GrangalanJr

6 ms·

1.
by GrangalanJr 15y ago
As someone who has started studying programming and CS recently, avoiding becoming a guy who "glues APIs together" has been one of my goals. I want to learn the underlying principles, not just the surface-level implementations that change e
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
Sure, but can anybody post from Lulzsec's Twitter account?
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
Here are some nice introductory ones: Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction (Tim Gowers): http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Short-Introduction-Timothy... The Language of Mathematics: Making the Invisible Visible (Keith Devlin): http
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
And the kind of education that offers real financial benefit is often technical or mathematical in nature. So there is something I wonder about: is there an IQ "floor" below which very few people will be able to benefit from or even complet
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
I am retraining myself, too. By inclination I am a liberal artsy guy with only a slight interest in technical stuff, but I've seen the writing on the wall and am learning to program. Turns out that it can be quite fun anyway. :-)
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
I noticed that the Ruby pages link to files that end in ".rb.html", but if you remove the ".html" from the end, it leads you right to the Ruby files.
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
Good question. I'm not sure what the recent momentum is about, but I remember two widely-linked stories about "hipsters" and "hipsterdom" back in 2007 and 2008: http://newyork.timeout.com/things-to-do/this-week-in-new-yor... http://www.a
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
I do this, too, even sometimes writing out code in a notebook. For example, I gained a clearer understanding of recursive algorithms after I "expanded" a few examples by hand.
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
Most very poor people are not young, athletic, with good physical and mental health, no dependents, and the background security of being able to leave their circumstances immediately any time they want. The book is "Scratch Beginnings" by A
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
What distinguishes "true geeks" from the pretenders?
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
"People (even scientists) tend to overestimate the "deepness" of technological advancement and underestimate the "wideness"." Very interesting thought, that our predictions have a bias toward "vertical" advancement -- vast improvements in a
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
"Our lives look a lot more interesting when they're filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery." Is the filter
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
Apple and Google are interesting comparisons. Some significant part of Apple's success lies in becoming identified with "cool": its products are stylish and fashionable in addition to being useful. Google's success, on the other hand, rests
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
Holder of a useless non-technical degree here. Tens of thousands of dollars spent on education, and now I work an entry-level retail job. But I do count myself fortunate that I have no debt from my (perhaps mostly pointless) university expe
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
I've noticed this, too. Once I step out of the shower and dry off, I actually feel unusually warm, perhaps because the cold water forced my body's internal heating mechanisms to start working harder.
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
Not officially, anyway. And that may be even worse when it comes to a potential "crackdown": if it is just one group of hackers running amok, putting them down solves the problem, or at least the public discourse can pretend so. But if we c
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
Three digits: http://i.imgur.com/kQSGr.png And two: http://i.imgur.com/OaynE.png
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
Made a visualization: x coordinate is the initial numbers, y coordinates are the "intermediate" numbers hit on the way to 6174. Diagonal is obviously the plot of the starting numbers. :-) http://i.imgur.com/DfxRB.png
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
Yes. All 45,000,000,000 of them. :-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drE5cHe6c3s
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
Those who have lived longer do have one advantage of perspective: they have years of experience pursuing many "prime of life" impulses / goals / desires, and are therefore able to look back on and judge the (negative and positive) results o
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
I don't ordinarily sleep a lot, so I doubt that I could be getting too much sleep on a regular basis. And my mood doesn't ordinarily seem to be affected by how much I sleep or when I go to sleep. The best way I can describe the effect is th
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by GrangalanJr 15y ago
I have used total sleep deprivation to kick myself out of persistent low mood. So far it has worked every time. Not a method to use too often, of course.
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by GrangalanJr 16y ago
In Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher, he describes exactly this habit as the thing that impressed him most about Karl Popper. I think some fear that giving an opposing position (X) the best possible interpretation, or responding to