Except they don't. I have a one-word legal name and I have rarely found any online from that allowed me to have less than two names. I realize I'm an edge case, so I just make up something for the other field.
Ironically, I practically begged Google+ to allow me to use my real name, which they require for their "fine dining experience" (<cough>advertisers<cough>), but they refused because it was less than two names and looked fake. They may have finally worked that out by now, I left the building long ago.
Should I care? If I am designing a system that requires only a full legal name...then it depends on the law of the target region. If it's for almost anything else...I'm not going to waste my time unless there are more than a few complaints.
My entire point here is that if it's really important to the system being designed, that the correct answer will occur to you naturally. Honestly, if we design a system that requires full legal names and we don't look into the laws of the target region, then we're probably not too bright.
So tell me, is two names United States, or any US state's law, or is it just a common assumption?
Do programmers routinely look up the law for common assumptions? I'm guessing no.
And by the way, the tone of your responses in this thread is the first time in my years of HN participation (under various user names) that I've wished for a plonk file. Everything you've said has the core of a relevant argument, wrapped in condescension.
You're missing my point. If the legal exactitude of the name is relevant to some functionality, then yes I do think that most decent engineers will naturally tend to want a reference of some sort. Otherwise, they just change whatever broken thing they did if and when it becomes a problem.
It doesn't make them any less intelligent than the author of this article. The cutesy way that list was written and that comment at the end of the article was what I was responding to earlier, but anyway...what exactly did I say to you or anyone else that was so condescending? I'm not saying that I'm not slightly intense at times, maybe I ask a lot of rhetorical questions... Sorry.
In addition to randomly generating a man page from /bin, consider mining your command line history and randomly selecting anything whose man page you haven't yet read. You'll want to keep a file of man pages that you've read, to help with that.
And since you're stocking up on C, don't forget that C's standard library is documented via man pages, e.g.
Vim is too big to learn. Eventually you'll muscle-memory a set of actions, for the way that you uniquely use vim, that you don't even know how to explain without thinking about it.
Rather than trying to go through one end of a tutorial or reference to the other (don't know if that's you), find a site or two of vim tips, and let them randomly trigger your mind. I think it's more interesting than going through anything beyond page/chapter 1 of a reference.
Coupled with that, whatever you find yourself doing in vim, take some time to understand what it is and the alternatives. Becoming familiar with :help's table of contents, rather than the contents of every chapter, is probably helpful here.
Similarly, when you do something accidentally, try to understand what happened. Sometimes you'll discover a feature. q: for example is discovered by accident by many people, including me.
Some tasks contribute directly to goals, other tasks just get you through the day.
Don't know what to make of that, other than to think that those two types of tasks are probably managed differently, and they probably give you different emotional payoff.
Except we won't. We rarely do, and only at onesies and twosies.
Besides, they aren't working on the fiscal cliff anyway, even if it looks like they are. They're wielding a tool which they created which gives them another way to make the other side look bad. That's the entire point. Governing is a side effect.
Tip O'Neill said that all politics is local. That may be true for elections. But it is certain that all government is politics.
Yes, staring is rude, I get that. But you have to understand, our brains are hardwired to stare.
Pattern recognition is so innate that when we perceive something that breaks the expected pattern our first instinct is to keep looking at it until we understand what we're looking at. It's unconscious, and if we're lucky we'll catch ourselves doing it to a person and try to mitigate the circumstance with shifty glances elsewhere, but our eyes will always be drawn back as soon as our concentration wavers.
When I see something unexpected (And this would apply to seeing a zebra in the middle of the road as much as the person in the article) lots of things fire at once. What did I just see? Did I really see it? What is going on here?
There is a literal jolt in my brain saying "what was that" and so I am probably going to at least double take before I have even mentally engaged with what is happening and considered the feelings of the person I am looking at.
Obviously this only applies to the initial moments after which I am far more likely to avoid looking at all for fear of upsetting them. It is far easier not to look than to act normally. We [should] all know staring is rude - but stringently avoiding looking is also very isolating I would imagine.
NB. No I am not comparing the person to a Zebra, but simply using an example of seeing something completely unexpected.
