small axe of kindness

nucleocide · 5 days

I'm still in the camp of mapping jk and kj to escape. I map capslock to control.

d_pug · 7 days

I enjoy this beer.

One time I was helping host a talk by Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of the programming language C++ and kind of a big deal. Bjarne was an incredible score for our tiny little software engineering speaker series, being such a big name.

Afterwards, we went to a nearby pub for dinner and a drink. So, here's this distinguished old balding Danish computer scientist and a bunch of us college seniors. The place has a respectable ~100 beers on tap, but we didn't know if Bjarne was into beer, and we were more than a little nervous that this venerable giant of software development would be offended that a bunch of college kids wanted to drink beer at a pub with him.

The moment comes, the waiter arrives, and asks this white haired guy what he'd like. In his elderly Danish voice, he declares: "Bring me your hoppiest IPA!" The whole group broke out in smiles. The waitress brought out a pitcher of Stone Ruination, and Dr. Stroustrup was visibly pleased. He ordered several more pitchers of it, and we all proceeded to get somewhat drunk with one of the more well known people in our field.

As such, Ruination will always have a special place in my heart. :)

vinayan3 · 8 days

I'm a big fan of Z Pizza. Good ingredients, lots of options (although I pretty much just always get a normal pepperoni). Delivery is reliable, it just tastes better.

JackieOrgasm · 8 days

I heard it from Doctor McNinja, and I assume they didn't originate it either. :)

JackieOrgasm · 8 days

Reposting a response to a friend on g+ that posted this:

So, Tesla was cool, but the circlejerk around him on the internet is a little crazy. This oatmeal, for example, is somewhat disingenuous.

Edison didn't invent the lightbulb, but he invented the first lightbulb worth owning- practical, cheap, and reliable (for the time). For example, we have 'invisibility cloaks' now, but they're not very good, are hella heavy, require lots of power, cost 1/2 a million dollars, etc etc. If I invented one that cost 10k and worked like Harry Potter, people would probably remember me as the 'father of the invisibility cloak.'
Regarding the million dollar payment that was never made, it looks like Edison really was joking- he was famously stingy, and didn't have that anywhere near that kind of cash anyway. The quote was "There's fifty thousand dollars in it for you - if you can do it" - which could well have been said in a scoffing manner.
Since Telsa started talking about the theory behind radar in 1917 and WWI started in 1914, it seems unlikely that he pitched it to the US Navy (and I can't find any evidence that he did).
Tesla was not the first one to play with x-rays. Further, Rontgen is recognized for being the first to make cool medical images.
There's apparently little to no evidence that Tesla produced ball lightning.
The Wardenclyffe would definitely not have provided wireless power to the whole planet- that doesn't even make sense. The project wasn't shut down either- he went over budget and the backers decided not to add further funding.

Not saying that Edison wasn't a dick (DC definitely sucked), or that Tesla wasn't badass, but it seems like everytime I read an article about him, his story gets bigger. I know the oatmeal is all about exaggeration, but I get tired of hearing Tesla described as this techno-mage that shot electricity from his eyeballs.

Saarrex · 8 days

Reading the article you linked, it sounds like the only problem was that they were also killing sparrows. There's no mention of the mosquito killing as having caused any problems.

getback101 · 9 days

"It Depends"

There's some good advice in this thread; from my experience, though, it depends on a few factors:

How motivated you are to learn on your own. If I'd spent 4 years sitting at home working as hard as I can teaching myself to program, I'd be far better at it than I am now after a BS in software engineering. That said, I wouldn't have done that- I'm not quite that motivated. Going to college was definitely a good decision for me.
Your career. It's really a spectrum- a degree in computer science almost guarantees you a job right now, and a degree in philosophy does almost nothing for your prospects. It used to be that "a degree, any degree" was a huge leg up in the world- not so much right now. If you're concerned about your prospects, get an undergrad in engineering or tech; if you can afford it, a higher degree in one of the sciences can get you a decent job.

Justinsalsburey · 11 days

That's an interesting idea, but it seems like it may suffer from lack of participation. Ie, I have a list of ~20 comics in my rss reader I follow daily. Even if 80% of them use your handy site, that's still 20% that I need to go back to google reader to view, at which point I might as well just use google reader all the way.

Franks2000inchTV · 12 days

One thing to consider is that it doesn't always have to be catered. At our startup, we go out for lunch every day and just expense it. It helps that we're in downtown SF, but if you're in any place with a decent variety of food nearby, that can be a good option.

andruf · 15 days

Interesting- I may need to look into that.

andruf · 15 days

Oh yeah, I'm with you there- if Vim is better (which I agree it is) and free, there's no reason to pay for it. That said, if Vim were $200, I'd pay it without a thought.

andruf · 15 days

reddit.com/r/homebrew

andruf · 15 days

My understanding is that most of these '90%' vim implementations miss the biggest things for me: the Vimrc and plugins. Stock vim just doesn't do it for me. I'd kill for a full vim implementation inside a decent IDE, for example.

andruf · 15 days

Really? I spend more time using a text editor than any other piece of software in an average day. $59 is a steal, if it legitimately improves your experience.

