Edward O'Connor

Ah yes, this is just brimming with positivism and love: http://edward.oconnor.cx/2005/04/rms

I am reminded of this famous Stallman incident, where he basically scorns at another developer for having a baby: http://edward.oconnor.cx/2005/04/rms

Well, considering he considers the practice of having children 'menacing' (his words, not mine), even when it is the children of contributors to his own projects, I don't find myself really surprised. http://edward.oconnor.cx/2005/04/rms

I'll just leave this here: http://edward.oconnor.cx/2005/04/rms

RMS is quite unkempt, his feet stink like a hobo. In general he has a retarded way of dealing with people, not a nice person to be in touch with. Just my 2 cents. PS: I did not mention his philosophy, neithe if his ideas are wrong. I just said he's got a bad personal hygiene and that he is has a retarded way of dealing with people, here are some quotes: http://edward.oconnor.cx/2005/04/rms It is plain wrong to offer condolences to a father with a newborn child and thus retarded.

My .emacs: http://edward.oconnor.cx/config/.emacs If you use Viper, this is the single nicest tip I have: http://edward.oconnor.cx/2009/08/viper-tweaks Some tips on running a dedicated Emacs instance for Gnus: http://edward.oconnor.cx/2010/08/standalone-gnus

You might as well try to use http://edward.oconnor.cx/elisp/hl-sexp.el everywhere, including REPL first.

The problem is that it takes ten years to learn emacs. Don't take my word for it, because I haven't: http://edward.oconnor.cx/2009/07/learn-emacs-in-ten-years .

Linux is a kernel. It has over 400 syscalls. The userland, with which you are probably familiar, is the GNU part of GNU/Linux. So if you want to blame somebody, blame Stinky Stallman, the baby hater. http://edward.oconnor.cx/2005/04/rms

Congratulations! On the humorous side, this reminds me of this story: http://edward.oconnor.cx/2005/04/rms (Richard Stallman speaks a bit about having children) The funniest part is: "It doesn’t take special talents to reproduce, even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really something to be proud of. It helps more people, too." One more link that made me laugh a lot (again, Stallman): http://www.art.net/Studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html

One major component of your execution strategy is going to be convincing the blogosphere that your company is the next big thing and will change their lives. You can't do this when you're in stealth http://edward.oconnor.cx/tags/paul-graham

I agree to a certain extent. All sciences specialize as they mature. Computer scientists looking to make their mark are inevitably driven out from the core into security, bioinformatics, robotics, data mining, distributed systems, what have you. I don't know Knuth's mind exactly, but it seems to me he decided to set up shop at the core, at theory and algorithms, to set the science on a solid foundation going forward. So it's fundamental algorithms, arithmetic, searching, sorting, and lately graphs and combinations. There are enough people writing in their specialties, and there will always be incentives to go baroque and novel. That's how we get stupid stuff like my thesis, or 8% faster neural network training, or the paper on implementing a Turing machine in C++ templates. http://ubiety.uwaterloo.ca/~tveldhui/papers/2003/turing.pdf It takes a special kind of person to forge ahead slowly, for decades, on the field-defining work that he does. The other kinds of scientists (and software engineers, for that matter) are all too easy to find. http://edward.oconnor.cx/2002/04/don-knuth-sells-out