fierycatnet

That would be interesting to read about this journey. I am pretty much starting my first steps in the same direction, don't know where I'll be but I don't have any other plans or choice.

"Write in C" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S1fISh-pag

I think that it could be said that C is in fact simple but not easy.

Is there a source for this? I don't doubt you but I'd love to read more about this. That is an interesting fact.

It is a work of fiction but it's fairly dense. One of my philosophy classes used the first Matrix to explore some philosophical themes. It's been a while for concrete examples, one of the users pointed out Plato already. And this particular quote "human beings define their reality through suffering and misery." made me think of Dostoevsky's literature for some reason.

One time I was craving some juice or smoothie, so at the gas station I took one of those 'Naked' brands and glanced on the label, it had some ridiculous amount of carbs and sugar in it, more than 50g. Put it right back.

> Schools force you to waste some of the most productive years learning about pretty useless things and are super inefficient at that too.

I don't know if this is the part of the problem for hikikomori phenomena but you are right about the above.

I started working at 16 and have worked multiple industries ever since. I've had many opportunities to advance and have a promotion but I was always held back by one thing, college. Simply because I was told to do it. I've half-assed both things, college and work, not because I wanted to or I was lazy, but because it was hard to do both at the same time. So many missed chances. "Oh you are in school? Sorry we need somebody full time for this position." Now several years later, I have a piece of paper and many lost opportunities with one weird resume. I wish I never listened to anyone about "you must go to college" and just worked and took on opportunities that I had instead of "sorry, it's not compatible with my college schedule, can't take this on".

And I gotta say that I am a "recent" graduate now who has been working since 16 but my resume looks like I am a dabbler with no extensive experience in anything. I am worse off now with a debt.

I'd be lying if I said it didn't effected me greatly emotionally and physically. The confusion about what I've done wrong is so stressful that I am a borderline hikikomori. So I think you are right in some parts.

Here is an interview with Kennan that puts certain things in perspective in post-Cold War era.

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/02/opinion/foreign-affairs-no...

Kennan was also pretty critical of American foreign policy towards Russia in the 90's.

I am not sure why Clojure is "stagnating". I don't think it's about Emacs, we have Cursive now which is very powerful and runs on top of IntelliJ. Clojure also is picking up in webdev. A new book just came out from Sotnikov, Arachne was announced recently, Om is being worked on, couple of different screencast series are being made, etc. I am not a seasoned developer but I like Clojure and I am sticking with it because it makes sense to me. I think it's an awesome language and I wish more people would try it and develop in it.

Prior to that you can find the same thoughts during Romantic era.

COBOL

From what I understand Kotlin is the language that was designed to be used in house by JetBrains to simplify their Java code. It wasn't born to be the revolutionary, just practical for Java developers.

Yes, so much this! I went to Wisconsin recently to visit relatives, they had a really nice house but in the rural location. They were always going over the data limit (30GB cap through satellite) and it was an awful experience overall. With all the same problems, trying to install ad-block and figure out how to minimize data drainage from auto updates. At that point I just never realized that there are places in US that might have these problems still. Everything is geared towards unlimited high speed cable connection.

My friend got hired at the start up like that and now he is doing fine. The truth is that I am very honest and critical of myself, I just don't have the confidence in my abilities. He also had several years of experience, I don't. I might start hanging out at local meetups again but the tech scene is small.

I was messing with programming for years now but I can't manage build anything worthwhile, even for my own amusement. I was CS major but I got burned out on high level math and I switched majors.

Through out these years it's always been a struggle to learn to code and finish something. I've done some basic problems, some Project Euler, etc. I did countless tutorials, it just doesn't stick for me. I've been through so many languages that I can't even remember them all, name it and there's good chance that I've read a book on it.

It also seems like there is so many tools and programming today is so convoluted and over engineered that I just get overwhelmed. I also don't have anyone to talk about programming, I am just spinning wheels solo and get frustrated when I get stuck.

Right now I am giving my last chance of learning to code. I found out Lisp and eventually Clojure. It seems more straightforward and simple, there are no 'design patterns' to remember and break my head with. I feel like I can slowly build something from bottom up. I have high hopes for Arachne upcoming framework. I hope it will be accessible and I'll be able to make SPAs sites.

But yeah, I feel like I've burned out on this. I just get frustrated with code most of the time when I can't come up with a simple solution.

There's Clojure too, if you are into that. Check this out http://codahale.com/a-small-nice-thing/

Yep, but you also need to sit down with a certain amount of money, otherwise you'll be playing a different game and at different stakes.

A lot of well deserved praise for Feynman but this video stuck with me for some reason and I always pictured the guy as a bit arrogant and snobbish.

youtube.com/watch?v=3D2RaDVkylY

Hm. I personally haven't used Parse and I didn't even know they were with Facebook but I've seen it mentioned as a pretty popular back-end platform for Android apps (for example). What's the alternative then? AWS probably then?

What are you using then and why is it better than Rails? Just curious.

Cursive is great, glad to see it mentioned. JetBrains are doing good for themselves, I hope their Kotlin language will gain some traction eventually too. Cursive is amazing because it's built on top of open source IDEA but I'd like to see Kotlin take off as well. Overall I think JetBrains are doing great.

I think I've heard it on some podcast that they are using Clojure to process these requests. Is that the project? I know Walmart uses the language so I am thinking it's probably it. Which is kinda cool.

That was actually pretty big in Europe before he went viral on YouTube.

Pocket Zoo? This is actually a really awesome idea!

I think Udacity is great but I don't know about efficacy of it. I think it's going to face the same challenges as any other online education site. I think one of the founders had some doubts a few months back about direction of the site, it didn't prove to be what it set out to be. In any case I wish Udacity all the best because I like them.

Wow, so this is THE "MMM" that people are talking about. They took Russians for a ride in the 90s, I didn't think I'd hear this name again.

What am I missing here? I've looked at it and it's just a collection of links to various resources. It's not quite the "book" I was hoping for.

Try Clojure and ClojureScript, there a few people who went from Ruby to Clojure, it seems to attract Rubyist. "Clojure Programming" book is very good and compares Clojure to Ruby/Python a lot so it's easier to understand. David Nolan's talk about Om (React wrapper) is pretty awesome and shows the power of Clojure/CLScript. In fact Om is faster than React.js! You can write server and client side apps in Clojure and utilize JVM libraries. Plus it's a very small language but powerful, it's a LISP with no nonsense and production ready. Anyway, check it out. Clojure and Ruby are two of my favorite languages and I actually understand Ruby much better now after playing with Clojure.

I think anything by Zig Ziglar is really good.