omarhegazy

Yea, I was kind of surprised when he said college students shouldn't start startups.

This could be partially because 10 years ago, PG thought startups were undervalued in society and wanted to preach them as a valid alternative route to success. Now startups are the new Pogs, with everybody in Intro to CS wanting to be a part of their college's official startup program. So maybe now he thinks they're overvalued and wants college kids to know that even if they could reach that "The Social Network"-ian dream (which, by definition, a majority of them can't), it wouldn't be worth it and they should enjoy their carefree life a little more before they bite off more than they can chew.

Or, like brudgers said, maybe it's a sign of personal progression. The overactive young PG wanted people to live the obsessively fast lifestyle like he did, but now the older and wiser PG thinks it wouldn't have done him too much harm if he spent a couple of more years crashing in random hotels around Beijing. Certainly the more amusing of explanations, I guess.

What a great analysis. I'd like to see stuff like this on other games : what about shooters with instant-hit and slow physics where the player is still definitely NOT a tank (2-3 bullets from most guns will kill you), still capturing the same sense of gameplay-over-narrative and experience diversity -- Counter-Strike. In fact, I'd like to see an article like this on every archetypal shooter type. Goldeneye, Halo, System Shock, Counter-Strike... does anyone know of more game analysis like this?

Getting indie developers on board with Linux shouldn't be hard in the coming future. Linux is rapidly growing and is started to be seen by the public eye as an OS some people would actually personally use for their own personal computer. Also, Unity and Unreal Engine 4, the two biggest engines indie studios use to develop 3D games, both easily support developing for Linux. Lastly, and most importantly, these guys don't have a choice. If they want to compete with the triple-A market they have to expose themselves to the biggest market they can.

To get the triple-A companies on board is a tougher problem. The most-thorough and simplest solution is to get more Linux users. Triple-A companies use engines built on top of DirectX because DirectX works much better than OpenGL on Windows and everyone uses Windows (like, everyone. Windows still has 90%+ market share). If you pulled the rug under that logic by having everyone use Linux, you would force triple-A companies to support multiplatform engines and graphics APIs. Just because this solution is simple doesn't mean it's easy. Linux market share is currently pathetic. There are more Vista users than there are Linux users. While on forums and discussions and other virtual agoras, evangelists annually preach "the year of the Linux desktop" and with each patch to every WiFi driver pundits will make blog posts about how better Linux is getting and how no one likes Windows 8 and just-you-wait, the fact of the matter is, before Linux topples Windows in the market share graphs, it has to start toppling "Other" in the market share graphs. And it's pretty obvious why Linux isn't getting the market share it deserves. 1. No one wants to install a new operating system on their computer, and the fact that people have to know what an operating system is at all is a tragic case of a leaky abstraction, because people don't want operating systems, they want pictures and videos and music and Facebook and e-mail, 2. No one wants to deal with WiFi and graphics driver issues, and 3. No one wants to think for a single second past "Best Buy" when they want to buy a new craptop for their lovely little girl going to college (which I think is why Win8.x is beating both OS X and Linux combined despite being an objectively worse OS), and you sure as hell won't be finding any Linux at Best Buy. Marketing exists for a reason. Older computer geeks with long beards remember buying the Macintosh 128K for being the first computer with an effective implementation of a GUI and a mouse; many other people will remember buying the Macintosh because the 1984 ad caused Apple to explode in the public eye and turned Steve Jobs from one of those computer people into a heavily publicized rock star. Apple would continue to master and practically define hype, and while OS X isn't faring as well in the market share war, what Apple really is focusing on -- iOS -- is killing it. Until the Linux folks discover how important marketing stuff is, they won't capture the people who don't care enough about their machines to think past "what's the most popular thing being used right now?"

These are huge issues, and until they get solved, you won't be seeing Linux with a high marketshare, which means no triple-A company will bat it a single eyelash.

The easiest solution, although less effective than the first one, is to increase marketshare in platforms that are not Windows. This is because most platforms that are not Windows will require use of APIs that are multiplatform, making it frictionless to port to Linux. Somehow get people to game through the browser by making it possible to run triple-A games in Chrome? Good. Linux has Chrome. Get people to game mainly on OS X? Good. OS X games usually use OpenGL, and that's easy to port to Linux. Because this isn't as direct, you will always get some people who give so little shits about a set of OSes that have less users than "Other" does that they won't go through the effort of clicking the checkbox next to Linux in the engine project setup page, but it's somewhat of a solution.

