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deathbob

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larrick@gmail.com

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It still boggles my mind that Anthropic would invent the MCP protocol but not fully implement it.

Especially when fully implementing it (prompts, resources, tools) is easily done in harnesses that don’t ship with MCP but allow good extension / modification like Pi.

Claude not being able to see its own usage or self invoke slash commands is also very frustrating.

works well for me in chrome / os x. Used the 'a' key to cut / tear.

Cool demo! I don't know much about this sort of stuff, could you talk about what's going on in the vertlet.js file a bit?

On Using Debuggers 16 years ago

The print statements to debug was a constant in "Coders at Work" too. Also in that book I found interesting that everyone interviewed was asked what the most difficult thing they had to debug was, and almost all of them said something to do with concurrency.

Without meaning a personal dig it's clear that you're quite ignorant about drugs. Anyone who's ever done any knows they're the original augmented reality. There are few drugs that one would take to escape reality entirely; the vast majority of drug use is social in nature and rooted in reality by definition.

master>python idiocy.py Traceback (most recent call last): File "idiocy.py", line 2, in <module> import getopt, sys, pcap, dpkt, re, httplib, urllib ImportError: No module named pcap

Is there a python equivalent to RubyGems ?

Richmond, VA INMUnited is hiring. We do Ruby on Rails and iPhone development mainly, and are looking for a senior developer with experience delivering large projects, although we'd love to hear from any devs who read Hacker News :D

I'm Bob, you can contact me at the email address in my profile.

INM United in Richmond, VA needs Ruby on Rails || iPhone developers. blarrick@inmunited.com if you're interested. Mention HN in subject please.

It works for me, pretty cool. Suggest you find some way to let one person be the photographer and the other the subject. Let the person with the webcam just sit there and the other person click when to take the picture and add effects. Maybe add basic paint functionality so they can add horns / moustache. Then share. Have to make it web 2.0 after all ;-)

I also have a history (and now CS) degree. If you want to get into programming, do some programming. Don't worry about what language or what project, just grab something and do something.

That said, I found http://www.processing.org/ to be very useful in my transition. Nothing like a little visual feedback to keep the motivation high :) Clean syntax, great documentation, active community. Fantastic starter language, a great way to dip your toe in the pool and see if you really want to do programming before you buy a bunch of expensive books. Attempting to use one of the more masochistic languages (c/c++/java) can break your spirit before you even get going.

I expect you'll pick up discrete math pretty easy, and a lot of the analytic skills you developed in history actually will translate pretty well to CS.

I wish I had more time to reply but I have to run, final 2 tips, install linux and write a compiler. Have fun and good luck!

No, I asked. I told them my experience was mainly with Linux and C++, and asked what sort of environment I would be working in for them, and they said most of the projects are on windows and use java. :(

Well the IBM position sounds like it would be kind of an easy transition, that I would not be thrown into anything too tough right away. NOt that there aren't challenges there, but I would be able to ease into it a bit. Bug fix here, documentation there, slowly and steadily work up to more difficult problems. Which is fine by me. But ultimately it sounded like their main stack was windows and java. I'm sure they've got *nix boxes and python doing things, but the main stuff would be in java on windows.

Now this may be stupid, but to me, right now, I would rather learn more about linux and python than java and windows. In 3 - 5 years I would like to be a python wizard, not a java wizard. Is that short-sighted?

First of all, I don't know anything about python, my first experience with it was doing the django tutorial last week. The small firm said they use python specifically because they found PHP programmers to be so different in level of skill, and that python programmers were consistently pretty high. I can't vouch for any of that, but to me, it does say that they're concerned about hiring good people and not just anybody. The owner/founder has an active development role so I'm thinking he's not too much of a "clueless wantaprenuer". Hopefully :)

"The IBM job may or may not be there in another 5 years. There will always be some startup opportunity available."

Another good point, between this and what ken said I think I'm leaning IBM now.

I'm pretty sure I'm gonna learn an awful lot no matter which one I choose. The people I've met so far at both places were very smart and nice. I'm fortunate that judging on those criteria neither job is far ahead.

"Even if the one you pick today ends up being terrible for you, it's simply not possible to choose a job so bad from which you can't recover. Not even "Swiss Patent Clerk"."

Excellent point. I hadn't really looked at it like that. Just getting started it feels like this job will determine the entire trajectory of my life but like you said, I can always change direction (relatively) easy later.

I take it you mean more interesting work at IBM. That's what I was wondering. If I get to go to work and solve interesting problems every day I would be happy. I just know so little about it that I fear working at an Office Space type environment. If anybody reading this does or has worked at IBM I'd love to hear what you thought about it.

What I want is to work on free software. The smaller python job offers that. What I'm not sure about is if it would be foolish to turn down IBM. I'm hoping other HN readers have been faced with this choice, or similar, and could tell me what decision they made and how it worked out for them. I don't have anything against working for a big company, but it was made pretty clear to me that at IBM I would be working on enterprise applications using java, among other technologies, on windows. I'm not really excited about working on proprietary software but this is my first job and I don't know what to expect. Is working on enterprise software challenging and exciting or am I going to spend all my time doing paperwork?

Found all three songs I looked for first try, but site is getting pretty slow. Might try whittling down the number of results returned. Also saw text encoding funkiness. Really nice tho, bookmarked. How are you getting the songs and pictures in the flash on the left?

[dead] 18 years ago

As near as I can tell the authors point is "all [scribd] does is strip me of basic functionality...So some engineers could do some flash-based masturbation & feel web 2.0". It's just an ignorant rant. Plenty of other people pointed out that scribd has the features he claims it lacks, I didn't feel the need to echo that. What I did feel was important is that the author of the article missed the point of why scribd exists entirely. It does not exist to strip functionality or demo flash skills, or to "lock things up by placing it in their own jackass format". Scribd is a service that allows people to share documents. I thought pointing out the parallels between the service youtube offers and what scribd does, and the compromises inherent in implementing such a service would be illuminating, but apparently it's not helping you. I also said that since scribd basically translates all the various formats uploaded to one standard display format, it makes sense that they have total control over the end format. I thought that shed some light on why they chose to use ipaper instead of pdf or any other format, but apparently you don't agree. Whatever. p.s. Let me know when i can turn my points in for a prize.

[dead] 18 years ago

"You miss the point [avi] files don't need a common platform. IT IS a common platform. [avi] is ubiquitous and full featured, there's no need to change file format in order to share it. The author's arguments is if [youtube] is a service to host files then do it - host the files, don't convert them to an inferior format. Heck instead of [flv] why not just convert them to [mpeg2] to begin with and save the intermediary.

See how ridiculous that sounds?

Also, Scribd doesn't just host pdf files, they host others too. If you had to write software to translate multiple source languages to one language, would you compile down to a language you control every aspect of (ipaper) or one you do not control (pdf)?

[dead] 18 years ago

I've lurked here for months, but this article and the responses has led me to register and comment. If you're debating the merits of scribd vs a pdf file, you've missed the whole point. That's like debating youtube vs. [insert video format here]. Who cares if you can do more with the pdf or .avi file? Scribd is a service that hosts files. The same logic that says pdf files are 'better' would lead you to host the raw DV capture on your own server instead of uploading it to youtube. When the goal is sharing your video/document with other people, does that make any sense? Also as many have pointed out every argument made in the article is pretty much wrong. Downloading works, copy paste works, etc. No they're not in competition with adobe, adobe doesn't host files... Ultimately scribd is about sharing, and it pretty much whips ass at that.