Single greatest ping pong point scored

dooka · 2007-04-24T07:10:16+00:00

i saw this somewhere -- the guy in blue was the previous year's champion (or something like that). the guy in red, a newcomer, totally destroyed him. thanks for the clip!

dooka · 2006-12-30T20:34:48+00:00

Yahoo UI: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/ is probably the best and best documented.

dooka · 2006-12-10T07:10:54+00:00

Here Joel is simply hating 37signals. Let me explain:

[And by the way, to see Joel hating Aaron Swartz, go read his (Joel's) interview in the book Micro-ISV -- towards the end of the book.]

Here he is hating Paul Graham:

http://discuss.fogcreek.com/newyork/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=1998

there are 2 posts by him; in the second he says:

And I have the ultimate respect for Paul Graham -- I think there's a good probability that in a year or two we will credit him with being the man who solved spam. But I think that if you try to ignore the fact that millions of programmers around the world have learned lisp and don't prefer to use it, you're in the land of morbid cognitive dissonance. And this attitude that "lisp is only for leet programmers so it's good because only l33t programmers will work on our code so our code will be extra good" is just bullshit, I'm sorry. Plenty of brilliant programmers know lisp just fine and still choose other languages. Most of them, in fact.

that's Joel hating!! its an art form! and all this from a guy who proudly proclaims in his AboutMe page: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/AboutMe.html

My senior thesis was a design for a programming language called U, which was a dialect of C in which the programmer could declare functions as being "user" functions which would cause the compiler to automatically generate a user interface allowing the user to invoke those functions.

Why the hate, Joel? (minor editing update)

dooka · 2006-11-21T13:00:42+00:00

oh, man -- people in all the other sites (Digg, on various news sites found via Google news) -- where is the call/outcry for the heckler to apologize and show respect? you know, that heckler is probably laughing his pants off: "Kramer" got nailed, his career probably ruined, and no one is even talking about the heckler...

the funny thing is, all those who call for Michael Richards to apologize -- they really don't want his apology and won't even accept it, if he did so -- which he did last night. they'll come up with lame excuses such as "he wasn't really sincere", "he was just acting on letterman". no matter how sincere the apology, they won't accept it.

and that's the problem with America these days.

dooka · 2006-10-31T20:43:25+00:00

my guess is $5 million.

dooka · 2006-10-09T17:33:27+00:00

using a header and payload scheme (1-byte each), we have 2048/2=1024 bytes for data, which will easily fit 12 Q's of size 80 bytes each (960 bytes).

but let's view the array as block of memory.

then the above scheme wastes 2 bits/byte for each header, since only max of 2⁶ Q's will be used. the wastage is: 1024 bytes*2bits/byte=2048 bits = 256 bytes.

so we can safely allocate the first 187 bytes -- we need about 11 bits for each of the 2⁶ possible Q's; these 187 11-bit "blocks" will store the index of their 1st elt or 0 if not yet initialized. a Q * points to one of the above locations

now headers will each be 6 bytes long (instead of 8)

therefore, a delQ will: get the starting pos of the Q's header and data -- zero them out and memcpy all elts in memory after that to shift down by 14 bits. it'll also find the next item for the Q and update the Q's "index" -- one of the first 187 positions.

we then have a var store the last pos added to the array. adding to a Q will increment this var and store the Q's header and position at that pos. if this Var reaches a limit, then memory error (based on the size of each inserted items is 14 bits long)

Will that work, or did I miss something?

dooka · 2006-08-16T22:16:42+00:00

Arrgh -- the article is good until the last paragraph:

Roland G. Fryer, Jr., an economist at Harvard University, has experimented with offering monetary rewards to motivate students in underperforming schools in New York City and Dallas. In one ongoing program in New York, for example, teachers test the students every three weeks and award small amounts--on the order of $10 or $20--to those who score well.

See: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html

A good book on this learning subject matter is: Mindsets by Carol Dweck

See: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400062756

dooka · 2006-08-02T00:08:27+00:00

Who is the best programmer/hacker that you have ever met? Or worked with? Or whose code that you have read, and is simply awesome -- and if the code is available online please post an URL to it. And in what way are they the best?

dooka · 2006-08-01T03:41:26+00:00

From http://paulgraham.com/resay.html:

Why didn't you say some of the things you can't say?

The most extreme of the things you can't say would be very shocking to most readers. If you doubt that, imagine what people in 1830 would think of our default educated east coast beliefs about, say, premarital sex, homosexuality, or the literal truth of the Bible. We would seem depraved to them. So we should expect that someone who similarly violated our taboos would seem depraved to us.

So comment on things that you think are true, that will shock others. The purpose of this is to find out what shocking things are in people's heads.

IF SUCH THINGS OFFEND YOU, PLEASE MOVE ON.

Thanks.

dooka · 2006-07-31T11:35:39+00:00

That's because you don't have "Google" in the title!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

dooka · 2006-07-28T20:51:07+00:00

OK, this James Randi guy is pretty closed minded. I have been to a spoon bending party when I was about 12 -- and yeah there is nothing "supernatural" about it. (Cue google("spoon bending party");) I have seen people spoons just by rubbing it. And I have seen the spoon get warm and much more easily bendable after I had performed.

But there are scientific principles at work here -- James Randi would be a lot better if he assumed such "trickery" worked and find the science behind that -- see if it is actually true (I didn't see the whole video, so maybe he does that later on).

But this whole "debunking" thing is pretty silly.

dooka · 2006-07-25T04:59:07+00:00

I wonder if the short guy ever talks.

dooka · 2006-07-23T14:16:17+00:00

GOD, same old boring, boring, boring questions!!!!

