tedkalaw

This reminded me of Sudhir Venkatesh's book "Gang Leader For A Day", parts of which were described in Freakonomics. Some of his findings included an organized corporate structure of a big gang, a gang member with an econ degree who wanted to put his education to use, etc. Pretty interesting read.

http://www.amazon.com/Gang-Leader-Day-Sociologist-Streets/dp...

Here's a post by Joel Kaplan, VP of US Public Policy for Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-washington-dc/a-mess...

Is that a magnet school?

I went to a magnet school and my experience was pretty good. Sure, there were "jocks" - but their "power" is vastly diminished in a school where kids are sad if they don't get A's. As you said, it's like minded people being in the same place.

Unfortunately, not everyone has access to a school like that.

I chatted with some engineers from BrainTree and I was impressed at their commitment to helping build the tech scene in Chicago.

It's an exciting time.

I'm back at school now after some time off and I'm happy to be back, though when things suck it's frustratingly easy to say "welp, just need to wait for the summer."

My goal for my remaining time at college is to learn things I cannot learn other places and take advantage of the opportunities I have. But after spending time in the valley, my emphasis has shifted from getting good grades (before my time off, I obsessed over this and was constantly anxious/depressed) to learning as much as I can - two goals which are, amusingly, not always aligned.

You'll get out whatever you put in.

I guess that Leo's post resonated with me because I find that the sharing of what I've learned so far helps me learn it better - and sometimes, there are people who are in the same boat as you before you came to some realization.

That is to say, sometimes I get stuck on something that should probably be easy - and when I find the crux, the thing that got me unstuck, sharing that is beneficial to people who are stuck in the same way. We all think and learn differently, so if there's just one other person out there who thinks the same way as me and might find things easier with the same realization I had...well, I think it's worth it.

I grew to love vim after being introduced to it in my data structures class.

One of my favorite tools is much older than me - which seems kind of weird in the current state of technology. I find it very humbling.

I just found this and...I'm curious about how well it works.

Really, really curious.

http://www.davidhuskey.com/tDCS/

Congratulations Geoff!

Geoff is an incredible product guy, and an even more incredible person. Every office hours we had with him during ImagineK12 he gave us a good old-fashioned hustling...prepare yourselves, YC.

From the second paragraph:

"If these companies were to take this route, all of these sites would go completely dark save for a message of opposition to SOPA censorship and instructions on how to contact your local representative."

I've had great success with the book "8 Minute Meditation." It's a pretty good primer to what meditation is "all about."

"Going analog" is something I have really tried lately. The more I find myself into tech, the more I appreciate not being around it.

I really want to give woodworking a shot this year.

You might be able to get them to switch if their are problems are big enough.

I'm not sure what the hell the deal was, but whenever my parents opened up Firefox, it spammed them with pictures of pie. Like, 5 little windows of pie.

I just told him to click the Chrome icon instead of Firefox, and my dad went on his way.

Do you think there's any sort of relevance for a Masters, not a PhD? The timescale is more similar to an MBA, and the 6-7 years of a PhD is quite a large commitment.

I am kind of surprised by this, especially given all of the positive comments. It took Audrey's post to make me realize that if I were reading HN, a lot of those positive comments would be, well..technical people.

So now I'm torn. My girlfriend is a graphic designer who wants to learn to code, and I'll probably have her give CodeAcademy a shot. And then maybe CodeSchool, since I have a subscription.

How have the non-CS/programmers of HN learned to code? I learned programming in a CS context, so I don't really know how to tell people where to start.

I wanted to reply to this because my experience was somewhat similar to yours. I dropped out of school to do a startup and realized that I actually WANTED to learn my major (CS stuff). I also missed the academic environment. Luckily for me, I was far enough ahead with credit hours that the time I took off didn't mess up my graduation time.

True. It would be interesting to see what the success rate of reported cures, etc in the media is.

I like hearing about scientific progress like this, but worry that it will be another "promising advancement" that we never hear about again, like a new cure for cancer or tax cuts for the middle class.

I think he's not necessarily arguing against t-shirt and jeans (despite his claim that the "days of t-shirt and hoodies are over" - this may be an east coast thing?), but that fit matters. Just because you're writing code doesn't mean you have to wear the ratty black t-shirt that you haven't washed in weeks and the ripped jeans that you bought in high school.

I know that, like with the "frat boy" you described, there are also stereotypes with the stereotypical programmer in the black shirt with the stupid text on it. How do those people make you feel?

This is a great introduction, but to this day I find the sheer size of Cocoa the largest barrier to entry for Mac and iPhone development.

Just have to get used to it, I suppose.

Is there anyway to do one-way flights? I really like it so far but cannot for the life of me figure out if one-way is possible.

I'm not an Emacs user, but aren't a lot of the text-editing shortcuts straight from Emacs?

I heard about these guys after seeing this site:

http://aduni.org/

Learned lots of useful things for my theory of computation class.

This reminded me that the people that seem to know the most ABOUT Steve Jobs don't actually know Steve Jobs. Really cool to read.

Many of the really good ones are also public. In engineering, for example, many of the top 10 schools are public - a lot of which don't have big endowments or are in states with broken policy.

Hey there,

The core of the project I'm working on is built in PHP. However, we found that there were a few things that would make more sense in RoR, and there are many features in the future that will be better served as RoR apps. Basically, we are using mod_proxy to redirect to the Rails app.

If you'd like to talk more about it, I'd be more than happy.

It's really cool to see information like this laid out. I'm from Chicago, and even property downtown is not (as) expensive. I was always told that the bay was more expensive, but didn't believe it until I started living in San Francisco. We're planning on moving to San Jose, or somewhere a little further away to try and minimize that effect.

Chipotle is 50 cents more expensive across the board here. Damn.

I think it has to do with the number of tech jobs that are based in those cities. I'm from the midwest and am working out of an apartment in SF so I have no idea what I'm talking about it, but it seems like a lot of startups are based out of places that are "closer" to the tech scene.

Again, I'm still getting used to the whole scene, but the center of everything really seems to be further south.

I know a few universities that are pushing programs to "fix" this problem in engineers by encouraging them to do more presentations and group projects.

It seems like there will always parts of "geek culture" that just don't care. Perhaps they're even proud of social ineptitude? But those aren't engineers I would want to work with.

I kind of like it as commentary on the state of modern shooters ;)

I wonder how the AirTouch desks compare to the GeekDesk. I'm really interested in trying out the standing/sitting thing, and those two seem to be the really big ones. Does anyone have any experience with either of them?