impeachgod

I think Alan Kay is referring to Charles Simonyi. According to Forbes, his net worth is $4.3 billion: https://www.forbes.com/profile/charles-simonyi/

I considered Virgil to be a good friend of mine for a very long time, and the last few years have been deeply saddening for me due to his increasingly bizarre beliefs and his irresponsible and inexcusable behavior, especially towards his female friends and colleagues. This is not the Virgil I knew when I first met him.

I cannot speak for other people, but for me personally, the pseudoscientific reactionary ideas you mention were very appealing to me at one point in time because I had, and still have, a very difficult time attracting women. There was a period of time in my life when I spent a lot of time reading pickup artist/RedPill/men's rights content on the Internet until I managed to escape it, mostly via the help of supportive friends. I think that there are a lot of misguided nerdy young men who fall into this frightening rabbit hole, where one bad ideology leads to another.

Still waiting for the HyperCard source code to be released. I am acquainted with one of the members of the original HyperCard team, but he says his old floppies are no longer readable. :(

Actually, the Russians developed a completely different programming language Prolog and Prol2 that had nothing to do with the French Prolog. It just happened to have the same name.

Source: http://forum.oberoncore.ru/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=4111

But much less than against C++.

Someone should create a Coursera clone that's not hosted in the US.

Fortunately for us, Apple acquiring NeXT instead of Be means that we get to program iOS and OS X in Objective-C instead of C++.

I wonder what are the advantages/disadvantages between a PEG and say, a Pratt parser (http://javascript.crockford.com/tdop/tdop.html)?

I feel like I have to get good grades, work research projects, and develop good relationships with other students, TAs, and professors in order to become better. I find it hard to relax because I feel like I'll be mediocre and end up working with third-rate soulless clock punchers; I want to work with first-rate colleagues.

Do explain how and why so many CS graduates hold on to cargo-cult notions?

So the way the OCD works is that I HAVE to have my documents formatted a certain way (e.g. characters per line), the time stamps a certain nice number, or I get super angry at myself. I HAVE to begin and finish eating, sleeping, and working at certain hours of the day. It suddenly arose within the last 8 months or so and I have no idea what causes it.

I too am currently having the same problem. I am attending a very large state school (over 40,000 students) and I am struggling to connect with people. I also have severe depression and OCD which prevents me from getting things done. I feel very disappointed in myself and in my life because I was having high expectations about how awesome college would be after a crappy high school experience.

What happened to the ebnf package?

Inaccurate? How so?

I have my birthday fairly late in the year, so technically when I started UCLA I was 17 years old.

This reminds me of Richard Hamming's talk "You and Your Research": http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

"I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important."

If there is a university near you, go to the library and use the computers there.

Eazy-E was right: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfMXROZ9qvo

Dealers of Lighting by Michael A. Hiltzik. It's a great book about the beginnings of Xerox PARC.

I think you can only get those if you go to MIT or CMU. The vast majority of CS programs and lecturers aren't that good, and certainly worse than what you could teach yourself on your own.

What would be more interesting, would be if he found a way to grow different fingerprints.

This is what I don't get about Americans - they have no toasting tradition. I grew up in Ukraine, and I remember being required to give toasts at dinners ever since I was a little kid. They didn't have to be long or complex, but original and from the heart. This taught you to speak in public in front of groups.

I also sat at the table with the adults (there never really was a separate kiddie table) and I learned to behave myself and talk like an adult.

Actually, in the Soviet Union you used to have 3-kopek and 15-kopek coins, as well as 3-ruble notes.

I've always been fascinated with Chuck Moore's VLSI design tools. How does he manage to design working VLSI chips with such limited functionality? Does he do complex simulation by hand? Wouldn't it get hard laying out each individual transistor?

So thus we have a good reason to have more women founders - immigrant hacker-startup guys are usually male. Thus, they can just marry their US-citizen startup cofounders.

I would too. I think it's best you make a public post about this, I think a lot of people will be interested in this.

> does that make me a "boring tool" who can't "think creatively" and only relies on "lame rote repetition"?

I strongly disagree. It does make you such. Memorization is overrated.

What if they're outside North America or Western Europe? Some place with weaker laws?

I tend to hold the Thoreauvian point that one ought to resist unfair laws. As I noticed, Child Protective Services are state agencies. If someone was falsely accused of child abuse/child porn, with no hope of winning the case whatsoever, how effective would it be to run away with the family?

So this means that we can have a safe-harbour Sourceforge or Github in New Zealand. Someone should start that service.