eel

The lack of people (or my inability to find them) who want to do the same thing as me. This goes for almost anything from playing board games to finding help for a side project.

I am a full-time graduate student looking for a part-time job in the Phoenix, AZ, area (or telecommute). I'm skilled and experienced in web development, particularly with PHP and JavaScript. I also know Python and C. I also have some experience with Android development. I'd like to pay my rent, of course, but I'd also be thrilled to work on a fascinating product or learn something new.

My email is thinkago at gmail.

If by "engineer", you mean "software engineer", then I say they are all the same. They all seem to be used interchangeably in job postings and job titles across different companies.

I try to sleep between 10 pm and 11:30 to wake up around 7 am.

My most productive times at work seem to be mid-late mornings. My most productive time for hacking seems to be 10 pm - 12 am, which is unfortunate because I end up neglecting one of sleeping and hacking.

I switched to cooking or preparing all of my meals, and it has been a big help against eating junk food for me. I think one reason is that there are two checks for eating junk food; one, I have to decide to buy it at the store and, two, decide to eat it from the kitchen once I have it.

Other things I've done which you might find useful:

- replace soda with water: I drank a lot of soda in my teens and early college, but this was one of the easier things to change

- have a sugar replacement such as fresh fruit available: if I eat something low in sugar (or maybe carbs in general?), particularly in the evening, then I get cravings for sugar. Eating fruit or toast seems to help this.

- go to the grocery store only after eating. I'm not sure if this is a myth or real, but I do it in hopes that my immediate hunger won't drive my shopping decisions.

- get enough sleep. Without enough sleep, my resolve is weakened by the afternoon, and I will want to snack rather than work.

No?

Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_sues_salesfor...

It's not even typical Microsoft behavior. From the article above:

Although the frequent target of such suits, the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft itself has only filed patent infringement suits four times in its history.

That makes me think that Microsoft is taking cloud computing very seriously, as Ballmer alludes to, and I would include going out of their way to seek injunctions against one of the largest players in cloud computing.

This is basically an echo of the news that been going around.

Yet still, everyone loves it. Why should Apple do a recall?

Somewhere in their cloud computing strategy must be to attempt to sue SalesForce.com out of business for software patent infringement.

I'm leery of nearly any domain with hyphens in it, as it almost always feels like an Adsense site with either low quality or scraped content.

To me, dashes reek of desperate SEO.

Noisy HP laptop, Core 2 Duo T5550, 3 GB RAM, dual Win 7/Ubuntu.

Speaking of computer setups, if anyone is interested in helping my friend obtain one (her old laptop broke), you can read more at http://www.philipfund.com

Summer: learn prereq material including functional programming and basic ai for an ai course that I want to take in the fall.

Life 1: live with less (stuff)

Life 2: meet a girl

As far as progress... I've started on Summer's, but I'm not as far as I hoped. Currently working on SICP. Life 1 is actually progressing, as very often I find things that I can get rid of and not miss. Life 2... not yet..

I just graduated (in computer engineering, but more interested in computer science) from an average (typically ranked ~60) department for computer science, but I am glad I went through the university. I agree with much of what several others have said, so rather than rewrite what has already said in the those posts, I'd just like to add a couple things.

First, undergrad research. I was able to participate in undergraduate research at my university. They offer an engineering (including CS) undergraduate research initiative for students to work with faculty mentors, and some professors receive NSF REU grants which allow them to fund undergrads for a semester or more to do research with them. These opportunities don't jump out at you, however, and you need to take the initiative to talk to professors and discover the opportunities. Don't think you are too "inexperienced" either - you can start looking in your first or second semester. If you decide to apply for graduate school in a few years, you'll find that having undergraduate research is a huge plus for your application.

Also, yes, my school offered C++ and Java as the required programming languages. However it's not going to matter what they offer - you really learn programming once (not a trivial task), and from there, you can pick up whichever languages you need (a comparatively trivial task). Most importantly, you should learn outside the classroom -- make your own projects/applications/websites or contribute to existing projects. I did. This helps in a lot of aspects -- it trains your motivation, improves your skills in programming, can be used as resume fodder, and so on.

Do live on campus, at least for the first year, if not more.

What's the significance of this? (Serious question - I'm not a Usenet user and I'm not too much older than this post.)

The link doesn't work because it should be /classic, not /classic/.

http://news.ycombinator.com/classic

That's the only drawback? It's not at all bothersome that the reps gave out passwords over chat? Or that the reps changed the email address of a different account based on someone's request?

Metricly seems to allow importing historical data. However, I suppose being in a private beta is a drawback.

What does this mean for http://www.searchyc.com? Will it stop too? (Afterall, it must be a bot too, and a robots.txt like this implies that no bots /should/ scrape the site.) Or will it be allowed?

I think they must be grouping it under Fox Interactive Media which has a large chunk on the graph and encompasses things like MySpace and probably IGN.

Wow - how does this work? Does anyone know or have a link to a place that might explain this?

A post entitled The iPad Big Picture seems to be lacking in something that I would consider to be part of a big picture: what will the product be used for?

Is it intended to be a replacement for the laptop? Or is it a supplement to the laptop, filling a previously unseen niche between the phone and the laptop?

original source: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0125/US-oil-industry-hit-b...

> What percentage of students after having passed a probability course can define a random variable?

In a typical probability theory course, all of them, hopefully. I found random variables to be a crucial part of my probability theory class, being used in almost all (if not all) topics after the first month.

There are certainly other approaches to learning probability theory (though perhaps not what you were thinking.) I understand that E.T. Jaynes' book on probability theory, which I have not yet read, does not go the route of random variables.

A corollary is that this may make ___ over HTTP more popular.

Hmm, I'm currently reading Programming Collective Intelligence myself, but I will check my library for Algorithms of the Intelligent Web too. Thanks!

Any other reading suggestions along these lines (or similar)?

It seems like this would be most beneficial to coders who are working on a bootstrapped startup or those without full-time jobs; i.e., those that would find it harder to pay $100/mo.

The author seems to me to be arguing that it is now more accessible to be a hacker, and while I would agree with that, I don't think that really translates to a rise of hacking. There is a key point in here: If someone wants to learn about how things work now, you have some really great resources. See, the resources may be there, but I'm just not so convinced that are more people now who have the curiosity and motivation to learn.

There is clearly a subset of hackers that is intelligent, thoughtful, logical, motivated, resourceful, and creative. If you go to TechCrunch and read the articles and comments, that subset is either diluted or non-existant. On the other hand, Hacker News is filled with that subset. It's amazing. So while the hacker culture as you describe it may indeed be dying out, I think that the real hacker is thriving, as evidenced through the community here. Let that old hacker culture die out. Let us build a new hacker culture that emphasizes that way of thought. And hope that this way of thought becomes mainstream.

Honestly, for me, increasing the number of Americans (and people elsewhere too) who can think more intelligently would be the holy grail of hacking problems. Can we create more hackers from modern society?

thesixtyone, probably. It's replaced Pandora for me. It's a little too social networky (I just want to listen to music!) but it works.

What about "he or she" and "his or her"? This is what I was taught was proper, though it does sound clumsy in speech.

Yes, JavaScript arrays are not true arrays. Yes, all property names are strings. If you use an integer as an index, it'll be converted to a string.

I suppose it's silly at first, but hopefully at some point, you grow used to it. Crockford's book JavaScript: The Good Parts is a good book that explains many of the oddities in JS.