Oh my God I thought these bullshit cries of doom stopped. It's such a simple matter of business. If Oculus did that, no one would by a Rift. That would be bad for Oculus, Facebook, and consumers. The much more likely thing to result from the Facebook buyout is they use their $2B to build a better product and market it better to compete against new behemoths butting in the VR marketplace like Sony and others that are surely about to jump on the bandwagon. That would be good for the consumers, and thusly good for Oculus and Facebook. There are literally zero good reasons Facebook would ram down tacky social media bullshit onto the Rift. That's bad design, bad business, and no one would like it.

Isn't rabid Facebook hating getting old now?

This with the Oculus Rift combined is going to make for some seriously awesome "tourism demos". Someone has to make a Bebop-as-a-service thing where you have warehouses full of Bebops across the world's largest tourist centers, then a paying user will have his/her Rift linked up with that Bebop, which will then fly high above the city's ground and let the tourist have a look at the city from the comfort of his/her home.

I didn't quite catch the joke.

Sounds pretty stupid.

Benefit gained from cancer cure is far higher than detriment from some idiotic comments online an a semi-spammy marketing campaign that was swiftly punished. Net effect is very positive.

"I'm not supporting this by principle!" people vary from legitimate and caring to just pretentious and snobby.

I would understand not supporting a lot of the biggest hardware OEMs for prioritizing machine production cost over the quality of human life (Foxconn and other very popular, very cheap Chinese production manufacturers that employ some really sketchy tactics to keep that production cheap). Obviously for you to make such a strong decision, I'd expect you to have read a lot, way more than whatever Apple-scapegoating bullshit you've read in mainstream media and on Reddit (the whole Foxconn thing is very popular with, like, every OEM, by the way, not just Apple), making sure you knew who and who wasn't actually breaking your very strong principle and to what extent you can expect a company to provide "quality of human life" and what that even means, etc.

But when you boldly declare you won't support a company, no matter what they do, because a co-founder made some stupid and tasteless comments (said company later fucking fired said co-founder) and because they unwittingly executed on a really spammy marketing campaign (which caused them to get kicked off of Google for WEEKS as punishment)?

Where were you when RapGenius made apparent some glaring inefficiencies in Heroku? Where were you when RapGenius was building the most accurate, most well-designed, most comprehensive repository of lyrics and text annotations on the web?

You're really deciding to wave your huge "muh principles. I HAVE STRONG BELIEFES" cock on the Internet because of a couple insensitive comments?

As for the general culture on HN regarding hating the general culture around RapGenius ... so what if their general behaviors are different than yours. What's unprofessional to you is just fun to them. Everyone behaves in different ways; ivy tower academics from researcher academics from front-end web developers from game developers from humanities majors from STEM majors from musicians from DJs from ... there's nothing objectively worse about the rap culture behind RapGenius.

Sure, that culture may sometimes throw around otherwise offensive remarks. But remember that the context behind a word is infinitely more important than the word itself. The context behind the usage of the word "faggot" is much, much more important than the meaningless combination of the letters 'f','a','g','g','o', and 't' and the pronunciation of those combined letters. If an immature 13 year old were to input "faggot" in a text-to-speech program, the text-to-speech program would very clearly say "faggot". You wouldn't blame the program : it's just executing on a pronunciation algorithm. The context is just the manipulation of bits and bytes on a stream. It's harmless. You wouldn't exactly flog the kid, either, he just has a poor sense of humor, and you'd just roll your eyes at that.

The problem we have with the word "faggot" is that, in the majority of cases, it's being used in a pretty offensive context, and said context says a lot of things about the person using the word.

But when the RapGenius cofounder says offensive stuff (I heard one of them insulted Mark Zuckerberg at a conference?), often the context is just lighthearted jabs.

They may be unprofessional and insensitive jabs, but given that they're A) just meaning harmless fun and B) building one of the most comprehensive and well-designed text annotation sites on the Internet, we give them some cultural license to have their shitty taste in humor. In this specific case, obviously, they really overexploit that cultural license by saying such insensitive things on such a raw , emotional topic, but again, the guy got fucking fired.

If you're afraid of looking silly to the company, just remember that everyone will be having that fear if their digital profile is requested. Relatively, your value doesn't change. If everyone has stupid stuff on their digital profile, well, the company still needs to hire people, they're not going to reject everyone because that guy posted pics with booze and that guy posted some incriminating status and that guy got in a fight with his LIT 101 teacher over the legitimacy of the class and nearly got suspended! So I doubt anyone rational enough is gonna care.

Also, the most successful companies hire the most capable programmers, so the most successful companies have to be aware of the fact that whatever stupid status you posted about getting arrested for a night in your freshman year at college is not at all correlated to your skill as a programmer. So they wouldn't even bother wasting the legal effort and time to get their hands on your digital profile from Google or Facebook.

