delwin

http://www.ninjainvoice.com/

Really nice work! Blows my competing product out of the water, unfortunately.

Thanks for the response! Your points addressed in order:

First, if college is all about social interaction, then it's hardly worth the money. I can go to conferences, take non-university classes, pay for coworking spaces, and intern at places all for much cheaper than college. I found it very difficult to interact socially at UT — the campus is enormous, making it rare for me to randomly run into people, and also, I grew up in Austin, so I already had a pretty solid base of friends and there was little pressure to find new ones (though I did meet many people, mostly through friends I already had).

I think your views on the CS degree are pretty much why I didn't get that degree. I don't want to be comfortably employed; I have no intention of making my life a linear path from college -> work -> family -> retirement. I don't ever plan to retire, because there is nothing I love more than challenging my creativity. If I had a CS degree, I would probably have a pretty high paying job in a nice place right now, but I certainly wouldn't be traveling 5 months out of the year (and in 2014, 11 months if things go according to plan). I like programming, and especially designing, for the web, but I also like working for myself. I have a pretty decent portfolio, and although I haven't gotten any huge jobs yet (biggest so far are a dating social network and a minisite for NASA), I make enough to support myself and my travels.

I also think getting a degree in CS would have minimized my passion for it. Getting a degree in linguistics certainly stamped out any ambitions I had on becoming a professional linguist. Although, I did get an enormous amount of value out of all of the electives I was able to take because linguistics is only a 24-hour major. I would have, no doubt, learned more computer science, but I know enough right now to get paid to do it, which gives me the freedom to learn it on my own time. And, I'm trying to transition to becoming a designer right now, which is its own set of challenges; something I would have completely ignored had I been taking a CS degree.

Lastly, traveling is definitely not cheaper when you're going through the university. When I travel, I stay on couches (CouchSurfing) or work on farms and homesteads (WWOOF), giving me guaranteed access to social interaction and informal education (I am staying on a farm in the mountains of North Carolina for two months while I work on a full-length album at their music studio, this will cost me $150/mo. in rent — and they are eager to teach me everything they know about foraging, which is very popular in this region, given all of the naturally occurring edible plants and fungi; I have also budgeted around $900-1200 for a two-month trip to Peru).

In sum: - Social interaction can be found elsewhere, for free. College is about learning, at least for me. - The CS degree probably would have been a good idea for someone who wanted a comfortable, stable livelihood after college. This is not me. - Using the university to travel would have cost a lot more than my current travel plans. I would have certainly learned a lot studying abroad, but since I plan to be "studying" and traveling "abroad" for most of my life, I

Thanks for the advice, but it is really geared towards someone who is headed for a different path, something more stable, something with a larger salary. Living my life through challenges and adventures is exactly how I want to do it. It pushes my mind and creativity to new places, and I have no plans to become stagnant.

Also, if I had the money, you bet I would go back to school. I would get a Bachelors in history, computer science, music, design, biology, and physics and anything else I could. I love classes, and I love going to lectures. This is why I'm so excited about MOOCs.

Hipsters are SO into Facebook. And even _more_ into Instagram. They define pop culture by positioning themselves against a "phantom" pop culture that is even more pop.

I don't think it is a counterculture yet. I think it will happen in 10-20 years, maybe more. Just a humble prediction. So no, it's not a counterculture right now. It's a bunch of vague ideas and random people who don't feel totally comfortable using Facebook or putting on Google Glasses. I think once tech begins to infiltrate further into our social lives (even further than it already has), _then_ the counterculture will coalesce.

This is awesome!! I love this guy.

That seems a little prejudiced. I know Americans who would do this. That doesn't make them less American. I know Germans who wouldn't. That doesn't make them not German. No generalizations, thank you.

I agree with that. Read the end of the article and you'll see I define the culture as not anti-tech but critically judgemental and cautious towards it. And while that is not be a totally new idea, I'm bringing it to attention because I think it is growing rapidly and will explode soon. Countercultures impact the mainstream heavily by definition, and I think this one has yet to make a big splash.

Read a little further into the article and you will see I very much agree with you.

Thanks for the term antihumanism. That is more what I'm getting at.

Anti-Facebook is not mainstream. It's a popular opinion, but not the MOST popular opinion.

that's what I'm saying! of course we're not actually locked in, but it's a pervasive illusion, especially if you are of a particular age/social group.

$971? Are you fucking kidding me? It took me less than $200 to outfit my kitchen, and that includes a breadmaker, a rice-cooker, as well as things to eat the food with. Most of this was scavenged from estate sales and thrift shops.

This MVK post goes completely against the whole "minimal viable" spirit, which _should_ be self-explanatory: only what you need. This kitchen getup is certainly viable, but it's anything but minimal. This is more like the "I have $1000 and want a fancy ass kitchen" viable kitchen.

I'm only 20, not sure I have a lot to say, but here it is so far:

Life: Deciding to stay with my girlfriend through a long-distance relationship. It's hard, but definitely worth it. We've not seen it all the way through yet, though, so it's hard to say yet if it really is a good decision.

Programming: Getting into game programming. That's where I started six years ago, and although I've moved on, if it weren't for the joy of making my own 3D games, I would have never dug deeper.

I haven't really had problems with this. I have an Android phone, an iPod, and dual boot Ubuntu and OS X. Google Music syncs iTunes to my phone via the cloud just fine; the iPod naturally syncs with iTunes. On Ubuntu I just use Google Music via the browser, or Pandora.