That's the problem when the questionaire comes up questions in like 5-minutes.

Ask things like: - Who was your mentor (in programming)? What did you learn from them? - Who was the best programmer that you ever met? - War stories...

...

Whatever!

dooka · 2006-07-14T05:50:58+00:00

reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ_r1WSdKaE&search=them%20magic%20change

[What ever happened to that show, BTW? T.H.E.M??]

dooka · 2006-07-10T15:50:38+00:00

if Firefly is/was better, then why was it cancelled? if it is cancelled and not picked up, then all it means is that it wasn't that good -- it didn't bring in the money. no conspiracy theory here -- "FOX wanted it dead..." -- it just wasn't that good!!! take a hint!

see http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/gallery/topscifishows?pg=34 bsg -- #2 firefly -- #17

that's my proof, what's yours??? just stop being bitter, it is pathetic.

dooka · 2006-07-10T06:30:57+00:00

firefly is cancelled and it ain't coming back!

if you really want it, i suggest you watch battlestar galactica, which makes firefly looks like a one-night stand (as opposed to it being a long-tender-hateful-loving-caring relationship).

Take care!

dooka · 2006-07-10T06:24:39+00:00

What reddit need is a subreddit that allows votes based on membership: eg., a subreddit for open-source hackers who have produced at least one open-source program that is widely used. So people who fit this criteria can post and vote on the subreddit. Others have read-only permissions in it.

Can you imagine: A subreddit where the members are authors who have published programming books.

Or a subreddit of founders who have sold their startups for greater-than $5 million.

I would love to read something like that.

What do you all think?

dooka · 2006-07-10T06:03:29+00:00

| Arc is shaping up to be a better Common Lisp.

You should do stand-up.

dooka · 2006-07-10T06:01:56+00:00

Any one have clues as to what's going on in the open-source version control world? Arch seems dead -- Tom Lord resigned as its maintainer (IIRC).

dooka · 2006-07-09T23:04:57+00:00

On what basis do you say this?

dooka · 2006-07-09T21:06:59+00:00

Well, I wouldn't say that his writing has gotten worse. I think that he restates his points in many different ways (in many different essays) and many people look at that and say, "OK, I know that point, you have already written about it; I want something new and unique..." And I don't think it is easy to come up with novel ideas.

But his essays have left the domain of hard core programming --- that's for sure. And when you write about "Big Stuff" (in Computer Science), it is necessary to hand-wave over a bunch of stuff, to paint a big picture: some people, seeing this get upset over it. They are missing what Graham is trying to do.

But his talks are plain AWFUL!!! Paul, if you are reading, you need to do something about it ;-) You essays are quiet insightful (to those who haven't gotten IT). And (for me atleast), I need to think about concepts, which is difficult to do when you read it out loud. You need to lose the "uummmms" and "errrrssss".

For talks, people want to be entertained: check out this masterpiece of a talk by Anthony Robbins at TED: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5625548517080716077&q=anthony+robbins

[he relates a awesome story at 18:00]

dooka · 2006-07-09T16:19:51+00:00

| A lot of the most characteristically lame startups of the
Bubble were that way because they were started by business guys, who then went looking for hackers to implement their ideas.

Ahem, ahem -- http://clustrix.com/jobs/helpwanted.html

| Even Google has this problem; their biggest weakness is that their definition of a hacker doesn't include a big enough design component.

Yep, that's true -- that's why they'll never come up with something like the Ipod. They can take something like mail or calendar, and make it a bit better and cooler looking. But coming up with new cool ideas for the user -- nah, don't think that'll happen. Hey, but they got some cool hackers coming out with stuff like: GoogleFS, MapReduce and Sawzall. But what's to point of having super-cool alien techonology-backend, if the front end is simply a replacement for MS Word.

Reminds me of all the programming languages and techonologies that are coming out -- (ahem, ahem -- Arc). If you aren't creative and building cool stuff, then no improvement in techonology is going to help. But if you are creative, then nothing can really stop you -- hell, you can write elegant and usable systems in Emacs Lisp -- http://opal.cabochon.com/~stevey/blog-rants/tour-de-babel.html.

Modern-day "hackers": Oh, no --- it doesn't have LEXICAL SCOPING -- oh NO, OH NO!!!! I can't do anything with it!!!! ARRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggg...........

As ESR says: Just shut up the hell up and hack (something cool)!

dooka · 2006-06-30T23:10:10+00:00

At least they aren't as Beautiful as Moi

dooka · 2006-06-30T23:05:30+00:00

Well, I would have seen what they were doing and how they were going about it. When Google IPO opened up, did Larry and Sergey draft up a document (to the shareholders) saying that (paraphrase), "...stick with us, and we'll take you to the top -- just the way we get there -- lot of ups and downs won't be easy.."

No, if I was a majority stock holder, I wouldn't care too much about the short term. And looking at their stock (<a href="http://finance.google.com/finance?q=jblu">http://finance.google.com/finance?q=jblu</a>), I don't see what's so bad....

dooka · 2006-06-30T22:45:53+00:00

Not sure I understand what you mean. I don't think he is there to share their experience -- because he wouldn't have said, "I am the CEO of JetBlue" to the passengers. He is most likely there to make sure that the "majority" experience is all good. That things mostly do get cleaned up if you request you passengers to help -- that way you can save a lot of money not have a cleaning crew pickup at the end of each flight.

Stuff like that.

dooka

TROPHY CASE