benthumb

6 ms·

1.
by benthumb 14y ago
Not meant to be a joke -- far from it. What it WAS was an ill-considered expression of outrage. And, btw, FU.
2.
by benthumb 14y ago
Two trips to Auschwitz this year, my friend. I was responding -- in a perverse and ironic fashion -- to this meme that I hear oft repeated that the US gov't wouldn't conspire to kill its own people ...
3.
by benthumb 14y ago
OK, before the conspiracy theorists on this board start coming out of the woodwork, let's try to keep this in perspective: they were drunks -- they deserved it!
4.
by benthumb 14y ago
I, for one, am not worried; especially b/c "true innovation" is an entirely subjective quality, and even if we could agree on a comprehensive definition agreeable to all camps, the effect of innovation is not necessarily salutary. I think
5.
by benthumb 14y ago
I'm delving into learning Polish myself but have been taking mostly a whole language, immersion approach. For example, when I was in Krakow I bought myself a book on CD and the book itself, so I can 'read' along as I listen. I use transla
6.
by benthumb 14y ago
It turns out that the obstacles are the same for both: tonal inflection. Most people are familiar with this fact as it pertains to Chinese and many of the languages of southeast Asia (Thai, Vietnamese, Cantonese et al) but remain completel
7.
by benthumb 14y ago
I'm glad someone has addressed this work-life balance canard. I would go further: getting hard things accomplished tends to take over one's life, and I don't think there's any way around it. Unless, of course, you live in Norway... I also
8.
by benthumb 14y ago
As much as I respect John Carmack, I have to say that I'm a little disappointed that he is rehashing this meme of software development not being a science... OK, wonderful, the state of the art in his shop doesn't rise to the level of being
9.
by benthumb 14y ago
>We must become more critical of what we read and think 'Is this reasonable? ' The problem w/ this prescription is that just b/c something is 'unreasonable' to us doesn't make it untrue.
10.
by benthumb 14y ago
Mac OS X: Avadis Tevanian - B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Rochester, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University Python: Guido van Rossum - masters degree in mathematics and computer scien
11.
by benthumb 14y ago
If this isn't engineering, I'd love to know what it is: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/07/google-cars-300000-miles-wi...
12.
by benthumb 14y ago
I bought the ipad on a total whim and have been repaid many times over by the enjoyment it continues to provide. I'm an old-school musician from the days when sounds were 'etched' on analog tape and I can tell you that as far as I'm concer
13.
by benthumb 14y ago
Not to mention message filtering that work as advertised ... I'm looking at you Thunderbird.
14.
by benthumb 14y ago
I've been a jack of trades in the web dev/IT space for an embarrassingly long time (considering how little money I make). Two years ago I decided to go back to school to finish college (I'm 45), this time w/ the aim of pursuing a degree in
15.
by benthumb 14y ago
Great story. You have to admire this young man's drive, determination, and obvious intellectual precocity. He'll surely go far (he already has). I also think it's inspirational b/c it points up the importance of synthetic scientific resea
16.
Lovebeef.com(lovebeef.com)
1 points by benthumb 14y ago|0 comments
17.
by benthumb 14y ago
It's interesting you bring up food. Everything goes much more smoothly when I'm fasting: I'm way more focused, and the problems that do crop up, I feel I'm able to negotiate more effectively. I tend to look at it as a kind of perverse kar
18.
by benthumb 14y ago
> I read that a NASA subcontrator wanted someone to design high-efficiency power supplies for the Space Shuttle. So I wrote up a decent design and showed up. There were maybe 20 candidates at the office, all equipped with advanced degre
19.
by benthumb 14y ago
In the post-9/11 era this is de rigueur and at some level socially sanctioned in the name of keeping us safe from terrorists and social deviants. And I don't think you can argue credibly against these operations w/o first interrogating t
20.
by benthumb 14y ago
AND if IBM Federal built it, why is the government being blamed exclusively... government incompetence is an overhyped meme.
21.
by benthumb 14y ago
My calculations give me approx $0.29 / household... I'm not sure I understand the fuss.
22.
by benthumb 14y ago
As a sometime developer myself and late-blooming CS student I see things like this and start to feel insecure about my place in the world... if the barrier to entry keeps getting lower so that anybody can build an app, what's the point? Obv
23.
by benthumb 14y ago
I guess I'm in the minority in that I liked the updates: it was like getting a suprise gift ... but the incompatibility w/ the latest version of flash has forced me, unfortunately, to move on. It's not even necessarily Mozilla's fault, bu
24.
by benthumb 14y ago
What's the difference between coders and the population at large? My thought is that it's the difference of problem granularity/scale/scope. In general, computer programmers are interested in solving bit-based problems, the rest of the po
25.
by benthumb 14y ago
The plagiarizer hasn't taken the care to assimilate an idea well enough so he can put it into his own words. The effort put into explaining something in one's own words has the powerful effect of spurring the imagination and intellect, whi
26.
by benthumb 14y ago
Very nice piece of writing ... nice to the point where I think this fellow may have found his true calling (He talks about attending a movie premiere, and, honestly, a film adaptation of six years in the trenches of a ycombinator start-up
27.
by benthumb 14y ago
My 2 cents: 1. Productive is Destructive ... literally (that's why we're in the position now of having figure out a way to mine asteroids -- industrial productivity under the current model is environmentally unsustainable) 2. Markets are (v
28.
by benthumb 15y ago
A great speech @ Google on a subject directly apropos of pg's start-up spiel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyNPeTn8fpo Another awesome speech from Google's tech talk series (it takes a little bit of tyrant to pull this off, tho): http:
29.
by benthumb 15y ago
Was at the Microsoft campus bus stop in Redmond recently and it was plastered (and I mean plastered) w/ posters for Mike Daisey's spoken word piece: http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/
30.
by benthumb 15y ago
This fellow's braggadocio is off-putting. Especially the dig he makes at the expense of Google. I mean, I wish he'd clarify what he's talking about when he says that the "engineering talent is just not there"... just not where?

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