Most of this tracking stuff is just going to be used for targeted advertising. All this social and personal stuff is pretty much useless for the workplace unless you're like, a murderer or rapist or something (in which case you're already in records far different than Facebook's or Google's and it really doesn't matter what they do). 70K NSA employees aren't going to randomly stalk the intricate life of some random Average Joe to figure out what color underwear he's wearing. Another irrational fear is that you're unwittingly breaking some stupid bullshit tiny law and all this tracking will allow you to get in trouble with that. howevermanyK Google employees aren't going to hunt you down and get you in trouble because you did something technically illegal because that costs resources to develop the technology to automatically detect those crimes and then legal resources to accuse you of them, and Google really doesn't get anything out of spending those resources (I doubt the government would pay off Google for that information, either, because if it's some insignificant, mundane, bullshit traffic violation caught by a Google Car, the government wouldn't care because they're too busy spending their resources towards more important stuff, like murders or kidnappings. Big companies already cooperate with government on large scale crimes like that, if that qualifies the trend.) No one is going to fucking make the US into some 1984 clone because that's in no one's incentive.

All of this data is just going to be sold to advertisers because all of these companies don't have any other source of revenue because we all decided we'd rather get ads than directly pay money for Google products. In very rare cases, the government is cooperating with regards to stuff like murders or kidnappings or such.

I mean, if you don't like that, fine. Go ahead and petition to get the ability to pay $30 a year to use Google products (which is the revenue per user per year that they're making off advertisement). Just recognize that this data isn't going for some James Bond-villian-esque desire rooted in pure evil. It's advertisement.

Really? Can you show me any statistical data for that? Or just anecdotal stuff? Because trust me, there's probably 10x as much anecdotal evidence for companies with large amounts of funding that HAVE had success. Just looking around me at the company-produced products I'm currently using : Apple, Google, Microsoft, IKEA, Black & Decker, Walmart...

You're probably dealing with a lot of confirmation bias.

If not, you're probably going to pull statistical data regarding the dot com bust. Failed companies during the dot com bust were a lot different than Snapchat. They had no users and were funded by clueless empty suits who thought that business success was the combination of a half-assed idea you thought up during dinner and waaay too many code monkeys working on your terrible idea with a forced deadline.

That's not what Snapchat is. Large amounts of funding from very respected investors with high success rates of investment in companies with a lot of users ... show high correlation with success.

Snapchat has a shit ton of users, runs pretty lean cost-wise (low amt of employees, small offices, efficient database/server management, etc.) as any tech company worth a shit these days will run (compared to dot coom bust, that is), continuously rolls out updates and features, and has a lot of funding. All of these very important factors when discussing a company's success.

For every example of a company that has failed with 1. had a shit ton of users, 2. didn't blow it's money on stupid shit like Aeron chairs and way too many employees (as companies during the dot com bust did), 3. has rapid development, and 4. has a lot of funding, there are 1000 companies that has succeeded like that. That's because those things are pretty good determinants of success.

User data is the current currency in Silicon Valley.

When you can't charge users for GET requests and everyone in the nation is too reluctant to spend a penny on iOS apps, the only real source of income for companies that focus on web/mobile markets is advertisement. So you work on optimizing ROI for advertisement. One way of doing such is optimizing user data analysis. Know your users' demands better -- their location, their demographic, their interests -- advertise stuff they're more likely to click on, get paid more by ad agencies. In order to analyze user data, you need, 1. "analyze" : accurate and thorough aggregation algorithms (I'm speculating that this is why Google bought Deep Mind and Zuckerberg/Thiel invested in Vicarious), and 2. "user data" : shit tons of raw data regarding your users.

And companies with a lot of users have a lot of user data. Even if Snapchat advertises ephemerality, they're really storing all of those pics on their database after they're deleted client-side (why else would servers even exist, there's no reason, technically, something like Snapchat couldn't work in pure P2P if you're really getting rid of the user data). Not to mention the metadata regarding your phone number and your friends list. While the first bit of advertisement optimization -- "analyze" -- may seem like it's not good enough at analyzing pictures and social graphs (your friends and your friends' friends and your friends' friends' friends, and your friends' friends' friends that happen to be in your friends and also your friends' friends, etc.) just yet, 1. this is why AI is becoming so popular, and 2. this is the risk the VC is taking by investing in Snapchat. Obviously every sound investment takes some risk, or else it'd be so objectively obvious that everyone would make the investment and you wouldn't get a high ROI.

The risk here is saying "user data in the form of pictures and social graphs, and whatever something like Snapchat can reasonably evolve into if we keep it surviving" is valuable.

What you're saying when you say "large amounts of funding have historically shown little correlation with success", you're talking about clueless, unexperienced investors saying that "my vague business idea when paired with hundreds of programmers and really expensive Aeron chairs is valuable".

