msluyter

60 ms·

541.
by msluyter 15y ago
Well, it's arguable whether public education is a public good. Wikipedia says: Law enforcement, streets, libraries, museums, and education are commonly misclassified as public goods, but they are technically classified in economic terms
542.
by msluyter 15y ago
Just curious... not that I'm going to do this. Couldn't this be easily gamed by having one person in a group do the challenge first and then broadcast the question to the rest of the group to analyze at leisure prior to taking the quiz?
543.
by msluyter 15y ago
As a developer ages, and finds it harder and harder to switch technologies, at some point, he or she is considered hooked for the rest of their natural lives to some technology — Java or C++ or the Facebook API say — that they can be expec
544.
by msluyter 15y ago
If said service requires passwords to all of my accounts, then, no, for reasons others have mentioned. But what about a slightly different model: Panic Button service makes deals with Facebook, Google, & other big players[1] which creat
545.
by msluyter 15y ago
I work at a company that currently provides a 32bit version of Windows 7 (the reasons are somewhat unclear.) But the bottom line is that we have the 3gb max addressable memory problem. When I have eclipse, outlook, chrome, various other dev
546.
by msluyter 15y ago
That's funny. As I was reading the slides, I was thinking about just how unconfident (in the sense of the presentation) most Java appears to me. I'm thinking specifically of the messily nested try/catch/finally blocks needed when creating a
547.
by msluyter 15y ago
I work in a very heavy database environment, and it's interesting. Nobody here ever talks about "left" vs. "right" joins. We also don't use ansi syntax (oracle), so for a typical outer join, we'll do either: select * from foo f, ba
548.
by msluyter 15y ago
Ahhh, idle speculation... Re: flying cars -- I think that even if all technical problems were resolved, an economic/legal problem would remain. In a car, if you crash, the externality is usually limited to the cars around you -- other drive
549.
by msluyter 15y ago
I love my 13" macbook air; screen size seems fine for development for me, though I do have to alt-tab to toggle apps a lot. It seems plenty fast enough (doing rails development). I also have the 128GB hard drive. I don't use this for photos
550.
by msluyter 15y ago
"Mostly easy" was probably a bad way of putting it. Perhaps a better way would be that, at the outset, some students can handle mathematical challenges, even when they require hard work and perseverance; after a while, a positive feedback l
551.
by msluyter 15y ago
IMHO, the tl;dr here is "math is hard." I do feel like math is the sticking point. At my school, it wasn't intro programming courses that weeded out so many CS students, it was sophomore level discrete math. That class had a 50+% failure ra
552.
by msluyter 15y ago
Fair enough. I'll check it out.
553.
by msluyter 15y ago
I guess I've been corrupted by working in a heavily database oriented environment, and further corrupted by the fact that it's Oracle, but for most of our own use cases, plain SQL is preferable to this. We'll probably have to run it ad hoc
554.
by msluyter 15y ago
This is a popular theme these days. I think the college education used to serve several purposes: a) serving the Liberal (big L) ideal of creating the sort of well rounded, educated, informed citizen upon which democracy depends, b) vocatio
555.
by msluyter 15y ago
a) I don't know why "real-world problems in web applications and operations" aren't also "engineering problems." b) I think you've just described about 99% of software developers. Few are doing meaty "algorithm" work. Most are just gluing t
556.
by msluyter 15y ago
I read a lot of economics and policy blogs (Marginal Revolution, Felix Salmon, Brad DeLong, etc...) and have come to the conclusion that the macro side of economics is still so in its infancy that it's can barely be called scientific. Wha
557.
by msluyter 15y ago
Well, clearly, in the anarcho-capitalist utopia envisioned by ryandickherber, you would go to the private justice authorities of your choice and get a ruling in your favor by presenting evidence that you never download child porn. An empty
558.
by msluyter 15y ago
Really nice. Can anyone comment on the architecture/stack used to create this, esp. with regard to the front end?
559.
by msluyter 15y ago
My answer to question 1) would be, "are you happy doing what you're currently doing?" If the answer is "yes," then it might not be worthwhile unless you enjoy it for its own sake. I'm older than you and learning rails just for fun. Perhaps
560.
by msluyter 15y ago
Thanks for making this available. I've been working on learning rails off and on over the past couple of weeks and will look through these.
561.
by msluyter 15y ago
It doesn't have the trinary options of "back support that jabs into your back like a knife" or "slightly less jabby but still painful" or "nothing." It doesn't have the steel bar at the front of the seat that cuts off leg circulation if you
562.
by msluyter 15y ago
A while ago I setup the Apple Mail app (forgot whether it was via pop3 or whatnot) to download new gmail messages, which more or less works as a way of replicating your gmail. But I often simply forget to run Mail, since I never have any ot
563.
by msluyter 15y ago
Steelcase Leap, no headrest -- it's not bad. Better than an Aeron. I'm curious to hear if anyone uses the Humanscale Freedom chair.
564.
by msluyter 15y ago
You've touched on a need I've often felt as well. Frankly, I enjoy debating politics and would enjoy doing it here on HN if it weren't for the fact that I've mostly internalized a !politics filter, which there seems have fairly strong conse
565.
by msluyter 15y ago
I like Krugman, but a Krugman editorial is the epitome of the sort of topic HN should avoid, imho.
566.
by msluyter 15y ago
I also dislike the Aeron. I have a Leap and it's not bad. I've never had a chair that's felt perfect. I'm curious if anyone out there has tried the Humanscale Freedom chair with a headrest?
567.
by msluyter 15y ago
First, unfortunately it's too late for me to go back and fix the typos above (HN + iPhone = errors), so my apologies for that. And second, I agree with you. It's not that I checked it that often in any event (if they really wanted to preven
568.
by msluyter 15y ago
My worked started blocking it, which totally pisse me off at first. And when I get home, there are so many status updates I can barely follow them. So I mostly stopped using it, and you know what? I hardly notice.
569.
by msluyter 15y ago
I'd like some actual empirical evidence that saying "this is tricky" or "this is difficult" actually de-motivates ("turns off") students. It might, but I can also plausibly imagine the reverse. What if you say "oh, this will be easy and fun
570.
by msluyter 15y ago
This is also Marshall Brain's idea: http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm IIRC, he advocates a 25k stipend for all americans, which incidentally, given ~300M people would cost 7.5 trillion. That's approximately double the entire

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