

The 75% answer - old-gregg
http://lbrandy.com/blog/2009/05/the-75-answer/

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randallsquared
_Effect or affect? Use the following words, only: effect (noun), affect
(verb), effective, affected, affecting (you’ll be right more than 75%)._

Accept their our other common misteaks people make, so its not at all clear
that you'll get to 75%.

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costan
Thanks so much for posting this! Now I know how to answer non-questions, and
avoid endless pointless debates.

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Aron
Just remember also that 'to effect a change' is the correct use of effect as a
verb. That gets you to 95%.

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noamsml
Most of this seems silly. OSX is the only laptop OS? Since so many people buy
PC laptops, that answer is clearly wrong more than 75% of the time (unless he
wants newbies to try and hackintosh). Also, what's with the "no black on
white" thing? Can someone explain that to me?

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madair
He gave his 75% answers. The readers of this article will have their own 75%
answers, and if they don't, then his are just fine for the demographic. It's
pretty smart really, and subtle.

They are not my answers, but that's very far from being the point. Well,
actually, that IS the point!

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madair
Duh, I just repeated what jodrellblank said, more or less. Oops.

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keefe
>>What programming language should I learn? C.

What a horrendous answer, no new programmer should start with C in 2009, java
or php or python or any damn thing but C and jockeying memory references.

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biohacker42
If you don't know C, you are not going to be a great hacker. You might not
want to start with C, but at some point, you better damn learn it.

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req2
And it's so much better to go "Oh, this is so much easier than C!" rather than
"Oh, this is so much worse than Python!" later on. It also tends to be easier
to learn a new, easier way to do something in a new language than figure out
the harder way with the easy way looming on the top of your mind.

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lucastx
So, why don't you learn assembly first? Better, why don't you start with logic
circuits?

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tsuraan
Assembly's too high-level :) In my school's sophomore year, CS majors are
required to implement a CPU on an FPGA; the instruction set, CPU architecture,
everything are up to the student groups to design and implement. At the end of
the class, all the student processors are compared w.r.t. size and speed of
execution of various simple programs. Our group had a guy that wrote an
assembler for our ISA, but most of the groups just wrote their programs in raw
machine code, using a hex editor.

Really, nothing teaches low-level programming better than starting with gates
and building your way up to programs. The sequel to that class teaches how to
deal with pipelining, CPU caches, and multiple-execution chips like the TI
DSPs, so after you design your processor, you get to see how real CPUs work.
It's really fun, actually.

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aaronblohowiak
Where did you go?

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tsuraan
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. It's a small place in Indiana, but I
think it's a pretty good school :)

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stanleydrew
This is particularly relevant given this "Ask HN" post today:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=603511>

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derefr
Is there a better 75% recommendation for fonts when you don't need web-safety?
(For example, when you're taking plaintext and printing it.)

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thristian
Helvetica Bold for headings, Times New for body text.

If you want to get fancy, Gill Sans and some variety of Garamond respectively.

If you're printing code or data, Consolas is a very pretty monospaced font,
followed up by Droid Sans Mono, Lucida Typewriter, DejaVu Sans Mono, or Andale
Mono.

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DLWormwood
> Georgia or Verdana. And never put black (#000) on white (#FFF)

Uh... isn't this blog black on white?

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mtinkerhess
According to Firebug it's #333 on #fff.

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madair
A 100% answer is like a zero-sum game. Good luck with that.

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Allocator2008
This is really good. I like the idea of using statistically relevant answers
in lieu of absolute answers. Like in this case, 75% of the time, Linux servers
may be the best type of server, but there is always that other 25% of time
where there are exceptions.

Reminds me of using the principle of mediocrity proposed by physicist Alex
Vilkenkin to make cosmological predictions when dealing with things like
inflationary theory. If there is a bell curve for some constant we are trying
to establish, we predict this constant will be somewhere in the middle,
chopping of the two extremes at both ends. Thus, say the theory is some
version of Guth's inflationary theory, and it predicts a constant that varies
over some spectrum. Thus we predict we will see that constant to lie somewhere
in the middle of the bell curve. Thus, if we observe or measure that constant
to be somewhere around where we had predicted it, that lends weight to the
theory we were working from. The idea being that we live in an average world,
e.g. in an "average" inflationary bubble, hence the principle of mediocrity.
The key point is that we CAN actually use statistics to make predictions about
the world, and need not have to always make precise predictions, which, in
some versions of string and/or inflationary theory, one cannot, simply because
of the infinite number of bubbles in inflation or the near-infinite number of
possible string theories (10^500 values for the false vacuum I think I read
somewhere).

Anyway the idea that there is no one right answer to a question that works
everywhere seems sound in some cases.

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sachmanb
We could use more 'dealing with stupid people' submissions. I appreciate the
help.

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jherdman
"Stupid people" is a bit harsh and not very accurate. It's more accurate to
say that we need more quick answer guides for the less experienced. We were
all there at one point in time.