Not only is the former much more believable, given the high success of companies that, 1. initially seemed like useless toys to short-sighted people on the Internet, but had a SHIT TON of users and a very fast development cycle and 2. gone from no-revenue to some-revenue YEARS after initial success, this is also a prediction being made by motherfucking Andressen-Horowitz.

So, no, I'd say cases like Snapchat have HIGH correlation with success. Sorry you don't have anyone to sext.

It's very possible to improve your skills on the side for a much, much better junior position. Resume padding and climbing the corporate ladder is not as effective as it used to be.

Do the least amount required in your current job to pay the bills, then, on the side, improve your skills. You don't need to climb up the corporate chain and suck dick until it's your dick being sucked.

The "Good HS grades -> Good college -> Good junior level job at a corporation -> stick at that corporation until you get a good senior level job" is firmly stuck in the 60s, 70s and 80s for a reason. The highest salaried jobs in programming are going to kids job-hopping from company to company in the Bay Area, graduating from average colleges (some minority not even having a degree) working at top companies who's HR departments publicly disavow the previously worshiped legitimacy of the GPA (word is, Google HR isn't even allowed to look at your GPA).

I recently glanced over this test Andreessen-Horowitz was giving out to recruit software engineers for some in-house development thing they were doing. In the description for the application, they said : "A resume is a plus, but you don't need to have it."

I know that, obviously, people with college degrees from top colleges have a higher rate of success in the corporate marketplace. Killer resumes and years of experience will likely get you very far. Sticking around at a successful company for a lot of years will likely get you a very respected senior role with really awesome stock options.

But the point is, for whatever very small but still existent minority, 19 year old college dropouts that have done 3 6-month jobs are still getting hired. Which means that a killer resume and corporate ladder climbing aren't hard-and-fast requirements anymore -- the only hard-and-fast requirement is merit. Obviously years of working within a single environment will get you a lot of merit, and obviously Google will start locations in Ann-Arbor and Pittsburgh just cause UMich and CMU are there, but that's just because Google values those areas for their high rate of merit, not for their pre-existing prestige.

And what OP is describing certainly shows that he is not properly developing his merit.

Now, in the 60s through 80s, there weren't really too many resources available to improve your merit on your own. So if you were in a shitty position you mostly just grit your teeth until you got in a slightly better position to improve your merit that involved less teeth-gritting and more enjoyable skill growth, and then used that skill growth to get into a slightly better position, ad infinitum where the base case is your retirement. So the best advice was to stick in a single corporate environment until you stopped being a junior and started becoming a senior because there was no more efficient way to develop your merit.

But nowadays, there are resources aplenty and much more efficient ways of developing merit. It's very easy to get cheap access to field-defining textbooks and online lecture videos and PDFs and ebooks and cheap personal computers with which to tinker around with and yadda yadda yadda, all of which can be done by any reasonably smart and dedicated but unexperienced young person, all of which is a much better use of said young person's time than climbing the corporate ladder until you got a job that didn't make you want to kill yourself.

So it's very possible to develop your skills and your merit without the prestige that you used to need in the form of a killer resume or long corporate history or stellar college grades.

So as long as you mastered your data structures & algorithms, your theoretical computer science, so as long as you mastered programming principles and can really say you're an expert in a language because you spent many man hours hacking away with that language at home, so as long as you know your OO, so as long as you prep up with the plentiful blog posts there are about mastering interviews (even for specific companies -- Steve Yegge has written a couple blog posts about mastering the Google interview, and for specific languages -- and I've very recently come across a very useful and thorough blog for knowing the ins-and-outs of Java for mastering interviews that demand expertise in that language), you can get an awesome job. Even if you never land a interview with Google or Facebook (because at that scale, so many hopeless hopefuls apply and you couldn't possibly scale HR with the rate of applicants, so you sort of have to rely on less-than-perfect prestige requirements like college degree from a decent college or networking with other good companies in the Valley. But I'm saying that the modern age allows for extremely low barriers for finding quality applicants and getting quality knowledge to become a quality applicant, and while there are certain institutions where you still sort-of need to reply on prestige, for the most part the industry is becoming a lot better) , you can definitely land a phone screen with an awesome software shop at least better than whatever shitty position you're currently in, and then you can get the interview after you display competence in the screen, and then you can land the job. And after that, it's all improving : improving your skill with awesome workmates in an awesome environment, and then eventually moving on to greener pastures at ... greener?... companies if it is your desire to do so.

Note that I'm not saying getting a more fulfilling job is easier by any means. Top companies will still only take top people. Just that, as barriers between companies and applicants lower and modern technology makes judgment of qualification more efficient, "top" is going to rely more on merit than prestige. And you do not gain any merit from staying at a shitty job.

Yes, but factor in all the activity and opportunities and life of the city, and it's worth moving there. Besides, it's not really higher cost if the wage of the industry you're working in scales nicely with the cost of living (true for programming).

