I was hired by Tom after emailing him through a previous HN Who's Hiring thread. We had a couple of email exchanges followed by a phone and lunch interview. Working here has been fun and challenging.
I would certainly encourage anyone in the Philadelphia area to apply.
Agreed. I was really surprised with how odd vim-latex felt.
In my experience, most of these language-specific vim plugins stay pretty light, enhancing built-in vim behavior to perform in the expected way given a particular language's peculiarities. Instead, it tries to build up this complex system of macros and shortcuts that added a really thick layer on top of actually writing LaTeX (a process that I actually quite enjoy). Maybe it's another one of those things that I have to see in use to appreciate, and I'm sure there's some really useful stuff in there, but it just didn't seem worth it.
Once upon a time I used some vim plugin--and that one sounds familiar--to allow me to compile from within vim and then jump to that paragraph in the dvi viewer. I think I could also click a paragraph in the dvi viewer and jump to that text in vim.
"Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind." - Henry David Thoreau
Probably true.
Physical discomfort when you're trying to think deeply about anything is a huge detractor -- hence the importance of taking care of your body even if your interests are mostly "mind".
But that said, throw out your TV, don't thoughtlessly collect expensive shit that you then have to worry about fixing/protecting from theft/maintaining, etc..
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I think this would fit under intellectual curiosity, but who's to judge.
Voting up political articles because of "intellectual curiousity" is a cop-out, and you'll get reddit if you go there.
This is very clearly one of those articles that people vote up because they like the message and it gets them fired up, rather than because they didn't know these things (unless of course they happen to reside under a rock).
I hope no one was trying to learn from that. FD can be tough to handle for people not mathematically trained.
Heat equation? Why? Any second order differential equation would suffice since there is no real example with materials, temperature, properties, boundary conditions, etc. Mine as well just been reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_difference_method
I'll probably modify the article to include a list of suggested prerequisites and change the heat equation to "diffusion equation", as that is less physically biased.
My real goal is for somebody with a background in mathematics (but no programming) to learn how to program FD, rather than just learn the theory. This is not really made clear by the current article and I will be adding an overview.
Thanks for the feedback though - I'd welcome any more, obviously I want the article(s) to be accessible to as many people as possible!
Do you think most users will care about this? They'll just want to know if they can still see what their friends are doing, who has posted new photos, etc.
What if the new owner decides to "generate revenue" by selling your personal information to the highest bidder, and then turns the site off? Reselling the information is cheaper than keeping a bunch of programmers and sysadmins employed, after all.
