eznet

Perhaps - I wish I weren't out of hero cookies - I would give you one for sure. Perhaps even 2.

Agreed. I is funny that the majority of these 'trolls' would not dare provoke an individual in the real world as they will online. I knew a guy in high school who was extremely passive and timid in the real world, but got the biggest kick out of being an aggressive ass to strangers online - I never understood him, but feel that he knew in the real world, there were consequences for his actions, where online he could get away with it with no recourse. Really cowardice in my opinion.

Well I apologize for my crassness and low brow jab - actually, no I don't. I guess I could have taken the time to articulate some well formed argument about the role of trolls and the underlining motivations for their actions on the net, but why waste the time?

These people are "douche bags" and I think my choice of terminology is concise and to the point. I am sorry if you have lost your sense of humor along the way and that you feel that there is no room for this language in the such a place as hacker news. Ultimately, I feel that the majority of the hacker world (not just on HN) finds a level of comfort and 'release' in the usage of such terminology - ex. Linus and his 'masturbating monkey' comment or the massive amounts of profanity widely known to be in source...

Not to attack you or your opinion, as we are all entitled, but just as you have (apparently) grown tired of low-brow language, I too have grown tired of the condescending tone of many people on here as well. Instead of taking the "holier than thou" route against my comment, how about taking your time to compose an original thought of your own in regards to THIS STORY - not my comment, an action I feel detracts from the value of HN far more than my selection of the descriptor "douche bags" to describe trolls.

In the real world we call them "douche bags"...

Here is the NASA press release for those wishing for a bit more breadth than Twitter can provide:

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/jul/HQ_08_195_Phoenix_w...

I think that misses the point of this MARKETING CAMPAIGN ;) They don't want a real study, they just want something SHINY to show people...

I am having the same issue on FF3/Ubuntu(Hardy)... Hmmm...

Edit: Oddly enough, open in Opera (Linux) and you get one continuous page - no slides...

Lame. Watch the individual videos:

- a lot of MS:"this is really vista." pawn:"really?"

- a lot of MS:"Here, let ME show you _randomGadget_" pawn:"huh. wow."

One thing I notice is what few actual pawn responses are given, seem to be coming from people who either a) have never touched or seen Vista aside from this 5-10 min DEMO or b) have never touched or seen a computer aside from this 5-10 min demo or a kiosk at their local mall... Again, this is DEMOED by a MS rep - these pawns don't even get to touch the box or use Vista...

Vista looks pretty at first - thats about it - and that really all that is required to convince people that an OS's UI looks friendly with just an glance. The real trick is taking the OS home, putting it on your box and continuing to like it after the novelty wears off - exactly what did not happen. Instead, countless people, MS fans and haters alike, obtained Vista, installed and used Vista and then decided they did not like it.

I was really excited about Vista - until I used it for about 2 weeks... Then I became tired of the excessive boot times, the sluggish performance on app load and the general bugginess of it all - on my new dual core 2.4 ghz, 2GB machine... Then I installed Vista, run XP virtually and could not be happier... I have booted Vista several times over the past couple years to update and try it again - always go back to Linux...

But thats just this pawn's experience.

Agreed. Although there has been a considerable amount of "unsuitable" material make it to the front page of HN, there has also been a lot of pointless citation of this unsuitable material - to the degree that it dominates constructive dialog taking place.

HN is changing, no doubt, but as has been pointed out time and time again on HN, if it is of interest to the community at large, it belongs. The community is changing (undeniable) but, maybe it is that sometimes posts other than an amazing O(N) bubble sort are also of interest...

I, for one, enjoy chuckling at XKCD - typically I just go there myself (without the aid of a social bookmark site!), but perhaps this one is just relevant enough to make it on HN... Or maybe I am wrong.

I too think that there is untapped potential with cell processing - specific tasks that the cell processors are more adept at performing. There have been some interesting publications about cryptography and password cracking using PS3's cell processing technologies published in the past several months - something you do not see branching out to other such related tasks.

What am I missing that lands a dice.com link on the front page of HN?

I am not a professional developer, and am more akin to a hobbiest programmer/developer, so take this for what it is worth.

