Irregardless

It's doable, and CS50 is a great place to start. You'll know whether or not you're cut out for it once you get to the more difficult homework assignments. Don't give up just because you can't solve them immediately though, it will probably take some Googling since on-campus students have access to TAs and classmates for help when they get stuck.

Learning by doing is usually the best way to get the material to stick though. If you can work on your own side projects or apply what you've learned at work, that might help you progress a lot faster.

Giving out the emails associated with their accounts is a really bad idea. Having them indexed by Google is even worse, hence the phishing attempts.

Wow, this company went through YC? I hope they only invested bitcoins...

It's one thing to lose people's bitcoins or randomly delay/cancel transactions (both of which Coinbase has been accused of). People know that bitcoin is still young and the companies supporting it are inexperienced, so they expect that. But exposing personal info and purchase history goes beyond any definition of 'unacceptable' or 'incompetent'. Over in the Reddit thread, they're already linking Facebook accounts with illicit transactions.

Users from Bitcointalk told Coinbase a week ago that they were starting to get phishing emails, which means someone has been mining this data for a while now. Yet there it is, still available through a simple Google search.

Then that makes your choice of name very interesting, because the conventional meaning of 'moot' is 'irrelevant' (unless you're British).

Something seems fishy here.

Interesting to see the creator of 4chan working on a more conventional forum platform...

Because the exchanges are immature and inherently untrustworthy. Icbit is no exception:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50817.640

Like I said, bitcoin is more of a toy than a currency. If I want to play around with fake money, I'll join a virtual stock exchange.

I'm sticking to my price target of $2 by late June/early July[1].

Still no sign of adoption by any popular retailers, the majority of demand is coming from speculators, and the exchanges are getting slower every day (MtGox is down as I write this and the queue to open an account is several days deep).

At this point, BitCoin is still more of a toy than a currency.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5324722

> Before BigBelly, trash collectors had to clear out each can three times a day. Now they do so three times a week.

Living in center city Philadelphia, I can confidently say there are a couple unintended reasons these things may require less emptying: First, they're often so dirty that no one would want to grab the handle and open the door to throw trash in (I avoid them at all costs myself). Who wants to touch a trashcan even when it's clean? Second, if you're willing to grab the trash-encrusted handle and open the door, they're frequently jammed (or locked?) shut. On the few occasions where I was forced to use them because there were no other trashcans in sight, they were difficult or impossible to open.

So what do people do? They throw their trash on the ground, or they find a nearby trashcan that doesn't require contact to use. It's not unusual to see bags of trash sitting by these things with random garbage scattered around or on top of them.

After reading her full explanation of the "incident" and the PyCon code of conduct, I have to disagree completely with what Adria did.

Two guys were making some silly, completely non-sexist jokes between themselves that mixed 'dongles' and 'forking' with a bit of innuendo. Despite the fact that they weren't directed at her -- or anyone, for that matter -- she took personal offense and decided the best course of action was to publicly shame them (picture and all).

Her reaction was far more immature than the humor that triggered it. If you're 30-something years old and still can't handle overhearing a bit of lighthearted middle school humor, it's probably time to move into a cave and cancel your internet service.

> Google Now is one of the most exciting pieces of technology I’ve seen in a long time. It’s solving problems that couldn’t be solved four years ago.

Showing people sports scores and traffic reports before they ask for them? Well, at least that gives us an accurate picture of your perspective (or lack thereof). The Galaxy Nexus is the best phone I've ever used or owned, but I couldn't possibly care less about Now. It's usually known as "that annoying thing that keeps popping up in my notification bar".

Everyone in the IT industry understands the frustration of trying to help people who are unwilling to change and insist on repeating history. Most of us don't give up quite as easily though...

Yes, much like every other food on the planet, grains do contain certain compounds that can be harmful when isolated and consumed in large quantities. Did you know fruits and vegetables contain arsenic?

Despite what the Paleo crowd would have you believe, phytates do have health benefits (like fighting cancer and inflammation). And even if they didn't, soaking and cooking grains reduces their final content of phytic acid. Unless you have a very poorly balanced diet that consists almost entirely of grains, phytates are of no concern at all [1].

[1] http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/QAA400758/Are-Phytates-Bad-or-Go...

> My main motivation in writing the article was to try to explain why grains so dominate the food landscape: because of their ability to deliver raw caloric energy. I think that's an interesting story regardless of whether or not it influences what you choose to eat.