I live in Manhattan. Within some 2-digit amount of minutes, I can experience the Tribeca Film Festival, I can visit some of the best museums and galleries in the world, I can get involved in the thriving nightlife, dozens of top restaurants, hundreds of huge retailers, and a massive tech scene. Whether we're talking conferences or weekly meetups or user groups or opportunities like Hacker School, there's just a higher chance it's going on in NYC than in a smaller city. Obviously when it comes specifically to the tech scene SF+SV+Bay Area is the juggernaut, but comparing NYC and SF to some small town is comparing some top college football player to some NFL players to your local middle school's quarterback. Yes, if I lived in the Midwest, I could get a McMansion and slightly larger numbers in the bank account if my industry's salary doesn't scale well between city sizes (again, programming does), but is it really worth it to give up all the other opportunities and stuff in bigger cities?

Glad to see you're the leading authority on this matter. Tell me, from whence did you judge that Snapchat is "ephemeral"?

How did you manage to outplay the dozens of very smart, very experienced, and very successful VCs and investors that have spent dozens of man-hours thinking about whether they should or should not dump millions of dollars into Snapchat? You are aware, that, as of now, Snapchat has raised more than $100M total in funding, from initial seed to it's Series C, and that some of the biggest players in SV have offered to buy it for upwards of $4B? I'm quite shocked to see that your little quip regarding it's long-term potential has somehow out-qualified all of this money and time and thought that went into it's current state. Especially since investors value long term potential over everything else : the whole deal with economics is finding value before anyone else does, otherwise you're just a bandwagoner. Early bird gets the worm, so the most successful early birds are those that look the furthest for the worms with the highest long-term potential.

They berated Google for making a bad decision when they acquired YouTube and they called Facebook a trend that was just "MySpace for college kids". Maybe you're not in the right demographic for using Snapchat, so that's why you don't see it's long-term potential?

Stuff like "next song", "accept call", etc. can be done with extensive knowledge in machine learning and some clever work.

The really tough bits will be stuff like,

"Siri, check if PBS Idea Channel has uploaded any new videos, please."

How will Siri know you mean the YouTube app? How will Siri know what "check if X has uploaded any new videos" means? How will Siri know you mean "PBS Idea Channel" and not the channel called "PBS Idea"?

For women that chase rich men (not saying all women do this, but the existent and very small subset of women that do), it's often not because of the success implied. It's because of what the paper can buy.

Those women would still chase trust fund babies -- they chose to be born to those parents just as much as you chose to be cute.

Those women would still chase those that became rich out of pure luck (eg.: lottery).

Your financial success says nothing about your ability to succeed in interpersonal relationships. In fact, sometimes qualities between the two conflict with each other : being 'aggressive' in business is a sound plan to boost your competitive abilities, being 'aggressive' with your girlfriend just sounds abusive.

The whole reason the social consciousness regarding the idea of a "trophy wife" exists is to describe shallow women who emphatically don't "love you for who you are".

Also, there's a bit of philosophical conflict when it comes to the significance of "characteristics you can't do much about". The thing is, you often can't do much about any of your characteristics.

I think you're trying to argue that personal characteristics, like being smart, being funny, or being relatable, are somehow more of a choice than being pretty. But do you really have a "choice" in being smart or being funny? Isn't the grade schooler who opines after a girl who values these seemingly choose-able personal characteristics not trying his damn hardest to have those characteristics? If so, why does he fail when he does? Didn't he have a choice? No. He couldn't do anything about it, much like he couldn't do anything about his physical attractiveness. Yes, he can learn from his personal flaws and adapt his personal characteristics, but, first off : that relies on the meta-characteristic of being aware about your characteristics, which, again, not a choice or anything you can change about yourself.

Is having the characteristics to be rich or successful something you can "do much about"? Then why doesn't everyone do something about it to be rich or successful? If it's because they're lazy or aren't determined to work hard -- are those characteristics that they controlled? If it really came down to just working hard (which being rich/successful isn't, there's a lot of intuitive judgment that you either have in your instincts or don't, but that's a whole 'nother discussion), can you blame lazy people for being lazy? Did they sign up on being lazy? Do you think they chose to be lazy and undetermined? If not being lazy is so clearly better, did they ask to not be able to see that clarity?

We don't judge people based on how well they take advantage of their control, because ultimately no one has true control.

The series of actions required to become a multibillionaire with an amazing lifestyle and an absolutely lovable personality where everyone likes you is not some undefined series of actions that requires superhuman levels of magic. It's just that you don't know how or you are incapable of becoming said person; you don't know which human actions to take and decisions to make to become said person. So you become the best person your sense of control allows you to be, but did you really choose that control if it's given to you?

