One thing that you can always depend on the HN crowd to do when considering Khan Academy is to only consider how it works for them personally.
The HN crowd is made up of intelligent people who tend to learn things on their own. We're autodidacts. For people like us, Kahn Academy is wonderful. As a general educational solution, it's going to fail just as badly as every other general educational solution out there.
It's not because it's a bad idea. It's because there is no generalizable educational solution. Until we're comfortable with the idea that education is personal and we allow everyone to gain that personalized education, we're going to continue waffle around with solutions that provide some hope and excitement for a year or two before burning out.
> As for what broke the author's disk, I don't know but I always considered the "long track"-trick a bit of a fragile beast, but that can very well just be in my head.
It could just be the magnetic data on the floppy disk decaying. I had many old games on 720k disk that I found had corrupted data when I tried them 15 years later.
The great thing is that one now only has to explain to people to use UTF-8 in all cases, which is preferable to having to fool around with a lot of language-specific encodings.
And it helps that almost all editors, these days, also default to UTF-8 encoding. So you can just copy/paste special characters and it works...
I wonder how much of the documented improvement is placebo effect?
Even if it didn't directly improve focus it seems like it would be a great placebo. Nine volt batteries are probably commonly perceived as being powerful. They are used in stun guns, for example. Next, you apparently experience unusual side effects after it's applied, further removing any doubt that something unique is happening to you.
I'm also not an expert, but we've had cross border copyright enforcement for over 100 years with the Bern Convention. The UK will recognise and enforce USA copyright that happens in the UK.
Facebook has to take down DMCA requests to stay with the DMCA and the safe harbour rules. However that's a US law. I don't know if non-USA people can invoke it.
It is going to take more then some article I read online to get me to strap electrodes to my skull. I am surprised at how many people are willing to try this despite the lack of evidence / research.
If I wanted to increase my productivity, I would start by not surfing hackernews. Eventually, I might move on to "home made electric chair for my brain."
As others have pointed out elsewhere, Facebook is in it's 8th year, Google was in it's 5th year. Google has a much faster growth attributable to larger revenues in the beginning than Facebook, percentage growth seems to be the same.
Occasionally, I have an irresistible urge to strangle everyone who uses Unicode and UTF-8 (or other UTF encodings) interchangeably.
UNICODE is a good thing because it provides a codepoint for every character that we care about, instead of having a 256-character subset for every groups of languages and needing complicated software to puzzle out how to convert from one subset to the other. Unicode allows fantastic stuff such as upper/lowercasing text including all the weird letters that you previously had to special-case.
ASCII used to be a good thing because it allowed people to ship around basic English and Cobol code without any worries, but is actually pretty evil because people from Anglosaxon countries assume that every other bit of text is composed of English and Cobol.
Having a notion of ENCODINGS is useful if you occasionally get bits of text that are neither English nor Cobol. You still needed different encodings for different groups of languages, and arcane mechanisms to provide hints on which encoding is meant, at least if you got non-English bits of text. The very notion of an Encoding scares the people who used to think the world consists of English and Cobol.
UTF-8 is a very reasonable encoding that can be used to represent all of Unicode while being Ascii-compatible. Hence it is a sane choice as a default encoding for people who are scared of having to think about encodings. Because UTF-8 is not the only encoding out there, Unicode-compatible programs accept Unicode text in many other encodings, including those that cannot represent the full range of Unicode and are only a good choice for some people but not others.
tl;dr: non-UTF-8 text can (and should) still be read as unicode codepoints. Ignoring the >=40% of texts out there or saying that they're "not Unicode" doesn't help anybody.
Honest question: aren't ACTA and the like all about cross-border copyright enforcement? I can't say I'm an expert, but...
Note that it's your friend claiming copyright infringement, with an exclusive license in hand. Legally, the question is whether you can actually give an exclusive license after uploading a photo to Facebook (the ToS has been challenged and changed on similar issues), but that is not between your friend and Facebook.
Google "facebook dmca": Facebook will happily take pretty much any page down (e.g. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101007/01244411320/facebo...). Do you really think that Facebook is going to risk a court case where it has to prove (on its own dime!) that you actually did have copyright on the image when you uploaded it, risking its DMCA safe harbor status?
