Non-issue, pointless to discuss.

If you're consistently the smartest person in the room, you probably need one of two things: new friends or a reality check. Possibly both.

The best advice I ever got about picking friends was that you should hang out with the people you want to be like. In your case, you seem to not want to go directly from a strip club to a social establishment and get crunked. Well, there is a fairly simple solution to that...

(UrbanDictionary tells me my usage of "crunked" is wrong. This is what I get for not spending enough time around people who are simultaneously drunk and stoned, I guess?)

I'm recommending only free software here.

1. Adium for chat. It is just awesome.http://www.adiumx.com/

2. Quicksilver. if you just want an app launcher spotlight is already good at that. http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-alchemy/downloads/list [edit: updated link to point to the recent versions]

3. Caffeine is small program which puts an icon on menu bar on which you can click to prevent your Mac from going to sleep,dimming the screen etc. Very useful when watching long flash movies. http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/

4. MPlayer This is a video player which plays almost anything you can offer. Also comes with excellent keyboard shortcuts support making it the best video player on any platform. Most people prefer VLC though http://www.mplayerhq.hu/

5. Flip4Mac For those videos that MPlayer plays poorly, typically WMVs Flip4Mac provides a fee codec which integrates with your quicktime player. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcompo...

6. HandBrake For ripping your DVDs to MPEG4, there is no better tool. http://handbrake.fr/

7. Tweetie. if you use twitter, tweetie is the best mac twitter client by far. http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/

8. Virtualbox This virtualization product from Sun Microsystems totally eliminates the need for parallels or Vmware if you plan to use the VM sparingly. http://www.virtualbox.org/

9. Evernote http://evernote.com/

10. Eigenclock. I find the OS X, menu calendar extremely limted. Eigenclock is a good replacement http://www.twistedtheorysoftware.com/eigenclock/

11. Onyx for system tweaking http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

12. Transmission - bittorrent client http://www.transmissionbt.com/

People are social animals. I think as analytical people we forget this aspect of our humanity a lot.

So you need to feed that social part of yourself without doing, time-consuming and mostly pointless things, like getting drunk with the guys and watching naked women dance. If you dig naked women dancing, get HBO. Or just surf the net.

As a consultant, I go through phases of alone down-and-working hacking, when I'm not on a big contract, and working full-time with other people trying to help them when I am on a big contract.

I've found that both of these lifestyles have something positive and negative about them. I need social interaction, yet I crave just doing my own thing and being left alone also. I've found that since I don't value my social needs, I sometimes end up taking just whatever comes along, instead of actively planning. This spontaneity is cool when you're 20. But it gets less and less cool the older you get, for some reason. (Usually after you end up with a decade of spending your free time and you've in the same spot, with the same people, doing the same things you were ten years ago.)

In the past, this has sometimes led to be hanging out with people who are, or at least think they are, exciting. If I were you, I'd find something bigger than yourself to believe in and get involved with it. Church, Boy Scouts, civic groups, environmental groups, politics -- something that you find both intellectually stimulating and where you have a lot of social interaction. Make yourself do this, because you will not think that it will work until you actually do it.

And give up the I'm-so-smart routine. Trust me, you're an idiot like the rest of us, just in a different way. So you have lots factual recall ability? Aside from a promising future as a game show contestant, who cares? People with a great recall ability can be some of the most annoying people on the planet to deal with. Trust me, I'm one of them! Meet people where they are, and relate to them in an honest manner that you both can handle. Sounds like you've got a big of overly-done self importance thing going on. Once again, finding something more important than you and humbly trying to contribute to it could make you more of a person that really is smart and interesting and exciting people, like myself, would want to hang out with. (grin)

Life is about you putting stuff into it, not sitting on your ass waiting to see what comes out of it and then criticizing what you get by default. Sorry to rag on you so much -- you probably don't deserve it, but geesh, you're 30. Get a better attitude and lifestyle already.

textmate

"They have won at the game of life, in that they fit in, are laughing, are enjoying themselves, yet the author feels that there must be something wrong with them."

You misunderstand. After you meditate for a while, especially with a knowledgeable support group (the sangha), you become extremely attuned to human emotions (since you watch them very closely all day long). If you then go to a party, a family gathering, or if you turn on the TV, tiny changes in people's voice, expressions, and breathing will give away what they're feeling - fear, unease, and nerviousness.

Imagine two people that have truly achieved something meet for the first time. Let's say, for the sake of the argument, Einstein and Feynman. Try to imagine in your mind what the meeting would be like. Would they laugh nerviously and use smalltalk? Would they use drinks to break the ice? Would they be, even momentarily, afraid to approach each other? If they are truly accomplished people at peace with themselves, none of this would take place. Now compare this to a typical party or gathering. Do accomplished people who have no need to defend their worth act this way?

The author isn't asserting that he's "better" than the masses. He has simply observed his suffering, and now he observes it in other people. Most "accomplished" Westerners are unhappy, and use incredible amounts of substances to mask that unhappiness (cigarettes, alcohol, prozac, whatever). And if it's not substances, it's behavior (compulsive shopping, addiction to following sports, internet, any kind of waiting for something to happen in your life, and watching nothing happen day in and day out).

It's not contempt. It's compassion for other people's pain.

The problem is that a single upvote-downvote axis has to capture two different, sometimes orthogonal, judgments: (1) is this comment valuable or detrimental to the discussion?; and (2) do I agree or disagree with this comment?

This entanglement is unavoidable as long as there's only one score per comment, given the interface and established practice, at HN and similar sites.

It might work to have a second axis/score that's specifically agree/disagree. (This could take the form of left-agree and right-disagree arrows, perhaps on the right of the comment-meta-line.) Then a comment could be be wildly agreed-with without offering a karmic windfall to repetitions of obvious popular sentiments, or wildly disagreed-with without the current undercurrents of censorship (sinking/fading-out) and karmic punishment via disagreement-downvotes.

Personally, I would expect to find the comments with both net upvotes (valuable) and rightvotes (disagreement) to be most interesting -- because they capture challenging minority viewpoints, but well-presented.

This is like watching dinosaurs attempting to do physics.

Everytime they hear Google mention the idea of 'opt out if you don't like it', they start crying 'Publishers should not have to choose between protecting their copyrights and shunning the search-engine databases that map the Internet'. So they want google to crawl their pages, and then pay them something on top for indexing them.

That's like asking the police to protect your neighborhood and then charging them a monthly fee on top for the policing.

It's this ridiculous sense of entitlement that's the most sickening out of all this.

This article is wrong. Microsoft doesn't want you to use PAE, because it's crap.

It was a weird XMS sort of memory extension developed for enteprise applications on the Pentium Pro. Supporting it adds all sorts of weird corner cases that have to be dealt with in the operating system. It is a good thing MS doesn't support it, it's the right technical choice.

Much better to go with a straight flat 64bit address space than hacked up crap. Anyone who remembers segments and offsets can tell you how horrible it is.