aware of ports and even the Cygwin environment, but it's just a lot easier to skip the whole thing.

Speaking as someone who started his career on hp-ux and since then included probably every major unix distribution both proprietary and open source, having an intimate knowledge of unix has served me well. Windows has finally caught up and (despite still getting the path delimiter wrong) is now a robust and usable operating system. The two worlds have merged, unix added curses, then x, and now looks as pretty as anything else out there, meanwhile windows added multitasking (yield didn't count) and ever wider addressing, a native tcp/ip stack, support for larger drives and so on.

Unlike you I have no good memories of windows 3.11

If all you can think of is Ikea, maybe hold off commenting until (you've actually read the article) others have opened your mind to more possibilities.

This might be silly to you, but since you're a mathematician, I am rather surprised the reason for names is not obvious.

you don't have to respect anyone.

Bloom filters are marginally more obscure, but I still expect a good candidate to have come across them at some point.

Possibly in your area the candidates you get may have come across them, but then they wouldn't be junior engineers, by definition. If you're advertising for "strong algorithms" candidates then sure, but I bet half the people reading this have never used or come across any probabilistic data structure!

I was the one that actually picked those, just out of thin air to illustrate my point.

This I feel pretty confident that if they were the best solution to a problem I was having, I would find them through research. is exactly my point. How would you know that a bloom filter might be the best solution unless you know of it's existence in the first place. An architect's role is to suggest areas of research to junior engineers, who very likely may only have some vague memory from algorithms class.

an "architect" [sic]

Having been a developer for a long time, the thing I have found is how much technology repeats itself, and how at its core, its all very much the same. The same algorithms I have used, like bloom filters or priority queues for example, have application in social networks and 3d rendering engines etc. Having done most software paradigms, an architect us supposed to know which ones work, and when they work.

I haven't written slides or visio in years. Nor have I been to Aruba :)