We judge people based on how well they suit our needs.

If one man's needs is someone who is funny and smart, so be it.

If another man's needs is someone who is physically pretty, so be it.

You really never did anything worth caring about in high school, academically, at least. Math was a series of formulas to memorize and various sequential combinations of said formulas to memorize. English and writing classes were focused on forced structure (Intro has 4 sentences, ends in thesis, each body paragraph's topic sentence must relate back to thesis, if discussing multiple stories - Intro-ABAB-Conc. structure is preferred, 3 pages long, must integrate quotes from narrative, etc.) using forced literary techniques (rhetorical devices, and general "proposals" that tell you how to write and what to write) as a (forced) lens to study ancient works of narrative that no student cares about. Then the essay is assessed on how well it fits each forced mechanism, instead of well, being assessed on whether it's good writing or not. History was a series of events and dates to memorize and recall. Natural sciences varied : HS physics was a lot like HS math, HS biology a lot like HS history, HS chemistry some mixture (zing!) of both, mostly the latter. You might notice a pattern (pattern-finding being a very valuable trait NOT taught in HS courses, because who needs patterns when you can just memorize each individual event in the textbook?) : a focus on memorization over analysis, a focus on pre-set structure over creativity.

At least Computer Science was all right. But that's only because I was lucky enough that my school's CS department was large enough to afford to be taught by some seriously smart people truly dedicated to both the study of computer science and the art of pedagogy, but small enough such that the principal let the CS dept operate as it wants without interfering with the College Board's awful way of treating every subject. Part of a course (AP Comp Sci A) absolutely required you to at least dip your toes into the College Board's bullshit, and skimming over the Barron's book/taking the actual test, it seemed like the College Board had planned a lot of tedious stuff like Java/Java's standard library details, manual loop evaluations, and that infuriating GridWorld bullshit (a complicated, but still incredibly awful simulation program; the test assesses your knowledge of GridWorld's actor types and which Bug goes which way rather than assessing ... computer science, which is honestly what I fucking signed up for). The stuff in my school's course that really intrigued me and got my mind jogging (working through sorting algorithms, data structures, and big O analysis on your own after you've been taught the absolute basics) was the stuff they cut out of the AP Computer Science AB program, which was an earlier program that was deemed too difficult, I guess. As if the College Board was intentionally avoiding stuff that required analysis or actual thought.

Really interesting program, although, as Andrew has said, seems kinda limited. That's not your fault at all; any early project will seem limited in scope. Given some popularity and extra effort, something like this could be the Siri of the command line.

Which gets me thinking -- is stuff like Siri and Google Now really just like this? Core set of pre-set commands surrounded by regex magic to recognize said pre-set commands? Interesting.

Begs the question : is it possible, using current knowledge in machine learning and NLP, to create a English-like interface for #{some_device_or_program_here} that learns and self-develops the English commands from the user? Sort of like how Bayesian spam filters (http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html) don't have core preset hardcoded set of Spam-Related Words and classify them accordingly, but instead takes an initial corpus and then learns and self-develops from the user after that.

The same way inaccuracies about tech in movies irritate people like Jeremy, the fact that people like Jeremy even care in the first place irritates me. I know he admitted to it being pedantic and not the point, but I can't help but scoff in absolute surprise when I read that fellow programmers apparently pause films whenever a shot features a desktop monitor to make sure that all the elements on the screen make sense.

What the fuck, dude. You're not watching the results of efforts to seem technically correct ( or the results of efforts to portray Facebook -- that would be a 2-hour instructional video on how to use and the history of facebook.com's UI and features. Nor the results of efforts to portray the foundings of Facebook, either -- that would be 2 hours of Mark Zuckerberg and Co. sitting at computers typing code, maybe some business-y and legal paperwork stuff towards the end of the film) .

You're watching the efforts of concocting and creating an elegant story that pieces together elements and scenes and bits of dialogue; the efforts of producing a story that uses genius character development and interaction and conflict and some of the wittiest, fast-paced dialogue I've seen in an film, all to emotionally affect the viewer in some way.

So who gives a shit if IRL Zuckerberg -- oh, for the rest of this post I will differentiate IRL Zuckerberg from tSN Zuckerberg by using those prefixes -- because those are two veeery different people, because tSN isn't a documentary and it's perfectly fine if the studio executives asked for a movie about Facebook and Aaron Sorkin delivered a very witty, fast-paced dialogue-focused story about fleshed-out, 3D characters and their beautifully complicated developments, all meaninglessly attached to the Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook names. -- anyways, who cares if IRL Zuckerberg's intentions weren't as closely tied to women and money (which is an incredibly immature way to see tSN Zuckerberg's intents, btw, I'd say they were more focused on getting recognition, fame, feedback and, subconsciously, getting Erica back. If you pay attention you notice Sorkin made sure to get across the fact that tSN Zuckerberg doesnt care about the women or the money for their own sake, but for the sake of recognition and getting his massively arrogant and pretentious judgments about himself qualified. But I'd have to go into a full review of the film to delve into those elements).

