Ben_Dean

the first question seems a tad ambiguous to me. Is a contiguous rectangular block a rectangle s.t. all restaurants == P, or is it rectangle in which every P has at least one immediate neighbor == P?

twice. will do it again soon.

+1 for Bringhurst, definitely. Plus, when you meet a cute designer somewhere, he or she will be impressed when you drop that name.

men performing sexual favors for men in exchange for money... right?

thanks! I do read LtU, and I'll check out this "Kragen's" of which you speak.

To Long, Didn't Read: I'm down with what you're saying, but I didn't ask that question. Where's the hot links?

Yes yes, I've asked ever so foolish a question and missed the fundamental problem, really failed to develop an overall understanding of the root causes of my interests and their dynamic nature, and lack a general theory of communication.

That, or, I had hoped that the widely read and interesting people who take the time to read arbitrary questions from strangers and give coherent, considered replies might direct me towards exactly the thing that I described: an internet content aggregator that is, in aggregate, more focussed on the technical and aesthetic issues, and less concerned with embedding those issues within a specific economic framework? A specific one that I can point ol' Chrome at?

More science, less startup. That's all I'm askin'. I do not care what Steve Jobs said to a guy who's iPhone was too beepy. I do care that a professor at MIT has claimed he's got a widget to beat photosynthesis, and I do care that someone's unearthed a video of bookbinding as practiced in 1947.

Certainly, I appreciate that I would be doing myself a disservice if I insisted that all I read, watched, or heard were something that I had already approved. I have no expectations that a community perfectly support anything. The nice thing about HN as a community is that I can ask this question, and perhaps find a supplementary community to address the imbalance that I personally experience. Also, I'm calling startup kids dorks cause I think it's dorky.

--Summer Glau

hmm. might could. I am consuming HN exclusively through google reader, so maybe I need to see a little more what it can do for me.

what. the. hell.

A+

I agree with revolvingcur-- I was pretty skeptical at first, but I certainly got the value out of this for free (and was mildly entertained, too.). More to the point, just on principle, one could take a _day_ to find out how realistic any of this is. I wouldn't try selling fruit in NYC without a permit, though.

good, now that joke's been made.

The API is weak, though. Everyone knows you lead with something interesting, and go to the name only after an actual conversation. UNLESS you're using friend-based authentication, where a third party initiates the handshake.

Because robots have been the next revolution for at least 50 years.

I think this corner of the flame war is pretty uninteresting. Balance is everything. Have a good idea and do it well. Or just get lucky.

Write interesting job posts. You may be able to tap into the small but motivated and smart pool of people with non-traditional backgrounds.

Evaluating them means being clear with yourself about what makes one a suitable candidate. Extracurricular projects of any sort are going to be invaluable, but ask general problem-solving questions and feel out how they do. Do they ask questions when they're stumped, but don't get stumped until they've chewed the problem over for themselves? That's the number one sign of a good junior programmer.

There was a study in a CS dept. somewhere that had a pretty convincing test. I can't remember where I saw it or the school, so I'll just try to recount it.

The test was given to students before the first bit of instruction in computer science (and for the sake of simplicity, let's assume it controlled for those with previous experience). Basically, students were given a problem set of code snippets in a non-existent language, and were asked to write what the code evaluated to, i.e. 34 @@ 14 --> [2], followed by possible answers.

It turned out that the students who performed well in their subsequent CS courses were not those who got the right answers, or those who got the wrong answers, but those who answered consistently. The best single predictor of a good student of CS (not strictly equivalent to a programmer in a startup...) was forming a consistent model of what they were looking at, and sticking with it.

Someone get this cat a dictionary so he can look up "decimate", a better word for what happened than removing "a handful" of staff.

hahahahaahahaha.

No. Would you hire someone who made basic arithmetic mistakes?

but they do have more satisfying sex lives.

I'm good at photoshop for sure, but I wouldn't suggest it for mockups, either. It's not what the tool is designed for, and it's not what the majority of the userbase is doing with it.

That said, if you want to edit photos, or do pixel-based image manipulation of any sort, it's superb piece of software.

haha. double home is funny.

puck ferl

its

14

not to mention one full of grammatical, style, content, and spelling errors. There was not one fact in this that is not immediately obvious to anyone who has been in NYCity for five minutes. And, also, in addition to that, some of the observations were dead wrong. For instance, Starbucks is universally known in this town to be the public restroom of Manhattan. Why all the ire, you ask. The reason is that this post contains numerous uses of "lol" as an arbitrary sentence particle, which, for some reason, makes my blood boil. Oh, also, New York is one of the greatest cities in the history of human civilization and to utterly fail to have any insight into it at all is embarrassing. Try again!

You are not doing anything wrong. You're just like every single other human ever to exist. The way you describe your problem makes me believe that some manner of Zen/Mindfulness approach would be appealing to you.

"I have a difficult time relating attempted solutions because I'm still not sure what the problem is."

To me, this says that you've already found the fundamental truth of desire-- you cannot sate it with its own ends, as counterintuitive as that is. I realize this is starting to sounds like the dreaded "get religion" solution, but there's no magic or mystery in these approaches. Just 2500 years of close examination human life.

Two specific, small things: I recommend a short, easy book, "Everyday Zen" by Charlotte Joko Beck. Try to sit still and just breathe for around 20 minutes. It's just as easy and just as hard as it sounds.

I was in the same position as you recently (and still am to some degree) though in worse shape, since I decided I needed math at the end of college. The points people made previously about working at it and repetition are critical. I absolutely understand that you don't want to do things by rote, but what's important to realize is that like ANY other skill, there is one best way to improve, and it's called practice. You'll just need to do exercise after exercise, and read and re-read proofs, even when you don't feel that you "get" it. First you do it, then you'll get it.

The other thing that works the same for every other skill is to teach it. Get a friend who feels the same, and teach each other math. This works pretty well when you're not even talking to a real person, even. Just having to formulate your understanding solidly enough to convey it to someone else reveals where you get it and where you don't.

The personal trick that will help though I find is the hardest to do consistently is to be OK with not getting it. You'll spend a lot of time not understanding, so get comfortable with that fact and keep going. For myself, I tend to back off the subject when I don't get it right away, but I learn much faster when I stick with the stuff that makes me uncomfortable.

Prescriptively, try looking at How To Prove It for an explanation of what's going on in proofs, and how to engage with them.

SICP, EOPL, Lil/Seasoned/Reasoned Schemer

You need to have a new job. In so many ways. I got a sysadmin "internship" right out of college with a studio art degree (painting) and was make $3K a month. And for a company that I feel is extremely exploitative of its workers. I completely agree with everyone. You can feel completely entitled to making 4-5 times what you are, salaried with benefits. Also, your boss is obviously just an ass. Only someone on the megalomaniac end of the personality spectrum would be calling you to task for showing up a few minutes "late", especially when you are a contract worker.

By default, open the link in a new tab/window, a la Google Reader. And I agree, some kind of standard syndication is key: Atom, RSS, etc.

That said, it's got a decent hit rate of showing me links I'm interested in so far.