pookleblinky

Indeed. It kind of read like Hunting of the Snark.

"The wikifiddler drew his wikivorpal sword and slayed the terrible wikibeast"

I can't speak for all emacs users, but I wouldn't be caught dead using an "IDE"

IDE ostensibly stands for "integrated development environment." AFAIK, not a single IDE is as integrated, programmable, hackable, flexible, or stable as emacs (or vim).

In Emacs, I can effortlessly open and navigate through an indefinitely large number of files. I can take advantage of myriads of language-specific modes for syntax highlighting, auto-completion, snippets, verification, prettification, truly integrated compiler/interpreter environments, you name it.

If I find I need to do some repetitious gruntwork, I can C-x ( gruntwork C-x ) it away. If this gruntwork seems excessive, I can program it into my editor and forget about it. If I find I really need some feature or functionality, I can pop open a scratch buffer, hack it, and use it instantly. No boilerplate, no compiling, no restarting.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, though. The overwhelming sense an emacs or vim user experiences, is one of power. We have complete control over our programming environment. We dictate it, hack it, and tweak it until it is effortless. This sense of power and hackability so permeates our programming environment, that it becomes physically painful to have to navigate a swarm of inconsistent modal dialogues, accept some kludges and pray they get fixed, and accept that The Developers know how best to configure our environment.

http://www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/nomouse/

Opera has an entire tutorial on ratless browsing.

The Bush one is in fact a bug, described pretty well here: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/07/11/662342.aspx

The second? No clue.

I haven't used Windows in years.

Does anyone know if these http://ishmeet.wordpress.com/2007/09/28/3-wicked-microsoft-b... still exist?

The =rand(200, 99) one looks interesting.

"NOTE: Depending on your query, it may take several minutes to return the results of your query to the worksheet."

First thought: this has got to be a parody.

Second thought: Oh Cthulhu, it is for real.

Third thought: Just by mentioning this link almost anywhere, it'll be excoriated as "just another baseless attack on Microsoft (which I, being a technologically fair and balanced soul, will admit to having less than stellar practices)"

"If you can't make the effort to make your post understandable to someone not in your domain, why should I assume you're saying something worth reading?"

He assumed the domain of people familiar with ginsu knives is roughly identical to the domain of people who have ever watched an infomercial in the past two decades.

Obviously, there are people all over the world for which this assumption is false. However, globalization is arguably incomplete until every single human on earth has at some time thought: "Gee. Cuts through a boot. How tired would I have to be for this advertisement to work?"

I don't get why this is on HN.

We have methods to kill Paula Beans in their tracks. Liberal arts does not.

Is this anything new?

The first programmer was a woman.

Perhaps a better checklist would be "actual reasons why the average human, without regard to gender, does not enter technical fields"

That, or you got a wife.

Wives seem remarkably efficient at curbing our deepest insanities.

This is not quite what you want, but there are quite a few 4D puzzles.

iirc, Scott Kim, who did many of the illustrations for Douglas Hofstadter, wrote a paper presenting an optical illusion only perceivable in 4 spatial dimensions ("The Impossible Skew Quadrilateral: A Four-Dimensional Optical Illusion").

http://www.superliminal.com/cube/cube.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-dimensional_sequential_move_p...

There is a 4D variant of tetris, such as http://illusions.hu/4dtris/

Not a novel, or a single book, but I love Richard Feynman's descriptions of Los Alamos. I can read his accounts of mental arithmetic battles with Bohr, safecracking, the programming of dozens of old-school human computers, all day long.

Consider Shockley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley). Brilliant, amazingly productive, and possibly the biggest and most abrasive all-around asshole since Newton.

In the end, any system which would disqualify a Shockley is a broken system which will bankrupt the tech industry.

I just got a horrible mental image of someone using M-x doctor to practice smalltalk.

I'm a hermit, similarly incapable of smalltalk.

I long ago discovered that no one really likes small talk. It's the prelude to a real conversation; that's the only reason people engage in it (or to signal to each other's monkey brains that one is not a threat).

The solution? Ramp it up into a real conversation. Talk about economics, politics, religion, and Emacs vs. Vim. Out of the blue, whatever.

