mmc

What a great essay, if out of date - I suppose maybe Windows' PowerShell might have changed his opinion of NT?

I wonder if the whiff of elitism he mentions is still a reason for people to avoid UNIX, or if the availability of Linux has changed that.

As others have said, it can be. He certainly isn't making any of the situations up in those comics. But of course, the good parts of grad school aren't as funny - so they don't show up as much in the comics, but should help balance out all the despair.

Good points - always good to get multiple views. It's worth pointing out that at least in CS, you can keep doing research after getting a PhD by joining industry labs, which shouldn't cost you as many houses.

Re: your footnote, the exact comparison would depend on what field you're looking over from, but no, grants don't flow like water in CS.

In fact, there's been some discussion lately that CS reviewers are overly critical of each others' articles and grant proposals, compared to other fields. For example, in a recent editor's note[1], Moshe Vardi coined the term "Hypercriticality" to describe the harshness of CS reviews. There's a great quote from Ed Lazowska, who called it "Circling the wagons and shooting inwards".

[1] http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/7/95070-hypercriticality/...

See also http://www.rooijan.za.net/?q=ack_el - you can compare each from within emacs.

Screen has apparently had this in CVS since 2008:

http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?15442

For systems programming, I've learned a lot from reading the source for open solaris: http://src.opensolaris.org/source/

And the LLVM compiler is far more understandable than gcc sources: http://llvm.org/viewvc/llvm-project/llvm/

"But were the effects of an accident limited solely to me, I am sure that the utility I get from being able to coordinate with others while on the road is greater than the cost of a marginal increase in the chance of an accident."

Are you sure? The study the article cites (see http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/story.php?relyear=2009&itemno=5... ) says that for light cars (trucks are worse), the risk of crashing is 1.3 (1.4, 2.8) times higher for talking on (reaching for, dialing) a cell phone.

I'd say that increase in risk is significant, especially because the potential cost of an accident, even if you don't involve anyone else, is so high.

Sitting here thinking about it, I'd rather miss a call.

(EDIT, the study actually said crash or near-crash event. Not sure how to process that.)

This quote is one of the better mainstream-media explanations of cloud computing I've seen:

"Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM is responding to the increasing corporate demand for inexpensive e-mail that's run on computers owned by an external supplier instead of the company relying on the service. This approach has become trendy enough to get its own catch phrase - "cloud computing.""

I built a prototype of something like this for the Mac OS X Cocoa text system several years ago - I called it "TextShapeView", and I was intending to make it into a Cocoa text system plugin (InputManager) so you could pop up this view next to any TextView in any program. I might have gotten further with that, but I can't remember.

Here's a blog post with details, links, and a screenshot:

http://michael-mccracken.net/2009/09/textshapeview/

The code is hosted at http://leverage.sourceforge.net/ , where there are a few other text system hacks that I did a few years ago - one of my favorites showed a hierarchical outline view next to any text view that would show the nesting of any kind of simple syntax, and let you move the selection around by selecting in the outline. It is unfinished but still pretty useful.

Nice name - I once had an idea for an accountability buddy web site for grad students, called 'e-advisor'. Basically you sign up and it sends you an email every so often asking about your progress. If you don't reply fast enough, it notifies your actual advisor that you're slacking.

1. set noprocrast on HN

2. use a separate browser for Gmail

3. don't check emails automatically. Only if I think of it.

4. only read online news once during the day, at lunch, and use instapaper.com to defer articles that might take more than a few minutes to read.

5. the null default browser page is a great idea - but in the past I've taken it further, with a message asking if I'm browsing for work. I've also thought that a script displaying my current todo list or bug count, etc. would be a good default page.

Very interesting. This was about managers and executives, but are there any companies out there that are known to have a poisoned technical or design culture?

Lots of places (in the US) have this, but it's ineffective to prevent Awkwardness - they only cover the height of the urinal itself. To fully prevent Awkwardness, I think you need full-height walls, so you can't see your fellow visitor's face.

another vote for lambda-the-ultimate.org gpgpu.org insideHPC.com

+1 I'm sure there are plenty of us Austinites here, it's just too hot to scroll this far down.