The tech community is _already_ smart enough to deal with their stuff. And the consumer community doesn't seem to care much about being locked inside a brand; they don't know any better, for some reason, to most people, it makes sense that if you have a Mac, you need an iPad, not a Kindle Fire. Or if you get a Kindle Fire, you simply adjust your expectations accordingly.

Obviously it's unethical for companies to do this, but when was the last time megacorps operated with any higher morality than economics demanded?

> You're blind to the box you're currently living in.

I definitely feel this all the time. Just about the time I start feeling comfortable building webapps, I step back and see _all the programming_ I'm not doing. Writing webapps in Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript in any number of flavors (Rails, Django, Flask, web.py, node, Backbone) still has the same feel, because it's all for the web; there's a common goal.

"Sprachgefühl" is perhaps a useful word here — having a "feel" for languages is all you need to start learning new ones. It's even truer for programming than it is for natural languages.

No, that's not apt at all. The "trade" isn't C, Java, Ruby, Python, whatever. The "trade" is solving problems with computers. Usually the same types of problems.

Any critique that world-class teachers give Khan Academy would apply to most K-12 math teachers as well. I think people are worried because Khan Academy can spread much further (and do much more damage) than a conventional teacher, who is fired if standardized testing scores drop below an arbitrary amount.

BUT the same effect is seen on Wikipedia, which has been reviewed and corrected more than thousands of other encyclopedias, simply because it's so open and accessible. Khan Academy was originally run by one guy, but they're starting to open up and partner with other educational entities. They aren't going to go unchecked. By no means is Khan Academy hurting the education system, unless you look at things from an economic or political standpoint, in which case it's potentially disruptive. But that would be cruel, wouldn't it?

Check out Pygame. There's nothing like making games to remind you how awesome programming is. Game programming ties a lot of things together — algorithms, AI, code organization, testing, optimization, etc. — and you'll learn a lot.

Or fork a Python project on Github: https://github.com/languages/Python

The question is irrelevant, there is already a standard. Browsers use http://, dead-tree material uses nothing, and no one uses //, because that's just weird.

Typing in http:// is never necessary, so we're already saving as many keystrokes as possible.

Just to clarify, I am not a power user. If anything, I'm less active than the average Quora user. My problem isn't really with the content of Quora, that's just a manifestation of a larger change that is happening — a shift from a Q&A site to a social network.

It's easy to understand why — once Quora understood it was attracting the kind of online socialites who like to boost their egos and flaunt their intellect (which is by no means 100% of the community, just a loud majority), they accustomed their site to a new demographic.

It was a fad for the Silicon elite but it COULD have been so much more. There were actual scientists, historians, etc. getting involved and those people could have made it awesome. The reason Quora faltered was because of startup/investor interests. They didn't seem to be curious intellectual types actually interested in the knowledge curation, they just seemed to have hit upon a good business idea.

Agreed. Survey questions are terrible. So are "joke questions", which are now legitimated by an official designation...

If there's a good enough workflow, there's no reason to not use LESS and SASS in each app. You compile the CSS before production anyway, which means you work with beautiful code, and use automatically minified code for production, and all of it is (usually) taken care of in the background.

Plus, if I work in CSS for simple apps and LESS for complex apps, I have to keep two sets of boilerplates. I don't want to be writing CSS from scratch every time I make an app. With using LESS in every instance, not only do I only need one boilerplate, but that boilerplate is modular and I can take the things I need and exclude the things I don't. LESS effectively has namespaces to make this super easy and MORE efficient than plain CSS.

No comment on CoffeeScript, though. I've not had to write enough JS to warrant checking it out in depth.

I joined Quora soon after it launched, thought it was kinda cool, forgot about it, and yes, then rejoined again sometime in the fall of 2010. There was a nice linguistics community built up for a while (I'm a linguistics undergrad) until everything kind of fell apart. Quora didn't know how to separate people very well, so people interested in memes gradually crowded everything out.

BUT I didn't actually have any problems at all with Quora (at least, nothing notable) until the launch of Boards. In fact, I really enjoyed the linguistics, philosophy, chemistry, biology, theology, travel, and cooking communities. I mostly ignored the Quora superusers and focused on niche experts, like you mentioned, but eventually it was just too much.

Perhaps I will revamp my profile when I get the time, start from scratch, and things will work out better the second time around.

It took me 5 days to stabilize my workflow in vim, and well worth it. Of course, those were 5 days without too much stress or deadlines, a few weeks ago. I still have a cheat-sheet print out, but am finding myself needing it less and less every day.

Although I've been working on fairly small web projects. For larger, corporate-style software development, the transition might be more difficult.

This is a great idea. As a step two, I would group them into categories (JavaScript, self-improvement, etc.) and then figure out time needed to become proficient in each one. Vim, for example, takes about 5 days to really get the hang of it, to pick up the essentials. The other tricks come later. CoffeeScript can become familiar after a weekend or two. A few of the others, like Arduino, take a little longer.

This is what I do when I want to learn things. Of course, I have a problem limiting it to programming. My list often includes stuff like "Thai cuisine" and "German" and "Celtic mythology".

The hardest part, in my opinion, is not tracking NEW things to learn, but tracking things to improve on.

Even better if you can curl these sites from the terminal.

Ideas don't mean anything, execution is everything. Feel free to give away your idea to everyone.

This applies to entrepreneurship, but not, I believe, to other more "creative" fields, like art/music/etc. Fine arts are judged much more on the fundamental idea behind the work rather than the execution. For example, with the exception of mainstream music, excellent records are released all the time that have sub-par mastering/production.