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antidoh

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So tell me, is two names United States, or any US state's law, or is it just a common assumption?

Do programmers routinely look up the law for common assumptions? I'm guessing no.

And by the way, the tone of your responses in this thread is the first time in my years of HN participation (under various user names) that I've wished for a plonk file. Everything you've said has the core of a relevant argument, wrapped in condescension.

"Programmers should already handle that."

Except they don't. I have a one-word legal name and I have rarely found any online from that allowed me to have less than two names. I realize I'm an edge case, so I just make up something for the other field.

Ironically, I practically begged Google+ to allow me to use my real name, which they require for their "fine dining experience" (<cough>advertisers<cough>), but they refused because it was less than two names and looked fake. They may have finally worked that out by now, I left the building long ago.

In addition to randomly generating a man page from /bin, consider mining your command line history and randomly selecting anything whose man page you haven't yet read. You'll want to keep a file of man pages that you've read, to help with that.

And since you're stocking up on C, don't forget that C's standard library is documented via man pages, e.g.

  man -k sprintf
  asprintf (3)         - print to allocated string
  sprintf (3)          - formatted output conversion
  vasprintf (3)        - print to allocated string
  vsprintf (3)         - formatted output conversion
  XtAsprintf (3)       - memory management functions

Vim is too big to learn. Eventually you'll muscle-memory a set of actions, for the way that you uniquely use vim, that you don't even know how to explain without thinking about it.

Rather than trying to go through one end of a tutorial or reference to the other (don't know if that's you), find a site or two of vim tips, and let them randomly trigger your mind. I think it's more interesting than going through anything beyond page/chapter 1 of a reference.

Coupled with that, whatever you find yourself doing in vim, take some time to understand what it is and the alternatives. Becoming familiar with :help's table of contents, rather than the contents of every chapter, is probably helpful here.

Similarly, when you do something accidentally, try to understand what happened. Sometimes you'll discover a feature. q: for example is discovered by accident by many people, including me.

Some tasks contribute directly to goals, other tasks just get you through the day.

Don't know what to make of that, other than to think that those two types of tasks are probably managed differently, and they probably give you different emotional payoff.

Except we won't. We rarely do, and only at onesies and twosies.

Besides, they aren't working on the fiscal cliff anyway, even if it looks like they are. They're wielding a tool which they created which gives them another way to make the other side look bad. That's the entire point. Governing is a side effect.

Tip O'Neill said that all politics is local. That may be true for elections. But it is certain that all government is politics.

You have a reasonable approximation of life security: food, shelter, health/healthcare, and financial flexibility.

You have a goal and are substantially achieving it.

I loved and miss the stylus on my palm devices. Accurate, natural, and you can use your fingernail if you lose the stylus.

Touch always felt like a blunt instrument to me, and blind because my finger hides what my finger is touching.

Question to motorheads:

Would you use a shop manual exclusively on an (your) ipad?

Or would you prefer to have a paper copy, so that you don't get your ipad greasy and scratched while you're working on a car?

Question to everyone: when are we going to have devices that are cheap and rugged enough that my first question doesn't matter?

Edit: If that ever happens, they won't be sold by Apple, the company that made unboxing a fetish.

New school C 14 years ago

K&R, and Harbison & Steele were my two favorites.

HN says that Learn C The Hard Way by Zed Shaw is good.

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22learn+c%...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027549

As with any new language, once you're comfortable with a small core of the language, start working on your own problems. Start with little made up problems, and move on to useful tools as soon as possible. You don't have to be a master to write your own tools, and you won't become a master until after you've written your own tools.

New school C 14 years ago

I keep on thinking I want to pick up C again (made a living with it 20 years ago), then I remember all the goodness that C++ adds (made a living with it 10 years ago), then I remember that C++ is huge and cryptic and I get all depressed again.

Windows 7 will be supported for years (probably past the lifetime of many of the machines it's running on), and is well understood, and builds on years of similar previous versions.

Windows 8 is different enough that it's reasonable to watch from the sidelines for awhile.