Who gives a shit if saying "LAMP" was off. Who gives a shit if the hacking competition was not realistic.

At the end of the day, it's still a brilliant story and that brilliant story could only be told if the writers were more focused on masterfully adding, removing, and resolving plot elements and character developments than focused on fucking going to hackathons in order to portray them more realistically.

And those scenes still do their intended jobs perfectly . OS scene's intent was to portray and further the idea that tSN Zuckerberg was a precocious CS prodigy, but he has ego problems hindering his ability to interact with other humans regarding that advanced skill. It still does that perfectly, so what if the actual CS is wrong. Hacking competition scene still does it's intention perfectly, which is to portray tSN Facebook and the environment that tSN Zuckerberg was creating as a fun, exciting environment with a lot of potential for growth.

And if Sorkin/Fincher and co. have to spend more time on the scene's additions to the core story and character development than they spend time on technical accuracy, so be it. I'd rather see Sorkin's interpretation of the hero's journey told through the lens of an arrgant, precocious teenager. Not like I'm watching the movie to make sure they accurately portray hackathons in the first place.

And this reminds me of all the people that criticize tSN by saying it's trying to say that creating a tech startup involves a lot of money and parties and sex and drinking -as well as the members of the exploding SV startup coolboy brogrammer "social webapp" hypeshow shitfest that exist because of that massive misinterpretation of the film's intentions. Again, that's not what the film is saying, or is about.

It's about a precocious prodigy who's incredibly arrogant because of his skills. When his arrogance and pretentiousness gets in the way of his human interaction and connectedness, he goes down a road of trials in an effort to get what he had with Erica. At first, he thought recognition (both in terms of social relevance, money, and women) would get him that -- and this is why he thinks mentioning Facebook when he meets up with Erica again in the restaurant will make her attracted to him again, and why he's so hurt when he realizes that's wrong ("WE NEED TO EXPAND!", he aggressively demands, as he thinks the answer to the connection he had with Erica is MORE recognition and relevance). Later, he meets a man who has the energy he thinks he wants and a thousand times more (Sean Parker, who's portrayed as someone who has all the social relevance, sex, and money that Zuckerberg wants), and latches on to him. Later, his conflict and dick behavior with the Winklevi (promising to work on something and then not working on it, even if tSN Facebook was nothing like tSN ConnectU and the tSN lawsuit was bullshit) and tSN Wardo (sort of letting tSN Sean Parker backstab his own best friend and replace him as lead business guy and money hustler in the company, even if Wardo didn't respect the potential FB had the same way Zucks did) further help him develop into realizing his initial goal (social relevance, money, sex) will never get him what he wants (human connection). At the end of the film, we see the protagonist finally notices the error in his ways and become a better person (the significance of "Go home, Sean." and the heavy implication of him being the one who called the cops, and finally him adding Erica as a Friend on Facebook). This all told using brilliantly fast-paced dialogue and fleshed-out characters. And all of that is far more beautiful and significant than whether the fucking hackathon was portrayed correctly.

I'd have to do a scene-by-scene analysis to really get across my point regarding the film's quality and it's character development and how it's sorely misinterpreted by techies and SV brogrammers, which isn't what I came into this thread to post.

So trust my ability to expand on this brief divulgation I left here if you want me to PROVE how good the film really is and how it's not about, or trying to be about, irl Mark Zuckerberg or irl Facebook or an inaccurate representation of the experience of starting a startup.

And if you don't trust that I have that ability, ask yourself this question (meant for blog author and anyone who enjoyed the film "despite it's inaccuracies", which I assume is a lot of people cause the film got raving reviews) : why do you think you enjoyed tSN more than the other "bad Hollywood representations of the tech industry"? Do you think it's really because the film is slightly more accurate than the other films and because Mark uses Emacs? No, there's obviously something about this story that intuitively attracted your inborn senses to appreciate good films (because good films are those appreciated by a lot of people, by tautological definition), even if you don't understand that intuitive attraction.

If you want, you can run some wget magic to get the whole book's html files (and used css/js files) on your hard drive .

  wget -r gameprogrammingpatterns.com

Pretty insignificant. You can't spend that money. No one can.

; YC, financially, is enough money for you to live in the Bay Area to work on your company for a fixed time in which you're expected to grow and acquire more capital and a probability assessment on your potential future value.

Keywords, 'potential' and 'future'.