On a side note, who do you think the women will remember more: the guy who they got into an conversation with about Frederic Bastiat, or the 100th guy to ask them about the weather?

This, combined with the report about a robot that can forage for biomass (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=614006), means we're that much closer to building a race of cybernetic Summer Glau's.

The future will either be awesome, or scary.

One of my VLSI friends lamented about his Gen Ed requirements:

"They want me to be a "well-rounded" engineer. Well, I know vector calculus, finite algebra, compiler theory, and enough quantum mechanics to know a little about what's going on under the silicon. Is that not well-rounded enough?"

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/mit-introduction-to-algorithms-... is a very good site, with videos of MIT lectures.

http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith/video-lectures/ is another great source for video lectures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_algorithms has a veritable zoo of algorithms. Best part: contribute to the pages and you'll learn it better than just reading. For a true zoo of algorithms to start off a search, http://www.itl.nist.gov/div897/sqg/dads/ is perhaps the best.

Stack Overflow's got many good threads on Big O and comparative complexities, for instance http://stackoverflow.com/questions/133008/what-is-big-o-nota...

It's all fun and games till someone accidentally the whole ~

This gave me a visceral pang of disgust.

Hilarious sarcasm. Full stop.

http://artemis.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs460/Spring98/contents.h... is a very good resource on the parent science of algorithmic information theory.

AIT and computational complexity theory arguably underlay all other sciences. They allow us to define randomness (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/georgia.html), pattern, probability (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_probability), inference (http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-solomonoff-induction.htm), ignorance, and perhaps one day consciousness.

They allow us to prove, with absolute certainty, whether we are talking to a deity ( http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=56), and to prove that some questions will forever be beyond our grasp.

Even discounting Zuse and Wheeler's "It's from Bits" conception of information and computation as the basis of physics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics), these disciplines promise to help us solve our hardest and most interesting problems by, first of all, telling us whether they are solvable at all, and if so, whether they are solvable before the heat death of the universe. Consider that Goedel, Cohen, and Turing struck down the Continuum Hypothesis from Hilbert's list of open problems, allowing us to abandon a futile line of inquiry and focus on other problems. Current developments in quantum computability theory may similarly strike down vast swathes of sterile ideas, directing us toward questions whose answers are solvable.

Depending on the distro used in your EC2 instance, it could be as easy as ssh'ing into it and then running:

sudo apt-get install nano

or whatever other package manager is used.

I'm an emacs junkie, but I still have to stand up for the vimfidels and say, "man, you just don't get it"

That being said, emacs -nw

It is the answer to all your problems and will give you oral pleasure.

Screenshots of Xmonad aren't that interesting. They don't show you how easy it is to do stuff without ever using the mouse.

Sometimes, though, this procrastination does wonders. Like bonzai tree gardening, or a Zen gravel garden.

As someone who uses Gentoo, Xmonad, Zshell, and Emacs, there's more than enough config code to tweak than there are hours in the day. The happy result is that if I'm stumped, I always know I can pop open a buffer and hack something a bit.

Hell, the alternative to wasting your time in a fully hackable environment is wasting your time on the interwebs.

If you're going to procrastinate, you could do worse than by hacking .emacs. Like Runescape.

On the screen: Gentoo running Xmonad in simpleTabbed layout. Opera, emacs, terminal with Screen multiplexing 5 zsh terminals (emacs -nw, irssi, ghci, irb, guile at the moment), Xchat, Pidgin, Skype, and Quodlibet; all running mostly in separate full-screen tabbed workspaces.

Meatspace: a battered wooden desk I found in the trash years ago, and a similarly battered armchair missing most of its upholstery. The desk surface is hidden beneath ashtrays, coasters, coffee mugs. My cat peers over the monitor, half asleep.

downvoted because he probably expected suggestions about which mode is best, etc. rather than snark

WWSGD?

What would Summer Glau do?

Dumbing yourself down is like hacking off a foot to fit in with a leper colony. It's a change that'll be hard to reverse later on, whether you want to or not.

I was expecting something like Gizoogle when I first saw the word "computizzled"

I hate to say this, but this was even more disappointing than the real Wolfram|Alpha