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tigerthinkon Crazy cool nginx.conf scripting and modules.

Why would you do this? Use a proper web framework!

tigerthinkon "We live in an amazing world and it's wasted on the crappiest generation..."

Once you've got all your essential needs covered I'll bet relative social status is more important to happiness than material goods. I believe surveys have shown that people would prefer to make $50K in a world where everyone makes $25K than $100K in a world where everyone makes $200K.

tigerthinkon Ask HN: Is there a point to school?

I agree. In fields other than computer programming like physics, school makes sense because there genuinely are years of knowledge you need to acquire before being useful. This isn't true in computer programming since you tap into those years of knowledge by--get this--programming with libraries. And using other peoples' software. Using someone else's web server means I don't need to know how TCP/IP works, or even what it stands for.

tigerthinkon "Mad Libs" Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%

So what are your results like?

tigerthinkon "Mad Libs" Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%

Dangerous? How about a best practice? If you don't have time or inclination to test, the first strategy you should use is one that worked for someone else.

tigerthinkon "Mad Libs" Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%

Suggestions for improving your form:

* "I'm given you" -> "I've given you", "I'm given", "I'm giving you", or "I'm givin' you"

* It's not clear what the field after "from" is supposed to be

* "your email is [ ] with a password of [ ]" -- what do you want my email password for? Try "your email is [ ] and your password is [ ]".

I've been reading Don't Make Me Think and Rocket Science Made Easy, both by Steve Krug. Good stuff if you want to catch issues like these. Just a small amount of usability testing ("a morning a month") can bring significant benefits.

tigerthinkon Ask HN: Rate my essay, please: On thinking

I have way more ideas for stuff to work on than time and energy to work with.

tigerthinkon Ask HN: Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?

Google Maps is pretty cool.

tigerthinkon Ask HN: The best way to put technical skills to the greater good?

http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/intro

tigerthinkon Jerry Seinfeld's Productivity Secret

There's already a perfectly good app at http://dontbreakthechain.com/

tigerthinkon Why Self-Discipline Is Overrated

Training yourself to enjoy what you want to work on is where it's at.

tigerthinkon Why Economists are often Cheapskates

Too bad the article never really answered the question.

tigerthinkon How Good Are UW Students in Math?

Actually, I'm pretty sure this problem is exclusive to Washington. Go here

http://www.wheresthemath.com/

and scroll down to 'Washington State Facts'. Anecdote: I attend a community college in California, found the problems laughably easy, and have met tons of people in my classes who would feel much the same way.

tigerthinkon Ask HN: How do you get in your "productive" mode?

Exercise.

tigerthinkon Ask HN: How do you get in your "productive" mode?

Seconding music, I've found this album to be good:

http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/18256

tigerthinkon Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

I'm young enough that I can still change my career easily, and I often worry that I'm not one of the super productive programmers, and that I'm wasting my time and that I should choosing a different career.

Is uber-productivity significantly enhanced by choosing the right development methodology (e.g. test-driven development) or is it mostly something innate? Aside from stories like rdouble's (which I don't find that helpful, since it doesn't contain information on rdouble or his employer's domain expertise), what is the evidence that super-productive programmers exist?

tigerthinkon How CMU increased number of women in CS from 7% to 37% [pdf]

>In general, females feel that the birds-eye view of a problem, and the end result, are more relevant than the coding details in between

Doesn't this suggest that men are more likely to be wired for programming?

tigerthinkon Linux: Linus Says, Linux Not Designed; It Never Was

Evolution isn't that impressive. Humans could build human-level AIs if we had millions of years too.

tigerthinkon The false god of coffee

Try mint flavored coffee?

tigerthinkon Teaching Students to Sift Mountains of Data

>If finding useful pieces of information from huge databases was really hard search engines would advertise smaller databases.

Come again?

tigerthinkon Tiny 'nuclear batteries' unveiled

The University of Missouri team says that the batteries hold a million times as much charge as standard batteries.

Does that help?

tigerthinkon Get Out of My Building

>What if he'd thrown a chair, destroyed a phone, or punched a wall? Where do you paint the line between what is and is not an acceptable amount of 'drama' to make a point?

All of those have associated economic costs which screaming does not. What exactly is the disadvantage of screaming?

tigerthinkon Google’s Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles: Usenet

What exactly were you hoping for?

tigerthinkon So...what the hell's wrong with you, Shooter?

Shooter was probably bitten by a tick that carried a ton of diseases. Most doctors didn't believe that any one person could have so many symptoms, and treated Shooter's individual symptoms instead of trying too hard to figure out what was wrong with him. Finally one doctor figured it out. Shooter is slowly getting better.

tigerthinkon Google's new culture: Perks are out. Being grateful you have a job is in

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm

Looks pretty good to me.

tigerthinkon Drupal Sucks

Try searching on google for site:drupal.org your problem here

tigerthinkon Teaching Linear Algebra

My favorite teacher sometimes lets us discover stuff for ourself just by repeatedly asking us questions about it, so it spoils the surprise to read ahead.

tigerthinkon Ask HN: Orange dot?

>See above, re: "being smart". Were you not reading what I said?

That "being smart" sentence was pretty convoluted, so I chose to interpret it as something I disagreed with just to be safe. :-)

tigerthinkon JWZ Unable to Distribute Two Free Pre Apps

The amount of effort he was willing to put in to release free software amazes me.