What about Learning Python the Hard Way? Would you recommend it for a newbie to programming who wants to pursue a career in CS? I downloaded that book due to Internet recommendations but havent dived into it yet. I would appreciate insight into what i should start with if i want to program seriously for the long haul.

I found the summary itself fairly useful and now intend to read the book, if I can find the time and a reasonably priced copy.

There is a website called ezproxy dot blogspot dot com which posts occasionally working password to library sites and universities' online resources. It might prove useful to some people here.

Hi, could anyone help me obtain

"Limits of Scientific Inquiry" by G. Holton, R. S. Morison ( 1978 )

and

"What is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable." Brockman, John (2007)

Thanks in advance

I think we're starting to outgrow the original spec for the lesswrong.com discussion functionality. Plenty of discussions from previous threads were not strictly related to the most recent chapter, and I can think of a few such threads I'd like to start, but I'm holding off because I know that as soon as a new chapter is posted, all past threads will be made obsolete by the creation of a new discussion page.

What are everyone's feelings about putting some dedicated forum software on a subdomain of hpmor.com?

I do know that these discussions are responsible for a significant percentage of Less Wrong's traffic, and obviously I don't know what the actual statistics are, but I do know that all my Less Wrong binge sessions have been instigated by links from commenters (which would still be made on external forums) or by links from the Author's Notes (which are not part of Less Wrong) or by other causes, none of which were related to my posting in the MoR discussions here.

So unless raw pageviews and user accounts are very important to this advertisement-free site, I think it's at least possible that Less Wrong might not be adversely affected by these discussions moving to a closely related external site. But again, I don't know any relevant statistics, and there may be a lot of considerations I haven't thought of, so please don't crucify me if this was a blasphemous suggestion.

Nice job.

I may get around to making a "better" off-line version. At the very least, I've added it to my list of app ideas! It has a slightly better chance than some of my ideas of getting done since it's not too complex to make...