Like icey said, pick up Django and learn it - this will get you results far faster and of a higher quality then rolling you own straight out of the gate.

From your post, it sounds like you will be learning to program, learning python and possibly learning Django all at once - an ambitious goal to say the least. Combining the three - centered around Django I think will be the most practical approach for diving in - far easier than learning to program in python and tackling the particulars of designing a web app framework from the ground up. djangobook.com , despite its (over-come-able) errors, will give you a nice base to start from. "Practical Django Projects" is also getting some good reviews, but I have not had the chance to check this one out yet.

I think you will find most of Django relatively easy to learn - and what is not so easy, will highlight some of the tougher aspects of developing a web app framework so you know what to look closer at and beef up on in the case that you do roll your own in the future.

Also, like icey said, once you become versed in Django you can decide to dig around in its internals. This will give you the chance to see what is already optimally designed (no one should reinvent the wheel) and what you can stand reinvention or redesign.

A loss for not only the realm of science, but the world as a whole - very inspirational man. Mr. Pausch will be missed.

spam makes me wanna kill myself sometimes too...

Ha! Yea, I am pretty sure that some of these will get your ass capped - depending on locale of course (aka someplace other than the Apple store).

Agnostic and atheist beliefs are likely more concentrated in the hacker world because this is a world of science and mathematics - worlds that have not traditionally reconciled well with the world of religion (no flaming please, historical observation - Copernicus: "The Earth is not the center of the Universe" Church: "Condemn the heretic!"). You need not search far to find examples of this (aside from the previous example) as most popular scientific periodicals and journals frequently discuss the lack of religious faith in the scientific community - Scientific American, Nature and Science all regularly discuss this very topic (very frequently in Scientific American).

On the flip, there are many hackers who are religious. Despite popular consensus, hackers are people and some 80%+ of the world population claims one religion or another. It only serves to reason that some of this 80%+ of the worlds population would call a scientific discipline, such as programming, their trade of choice.

Although a generalization for sure, there is likely a grain of truth and logic to the posed argument - specifically, fewer hackers are religious than is the case with other disciplines (such as, say, insurance agent).

I know a great number of hackers who claim to be "religious", though philosophical discussions often show them to hold concepts more akin to agnosticism. My (unscientific) theory for this phenomenon is the "fire insurance" argument - i.e. If a particular religious system is correct, denouncing the legitimacy of said religion will ensure them a place in hell. If the individual does not formally denounce said religion (despite the religion not necessarily syncing with their true beliefs), they can still claim a place in heaven as a 'believer'. The "if there is a God, I am good, if there is not, what did it hurt to pray?" defense.

To each their own I say. If it works for you to believe, then by all means, believe. Concerning science and religion, evidence suggests if there is a God, he like to play dice - something that many notorious religious scientist were uncomfortable with. Myself, I find comfort in the randomness.

What makes the situation worse is that the laptop manufactures work with Microsoft to include 'Vista only' hardware, making it difficult to get XP running on the machine - my DV6000t is a prime example.

Thank goodness that Ubuntu, SUSE and Fedora all run great (fast, cool and stable) with less configuration than XP takes to get rigged to work on here. Since I am running Ubuntu, and not running the hog that is 'Vista', I have plenty of machine "left over" to run Virtualized XP at lightning fast speeds...

Paint a turd(Vista) gold(fight back ads) all you want, you just have shiny shit at the end of the day...

On a related note: I think it would be interesting to see how many prior Windows-only users were turned to the world of Linux because of Vista being poorly released at a time when the Linux environment was moving towards its current usability and hardware support.

Good job - I like. Functionally streamlined, clean design and creative branding hook - I'll be checking back in the future.

"Method and apparatus for creation and maintenance of database structure."

Clown-shoes. I think they also hold the patent on "process and action of making outlandishly stupid patent claims".

I think they should be sued for wasting the patent office's and court's time.

There are cons, but a lot of people have a PayPal account - a lot of people who otherwise would not enter their credit card info to donate.

Thank God! Craig's List is a cesspool for BS Ads - hopefully this will cut the craptacular of manipulative ads that have been on there traditionally.

