I would say you would be better dropping out now and saving the time and money than you would be getting a General Studies degree.

I registered a domain name with namecheap the other day. My inbox is now filled with spam about web design, SEO services, logo design, marketing, and all sorts of other garbage.

I never had this issue before, and I'm pretty disturbed by this. I'm not going to accuse namecheap of spamming me, so I guess some register logging site might be doing this? I don't know though, because I have whois block on my domain. What's the deal here?

ok I worked it out a million times during the test and kept getting 13.25, but it's painfully obvious looking at it now. I got it at like question #90 and I was already really underslept and hungover.

that exam was really easy for professor [REDACTED]. I'm used to his nightmare java exams. I have a 102 in the class which i'm kind of confused about because 2 weeks ago I had an 82 but whatever.

My first job out of college, working on boring-ass enterprise software, it took about 6 months to feel like my job sucked and another 6 months before I left.

Whered you go from there? Thats where i am! But Im not sure I can leave my foosball matchups

as we're on the subject, what are your guys' thoughts on somebody who (like me) has an unrelated degree but wants to go into comp sci (specifically machine learning.)

is it worth it to go back to school and get a second bachelors, or is what i'm doing (taking a bunch of edx/coursera/etc classes in fulfillment of something like this) sufficient? would doing that and attempting to deploy something signifigant using programming applications at my work get me in the door somewhere?

i suppose career objectives are of course a big variable here. i work in finance currently (econ background) in a senior analyst role for a large company doing strategic operations analysis (think consulting like mckinsey, bcg, but inhouse for a large company in consumer disc.) when i was interviewing for this job i got a couple interviews at a place called cogo labs which is a start up incubator, at two of their firms (adharmonics and i forget the second.)

i ended up getting an offer that was pretty solid at my current firm so i had to abruptly cut short that process, but the more i realize it as i sit here combing through project euler questions i desperately wish i knew how to answer, or listening to an edx basic course on comp sci, or a youtube lecture on discrete math, this is definitely the field that i wanted to be a part of. not so much the corporate strategy / beancounting / analysis and planning side but more the actual algorithmic math/stat/comp sci based world where problems are taken in and answered with math and intuitive code. data science is an alternate field im also interested in (for obvious reasons), but my statistics is hilariously weak compared to most in that field (ive only had like 2 classes in econometrics.)

sorry for the rant but any thoughts? im currently 26, make like 80k/y, no student loan debt because of full scholarship at previous university. i suppose if i were truly interested i would have dropped the current job offer and pursued the startup incubator in full because that is exactly the culture i want to be a part of. super young. super intellectually curious, constantly uncomfortable because of new ideas and methods rather than relying on archaic and silly excel models. etc. but i was uncertain that with my shaky stat background compared to people with like masters in stat and econ that i would just get there and be thrown in without a life vest whereas here i can get paid (better) and enjoy some freedom with learning outside stuff because i think my work is fairly easy from an intellectual standpoint compared to what people traditionally do in your field; affording me less stress and more time. ironically people in my field are super stressed out for some reason, but i think compared to how hard the questions that are being asked in the comp sci/math space, its pretty hilarious.

You know you don't have to intern where you live? Good internships will pay for your relocation/housing for the summer.

Yah, also I wouldn't dismiss the top companies based on what I've read above in this thread.
It really depends on who you're assigned to and what your work is.

Many types of interns that take different paths, just like there are many paths to take in this world.

Video games for 6 years, then just moved to a startup.

I'm starting to like Java more and more. You can actually be close to Python level efficient with it if you try hard enough (I'm not even close to being there). I dunno...it's something I want to get better at.

I also played with the Twitter API (and some APIs for aggregators, both Python) on Friday which was fun. I'll be doing a bit more of that in the near future.

+My new place of work has all sorts of intriguing toys like Rifts, complete 3D rooms, touch screen tables etc...I think I'll have some fun in the near future
Got handed a Leap Motion to play around with (they kind of suck) and have access to the other toys..yay. OS X still sucks.

Can you still not page down without 2 hands?

anyone got any articles or links about how to read from RAM? i have no idea what im doing but it sounds something that would be interesting to learn how to do. I dont really know where to begin, or what language to do it in

I was playing around with TwiiterAPI for Python3 the other day as well, just to refresh my mind on how it works. I appreciate using dicts over json any day of the week.

I was planning to run a 3gig text dump into a local file but I lost my inspiration once I figured out that there's nothing I'd be interested in learning about.

More meta: suppose we ask public opinion about things that are fairly non-controversial, meaning everyone agrees it is good. Take food for example. How much noise would be generated from bots and trolls before we find out how many people actually don't like food?

I know you like Unix, so what part of Unix did OS X destroy that you can't get used to the Apple flavor?