You can't up and sell your company for $1.7M, Sam Altman can't, no one can because no one would buy it because YC isn't saying "You are now in possession of, and operating something, that is worth $1.7M to the world." At such an early stage, all they're really saying is, "There is a probability that your company will be worth $1.7M, and the probability is high enough such that we're willing to put our money where our mouths are."

This fucking sucks, man. Tom's always seemed like an awesome guy.

As always, absolutely overblown PR messes like this are a result of faulty communication.

Without proper context or research done about it by Internet warriors frothing at the mouth, a one-off donation ruins Brendan Eich's once rich and successful career. Partly because Internet warriors tend to make emotional judgments before they properly study the evidence and contex and before they think through things, but also because Eich ... never responded. He never let the facts through, never let out an, "Oh, sorry guys. This donation was done because of X and Y and Z (don't support marriage as a whole/don't want government getting it's hands in things/etc.,etc.) and it doesn't reflect my current views on sexual orientation or that people with certain sexual orientations deserve less opportunities.", he never gave proper context and evidence to suggest that he wasn't a bad character.

Similarly with this. People are (conveniently?) keeping facts back, giving very vague stories, saying very little with a lot of words, etc., etc. If we are to believe that this thing was a huge misunderstanding and GitHub doesn't employ a bunch of mysognisitic, immature people, why hasn't Tom spoke up? I'm sure that GitHub is internally a lot better than it's image on the Internet right now is -- why doesn't anyone speak up?

Or is it really as bad as the Internet's image of it is?

My favorite part about 1.0 is Gradle. No more Eclipse! Time to start writing my games in Emacs, maybe even Sublime Text ...

Great fucking work, guys! Congratulations.

Not an easily solved problem, though, to just up and install new toilets. The only thing you can do at this point is optimize for wait times.

Agreed. I don't think the author ever said hacking was an inferior or unreasonable tactic -- she never said clever kitchen extensions were bad. She just wanted people to be able to separate and properly judge what is a clever kitchen extension and what is proper house foundation, and know when to use each.

However, I don't agree that hacks are inherently short-term only. It's possible, although very difficult, to come across a quick, easy decision that will improve your long-term as well as your short-term.

Like what Twitter did at SXSW 2007. They set up 2 huge 60 inch plasma TVs in conference hallways -- that one small, quick, dirty easy decision caused them to explode in popularity.

It really depends on what you're doing. Triple-A games and most graphically advanced 3D games pretty much require you to use C++.

Yes, similar to why I flog my children for liking Toy Story : toys cannot move or talk, fools!

At one point these complaints stop being "this is too much to suspend my disbelief" and become "yes an opportunity to thinly veil my desire to seem smarter than everyone by pointing out every single insignificant mistake!".

You're right. I guess I'm just a huge sucker for the whole dynamic languages with a REPL thing. I mean, Ruby is just so goddamn neat. The stuff that takes me 2 lines in Ruby can take me 10-15 in Java or C, and the difference only gets bigger as the program gets larger.

Maybe I should try out static languages "done right" (type inference, etc.) before I give up on them.

Fucking awesome art, dude.

Any gameplay vids? Demos?

What are you deving in? What platforms do you hope to release for?

Code navigation is hard in plain text editors, but definitely doable. I think the cost of setting up code navigation and jump-to-definition in Emacs is lower than the cost of dealing with how slow and bloated IDEs are. But, hey, to each his own.

Although I think Light Table is trying to be like what you're saying, incredibly liberating in it's ability for code navigation. But it's still young.

As for type annotation and static analysis ... you don't need to have static analysis for what you're talking about. Yes, static analysis works best for static languages, but you can have code auditing in dynamic languages. An auditor can dig through and profile your stuff while tests are running and learn about interactions between various entities in your code. And if you're doing anything in a dynamic language properly you're doing a lot of tests.

Not bogging down your service with unneeded features is a feature in it of itself. And often times the best feature.

Also, ditto with it not being the rule that customers know what's best. Customers are for the most part good judges of their own happiness, but it's a heuristic, not a hard-and-fast rule : take it with a grain of salt. If you know what you're doing, you, as the designer of the product, should know more about it than the user, the layman who uses the product, so you know what'll be the best in the long term better than the user.

But another thing about being the designer of the product is that you spend so much time with it you start staring at it from a millimeter away, losing sight on the grand purpose. It's something you can't prevent even if you're aware of it; as the artist, it's your job to focus on detail. It's why programmers initially thought Dropbox was just "rsync and ftp with a neat UI, what's the big deal?". The more you focus on detail, the less you focus on the big picture, which is an important perspective to have -- which is why it's also important to keep tabs on what the user says h/she wants.

They hated the News Feed when it was originally released and they shat on the iPad when it originally came out.

But they also thought OK Soda would be a good idea.

Maintain a balance.