joe42

7 ms·

1.
by joe42 14y ago
imap jk <Esc> Hitting jk in insert mode for escape is wonderful.
2.
by joe42 14y ago
I remember a brief discussion of this on HN from about a year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2425228
3.
by joe42 14y ago
I'll add a couple techno acts that I like: http://soundcloud.com/mike-vaeth http://soundcloud.com/aka-aka They've both got a lot of long (1-3 hours) live sets available for download. Energetic beats, but the progressions are gradual eno
4.
by joe42 14y ago
> there's a certain amount of tedium in any endeavor. Yes, I'm cherry picking a bit here :) I think I was a bit too hard on physics in my previous comment. I've definitely loved it before, and I still do occasionally. I think the frust
5.
by joe42 14y ago
Agreed. I guess I'm just trying to weigh the "worth" of the degree (not just money) against the "cost" of it (not just money). Lots of intangibles in the equation. It sounds like the consensus is not "Absolutely do X, or you'll regret it la
6.
by joe42 14y ago
It's mostly the course work and preliminary tests (studying for them) that I'm not liking and dreading, which are supposed to take another ~2 years. At that point, the sunk cost fallacy would probably keep me in for the whole thing.
7.
by joe42 14y ago
> worth in terms of cherished personal values Yeah, that's probably part of it. I guess The Internet can't help me with that one. > I ended up deciding against choosing a narrow specialty and becoming a miner, so I headed to industr
8.
by joe42 14y ago
> SV type stuff? I was being purposefully vague--I just meant the Silicon Valley scene. I have a college friend who just got a cool job there, and some family friends, too. It sounds like a fun place from the culture side, but also from
9.
by joe42 14y ago
Yep, it was something of a revelation to me this week, that "hang on, I could actually quit if I wanted to!" feeling. Powerful, but I'm afraid it's dangerous.
10.
by joe42 14y ago
That's pretty much the decision I had to make a year ago, and I ended up in the PhD program. But if I knew then what I know now (that I'd not be having a good time), I'd be leaning closer to the software job. The remaining unknown (to me) i
11.
by joe42 14y ago
(At risk of hijacking this thread) I'm a first-year physics grad student (so ~5 years to go, for a PhD), and I'm pretty sure what I want to do is software engineering, SV-type stuff, and I've been seriously considering quitting the phys
12.
by joe42 14y ago
It's fun to imagine large social networks of bots which are indistinguishable (from Pinterest's/Facebook's/Twitter's P.O.V.) from human social networks. Here, it could be a 1-man spamming operation, but you can imagine government-scale astr
13.
by joe42 14y ago
I absolutely agree that the hackish (you know what I mean) aspect of this feat makes it impressive, but I'd really like to see him work without the handicap. Given his/her choice of tools, most people would probably be more expressive
14.
by joe42 14y ago
> What do you want this person to do instead? I get that Minecraft is fun , but wouldn't it have been more practical , in the long run, to have built something equally cool in a real CAD/HDL/etc. software? It'd be really cool if someo
15.
by joe42 15y ago
>To put the numbers so far in this chapter in perspective, the average adult on planet Earth earns $8,200 a year (U.S. dollars). The average American makes about $45,000. Since you see your paycheck, you know exactly where you stand. Bi
16.
by joe42 15y ago
X-rays have enough energy to break molecular bonds in your body (ionizing radiation), millimeter waves do not.
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by joe42 15y ago
Some common themes with an essay[0] I read yesterday. Social media is to the Read/Write Web what sprawl is to the metropolis of modernity: a homogenous, cancerous, rhizomatic junkspace that expands exponentially outward on a sludgy wave of
18.
by joe42 15y ago
I have one of the Philips wake-up lights[0] which gradually brightens its lamp over 30 minutes before playing some optional bird-chirping. The gradual light-up feature gives it an edge over the sharp turn-on of a lamp plugged into a timer,
19.
by joe42 15y ago
>It's an accident waiting to happen. It'll be a shitstorm when a large set of address books gets leaked to the internet (à la AnonOps, etc.). (Though it would be a lot of fun to run some graph-theoretic metrics on the dataset (closene
20.
by joe42 15y ago
Not the first Facebook app to do this. For example (link now deleted, though), http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2334990 , which I remember because I posted this comment: "Oh, I just marked you/everyone to see if you had marked me, I was
21.
Pitchfork Media, 1995 – present(nplusonemag.com)
1 points by joe42 15y ago|0 comments
22.
by joe42 15y ago
The textbook renting service Kindle introduced last month depends quite heavily on DRM. I verified recently that I can "rent" a book for, say, 30% of its "buy" price, remove the DRM, and be left with a DRM-free book (not limited to a month
23.
by joe42 15y ago
I've read that the RGB (horizontally) allows better rendering than VRGB (vertically) because (at least in the Latin alphabet) extra horizontal resolution is more often more useful than extra horizontal resolution. Eg. 'm' and 'w' would bene
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by joe42 15y ago
Business hackers.
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by joe42 15y ago
It sounds to me like a way to "launder" possibly-pirated music. Exchanging mp3s for iCloud songs is analogous to exchanging cash for bank account money.
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by joe42 15y ago
Editor's note (6/1/2011): We are making the text of this July 1985 article freely available for 30 days to coincide with the publication of a paper on entropy and quantum systems by Vlatko Vedral. He authored our June 2011 cover story and
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The Fundamental Physical Limits of Computation (1985)(scientificamerican.com)
4 points by joe42 15y ago|1 comments
28.
by joe42 15y ago
I was curious about how this would compare to large concert venues / stadiums / convention centers? Anybody know how much those cost, ballpark?
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by joe42 15y ago
Yes, those would be the two big challenges: * It needs to be widespread to work well. * No creepy factor.
30.
by joe42 15y ago
The author gives four reasons for why people check in. He didn't mention the reason I would like to use a checking-in service (I'm not sure if there is a popular one like this yet). I'd like to check in at a bar or a club (I often go alone)

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