rtw

You can be quite sure I know exactly what the word means.

The website: http://www.iphonefreelancer.net/

I disagree entirely. If I was pessimistic I wouldn't have met and talked to anyone. It was instead the opposite situation.

Eventually I couldn't attend all my usual spots to get any work done because there were too many relationships there (both the good and the toxic).

I was talking about the specific plan to monetarily support such a place. Seems like it would be a time suck to engage in this kind of place a lot -- and therefore the self interest it takes to get people to "buy in" and help isn't there.

Your comment, it doesn't address anything I've said. I'm well aware that relationships take work and that is central to my point: sometimes that work isn't worth it.

Consider the "Grandma" in your life, the person you love to help set up their computer, come over to troubleshoot, etc. What a sweet lady.

Now imagine there are ten of these people in your life. Now imagine they start loving computers and tell you all about the cool new stuff they found, etc. Now imagine you have no other relation to them other than these conversations. And they love starting such conversations.

This boat circumnavigated the world on renewable fuels which included human fat:

http://www.earthrace.net

I am not trying to be super cynical here, but...

The problem I see with this kind of thing is that it looks like it would probably be against someone's self interest to make too much of an investment in (by hanging out there, possibly paying up for it). Because it could be a big time-suck.

It is not possible to have a good or meaningful relationship with everyone, especially if you have a busy life already (non-computer friends, family, work etc.). So we discriminate. Not in the surface-sense, but the more you get to know someone you discriminate on future potential from the relationship.

In the context of hacking on things together or shooting the shit about computer etc: some people are not in the same place at all.

After talking with someone (sometimes, even for a minute or two) you could determine that they a) don't know crap about computers, b) seem to be good company, or c) are way more experienced than you.

B and C are cool, but in this context I'd really worry about meeting a lot of people that don't program for a living, etc. It's all a question of balance, I don't mind "teaching" someone something at all, but I can't move forward if that is going to take up my whole day (unless I am trying to move forward as a teacher which I am not).

I meet "computer people" at coffeeshops all the time (for three years I worked full time as a coffeeshop-inhabitating programmer). I always tended to like the people fine enough socially etc. in our "half-relationships", and even made a friend.

But by far the majority of the computer conversations were not anything interesting to me because I was "beyond" that level. Hmm, "beyond"... I am trying really hard to not make this about any kind of hierarchy -- I fully appreciate that there is a rich world of ideas and concepts out there that I am a beginner in. But if someone's asking you how to do something that is answerable in a "I'm feeling lucky" google query... I tend to not try to go out of my way to be have lasting "computer relationships" with them.

Online mechanisms allow you to have some control over who you spend time talking with and it's much easier to arrive at a good balance.

I'm very interested in opposing opinions (especially from people with busy lives).

Awesome thanks. Two coincidences: this fun mud thing is in Python (works via RPC)... and the entry method name is "hammer," heh.

I have a screenscraping thing in place that targets an ASCII only environment (LambdaMOO mud). Manually replacing unicode stuff like this has been a pain in the butt. Luckily that was all just for fun and didn't need to be perfect.

Is there a good library out there (in any language) that does good unicode --> ASCII substitutions for major languages?

Interesting, Argentina suddenly popping up here a lot, see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408190

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407853

It's highly likely that you a) explicitly agreed to this default when you signed up and b) their terms of service (which you agreed to when you signed up) is written in such a way to prevent them from refunding you.

I'm not going to go look into the details but I'll wager $10.88 that this is the case. (seriously)

I see downmods on above comment without explanation. On a whim, this prompted me to say a little more:

The more OSX crosses into mainstream consumer territory, the better. I only run Linux myself, but having been a long time developer and troubleshooter for Windows, I am seriously psyched about seeing the OSX market grow and grow. Getting over the stigmas of "coolness" and elitism is a good step in a positive direction. Whether you like it or not, these stigmas are out there (I doubt people frequenting this website were lured into Macs for this particular aspect of them).

(original submitter here)

I care. I care about end-user personal computing trends.

They a) amuse me and b) affect my income. That's why I submitted, to see discussion on a topic I am interested in.

Quoting from http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site."

It was actually accepted as a "poster" which is not a rigorous thing. I still think it's an embarrassment. This has been done before, and accepted as a full CS paper (search for "scigen").

The best example is the "Sokal affair" (search for "Alan Sokal") which is awesome because it doesn't just demonstrate sheer negligence with a randomly generated paper: it was carefully crafted to sound like it made sense.

Pretty cool, thanks.

Coincidentally... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408190

Does your buddy need to travel back to consult with customers in the US (assuming that is where he is from)? Was he an established consultant before the move?

laptop, huge-normous battery for laptop, water

Teaching is a skill on its own, it's orthogonal. I've read, and believe through my own intuition/experience, that being a "true expert" in most things is often such an intuitive place to be that it cannot be translated mechanically in that person's mind into steps for teaching it.

It's arrived at after years and years of "doing" and growing past internal boundaries and goals.

One thing you can be a "true expert" at is teaching itself.

What is the value of this over Google CSE (Custom Search Engine)?

http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

s/affect/effect/

I know, you already knew that. But if nothing was said, we would descend into chaos.

From the article:

* 92 percent of VCs thinks investments will slow in 2009. (Translation: We are all going to be hiding under our desks.)

* 19 percent say they are going to invest in more companies.

* 60 percent are decreasing their seed investments. (Translation: We are not taking any significant risks)

Led me to http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/

Funniest single serving site ever.

You need to try it out, for example:

http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=something

I also won't store my backups in anything but my own S3 buckets (they are encrypted, privacy is not the issue). Is duplicity stable in your opinion? I am usually one to use alpha/beta software etc. but this is a long term need. I am a big rdiff-backup fan, this looks like a good alternative to my current strategy.

My current strategy is a little lame but works quite well: rsync daily to my home server and about once or twice a week an EC2 instance is fired up with elastic block store attachment and the home server does rdiff-backup to it.