False advertising. They promised 1Gbp.

Nchabazam interestingly enough I got a mail from the people I do the lean startup lecture for that they have booked someone to do a workshop (I suggested that it would be a good idea but was obviously too lazy to do it myself+I'd rather want it to be by someone that runs an actual startup or something :P). Googled the guy and his company seems to be doing exactly what you're shooting for so if I have the time I'll attend and grab+grill him.

It's in June though so probably not worth much to you by then :P

Re: CMS...heard some decent things about Magnolia if you don't mind the Java. Good architecture and has a plugin or whatever they call it to hook it up to Spring.

Man, CS is the first subject I've ever studied in my life that makes me feel dumb and worthless and I can't tell if that's a sign I should pursue it harder or just give up entirely. You guys are all geniuses.

Do you enjoy it?

yes, a lot.

I'm a flaming idiot, dude. Stick with it if you like it.

It's one of those subjects where the more you know the more you realize just how little you know.

It's like "oh nice, I just learned about xyz", but learning about xyz just opened a world where you know like 0.0001% of what's going on.

I've felt like this for every subject I've ever studied in depth.

I guess its not surprising that for any non-trivial subject/career there's a lot to know to do it well.

I had these thoughts so many times when I first started programming at my job. Here was the cycle:

Get assigned a task.
"How the hell am I going to do this.. I don't even know where to start."
Do some research.
"Now I just have a better idea of how impossible this is."
Make some progress.
"Something is happening!"
Figure out how wrong my approach was. I'm a ****ing idiot.
Finally make it work. I'm a ****ing genius.

Get assigned a task...

Eventually, after repeating that cycle enough times, you gain some confidence and new tasks become more like "I have no idea how to do this, but I'm sure I'll figure it out." and "Sweet, I get to learn something new!"

Getting paid to do what you enjoy is a rare gift. Programming isn't like acting, singing or professional sports where only the top few get to making a living. It's not a competition and don't worry about the other guys.

This. It's also pretty great that you don't *have* to study computer science in order to be a programmer (though more power to you if you do). And what candybar said also applies to the harder sciences like physics, etc. which are quite hard to make an impact in these days.

If you're enjoying it, stick with it. It's definitely one of those things where it takes some time banging your head against the wall before something "clicks". Once you cross that first click though you'll be a lot more confident that you can overcome future hurdles.

One of those first clicks for me was using a debugger. It made everything a whole lot easier. If you haven't had a chance to try that out, you really should.

Keep going jmakinmecrzy! Success is about being willing to feel dumb for enough hours to see positive results .

I cant even explain how dumb i felt the first time I was being taught about bit shifting and unsigned vs signed ints and big/little endian. My god that was horrible


Also, Im still pretty dumb

You forgot the flags!

**

I went to a Django meetup. Very interesting people and lots of conversation. Quite contrary to any other meetup I've been to people, they are quite forward about asking if you are looking for a job. I was taken aback and didn't really know how to respond to this, but I waffled and said yeah but that's not why I'm there.

I have no idea how to respond to those sort of questions. It was weird and I am the worst job-finder in the history of humankind -- which partly explains why everyone is absolutely shocked that I'm not a paid developer . Turns out that they were sort of fishing for someone that can do real-live super-scale DevOps. Yeah, not me. Kind of interesting that this same person brought up the idea that I should look into trying out Erlang after hearing that I do a bit of work with Clojure since some company down the street uses Erlang. This isn't the first time I've heard this one. He also said that he loved the idea of Clojure & FP and really wanted to look into getting started.

There was someone I met once that was talking to me about Clojure. He tried Clojure, quit, then tried Erlang. He ran into a few Haskell programmers and he mentioned that he was learning Erlang. They looked at him and said "Why don't you work in a programming language people have heard of?"

Sort of a mind-dump, sorry.

Question. There's a need at my current job to do something with databases, and this would not be a minor program. It will likely require a bit of custom functions and will certainly require triggers and a solid schema. Since this goes well beyond the call of duty, would it be out of line to mention the great deal they are getting and require that said program has to be open-source?

I found proof-positive that CentOS is enterprise to the bottom. The default of FireFox is FireFox ESR v17. That is 10 versions behind the present version. I got it to update to FireFox 24 or so. I didn't even know FF ESR existed.

I don't know the context but 'require' seems pretty strong. If the company doesn't have a culture of open sourcing stuff it could take a long time to actually get to the point of being able to do it. They'll want to consult their lawyers, pick a license, get buy-in from executives, blah, blah, blah.

Recursion makes me feel that way. But I like it because it tickles my brain.

Why are you putting a browser on a production box?

Time for my dumb weekly noob java question.

What exactly is the relationship between Formatter and System.out.println()?

For a project I'm working on I need to implement the Formattable interface to create my own format method. I notice if there's some sort of error when I create a new Formatter object in my main method, all the System.out statements have errors too.

This is probably a situation where you'll learn more by reading the oracle Java docs for Formattable interface (and Formatter class).

Yea, I have been. Making more sense now. Sorry

It's definitely a good exercise implementing someone else's interface. How will you test it? Do you satisfy all the requirements/expected behavior of the interface? Make sure you handle the edge cases too.

What?

So I'm trying to migrate to a good equity library. I looked at pokersource and it seems like it can only do hand vs. hand whereas I want hand vs. range (i.e. I want to answer questions such as "do I have a draw with >30% equity vs villain's range").
After some searching I found pbots_calc (based on pokersource)...has anyone here used it/can recommend it...last commit seems to be a year ago which isn't too bad?
https://github.com/mitpokerbots/pbots_calc

I've already managed to build a C library with one function that prints hello world and load it, map it to a Prolog predicate and call it from Prolog and compiled the pbots_calc library and did some EV calcs with the provided script (seems fast enough for my purposes, can do hand range notation alas a bit crippled)...I'll try hooking up the library instead of my hello world and write a Prolog wrapper for the functionality I need next week...just checking if there's anyone screaming ZOMG DON'T :P

Edit: I read over the roundup blog post and the 2p2 one isn't an option due to the size of the lookup table