That's all well and good as long as you give the full story, but you've forsaken the anti-grain diet fads while parroting their mantra almost verbatim. Namely, the idea that grains are a primary food source only because they're an easy source of calories. What about the fact that they're also rich in essential nutrients and have numerous documented health benefits?

When you say this:

> fruits and vegetables are generally healthier to eat than grains.

And then follow it up with this:

> Around 12,000 years ago, a group of Neolithic humans conducted an experiment that forever changed the course of human development. They left behind the way they had eaten for countless generations and moved to a diet that helped them face new problems and evolve in new ways. I believe it’s possible for this generation to do the same.

It's clear you're trying to persuade people to eat fewer grains. Don't get me wrong, I love to re-examine common knowledge we all take for granted as much as anyone, but there are good, scientific reasons people say "eat lots of whole grains" and it seems very odd to condemn them without taking those reasons into account.

> Eating fewer grain products is not synonymous with popular diets like low-carb or gluten-free. It needn’t be borne by commitment to a food movement like paleo.

Sure, it doesn't need to be related to the Paleo diet, but that's still where it all stems from. It's the same as any other fad diet or pseudoscience: Come up with some reasonable-sounding claims that take advantage of poor scientific awareness (e.g. 10,000 years isn't enough time for humans to adapt to eating grains, so we should eat like cave men instead), then make millions of dollars promoting your diet and selling books to your unquestioning followers.

There's a common sentiment among Paleo zealots that they finally need to distance themselves from the irrational underpinnings that started the whole fad (see here[1] for a FAQ by the 'Paleo diet' inventor). The problem arises when they go searching for scientific evidence to support their grain bashing, and then we end up with statements like this:

> It can stem from the simple proposition that fruits and vegetables are generally healthier to eat than grains. That’s an argument I’ll cover more deeply in later posts.

Oh, how convenient. Save the crux of the argument for another time. We'll all be patiently holding our breath.

[1] http://thepaleodiet.com/paleo-diet-faq/

Sorry, should have made it more clear -- all of their billing is hourly (although they'd probably be much better off switching to daily or weekly).

In your $10 million of value example, what would you say is a reasonable percentage of that to charge? It would be a bit more difficult to measure, but I think this firm could probably bill on a value-added basis as well.

> It's about how you can quickly iterate an application using StackMob

Then the title should say that.

If you dupe people into reading your article by using a misleading headline, you should be held accountable for it.

Maybe the title should be modified to better fit the content of the post then? If I wrote an article called "How to build a Lamborghini clone for $2,500" but demonstrated how to put a look-alike body kit on an old Honda Civic, you would be justified in telling me that I didn't accomplish my stated intention.

In the conclusion, you say:

> What’s next? Well you can extend your app by adding payment options, email notifications, user feedback. . .

Aren't those core features of AirBnB? That's like saying "Next, you build the entire application." So you really haven't built a clone at all, you've just built an empty shell with a tiny fraction of the functionality.

If you ever need to move a file of any kind from one location to another, Android makes it easier than iOS. The fact that my grandmother's cat prefers Meow apps over the ability to transfer files doesn't change that.

Which phone are you using? I have a Nexus with the stock 4.1 (Jelly Bean) keyboard and it corrects everything as expected -- proximity errors, misspellings, contractions, hyphenation, capitalization, etc.

Android also shows you a list of potential matches for what you typed, and you can add new words to the dictionary on the fly just by selecting the word you've entered from the list. Not to mention it only takes a single backspace to undo a bad autocorrect on Android.

> And regarding third party keyboards, how about Google do a good keyboard that doesn't require installing a third party app? It seems like an important enough feature to do right instead of abdicating responsibility to others.

No keyboard will please 100% of smartphone users. The only way to make everyone happy is to let them pick the keyboard that suits them best.

Autocorrect is one of the most common complaints I see about the iPhone. Whether it's professional reviewers or normal users, there seems to be a consensus that the stock Android keyboard and autocorrect have now surpassed their iOS counterparts.

I'm not sure what your friends were doing or which phones they had, but as others have said, Android at least offers you the ability to switch keyboards if the stock keyboard doesn't fit your personal typing style. If the stock iOS keyboard doesn't work for you, tough luck. No keyboard will work for 100% of the population, so the ability to customize it is a clear winner in this situation.

Default will depend on which phone you get, but there's no shortage of great free ones in the market (Astro and ES File Explorer, for example).

