reuven

51 ms·

481.
by reuven 13y ago
I actually think that Obama's generally an OK president. (Not that I agree with many of his policies, including those having to do with Guantanamo and drones, mind you.) But I still think it was kind of weird for him to get the Nobel
482.
by reuven 13y ago
I don't think that the Peace Prize is only meant for people who have made tangible changes in the amount of violence in the world. It's also a carrot that you can dangle in front of people to reward them for taking risks in the i
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by reuven 13y ago
First of all, a huge number of people are nominated each year for the Nobel Peace Prize. So the fact that Snowden was nominated doesn't really surprise me; I'm guessing that many activists from around the world are nominated. The
484.
by reuven 13y ago
Yes, I meant that GoDaddy and PayPal should apologize. Twitter should look into what happened in this specific case, and somehow (if the posting is right) return the username to its original owner. But there does seem to be something terrib
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by reuven 13y ago
The problem here is that Coursera is a for-profit company. If they were an educational non-profit, my guess is that they could find a way to somehow work with individual citizens of these countries. But the sanctions are in place to stop
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by reuven 13y ago
Yes, absolutely. The guy has given a clear and convincing story of what happened. I'm sure that it would be pretty easy for someone on Twitter's security team (assuming that they have one) to verify that the username was taken wh
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by reuven 13y ago
Social Security numbers are not ID numbers, as other posters have written. Other countries (including Israel, where I live) do have ID numbers, and they are used universally -- by governments, employers, credit-card companies, and the like.
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by reuven 13y ago
> Completely disagree, what you describe is more "Software Engineering" than "Programming". I think that a huge proportion of programming is about understanding and creating abstractions. But hey, I was brainwashed b
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by reuven 13y ago
> People should learn two programming languages at the same time I find this completely impractical. Programming is hard for people to learn. They're juggling all sorts of new concepts and ideas. It's hard for them to rememb
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by reuven 13y ago
I've been teaching programming to many people, for many years. The majority of my students are experienced programmers, but no small number are new to programming beyond very simple stuff. I've found that Python has a number of
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by reuven 13y ago
I don't live in the US (although I'm a citizen), I don't smoke pot, and never have. But I find this to be a completely fascinating set of circumstances, and one which is leading to confusion and a lack of standardized rule o
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by reuven 13y ago
I completely agree. I used to have systems upon systems for remembering passwords, but I inevitably had accounts with the same password, and remembering them was impossible after a while. I started to use 1Password (for my Mac) about two y
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by reuven 13y ago
Thanks for the excellent, in-depth explanations. I think that the TAL episodes were great at exposing the fact that there are patent trolls, and that there are problems with the current patent system. But your descriptions and analysis do
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by reuven 13y ago
In case anyone missed it, This American Life had two great shows about patent trolls, including Intellectual Ventures: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/w... http://www.thi
495.
by reuven 13y ago
I'm sure that it all helped. But I definitely remember asking, on several occasions, why we would ever want to use radians rather than degrees, and why they seemed to be in such weird increments. And no one ever really told me. The a
496.
by reuven 13y ago
I think that it'll speak volumes, not just to the bereaved parents, but also to the employees of Office Max, if the CEO were to demonstrate a true, deep apology. Corporate culture is an important thing. This is the sort of thing that&
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by reuven 13y ago
I'm guessing that companies are using all sorts of things, including newspaper articles, to be able to identify target markets. That doesn't bother me too much; once information is online, there's very little you can do to s
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by reuven 13y ago
I'm totally OK with "do what you love," so long as it's followed by, "So long as you can afford to do so." I often tell my children that I'm incredibly fortunate to work in a field that I love, and for whi
499.
by reuven 13y ago
If this is your first freelancing client ever, then my guess is that just getting the client, and being able to demonstrate that you were able to deliver, is probably a good first step. Your goal, in such a case, is to convince the client
500.
by reuven 13y ago
Yes, one of the problems with China seems not only to be that the party is corrupt, and encourages corruption, but that it is immune from investigation and punishment. I read a book this summer about the Chinese Communist Party ( http:&#x2F
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by reuven 13y ago
When I was working at HP, just after graduating from college, the CEO (Lew Platt) announced that he would be stressing work-life balance among employees. He specifically said that he wanted to accommodate working mothers, and especially si
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by reuven 13y ago
I got excellent grades in high-school math. I took a year of math in college. I knew how to calculate with radians, but never understood their basis until viewing this animation, despite asking people on a number of occasions what the b
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by reuven 13y ago
Funny you should mention that... the company in question was a large (by Israeli standards) newspaper, with lots of popular sites. But I don't believe that they have any personalization, or that it's active for any meaningful num
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by reuven 13y ago
I teach a lot of programming classes (mostly Ruby and Python), and it never ceases to surprise me to discover how many people are still working in Tcl. It would seem that Tcl really took over a lot of the embedded world, such that companie
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by reuven 13y ago
I met with a company in 2011 that was using Vignette, and was considering creating their own CMS. I said something like, "I know that the really old version used to work on Tcl, but I assume that you're long past that." I wa
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by reuven 13y ago
If you're interested in North Korea (and I find myself increasingly fascinated by it, perhaps because it's so different from anything I've ever experienced), you should read Nothing to Envy ( http://nothingtoenvy.co
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by reuven 13y ago
You can use Unlocator ( http://unlocator.com/ ) to get around it. I've been using this for a number of months, and highly recommend it. (And for now, at least, it's free!) This is a practical workaround for what I
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The Strange Case of the "F Gwenifill" Tweets, Solved(slate.com)
2 points by reuven 13y ago|0 comments
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by reuven 13y ago
Oh, I should have been clearer about this: When I say "prepare," I don't mean, "write everything down that you want to say." I agree, that doesn't work well for many people, including me. Rather, I meant that
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by reuven 13y ago
I have been speaking professionally for a number of years now. In a given week, I'm probably speaking 2-4 full days (minus lunch and breaks), teaching various programming languages and technologies. I also give talks at conferences a

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