I am a human, a male, an American, a Caucasian, a PhD, a statistician, and a Risk Management Quantitative Analyst (level II), in broadly-decreasing levels of specificity. The term "programmer" is ridiculously broad, the same way that "weight lifter" is ridiculously broad. No one uses the term to mean anything more than it's broad definition nowadays. You don't see job advertisements for a "programmer" without further clarification as to what type of programming. Usually the term is qualified as "C++ programmer", or "SAS programmer", or "AMD chipset programmer". As the OP correctly noted, academic postings are typically referred to as "computer scientists", and even then the job posting will specify whether they're looking for an algorithms specialist or FPGA experts.
We use the term "programmer" as a simple way to classify. People are typically able to quickly determine whether an article/job/discussion is appropriate for their programming skills, so I don't see any particular problem with the continued use of the word.
> I wonder if consumers (as opposed to power users) would still pirate.
The practise will just move back towards meatspace. The people in a social group who have the know-how and access will pass the resulting content further into the group. Once it is a file on a local disk it can spread by the old fashioned methods rather easily.
On a loosely similar note, many (some?) countries can prosecute their citizens if they break law outside of the country, despite "it" being legal there. So in theory, you can be put to jail for possessing marijuana when visiting Netherlands. The "in theory" is important as there is no one that could report it back to your home country. I believe this exists to prevent from import of polygamy and such, but it's still interesting.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are more people looking at the effects and applications of quantum mechanics in biology than there are people who split their time between systems programming and rails development.
Modern ECT would be performed on only the right side of your brain, with one electrode on the temple and one slightly offcenter at the top of your head.
Your conclusion does not hold: making something retroactively legal is vastly different than making something retroactively illegal. The first happens all the time and is the entire point of a full pardon. In the US the latter is unconstitutional and the former explicitly constitutional.
Besides which, your approach assumes the law that allows for chemical castration because he was gay was a legitimate application of state power. I maintain that it was not.
Burp is fantastic. The free version is great, the paid version (which is very cheap) is even better. All our developers use burp to catch traffic between their development simulators and the testbed for debugging.
I disagree with the three main points that this article expounds (and I find all three arrogant and patronising).
The first thing I disagree with is the idea that programmers are not all 'programmers'.
My Dad is a civil engineer to everyone except other civil engineers and a guy who drives a truck is a driver as much as a guy who drives a rally car. What's the problem?
Every term especially those of specialised subjects has both general and specific forms.
It is neither insulting nor a gross simplification to describe yourself as a programmer to a non-programmer despite the fact that few of us would refer to ourselves with that exact term when discussing our work with another programmer.
Programmer → games programmer → graphics programmer → shader programmer: all programmers.
Programmer → server programmer → database programmer → Non-SQL (Couch DB) specialist: all programmers.
What would the shader programmer call herself when talking to the Couch DB programmer? Would they even know what the other did? Why does it matter that they have to go back up the chain to find the most specific term that they both understand.
Secondly, I disagree with the idea that we are not doing the same fundamental job. The word programmer does not 'cover a stupendously large spectrum of abilities and skill levels' that's a programmer with a superiority complex asserting his own status and the complexity of his career. Both the guy who designs the hardware and the guy who comes out to fix a broken socket at the back of your unit is called a TV Engineer as they are both dealing with the internals of a TV.
Thirdly I disagree that our job is difficult and therefore we are somehow superior—an idea, sadly, that this article reeks of. We deal with data and algorithms that manipulate data. Its not that difficult, which is why so many people do it for a living. If it paid more I'm sure many of us would be dealing with Tar McAdam and telling the world how extremely difficult it was to get it perfectly flat.
How about none of the above? Directly to the CEO is the only thing that makes sense. And the CEO had better be focused on Product (or Service) Management above all else, and all those other things should report INTO the PM organization.
Engineering? Implementation of PM strategy.
Marketing? Communicating the PM message.
Sales? Delivering the product spec'd and built by PM.
The author is probably right that there is an issue somewhere, but since I've been using SteerMouse (http://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/) I haven't had any mouse annoyances anymore.
Not sure what it changed though; I thought it was the acceleration curve but for all I know it could be replacing the entire OS X mouse driver, laggy code and all.
