Viewing profile — connellybarnes

Actually sorry for my complaints. I thought about this more and realized being a professor is actually pretty good socially. I think being a grad student is just hard, unless you a…

Well maybe those physics PhDs are a lot better at socializing than me. I remember spending years of my PhD trying to make friends, going to bars/rock climbing/dances/running clubs …

You can't eat prestige. Nor find joy in a life of isolation. Look at Rembrandt's philosopher if you want the true picture of the life of the mind. How history remembers you only ma…

Hi this is Connelly I'm the first author on that paper. Adobe ATL's business model is that they do research and then put it in products. So Dan took the code I wrote for a summer i…

"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then t…

The "corporate ladder" analogy is broken, because the ladder is tree shaped. It's statistically impossible to climb tree shaped ladders, because they get exponentially smaller at t…

With a typical salary at a typical programmer job, you can make enough money in every year to take several years time off. But meanwhile, taking time off tends to cause isolation, …

For much of my life, I lived in my mind, kind of autistically. I spent a lot of time figuring how to get away from people, because they wanted me to do things, and I wanted to go b…

My ex-wife left me for her WoW guild leader. It's a rather addictive game, but I wouldn't exactly categorize it as social, because the 'social' atmosphere evaporates as soon as you…

I'm not sure how many hackers could physically work in [law|business|medical|pharmacy|nursing]. My point was that because school systems are hackable, sometimes hackers will have h…

One counterexample to your theory is that if bosses limit autonomy, then large universities should limit autonomy significantly; however, they're generous in autonomy. Now on the t…

My grad school pays $25 per hour. I paid nothing for undergrad. This isn't atypical.

Good point, and thanks for pointing out defaultdict(); I wasn't even aware of that class. I suppose one could use defaultdict() to gain associativity also (pass 'not found' variabl…

I agree, with two objections: I disagree with rewriting one's program. If I rewrite a program to solve the same problem, then I'll end up having exactly the same code. This is usel…

The string interpolation operator isn't ideal. It isn't associative, so you can't paste in a few variables, and then a few more later, and it raises an exception rather than simply…

Actually, it's probably beneficial to encourage flames. Your users are hackers, and flamewars are the only form of public dialogue among hackers. Ergo...

Corvallis has Hewlett-Packard. And a couple smaller companies. I'm not sure if it could be called vibrant...I lived there, but I'm always rather out of it.

What's great about Wellington for hackers?

People who are programmers might not have as much respect for or interest in college, because C.S. tends to be a little watered down as far as standards go. If you want high standa…

Visual Basic was great. Maybe barely usable as a language alone, but great because it allowed you to do lots GUI-wise with little code. As far as great hackers having an effect on …

Or see http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/ . The point is, if you're not talking about games, Microsoft is basically irrelevant to the way that the majority of people use comput…

Wow, OK many of these comments are kind of like disrespectful to Paul Graham because they kind of indicate that many people have learned absolutely nothing from him. Wow. That's re…

Microsoft will linger on as long as games are based on DX. They might be able to do some additional damage with their browser monopoly. But I agree: fresh air is blowing in the doo…