It is f'n funny to see the low-life, scumbag, POS, donkey-raping, child molestering, masturbating monkeys(wait, Linus reserved that one for the OpenBSD community) that make up the "professional spammer community" whining about loosing their free ride. Boo-hoo. Maybe CraigsList will be worth a crap now.

Hmm. So, basically it boils down to adding new novelties, bells and whistles took precedence to implementing basic functionality and utility?

If this is Apple's reason for not adding cut/paste, they need to pull their collective heads out of their collective arses.

Disclaimer: I am a noob, so take this for what it is worth.

After/during school I played in Ruby, Perl, PHP and most recently Python. I love Python and find it making sense where the other languages and frameworks seemed unnecessarily confounded at times. After a week in Python, I felt like I absorbed more than a month in any of the others (although PHP is 'easy' to pick up, its peculiarities are a bit cumbersome to work around).

After forming a fondness for Python, I decided to start on Django and love it. I am currently working on a couple of small apps based on the framework and feel the rate of progress concerning both my learning and development to be extremely rapid - far more so than was the case in reading through the various rails tutorials (just for contrast - no flaming please. I admit my complete and total ignorance in advance to any fanboys currently mumbling "idiot" as they read this).

I personally recommend checking out http://www.webmonkey.com/tutorial/Install_Django_and_Build_Y... 1st to wet your appetite - its quick and allows you to see the power of the framework in no time flat. When you finish there, head to http://www.djangobook.com and start working through - I am and am having a blast doing it.

I know it is a bit cliché, but Python + Django has been a pleasure to program in. Although I may not be able to etch out a living doing it right now, I think this is where I will be spending my recreation time for a while.

Find a way to make women as fascinated by men as men are by women? Also, I think the comment on 'rich guys' is likely onto something - advertise on ladders.

Furthermore, this was apparently a cooperative movement between Canonical, ValueSoft and BestBuy to make a more accessible and user friendly Linux available to the masses.

http://blog.canonical.com/?p=18

Viva La Linux Revolution!

Thanks for the condescension. I couldn't agree more on cost not equating value - I am an avid Ubuntu user and would gladly pay for its value as an operating system. The above was a joke - apparently not a good one, but a joke none the less. It was intended to be delivered at the expense of BestBuy, not Canonical - surely you are not presenting them as providing valuable service ;) But alas, a joke that requires an explanation was clearly not a well executed joke to begin with - I retract. Thanks for the education on value and economics. sheesh.

I guess if people want to pay for something that is widely reported as being free, then let them pay for it. Maybe once they become emerged in Ubuntu goodness, they will awake to their error in paying for something they could have burnt themselves for free - likely causing some customer relation issues for good old Best Buy along the way.

On a related note, I would personally like to offer 'air' (not to be confused with AIR), a simple and easy to use fusion of nitrogen and oxygen - for the low price of 19.99!! Also, for a limited time I am offering CrapSquad support for the low-low of 99.99 per service call. Act now!

I too have known people like you describe here and can say that it is more likely that they began habitually smoking marijuana because of some latent psychological conditions - and not that they formed these conditions as a result.

Sure, marijuana may exaggerate seemingly innate personality characteristics, but create them? Highly unlikely. Its all about the individual's personality and mindset - same reason some individuals develop PTSD, while others walk away from the exact same traumatic experience with no lasting psychological scars.

I feel confidant in saying that there are far more chronic users of marijuana who are otherwise mentally healthy than there are users who are teetering on a "major psychotic episode" - a sign that people such as your colleague are the minority, unstable demographic of the population. Also, it is far easier for individuals who 'freak out' and have embarrassing 'psychotic snaps' to point to an inanimate, socially demonized substance to blame rather than to find and accept blame with 'self'.

Called CompTIA today - at first they said I was mistaken... Then I sent links to my flickr account and to the various tech/certification sites making the "maybe they should increase their Security+" crack. I was called back this afternoon and told that their tech dept is working with Google (?) to resolve the issues...

Thanks for the pointers... Yea, I have recently acquired a rough understanding of Python and am picking up Django at the moment to hopefully increase my marketability and show my ability to pick new skills...