laurasbadideas

> I'm 35, started programming at about 10 in my TI99-4A, typing games from magazines, etc. the usual stuff.

> No way a 40 year old guy have more experience than me in general programming, unless he was working at Microsoft or IBM at that date, and surely they are about less than 10000 of those guys in the world.

You're talking about 1989, right? In 1983, there were 443,000 computer programmers and 276,000 "Computer systems analysts, scientists" in the United States alone (source: http://www.census.gov/prod/2/gen/96statab/labor.pdf).

Yes, they both had titles (something like "My cat is not a Twilight vampire" and "Holly and Thunder on a sunny afternoon". One other thing that might be relevant is that they were both PNGs.

It would be nice to have next / previous / random buttons on the detail pages.

I tried to add a couple pictures, and they haven't shown up on the "newest cats" page (and yes, I'm sure I'm not just looking at a cached version). If that's by design, it would probably be a good idea to display a message to that effect after a picture is added (I just got the blank "add a cat" form after submitting my pictures).

That bothered me too. It seems inconsistent to say that "programming is generally more difficult", but "good people skills" are relatively scarce compared to programming skills.

Two cats doesn't make you a crazy cat guy -- in some ways, two cats are easier to care for than one. And if the cats like each other, they'll frolic and cuddle together, which the theoretical women you bring home may find adorable.

I'm curious about whether the business owner mentioned this during the hiring process.

I also wonder whether this affected the demographics of the company. If someone were to spring this on me on my first day of work, I'd probably wonder whether this was a hazing ritual or a test (and whether the desired behavior was to clean the bathroom myself or get it clean some other way). If, in addition to that, I happened to be the first female employee or the first employee with an ethnicity different from the owner's, I'd also wonder whether this was really something they did to everyone or whether it was some kind of racist/sexist stunt -- especially since this would be happening on my first day of work, before I had a chance to get to know anyone reasonably well. Regardless of the actual motivation behind the request, I think it might have the effect of disproportionately driving away people who are in a different demographic than the majority of people at the company.

I think that the college experience includes a lot of interaction and feedback that you can't get by reading lecture notes or watching videos online. You do problem sets and write research papers and then get back comments on your individual performance. You take tests and can see what you got right and what you got wrong. You do lab experiments using equipment that's not available to you at home. If you study a foreign language, you get critiqued on your pronunciation.

I think online courseware is a fantastic resource, and I'm very happy it's out there, but using it is nowhere near the same as attending a university in real life.

I don't think he's saying that learning to program in C caused him to become an atheist. I think that he's saying that learning to program led to an outlook on life that caused him to question his previous beliefs (and then, eventually, to become an atheist).

The difference between programming (and math) and just about everything else that he's probably experienced at this point in his academic career is that when he writes a program, he can test it himself; he doesn't have to ask a professor to verify that it works or look up the answer in a book. That's different from humanities subjects and even most science classes, and it probably led him to realize that he can figure things out for himself and to start questioning things that he'd previously taken for granted.

To be fair, that was only the lesson for stories 1, 2, and 4. Lessons 3 and 5 were "awww, little boys are so sweet".

Seriously, I agree -- if you're going to try to persuade people that doing these things is inherently good, skip the fairy tales. The Mrs. Nat King Cole story is especially bad -- they guy did a small favor (giving a ride) that made a big difference in someone's life (Mrs. Cole got to see her husband one last time), but apparently the author thought that what really matters is the fact that the guy got a TV out of it.

(I'm using "fact" loosely here; I have no idea whether this story is true).

I once interviewed someone whose resume said he had "modified the Unix kernel to support [some device]". I assumed that meant that he'd written a device driver, but when I asked him about it, he explained that he'd bought a third-party device driver and installed it on his local system.

Save the websites for after you graduate -- right now, take advantage of the resources available to you as an MIT student. See if you can get some real-life experience with a UROP. Ask your CS professors (or even TAs) questions during their office hours. Go to some SIPB events.

Effects on cats were discussed in a USDA risk assessment of a similar program in 2002 (http://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_damage/nwrc/publications/...) -- basically, it looks like cats are likely to die if they eat the poisoned mice, but cats didn't seem interested in them.

Also, if I'm reading the report correctly, then (at least in the 2002 program), the baits were prepared by inserting (somehow) acetaminophen tablets into mouse carcasses. I think a cat that began to eat one of these mice would be likely not to swallow the pills (just based on the fact that I've never managed to get a cat to take a pill hidden in cat food).

This really seems like a scam to me. It's possible that the amount of guilt that this person feels is sufficient to motivate them to buy the a 160 gig disk (and spend time selectively copying the most important data) but not to motivate them to buy a 250 gig disk and copy everything. It's also possible, though, that this person is trying to draw you into a conversation focusing on how important the data is to you, in order to convince you to send money to buy a disk or buy the laptop back.

Actually, how sure are you that they even have your laptop? Did you mention the theft someplace public, like on a blog or twitter? The only information they've demonstrated that they have is your email address, the fact that you've used Time Machine at least once (probably a pretty safe bet if they know your laptop was a Mac), and the approximate amount of data that you had stored (assuming you know that's correct and aren't just taking their word for it).