Viewing profile — joe42

imap jk Hitting jk in insert mode for escape is wonderful.

I remember a brief discussion of this on HN from about a year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2425228

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 downloa…

> 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…

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 t…

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 fa…

> 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 sp…

> 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 soun…

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.

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…

(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 stuf…

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 s…

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 o…

> 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 re…

>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…

X-rays have enough energy to break molecular bonds in your body (ionizing radiation), millimeter waves do not.

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 junks…

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 …

>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 ru…

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 …

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 DR…

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 …

Business hackers.

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.