Also, Android phones work just like a USB drive if you want to drag and drop files then access them from another computer later. You can store anything you want and create your own folders, unlike the iPhone where you can only sync certain media types through iTunes. That's what I was referring to with the file manager thing, but I'm not sure how to say that succinctly...

There's no doubt Apple is playing catch-up with Android these days. Siri was their only real innovation in the last 3 iPhones, and Google leapfrogged it within months.

Meanwhile, Apple is still trying to implement a decent notification system, their auto-correct is garbage, there's no file manager, you can't set a default browser (or default anything, for that matter), there are no widgets, no app shortcuts, no custom keyboards, managing settings is a nightmare, and you can't side-load apps without jailbreaking. That last one is especially bad thanks to their cryptic app approval rules and the fact that their app store is the least intuitive to navigate -- if what you want isn't in the top 10 and you don't know the exact name, forget about it.

But hey, at least you get the privilege of spending a fortune on chargers and adapters. And other people with iPhones will think you're cool for owning one, right?

Ringing in the new era with a dud.

Why does it need to fit in the palm of your hand when it will most likely sit on a shelf its entire life? And who thought there was demand for a $1,000 mid-range gaming console? A cheap, low-performance device could at least be justified as an emulator/HTPC if it couldn't serve as a dedicated current-gen gaming console (which the Piston can't do either).

If this is any preview of what's to come from the "Steam Box" lineup, consider my excitement totally extinguished.

Yeah, it makes perfect sense to hand your address and bitcoins to anyone with a half-finished Bootstrap website, zero contact information, and zero information about their payment/delivery process.

Gaining trust is key if you want people to give you personal and financial information, and the 30 second Bootstrap website really isn't inspiring any confidence -- especially the visible seams in your pasted together background, the complete lack of form validation, and all the blank links at the bottom.

WoW has similarly minor downtime most weeks, but the point still stands: MMO players are willing to tolerate significantly longer and more frequent interruptions due to the nature of the games and the architecture necessary to support them.

I don't know how much simulation is being done server-side or how resource intensive it is, but if the Sim City of 10+ years ago was possible without it, I'm pretty sure EA could've done this one without it as well. Smells like an excuse to me.

Server woes are a necessary evil with MMOs, and people buy the game knowing they'll have to deal with some amount of downtime due to maintenance, overcrowding or just plain growing pains.

Try telling FPS players that their game will be unavailable every Tuesday morning for 6-12 hours and they'll probably riot -- that's standard downtime in the MMO world though.

> You aren't going to pirate Sim City 5.

I'm tempted to believe that due to the simulation grunt work being done server-side. But people also said the same thing about WoW and Starcraft II, yet you can easily play either of those for free with fully functioning multiplayer (just not on Battle.net).

> There's also the question of preserving gaming history. As we saw with THQ last month, publishers aren't immortal. They can die, and had THQ implemented always-online DRM in Darksiders II, all copies of that game might've died with it when the rights to the series weren't bought up by another publisher.

That's the part that concerns me the most. I still install (and play) lots of old games on every computer I own -- King's Quest VI, C&C: Red Alert, Worms: Armageddon, etc. And who could live without the console classics like Goldeneye or Ocarina of Time? All you have to do is pull out the disc (or cartridge), pop it in, and play.

We still don't know exactly what will happen with this new generation of games that consumers are merely "renting" from companies like EA, but piracy seems to be our only guaranteed method of preserving them. What happens if you want to play Battlefield 3 again 10 years from now? You might be able to access it IFF:

   1. Your account is still in good standing (not banned)
   2. EA still exists
   3. EA has decided to maintain support for Origin
   4. EA has decided to maintain support for Battlefield 3
   5. You remember your PW or can prove to EA you're the account owner

There's not much history to base this speculation on yet, but what little we do have shows that that's an extremely unlikely scenario. If there's any chance to preserve the games we're playing now, it's probably up to us to make it happen.

The same entities who would be responsible if engines started randomly falling out of cars: automakers.

If driving becomes a feature of the car itself and that feature fails in a way that causes and accident, there's no other answer. Maybe they'll find some kind of loophole where the self-driving feature is only covered for X years under a warranty? I don't think it would be too far-fetched for them to argue that the sensors for automated driving can deteriorate over time, at which point the consumer's insurer would become responsible for damages caused by any failure.

That being said, it might be in our best interest (or Google's?) to shoulder some of the liability if this issue would otherwise be a major hurdle preventing the adoption of self-driving technology by automakers.