With some preparation, you can transform the problem from one that may not be part of your job (solving completely new problems in front of an audience) to one that certainly will - explaining your solution clearly to an audience.

If you try hard enough, you can be familiar with likely interview questions and then the problem is how best to present your solution, which is an important skill, and one worth practicing.

I didn't think it was government supported, so I checked - from http://www.npr.org/about/privatesupport.html :

"A very small percentage -- between one percent to two percent of NPR's annual budget -- comes from competitive grants sought by NPR from federally funded organizations, such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts."

So I was wrong. That page also says that NPR's revenue mostly comes from membership dues and fees from stations, sponsorship and retail sales.

On top of not really seeming to help kids learn anything, these toys certainly push some gender stereotypes. What if a girl wants a penguin that shoots rockets and kicks soccer balls, or a boy wants a gorilla that hugs?

Call me when the robots let the kids program them.

I say, pick your battles. "fail" as a noun rankles far more. Killing "(epic) fail" would be truly awesome. I'd even be willing to bring back "tubular" in trade.

OK, I'll buy this.

At first I couldn't think of a real use-case that matched your description, but then I realized one that might be close - Say I want to copy some pictures in a directory that relate to a craigslist posting over into another directory. I've done that. And since I only ever use those photos once, I prefer not to import them into something like iPhoto or the like.

So that's a case for having a GUI file manager, but (back to the original point), I'm not sure it's a case for cut n' paste.

"but I suspect that managing buffers (and making sure they end up in the right pane) will take as much effort as dragging a few windows around."

I think you'd be surprised. In my experience I have a fixed set of windows (not os windows, but panes, as you called them), and easily and quickly switch between them with Iswitch-buffers: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/IswitchBuffers

this add-on gives you incremental-search to choose among open buffers, and usually it only takes a couple of keystrokes to get the one I want - so instead of moving the mouse around and clicking somewhere small and dragging things around, I am back in business after something like 'C-x b sh' - control-x, b to invoke iswitchb, and 'sh' to get me to my shell buffer...

A friend of mine just got his first mac recently, and he mentioned this same complaint to me - I had no idea, because I almost never use the Finder for file management. (I assumed you could do cut & paste)

I always just use 'mv', etc. from a terminal. So this is genuine curiosity - is there something that other people do for which a Finder window and cut and paste is better/faster/less prone to mistakes, or is it just that the shell is not as familiar for them?

Honest question - what exactly does a "professional networker" do? Who pays them, and for what?

I wonder if you could make a similar case for hacking - switch tools every few years to recapture some magic earlier perspective on your work? Or just to avoid a rut? Is sounding too polished the equivalent of thinking everything's a nail?

Sure, I use a 3-cup Chemex daily. It's great - the brew is consistently high-quality, and it's so easy to clean. You just toss out the filter and rinse the carafe clean, done in 4 seconds.

The Chemex filters tend to mellow the taste (not the caffeine) of the coffee out just a bit compared to a french press, but I personally like that aspect.

This was a funny comic. I'm curious if anyone here has had their work watered down by media coverage - any good stories?

I bet the security folks ought to have some experience here...

Very good point. Finding the second breakdown seems harder.

At any rate, it's still the wrong game to play for the OP.

http://www.divorcerate.org/ has the following for men:

  age   rate
  <20   11.7%
  -24   38.8%
  -29   22.3%
  -34   11.6%
  -39%   6.5%

So if you are just playing the numbers, wait until your late 20's at least.

But please, don't play the numbers. As someone already said, don't try to plan love.

This AP article [1] (tech.yahoo.com seems to be having problems just now) says that the overall market fell by either 7.1% or 6.5% worldwide, depending on if you ask IDC or Gartner. US shipments were either down 3.1% (IDC) or <1% (Gartner). Also, the article mentions that Apple's market share increased, but doesn't have an estimate of its shipments.

So without knowing how NPD Group is counting, this 1.8% number is not very useful. If it's global, it makes Apple look pretty good. If it's US shipments, it's harder to say.

[1]: http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:tw4QpCy8JFoJ:tech.yahoo....

More than a (month of) life offline, this sounds like a life just off.

If pressure and constant stimulation has you down, how exactly is ignoring your friends and the outside world going to help, I wonder?