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 principles, not just the surface-level implementations that change every few years.

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

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 very few people will be able to benefit from or even complete this sort of education? What percentage of the population falls under this floor? And what will they be doing in the future as both the "service" and manual labor sectors, the traditional absorbers of people with no degrees or impractical "soft" degrees, dwindle in the number of people employed?

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 program. Turns out that it can be quite fun anyway. :-)

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.

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 immediately any time they want.

The book is "Scratch Beginnings" by Adam Shepard, btw.

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 bias toward "vertical" advancement -- vast improvements in areas addressed by tech that we already have -- rather than the "horizontal" creation and filling of new niches in demand.

"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 and a machine confirms our sense of mastery."

Is the filtering process people use on Facebook really so different from the ordinary "filtering" of our life stories that happens when we tell people about ourselves in any other context? Sure, when talking to people we don't know so well yet, most of us don't open up immediately about our flaws and vulnerabilities and fears -- on Facebook or anywhere else. But I don't see why that is particularly problematic.

"I did this not without significant resistance, because it's very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool."

Is having a passion really "uncool?" Maybe some people think bird watching in particular is dorky, but I don't think you can generalize from just that.

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 to being useful. Google's success, on the other hand, rests very little on that; it started out as pure utility (search), something people used not because they had lots of friends using it or because it was "cool" to use it, but because they tried it and it got them the results they wanted. And even if Google has become known recently as something of a "cool" company, I don't think that its individual products are identified as "cool" in the same way Apple's are.

So it may be worth asking: is Facebook more like Google, or more like Apple? Or in other words: would Facebook survive a demotion from "cool, trendy place to be" to "utility?" Is such a "demotion" happening as we speak?