pushingbits

Yes, it is obvious. So obvious that assuming that that's what the grand-grandparent is proposing is either disingenuous or extremely uncharitable.

Instead of a posting a glib response, a reasonable thing to do would be to read the wikipedia article on civil disobedience and realize that a single person randomly disobeying a law in public is not how it works.

I don't think you're getting above DH3 here (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html).

Aside from that: I wonder what would happen if all the people in the country who are using marijuana at least semi-regularly were to go to some very public place at the same time and light up a joint.

> "Never, ever say that again. You should always try to relate the situation to something you do know. Saying I don't know just means you're lazy."

Series of tubes...

This is why Knuth has stopped writing cheques, incidentally:

"Nowadays almost everybody knows that it's dangerous to reveal your credit card number, or to have that full number on a printed document that somebody might find in the trash. Soon people will learn that it is equally dangerous to reveal the numbers that are printed in plain sight on every check. Forget signatures; banks have no time to verify them. The once venerable system of checking accounts is irretrievably broken. Before long, companies will find it impossible to give out paychecks without exposing themselves to unacceptable risk.

One consequence of this debacle is, alas, that I can no longer write checks to reward the people who discover errors in my books. The system that I've been using has worked well for almost forty years; but recently I have had to close three checking accounts, and the criminal attacks on those accounts have caused significant grief to my bankers. (Certainly I do not believe that anybody who received one of my checks has been in any way a culprit. But all such recipients are entitled to bragging rights; therefore the numbers printed on those checks inevitably become known to random members of the public.) I cannot in good conscience continue to traumatize the people at my bank, who obviously have plenty of other things to worry about."

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news08.html

This is supposedly happening all the time, yet no one has managed to catch it on tape for some reason. I can't think of a credible explanation for the lack of hard evidence (and lawsuits).

"Because these people are paid poorly, they have a sense of living on a precipice and will do anything to avoid falling off."

This is actually a positive externality (well, depending on how you look at it) of providing some sort of social security net. You get to live in a society where people are less incentivized to stab each other in the back. Of course, they are also less incentivized to work themselves out of being-close-to-the-cliff.

On the other hand, in societies where, if you don't have any money, you are starving on the street as well as ostracized, you can hardly ever trust anyone not to carve you up if there is anything to be gained by it.

I once heard of a doctor working for an NGO in a major Indian city (I think it was Calcutta), who talked about how it was virtually impossible for a white person to make a friend there, because everyone he met was just trying to use him to gain status/money in some fashion.

Here's one: python list popleft

Third result is: http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html

6th result is: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4426663/how-do-i-remove-t...

Neither one of those contains "popleft".

I find that I am slowly losing confidence in Google. What I often do is input searches in the form: "general term", "specific term", then click on a link and immediately do a find for the specific term I searched for. In the last few months, the specific term I searched for often does not exist on the linked site at all, which I find quite annoying.

I tried bing a couple of times, but the results are even worse.

Maybe Google verbatim mode will fix the problem? I've set up a quick search recently, but have yet to start using it.

Reminds me of this recent submission: http://www.marco.org/2012/02/25/right-vs-pragmatic

HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633985

I think there are some good nano questions that show A) that you have worked with some piece of technology (or at least read up on it well) and B) that you have some deeper conceptual understanding of it.

For example, you could ask how to switch two variable's values in C++ with the aim of finding out whether they know about the swap function (and you can then go on to ask about template specialization for extra credit).

This would be a better question than the ones in the OP because it's not just trivia and it's not something that your IDE will do for you.

Many people will claim to know a programming language on their CV because they spent a week trying it out 3 years ago, figuring that they can just pick it up quickly if they get the job (this might be somewhat true for the 5th or 6th language, but probably not for the 2nd). And these are the same people who will then program in that language for years without ever producing any quality code because they don't realize that there is room for improvement after you know all the keywords.

I remember someone telling me that in Sweden when you move into a place, you can just plug your network cable in, your browser will direct you to a page where you can select whatever provider you like, enter your payment details and you are online.

I'm using the date range search option a lot when I am getting outdated search results. Even constructed a quick search for it, so I can type something like: "gdr 30 things" which will then search for stuff from the past 30 days.

Blog post about it: http://www.pushingbits.net/posts/google-date-range-address-b...

Oh, I am sure we would have gone similar places without him... eventually. A windowing graphical user interface is objectively easier to use for most people than alternatives at the time, for example. But he saw it at Xerox, recognized it for what it was, refined it until it was sharp and crisp, and made such an impression that everyone followed suit. How long would it have taken otherwise? How many failed attempts and how many iterations? How many more failed tablets and how many more incremental improvements on feature phones? It's not like it only happened once.

Anyway, you may very well disagree. I was just trying to explain why some people who think differently might be more than a little sad about it. And that just because he was a stranger doesn't limit the amount of sadness people may legitimately feel.

>It is not legitimate for the mass of HN to be "in grief" because of Steve Jobs's death. You may be sad, but certainly no grieving period should be necessary for strangers.

When was this decided? And by who? Did I miss a memo?

I've never owned an Apple product in my life, but the computers I have used, the smartphone I own, the tablet I will eventually get, the world I will live in 20 years from now, probably would not exist if it wasn't for Steve Jobs.

The world has lost an exceptional human being, and along with him, we have lost a chunk of the future he would have created if he'd lived longer.

So who's deciding how we are to legitimately feel about that?

Makes me wonder whether a free software Steve Jobs (equivalent) would be possible. Maybe you need to be a powerful autocrat to generate enough directed force to dent the world?

It certainly seems like the divide between computer consumers and computer developers is getting ever wider. One side has their computer experience made ever simpler, whereas the other has to deal with ever more complexity (cf. Ryan Dahl rant).

The ultimate revolution might be to simplify programming to the point where anyone can do it.

I switched to delicious from Google Bookmarks some time ago because I liked to keep things tidy with tag bundles, though I missed the full text search and delicious is sooo slow.

After the relaunch it looks like they are trying to position themselves to compete with pinterest et al, but they still have a lot of catching up to do in terms of UI and they are still soooo slow.

Anyway, using delicious as a private bookmark manager (which is what I was doing) doesn't seem to be a use case they have in mind for the future. Time to give pinboard a try, I guess. Maybe I'll learn to live with the tag cloud.

This has already been submitted as a one-page some time ago, but it didn't end up getting much love.

I rather enjoyed it, so I figured I'd give it another stab.

One-page is here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6471/the_valve_way_gab...

Favorite part: "Premature monetization is the root of all evil."