At least everything works asynchronously now. Waiting for a phone call used to be excruciating, before voicemail. Thankfully, we don't have to worry about someone "tying up the email" while we wait.
You know that you can scan for his replies on any thread by using the http://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments link, right? Just in case someone starts another "YC e-mails are out!" thread?
oh, i guess i should mention. it sends a SMS to a sprint phone via Sprint's www interface. i do not know (nor do i care) if it works for other cell phones. you can see if it does by setting the starting_count variable to 0.
I say, wrong. That's not how it should be taught. Well, actually, concentration on algorithms is good, but AFAICT, it's only algorithms there.
Part of the reason Computer Science is such a great subject is that it combines theory with practice in such an easy and elegant manner. There's a reason I got into CS before I got into math - because CS (well, at the time, it was more like just Java than CS) gave me an opportunity to make something and see results. This type of response from a subject fosters creativity and interest, and overall makes the subject more motivating and interesting. If you only teach algorithms, all of this is lost.
Also, you've got to admit it, someone who knows all the standard algorithms but can't design one of their own or code/debug it is useless.
Judging by Joel's articles, he at least claims to hire only the best of the best of the.. you get the idea.
Depending on how challenging your software is to develop, you might want to set the bar a bit lower (than the seriouslyfreakingabsolute best).
A genuinely good developer should be more than enough for most tasks, but maybe your product can't be built by merely good developers.
Hackers seem to be quite idealistic too. They would probably like the idea of doing something "good".
Maybe even something to make the world a better place - and who knows, maybe your medical thingie qualifies!
(Sorry, I'm feeling a bit playful here, and right now I can't see the post where you explained things)
What can you offer that would lure hackers to your venture?
How about offering to get them hot chicks? Moderately hot ones? .. only slightly retina-burning chicks?
At first, I thought of suggesting you respect your "hackers" as fellow human beings, and make sure they find you respectable too. I guess that's my two cents after all.
That's exactly it. Saying that learning a new language is just a matter of learning a new syntax is like saying that an English-speaking, non-German speaker could translate a German text to English by taking a German-English dictionary and going through and translating the words one-by-one. It's not quite as simple as that.
Actually, I'd compare that to saying that two languages are the exact same except for some of the words -- that JavaScript is exactly like Java except System.out.print is renamed to document.write. Saying that learning a new language is just the syntax is more like saying that translation between English and German can be done with just a German-English dictionary and a full knowledge of the grammar.
However, just as lambdas cannot be directly translated into languages without lambdas, some languages have unique concepts. For example, the German language has a part of speech called the particle that conveys a general feeling into sentences. While the statement "Er wisst das." could be easily translated with a dictionary and knowledge of conjugation rules into "He knows that," adding a particle to make "Er wisst ja das" could be variously translated as "Of course he knows that," "He obviously knows that," "He most definitely knows that," etc.
I find such comparisons misleading. The differences between natural languages are not at all the same thing as the differences between programming languages. All natural languages have the same expressive power, or at least very close. The existence of the phenomenon of translation proves it. You can take a book in Classical Latin (according to my friend's girlfriend who is a linguist, a very terse language) and its translation into German (typically given as an example of a very verbose language) and the difference in length will be maybe 30% (and frankly, I don't even believe this difference can be accounted for by the greater expressive power of Latin; my guess is it's just that German words are longer on average.)
I've noticed that the most effective way to get a programming project finished is to just let everything else slide for a few weeks: paying bills, exercising, being social. Probably not a very healthy way to live in the long run, though.
http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/academics/courses/325/program...