antidoh

My apologies.

So tell me, is two names United States, or any US state's law, or is it just a common assumption?

Do programmers routinely look up the law for common assumptions? I'm guessing no.

And by the way, the tone of your responses in this thread is the first time in my years of HN participation (under various user names) that I've wished for a plonk file. Everything you've said has the core of a relevant argument, wrapped in condescension.

I don't fly much. When I have, it's a brief conversation with the TSA supervisor, followed by the miracle of flight.

Essentially true.

I usually use the same name in both fields. My question was more rhetorical to the person I responded to.

"Programmers should already handle that."

Except they don't. I have a one-word legal name and I have rarely found any online from that allowed me to have less than two names. I realize I'm an edge case, so I just make up something for the other field.

Ironically, I practically begged Google+ to allow me to use my real name, which they require for their "fine dining experience" (<cough>advertisers<cough>), but they refused because it was less than two names and looked fake. They may have finally worked that out by now, I left the building long ago.

I have a one-word legal name.

Some people have two, three or more names.

Now what?

In addition to randomly generating a man page from /bin, consider mining your command line history and randomly selecting anything whose man page you haven't yet read. You'll want to keep a file of man pages that you've read, to help with that.

And since you're stocking up on C, don't forget that C's standard library is documented via man pages, e.g.

  man -k sprintf
  asprintf (3)         - print to allocated string
  sprintf (3)          - formatted output conversion
  vasprintf (3)        - print to allocated string
  vsprintf (3)         - formatted output conversion
  XtAsprintf (3)       - memory management functions

Vim is too big to learn. Eventually you'll muscle-memory a set of actions, for the way that you uniquely use vim, that you don't even know how to explain without thinking about it.

Rather than trying to go through one end of a tutorial or reference to the other (don't know if that's you), find a site or two of vim tips, and let them randomly trigger your mind. I think it's more interesting than going through anything beyond page/chapter 1 of a reference.

Coupled with that, whatever you find yourself doing in vim, take some time to understand what it is and the alternatives. Becoming familiar with :help's table of contents, rather than the contents of every chapter, is probably helpful here.

Similarly, when you do something accidentally, try to understand what happened. Sometimes you'll discover a feature. q: for example is discovered by accident by many people, including me.

Some tasks contribute directly to goals, other tasks just get you through the day.

Don't know what to make of that, other than to think that those two types of tasks are probably managed differently, and they probably give you different emotional payoff.

"1. May work on a central tool to show same clean graph for ANY stock symbol. Thinking of a good domain name ... hmmm."

cleanstockcharts.com is available. For now.

Except we won't. We rarely do, and only at onesies and twosies.

Besides, they aren't working on the fiscal cliff anyway, even if it looks like they are. They're wielding a tool which they created which gives them another way to make the other side look bad. That's the entire point. Governing is a side effect.

Tip O'Neill said that all politics is local. That may be true for elections. But it is certain that all government is politics.

Except you don't do that to people.

If you want to truly understand someone's condition, first be their friend and earn the right to talk to them about it. Or jump on wikipedia.

But don't stare. People are not here for your edu-porn.

Are you OK with losing me as a customer? Because I don't have a smart phone.

You have a reasonable approximation of life security: food, shelter, health/healthcare, and financial flexibility.

You have a goal and are substantially achieving it.

"Maybe each generation needs a space to call their own: We've never had a social graph last >10 years at scale."

Physical postal addresses (and address books, if you insist).

Telephone numbers (and address books, if you insist).

Xubuntu, with awesome for the window manager.

I loved and miss the stylus on my palm devices. Accurate, natural, and you can use your fingernail if you lose the stylus.

Touch always felt like a blunt instrument to me, and blind because my finger hides what my finger is touching.

“Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains.”

― Winston S. Churchill

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/95528-show-me-a-young-conser...

Where on CNBC are these "Primer Posts" linked from? In other words, what CNBC page would I bookmark to see the latest one?

The best I could come up with is a search, which is silly.

http://search.cnbc.com/main.do?target=all&categories=exc...

"I love technology. But coding just doesn't exite me. ... I just enjoy playing with the latest [...] product, watching TV, and reading Hacker News. What kind of life is that?"

Have you considered something in systems administration?

Question to motorheads:

Would you use a shop manual exclusively on an (your) ipad?

Or would you prefer to have a paper copy, so that you don't get your ipad greasy and scratched while you're working on a car?

Question to everyone: when are we going to have devices that are cheap and rugged enough that my first question doesn't matter?

Edit: If that ever happens, they won't be sold by Apple, the company that made unboxing a fetish.

Maybe the $99 is a way to establish that a contract has been agreed on.

K&R, and Harbison & Steele were my two favorites.

HN says that Learn C The Hard Way by Zed Shaw is good.

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22learn+c%...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027549

As with any new language, once you're comfortable with a small core of the language, start working on your own problems. Start with little made up problems, and move on to useful tools as soon as possible. You don't have to be a master to write your own tools, and you won't become a master until after you've written your own tools.

"and now they can't have them..."

Actually they can. Print the board games on silk, and package the game in the board/silk.

I keep on thinking I want to pick up C again (made a living with it 20 years ago), then I remember all the goodness that C++ adds (made a living with it 10 years ago), then I remember that C++ is huge and cryptic and I get all depressed again.

It's very possible that "they asked" is part of the back story.

Windows 7 will be supported for years (probably past the lifetime of many of the machines it's running on), and is well understood, and builds on years of similar previous versions.

Windows 8 is different enough that it's reasonable to watch from the sidelines for awhile.

Or Amish.