The window manager (getting in the way) is the problem (and me missing apt/package management)

It's just too odd and colorful. I like my boring XFCE with quake-style term mapped to ^. I've gotten better at using OS X...figuring out that you can swipe the trackpad and scroll with it was kind of useful. It's still strange and using closed source software usually leaves me frowning.
All the little things are extremely counterintuitive (had to Google how to add my home folder to favourites...lol at that not being there and defaulting to ~/Documets) and there's small stuff that just gets me raging (like typing "exit" not exiting a term but just ending the process leaving the term open; x-ing stuff just minimizing it etc.)
Clock+date not being displayed by default (only one is shown) dragging stuff around is strangely annoying (because everything seems to depend on drag+drop and you have to have both windows visible somehow) the list goes on and on

The most annoying thing so far was trying to create an empty text file from the GUI...I'm still not sure how you're supposed to do that.

It's also strange to have 3 different ways of installing software (that I've counted so far for regular stuff not Java etc.)

[Virtual Box with Xubuntu is installed]

Edit: Oh yeah forgot to mention one more thing...German keyboard layout Mac (which is what I got) seems rather unusable for programming out of the box. At least I'm missing the key to shift to {} and [] being on the right side of the keyboard.

Installing and playing with iTerm2 is on my list for Monday. Basically I'd already be a lot happier if I'd have a more accessable terminal that I can work from comfortably (i.e. use it for copy/paste/move stuff and general navigation instead of lol drag+dropping things and using Finder which seems like the nutlow)

Haha xing stuff and having it minimize sends me into a rage too.

I had to use a macbook the other day. It took me like 10 minutes to figure out how to rename a file.

Really? You don't slow double click in Windows to edit a file name? You don't use mv from the terminal? You don't right click (two finger tap or ctrl-click) on the file, select get info, open the name & extension menu then edit the file name in your OS of choice? Please.

A while back, I had to do an HTML / CSS test on a Macbook. I probably spent >50% of my time trying to figure basic things like scrolling down the page and finding the scroll bar on the page. I couldn't figure out how to do any of it. It really sucked because I couldn't remember the proper CSS syntax for something, and there wasn't a single bit of code above the fold.

Although it took me way too much time to do the layout, I managed to finish and get it correct. I apologized and said that I took a while because I didn't use the web for any answers, which while true, was perhaps less embarrassing than admitting that I couldn't figure out how to use a $2000 easy-to-use machine. I also had to use Textmate or something like that. All arrow keys FTW?

I was on a client's macbook having never really used a mac before. I wasn't about to fumble around to find terminal, and there's no chance he would have known.

I don't use track pads so 2 finger tap was totally foreign to me. I had to ask him how to even right click a file and scroll down a page.

I have not used Windows for long enough that I forgot about the slow double click method which is eventually what I figured out.

I've been running xubuntu for a while. 98% of the time I just use mv in a terminal and if I'm using the GUI I just right click -> rename. In Windows the right click menu also has rename, it was really surprising to not see it on the Mac.

Edit:
As for CTRL click, I only use shift/CTRL click to select files when using the GUI. Does that bring up a right click menu in Mac?

I'm in shock

For renaming in the GUI, I use F2, which works in Windows or Linux (LXDE). Sounds a lot easier than all of those finger gymnastics.

I'm in shock that you're in shock haha. I thought it's pretty standard to not have mac experience?

I live in a terminal or browser, prefer work stations over laptops (lack of touch pad experience) and always self assembled PCs in the ~$600US range.

Dave, F2 also works in xfce but I've never used it before. Good to know.

Whenever I do anything with Twitter data I end up weeping for humanity.

Although its lead to one of my rules of Big Data - if you do anything with internet data and sex isn't the first result you probably have a bug somewhere.

Saved up 3k after getting employed for a macbook pro retina with built in gpu.
Was best decision I ever made in my life but who knows...

You just can't beat a laptop that you put on a stand sitting on the desk. Plug the bad boy into a monitor, then the usb hub with all the mouse/keyboard and devices for testing.

I can just go anywhere and use it for my personal use too because its powerful enough for everything i throw at it.

The trackpad on a macbook pro is what I consider the best trackpad I've ever used and I've used a lot of ****ty thinkpads where I wanted to just throw it onto the grass and take a bat to it.

It really does depend on your work but it is really perfect when you have parallels and every OS you need in one form factor. I think it is safe to predict a docking station where you have graphics cards sitting on your desk that you plug in by thunderbolt eventually anyway.

Programmers should be pushing away from desktops no matter how I look at it.
Also it should take a week to convert if you are serious and you won't regret it.

I get that you like your laptop but don't see how you come to this conclusion.

Maybe push away from mac desktops...