mdakin

14 ms·

121.
by mdakin 18y ago
Rent A Coder is a waste of time if you're in a part of the USA with some local high-tech companies you can work at in person. I got my first UNIX system programing job back in HS in the days when there were lots of little local companies re
122.
by mdakin 18y ago
I think it really depends on just how gifted and motivated the student and teacher happen to be. I admit it probably would not work for most student/teacher combinations. But imagine understanding the Y combinator before the age of twelve
123.
by mdakin 18y ago
What about "The Little Schemer"? I remember thinking it would be a great book to teach a smart little kid about computer science. Unfortunately I don't have it with me right now (and won't anytime soon) so I can't confirm my memory. I th
124.
by mdakin 18y ago
Really I think it's just applied poetry. The rational argument associated with the point is boring. Parsing out "envelope of serendipity" might take epsilon more time/effort but it's that epsilon which causes you to feel a small spark of
125.
by mdakin 18y ago
Wow, such an awesome question! * The road in Iowa that hugs the Mississippi is quite a nice relaxing drive relative to the Interstates. A good break. * In the SD/WY area I90 is a much nicer road than I80. * The camping/hiking in the Black
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by mdakin 18y ago
If you intend to do heavy lifting in OSX and VMWare/Windows concurrently you either need "patience" or 4GB of RAM. If you only need one OS at a time 2GB should work. This advice is specific to my type of software work. Depending on your
127.
by mdakin 18y ago
If he really is advertising well, interviewing people and not getting results the offer is simply too low. There must be some factor that we can't see from this blog post that is visible to the people he's interviewed that makes this job N
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by mdakin 18y ago
"Instinct" in this sense refers to "intuition." A less ambiguous statement would be "follow your intuition." Intuition refers to suspecting that something is true that you've not yet proven to be true. An emotion is a subjective form of a
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by mdakin 18y ago
Source: http://www.csom.umn.edu/assets/71190.pdf
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by mdakin 18y ago
There is statistical evidence that suggests ceiling height influences thinking patterns. Higher ceilings encourage creative thinking and lower ceilings encourage detail-oriented thinking. [1] Obviously both patterns are critically importa
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Ceiling Height Influences Thinking Patterns(scribd.com)
12 points by mdakin 18y ago|1 comments
132.
by mdakin 18y ago
Triage (though I bet it kept popping into his head at inopportune times).
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by mdakin 18y ago
Surely the path towards becoming technologically advanced also requires cooperation in addition to competition. These two processes tend to hold one another in balance nicely and yield results. I don't see any clear evidence that suggests
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by mdakin 19y ago
Whoops, duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158019 .
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by mdakin 19y ago
I can't help but think some of this reaction to your essay is going over your head. Sort of similarly to how the essay itself went over some other people's heads. You're taking inputs and synthesizing them in the context of intellectual, e
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by mdakin 19y ago
I think we're speaking different languages (despite the fact that it appears we're both speaking English). :) I know you can reduce development time using a high level language to solve problems like this. So do you. And now so does he b
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by mdakin 19y ago
We can't possibly be in complete agreement if we are drawing opposite conclusions. I think the difference might be that I assume the OP is heavily concerned with efficiency . Given his background and goals it is not efficient [1] for the O
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by mdakin 19y ago
C is not the path of least resistance for the OP. He is neither trying to make a career out of software engineering nor hack on a UNIX kernel. He wants to be at the fringe of business and software and these days if that's where you want to
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by mdakin 19y ago
Digital and analog circuit design are art-like activities and doing them with grace requires knowledge of many other levels of abstraction all the way down to physics. It is possible to lack these fundamentals and become a decent designer b
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by mdakin 19y ago
John Cage's words visually formatted by Sister Corita Kent. Cage's original title is "Some Rules and Helpful Hints for Students and Teachers."
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Some Rules and Helpful Hints by John Cage/Corita Kent(hi-and-low.typepad.com)
2 points by mdakin 19y ago|1 comments
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by mdakin 19y ago
I took 6.001 in the spring of 1997 and we did the simple "Decaf Java" interpreter (in Scheme). Decaf Java is an s-exp representation of a Java program's parse tree. It is foggy and distant now but I believe we did do a problem set in actu
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by mdakin 19y ago
This is probably a personality thing. Many of my friends at MIT loved 6.001/SICP/Scheme and most of them at least respected it. Personally the class rewired my mind in fundamental ways and I appreciate that. That said I trust the folks ru
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by mdakin 19y ago
"The human mind works at low efficiency. Twenty percent is the figure usually given. When, momentarily, there is a flash of greater power it is termed a hunch, or insight, or intuition." -Isaac Asimov
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by mdakin 19y ago
"We gotta screw it up and waste money," -Paul Kedrosky People actually give this guy money to invest? Maybe the reporter is taking the quote way out of context?
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by mdakin 19y ago
Many of the projects I've worked on have succeeded in spite of lousy tools, insane deadlines and other various hardships. Those experiences were the genesis of my personal philosophy that good people get the job done one way or another. L
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by mdakin 19y ago
Agreed. Exchange of ideas is valuable, esp. w.r.t. emacs.
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by mdakin 19y ago
Such people are properly known as "camera fondlers". [1] Only some of them are actually photographers. [1] http://nemeng.com/leica/002e.shtml
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by mdakin 19y ago
I understand what you're saying but I think you're missing my point. If any tool was empirically "not good enough" or "crippling" it would be abandoned and the show would go on. The focus is on the end result. The SFP gets there one way
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by mdakin 19y ago
Neither choice matters much. Smart, flexible people tend to get the job done one way or another. If a bottleneck becomes apparent they work around it: revise, redesign, change languages, tools, editors as necessary. Historically a lot of

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