dilanj

Will miss Stevenotes :'(

"Lisp would be Zen Buddhism" & "Python would be Humanism"

I feel strangely peaceful.

Poor guy can use some Valium.

Once wrote a compiler in Lisp. It makes you smarter the first time. Therefore you won't try a second time.

Disregarding Neurogenesis, this guy is attempting all-at-once to,

1. Stop smoking, that is from almost chain smoking to none.

2. Start running 4km a day - I've done this, takes incredible amount of effort.

3. Lift etc. every evening - Not as hard as 2, but close.

4. Start meditating - if you do the proper way, incredibly hard.

5. Avoid junk food - difficulty depends, but sounds like he does consume pizza or Ben&Jerry’s daily.

I'd love to seem him succeeding in the 'coming weeks', but he won't. It'll take years at least.

He'll get linked though.

Does anybody know the percentage of coders in these numbers? I doubt the job security/demand for a good programmer has changed at all.

I’m talking about how much the logo alone by itself communicates. Lets see,

1.The ‘O’ symbolizing Obama. 2.The colors of the flag. 3.The unification of red and blue, indicating cross-party unity. 4.The sunrise image aligning with the ‘hope’ and ‘new start’ campaign themes. 5.The horizon, indicating the future.

Just a few that came to mind. Does the Nike swoosh, the Adidas three stripes or the McDonalds arches symbolically convey nearly as much?

No disrespect, but to assume there must be smaller and smaller particles than atoms and there must have been universes before ours is probably much more obvious and comforting than trying to think up wave mechanics or explain singularity.

Scientifically, your dads words carry no more merit than that old lady who thought "its the turtles all the way" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

I'm trying to think of another logo that is so simple yet is so relevant and communicates so much, but I can't seem to. Any other examples?

You can also use Crossover to use many windows apps on Mac without a VM. Performance is very good in my experience.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - (Never actually said by) Bill Gates

When in Mumbai, you send your driver to the DMV to get you a drivers license, along with the standard bribe for the inspector.

This would not happen if the cost of putting a bad driver on the road was so high that the society would fight to prevent it. That would be the case if the legal costs, repair costs and above all medical costs of an accident were enormous. Like it is in the US.

But no, in India the government will bail you out if you get in a road accident. They do that by providing free healthcare, maintaining low fines, leaving glaring legal loopholes for your convenience and in most cases keeping motor mechanics in a low income tax exempt category, so you can fix your vehicle for dirt-cheap.

Hence you don’t care if a terrible driver is permitted to drive. Neither does society at large.

Strong economies are driven by the duality of strong incentives and costly penalties. Weak ones are undone by cultural and economical ecosystems built solely for saving each other’s ass.

For the life of me, I can't remember people.

Fuck.

"A final difference: After the 1929 crash, the nation had to wait more than three years for a president who simply wasn't up to the job to leave the scene. This time, we've got to wait only two more months." Golden.

Being popular generally requires being a good practitioner of convention. Good ideas almost by definition are never part of convention but rather define future convention. Therefore if one is popular and thus is consumed by convention, in most cases he/she won't be a source of good ideas.

* This tho probably only applies to good ideas as in paradigm shifting game changers. If you include minor evolutions of existing ideas (that can be quite successful financially of course), being popular might even help to come up with those.

Ok this is a great book, but also boring as hell esp for self study. The MIT course also has switched to using python. For algorithms this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms is a pretty awesome read.

Uh courses! Just install visual studio and start hacking some c#, its super easy to build something cool. A lot of tutorials out there. Start with a screen saver!

Then, 1. Get a mac 2. Look around MIT open courseware stuff. 3. Keep hacking.

The numbers alone don’t work out. 48% of the class or 06 at MIT were female (up from like 2% back in the day) and most of them were serious hackers. Yet today almost all of the girls who didn’t go to grad school are working for either one of the big tech companies (Oracle, M$ etc) or an investment bank.

With the whole goddamn responsibility of keeping humanity alive on top of them undoubtedly there’s a genetic disposition for women to be more risk averse. That though probably does not matter as much because women have clearly been extremely competent in pretty much every other field now for decades.

So the problem has to lie in social conditioning. Cultural expectation and etiquette has always been the most powerful destroyer of human potential in both men and women, from the day they are born (and thus being most effective at it)

Heard this joke? Why do baby boys wear blue and baby girls wear pink?

Cos they don’t have a fucking choice!