Awesome idea! This would benefit greatly from a "starter deck" of stock pictures collected from knowyourmeme or possibly less reputable but fresher sources.
Yeah, I got news.ycombinator.com stuck on "new", refreshing it from time to time, about once or twice a day. Since the front page stories make it to @newsycombinator on Twitter, I only check that page when I have more free time than I can handle, or when it feels like a story might have interesting comments.
The number of times I got hired to pick up after you because your technical debt technically bankrupted the company and you got fired. My only hope is that innocent new coders reading your piece will not feel "inspired" by your little bracelet waving, but instead learn how to get good at her craft. That's the real reason it takes you 5 days of "procrastination". What you need is not to "just get it done", is to learn and gain experience before you tackle something out of your league, so that you don't leave other people picking up the pieces. Please.
I get the same feeling as you. I only recently discovered HN and at first I was put off by the large amount of noise. After sticking with it for a while, I now get a better feeling for what's worth reading and what doesn't deserve a second glance. Like you say though, I'm sure somewhere, well guarded from the unwashed masses, there's an utopian community of smart people having smart conversation, much like how RoG describes the early HN to have been.
That's very very interesting. I'm also curious if something like this already exists or is being actively worked on. I'm pretty sure most big recipe sites like allrecipes.com must allow you to make your own recipes, but the spin is centered more on the site itself. What you suggest would be more of a platform than a destination site, say the way wordpress.com compares to techcrunch.com (for lack of a better analogy).
I wouldn't really call it a mouse, but it's a good idea to decouple the cursor on a touch-screen from the point of finger contact, for visibility reasons. Somehow, I don't seem to have this problem with the iPhone, it clicks the right links almost all the time, but it used to drive me nuts on Android. Maybe the screen is physically more precise on the iPhone, but this is definitely solving a pain point for Android devices. The gesture system is just the icing on the cake, it makes interaction so much smoother.
I think the point is precisely to take design entirely out of the picture when you're teaching a new comer about programming. The fact that you have these problems and you can write executable recipes to solve them is already more than a mindful, everything else only confuses.
Hey, don't worry about it, that's just how it came through to me, most likely because of my own experience in thinking about these things. I often noticed how extremely excited my brother gets about traveling and how he tends to evaluate people predominantly on criteria related to it. From there I noticed how other travelers have a tendency to overdo the traveling thing as well. When I read your examples and how quickly and carelessly you labeled these people, you came across as someone like that too. Maybe it was a you-had-to-be-there kind of thing, but when you dismiss people like the first 2 japanese guys as not awake simply because of their attitude to traveling... well, I don't grok that.
Wow, that's a pretty presumptuous article. The OP somehow confuses "extroverted adventure seeker" with "awake". Maybe we're arguing semantics here, but in my experience these are some of the least awake people I know. In my conception, to be awake involves a lot of meditation, enough in fact that it affects your demeanor in ways that can make you come across as reserved, not really there, and even "asleep" to those with bubblier personalities.
Quite contrary to the OP, in my experience the true inner state of a person is one of the hardest things you can tease out, and it's very very easy to be mistaken. To claim that it's fairly easy to distinguished awakened people by way of some light questioning, well, that just seems to me rather hasty, if not even silly.
What an amazingly accurate and succinct synthesis of the nature of design. I'm writing this down somewhere: "In essence, design is not a chaotic expression, it’s a measured approach to creation."