Artoemius

This is pretty non-standard. However, if it wasn't a deliberate joke on her part (maybe she wasn't interested in a coffee, but saw this as a chance to do something someone would never forget), her behavior suggests that she may have been more nervous than you. A more painful outcome could be, for example, if she laughed at you and then walked away indignantly.

For people with social anxiety, this is true to the point of being not funny. This is almost exactly the kind of stuff I always worry about, although I'm usually a bit more negative about it.

(If I slip up and they accidentally see through me, see what a socially inept and boring person I am, they'll hate me forever and also they'll tell everyone in the world about their boring experiences with me, and no one will ever like me anymore.)

At least it's better than to let a KGB-run dictatorship have any say in the matter, especially considering their aggressive foreign policy.

Meanwhile, this guy worked 120 real productive hours (albeit just for one week) and he has a video to prove it: http://blog.nickwinter.net/the-120-hour-workweek-epic-coding...

> O(n^2) listening: cross-comparing all the things they've said for informational pairings

If you manage to think of a good hash function for everything they say, you can use a hash table and cross-check every new thing they say in O(1), which makes the total complexity O(n).

Use Workflowy to manage everything in your life that needs to be in a list (https://workflowy.com/)

If you are on Chrome, use Tabs Outliner to manage your tabs (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...)

Every time I see an issue like this, I think of this Steve Jobs quote:

"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you."

(That is, you can count on some things having been made by idiots.)

There's a whole field you might want to study (altruism features there quite prominently): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology

> How to write a novel that is actually a worthwhile read?

There's no silver bullet for that, but one promising approach is to honestly try to write something you'd really like to read yourself.

> Why should you invest your time into an endeavour that will most likely fail and have no significant outcome?

The answer to this fully depends on your personal definition of a significant outcome. Some people consider working on open-source projects a waste of time. Other people think the same about working for a corporation. For some, the only outcome worth working for is noticeably and unambiguously making the world a better place. Others (the happy ones) just do things "for the hell of it".

He was born on October 28, 1955. Therefore, in August 1981, when the game was released, he was 25.

> The first version of DONKEY.BAS was released in 1981, followed by version 1.10 in 1982

This is the improved 1982 version.

> the solution evolution came up with was to program us to take our cue on that from the people around us

Exactly, I cannot agree more. One of the most striking examples of this is a classic experiment where people are no longer able to trust their own judgment in a very simple matter and are compelled to give an obviously wrong answer to avoid deviating from the norm:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

I second the iOS with Swift recommendation. It's by far the best course on Swift and iOS available online.

An updated (iOS 9) version of the course is already out:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/developing-ios-9-apps-swi...

> I like to hang out with people who share my world view rather than seek out those with opposing views.

That's an example of a well-known cognitive bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Being biased is not a good thing if you care about knowing what is true and what isn't.

As an example, someone who is into astrology will have less opportunities to learn that it's all bullshit if Google continues to do this disservice to people.

With years, we grow intellectually. When I was about 13 or 14, I was interested in astrology too. It would be stupid if those idiotic years would still haunt me in my google searches.

Most programmers already know how to win the coding interview. You simply have to solve problems, at the same time trying to evaluate your next boss (or at least the kind of people who work there) by the level of insanity they generate during the interview. If the coding style in the company disagrees from yours too much, it's a good thing they won't hire you, so no problem there.

The tough thing is to pass the HR interview, with dozens of idiotic questions and no way to answer them correctly except having googled the answer to each particular question beforehand.

This is basically a pay-to-win game simplified down to the leaderboard.

I hate pay-to-win games. They do have an uncomfortable similarity to the real life though.

It won't accomplish anything for the victims' relatives, that's true. But other people will feel safer knowing that at least some percentage of children murderers are locked out for good.

It's not about making the murderer suffer either, it's about preventing future crimes. When you have cancer, you don't kill cancer cells because you want them to suffer. You kill them to prevent them from killing you.

I don't think 8 years for murder is reasonable. Within a lifespan of 80 years, someone could kill about 10 people. That doesn't seem reasonable to me.

On the other hand, there were the days when you had to be born into the right social caste to have any chance for an interesting life at all, otherwise being doomed to a lifetime of menial labor.

I really do prefer our current situation to 99% of the history of mankind.

MS-DOS 6.x

Pre-iOS 7 Notes and the old iOS UI look in general.

The most interesting thing for me is how easily KGB survived the fall of the USSR. Not only did they seamlessly continue all their espionage programs started during the Cold War, but they also easily came back into full power in less than a decade, appointing one of their agents as the ruler of Russia for life.

This shows the power of any major secret service. They can do literally anything they want. They don't care about anything except their own survival, and they will easily adapt to any circumstances and any political climate.

I'm sad Aaron Swartz did not live to see this unfolding. He might have been in prison now, but he would still be a world-class hero.

I wonder what is hidden behind the phrase "the college partnerships failed".

I took some great courses on Udacity, Coursera, and edX back in the days when they regularly offered amazing comprehensive college courses for free.

They do still offer free courses. However, it seems that the atmosphere of free accessible education is somehow lost, with the advent of the "specializations" and "nanodegrees" and the like. Or maybe I just got older and more cynical, I'm not sure.

People are infinitely fascinated by scarcity.

The main problem is not the bug itself, but the fact that it's not fixed for so many years.

Anyone who had to deal with time zones at least once in their lifetime, provided that they have a perfectly natural habit of reading Wikipedia when they find something new to them.

Thanks for this post. Now I'll wait a bit longer before moving to an Android phone.

From a developer's point of view, Android is known to be a mess. I thought the reason was the lack of organization between the numerous manufacturers. Now I see that the reason is even more fundamental.

It's almost as if there are two separate types of people. People who learn by reading books and people who learn by asking questions. They do not always understand each other and maybe it's bad.

However, I can attest that reading books (also, googling these days) and never asking basic questions is a perfectly valid way to learn.

I never read in my original language anymore. Seems like the whole universe writes in English now.