Taq_Polymerase · 1 month

I would say it largely depends on your field. I've heard that in, saw, law or medicine, it makes a significant difference. In my field (software development), it means almost nothing. I mean, there's a big difference between a community college and a university, but the difference between some random state school CS program and Standford/MIT isn't /that/ big in terms of career prospects– what you've done outside of school matters far more.

humbled · 1 month

For json, at least, I have this in my vimrc:

nnoremap <Leader>fj :%!python -m json.tool<Enter>

It does rely on python, though.

tinytortoiseshell · 1 month

Re Git: I wish I knew a bit more about version control then- SVN was the best I knew how to use at the time. Thank god we use git + github where I am now.

Re: Eclipse- I tried, but I just couldn't get their build setup to work outside of RAD (and they warned me that no one else had succeeded in doing it either). Why they didn't use even something like make or ant I don't know, but they coupled the whole mess pretty tightly to RAD.

tinytortoiseshell · 1 month

I was working on the Lotus team. Lotus products are, in general, the absolute worst of 'Enterprise' software: bloated, ugly, difficult to use, slow, overly complex, and disorganized. I wrote up my thoughts on some of the reasons why it was so bad here.

So, part of it was just that the software I was working on was so bad. Then there were the tools we had to use to build it... we begged to use Powerpoint for our presentations, but they insisted on using their slow, buggy, and obtuse version of it (Lotus Symphony). For development, we used Rational Application Developer. It's like Eclipse (it's built on it, in fact), but actually more memory-intensive, with a worse UI, and buggy too.

If you every talk to some developers with bad co-ops, you might hear horror stories about this horrible tool called ClearCase. It's one of IBM's proprietary version control system, and I've heard nothing but horror stories about it. When I was as IBM, we had to use the predecessor to that: CMVC, from the early 90s. It had this horrible Java Swing interface; iirc, it took ~7 dialogs, a few dropdown menus, and about 10 minutes to kick off a commit. You'll find out 20 minutes later if it didn't work. Checking out the latest code was about as long.

Further, almost everything I learned there (from a technical perspective) was only useful within the context of IBM. The ins and outs of RAD, the iWidget spec, Websphere- most of what I got experience in will never be applicable anywhere else.

They also used the Scrumbutt methodology. Named after the phrase I've heard at many companies: "We follow the scrum methodology but... [we skip step X/we don't do this other thing/we don't really do it right]. For example, 30 minute sit-down "Standup Meetings" on conference call.

I could go on more- about the people (a mixed bag), the office, the lack of support from above... but Game of Thrones is on, so I'm off for now.

tinytortoiseshell · 1 month

Mine were educational.

GE MDS. I did java development; it was useful, I used what I learned in class, and it was a decent first co-op.
IBM. It was horrific, and I pretty much swore off gigantic corporations.
Parse3 (a smallish web-dev company in southern NY). It was fun, I learned a lot, and I realized that smaller companies is where I'm happiest.

As a result, I ended up going to San Francisco to work for a startup and couldn't be happier. I really doubt I would have done that if I hadn't had the good and bad experiences of my co-op (as well as the extra cash that let me afford to finish my degree).

WolfKid · 1 month

Man, I'm amazed I had to get this far down to find the dimpled pint! That's definitely my default (otherwise, a hefe glass for a hefe, a pilsner glass for a pilsner, a tulip for stuff I'm tasting, etc).

One particular dimple glass has some special meaning to me- for years in college in upstate NY, my friends and I went to a local pub every thursday night without fail. When I finally graduated, we had one last hurrah at the pub in which events got a little blurry. When I woke up, I had one of the bar's dimpled glasses, and I've taken it with me ever since. Here's me giving the NY glass a taste of the west coast.

Fauropitotto · 1 month

...covered in lamb's blood.

MrTrampStamp · 1 month

Hey now...

thatguy_fromtheplace · 1 month

Her money would be better* spent at a reputable charity. A decent charity can make a dollar go a lot further by buying food in bulk, by buying at a charity discount, by using it to solicit donations of far more food than the cost of solicitation, by cooking with volunteered time, etc etc. So your sister can give a guy a $5 hamburger and feed him for a day, or give $5 to a charity that can feed him for 3 or 4.

Assuming the goal is just maximum good done. If the goal is also "feel good by seeing someone benefit here and now", I'll admit that giving to a person directly serves that well.

thatguy_fromtheplace · 1 month

www.charitynavigator.org is handy.

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