Viewing profile — GrangalanJr

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 principl…

Sure, but can anybody post from Lulzsec's Twitter account?

Here are some nice introductory ones: Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction (Tim Gowers): http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Short-Introduction-Timothy... The Language of Mathemati…

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 …

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 progra…

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.

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.time…

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.

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 immediate…

What distinguishes "true geeks" from the pretenders?

"People (even scientists) tend to overestimate the "deepness" of technological advancement and underestimate the "wideness"." Very interesting thought, that our predictions have a …

"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…

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…

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 hav…

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 st…

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, …

Three digits: http://i.imgur.com/kQSGr.png And two: http://i.imgur.com/OaynE.png

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 numbe…

Yes. All 45,000,000,000 of them. :-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drE5cHe6c3s

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 …

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 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.

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 pos…