Viewing profile — benthumb

Not meant to be a joke -- far from it. What it WAS was an ill-considered expression of outrage. And, btw, FU.

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 ki…

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!

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…

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 boo…

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 As…

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 …

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 sta…

>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 u…

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 v…

If this isn't engineering, I'd love to know what it is: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/07/google-cars-300000-miles-wi...

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' …

Not to mention message filtering that work as advertised ... I'm looking at you Thunderbird.

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 col…

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'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 e…

> 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 ca…

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 cr…

AND if IBM Federal built it, why is the government being blamed exclusively... government incompetence is an overhyped meme.

My calculations give me approx $0.29 / household... I'm not sure I understand the fuss.

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 l…

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,…

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 in…

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 pow…