ahomescu1

Huge 24 fan here (watched all seasons), I loved the show but that doesn't mean I support torture. I always found the following things ridiculous (and pretty unrealistic):

1) The ridiculous urgency of it, where they're running against the clock to "stop the bomb" or something like that. These kinds of scenarios are highly unlikely in real life, IMHO.

2) That Jack Bauer always got away with all the things he did. AFAIK, he did not spend even a single second inside a US prison (although he did come pretty close a few times).

I always looked at the show as fiction (like a superhero show), not something to be emulated in real life. I really hope most of its viewers looked at it the same way.

> ... or you can skip talking about your favorite framework and point to theory like logic, computational complexity, data structures, lambda calculus, relational algebra, and other stuff that actually matters. He already took the first step, which is playing around with some programming.

Yes, exactly, that was my first thought too. I'd add things like microprocessor architecture (like the von Neumann architecture, the cache hierarchy and how memory is structured), Turing-completeness and Turing Machines (which probably fit into your "computational complexity category"), programming language design and implementation (including things like parsing and grammars), and concepts like object-oriented and functional programming.

For example, a lot of programmers struggle with C, until they read about computer/processor architectures and realize how the processor accesses memory.

An alternative is to offer it, but mark it clearly as "incomplete" or "alpha" (which is what one of the original complaints was about). Versioning it would be even better (say, call this "emoji 0.1").

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University, about Harvard (known then as New College):

Although never formally affiliated with any denomination, the early College primarily trained Congregation­alist and Unitarian clergy.

Also notable is this list (note how many Ivies have been around since then): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Colonial_Colleges

> A few of us would be fantastically wealthy and powerful, but even they would be limited by living in a violent world populated by uneducated and over-exploited masses incapable of doing things like getting an education and finding their own passions that lead to innovation, invention, and creativity.

I'd like to point out that Harvard University precedes the United States by 140 years (1636 -> 1776), and the government before 1776 wasn't exactly "for the people".

> Only downside: more memory needed, but nobody except the embedded guys care anymore.

As an Android user, I care. Android needs 2GB of memory to run the apps that iOS only needs 1GB for (running Android on a tablet with 1GB has been painful for me).

> I have seen many PhD students, including myself, arrive with half-baked ideas that go nowhere.

Another way to look at it is that failure is a part of learning, and chasing those half-baked ideas can build experience (by finding out what doesn't work).

> In America we deplore things like [...], rule of law, [...]

Is that supposed to be in there, or did you mean something else?

That's an idealistic view of education. In today's "industrial education system", where each teacher/professor teaches classes of 30-100, I don't think each student gets the attention/discussion time they need. You still wind up doing most of the work yourself (at least I did).

My own practical experience (from looking both at myself and many others) is almost the opposite. I think one of the great fallacies of modern education is the idea that you can take an idiot (for lack of a more appropriate/PC word), put them through school and they'll come out a genius. IMHO, practice shows otherwise.

> Life is so much more and education benefits much of it. I could not write nearly as well, use mathematics, understand science, understand art, understand humanity, be as creative, etc. etc. without the years I spent studying those things.

You could study and understand all of those without going to college, given the right resources (like books and time). In my opinion, it is a person's intelligence and curiosity that matter, not four years in an institution or a degree (I say this from a the inside of the educational system, currently pursuing a PhD myself).

Question already came up a few days ago in a different thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8672761

> Can someone TL;DR the problem with systemd?

> It seems she couldn't pay it back, because later she says "my credit is wrecked".

Earlier in the article she says "I cashed in on my excellent credit, took out cards, and used them to pay rent and buy food because it would be six months before I could receive my first unemployment compensation check."

> systemd replaces a large number of startup and utility programs (specifically: sysvinit, pm-utils, inetd, acpid, syslog, watchdog, cron and atd). It also adds new daemons for logs, logins, locales, hostnames and a few other services.

> But there are other objections from people who think systemd is too big in scope or too controlling or focussed on one technology or another or... some kind of conspiratorial trap or something (http://boycottsystemd.org). I think these arguments are a little hyperbolic since systemd isn't actually a single monolithic system and is really an overarching project to update a lot of major system utilities.

The problems start when those replacement system utilities become (more or less) tightly coupled, so if you want to change one of them (say, I want to use my own DHCP client) then you need to change all of them (and it's increasingly looking like you can't).

In short: it's taking over Linux userspace. It's slowly leading us to a point where systemd will be "the Linux middleware", and all apps (above it) and the kernel itself (under it) will not work without systemd.

Earlier submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8669913

Mailing list announcement: https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20141127.212941.f55acc...

> They haven't had one successful product in hardware yet.

Nexus 4 user here, have had it for 2 years and am pretty happy with it (I hear N5 is also pretty good).

Battery Saver mode is a new feature in Lollipop that does exactly what the name says. It turns on when battery life reaches 15%, or you can turn it on manually.

Not sure if what they advertise is just the vanilla Battery Saver from Lollipop, or a modified one.

Others consider programmers underpaid, even at these salaries. This makes some sense when considering that Google has a revenue of around $500k/employee (saw this number a while ago in a comment, don't remember exactly which one).

The title is ambiguous, I read it as "Google search is king of the US" and started wondering "huh?".

I think he/she means that companies like Google, Apple and Tesla are all US-based, not to mention crazy/niche stuff like Oculus. Europe-based high-profile tech companies (like Nokia and Skype) seem more like outliers than the norm. The US seems to be the "technology king", so to say (disclaimer: I'm not an American).

> However, the big fun is coming on Thursday, when the EU is due to rule over Google and politely requesting that Google splits off search from the rest of its business.

This doesn't seem to me the same as "splitting up Google", more like unbundling or splitting up products. For example, I can see them mandating that Android support other search engines in the launcher/Google Now.

What would that achieve? Most of the Google engineering is done in the US, and its main offices in Europe are Zurich and Dublin (I think). Worst case, Google will also move their datacenters out of EU countries.

> My preferred intervention would have been to nationalize the companies and fire all the executives.

...and replace them with politically-connected cronies? That's what usually happens for nationalizations.

Article says they're not using any American firms for the infrastructure. This just makes me wonder what companies are they using (Chinese maybe???), and why/how do they trust those people not to spy on them.

> I think that vesting direct power in him would likely lead to personality-driven polarization

That sounds exactly like the current system. A lot of people voted for/against Obama/Bush for similar reasons.

> Imagine Rush Limbaugh having the power to vote on behalf of millions of people.

If his vote is identical to what they'd vote on their own, what difference does it make?

> One of the biggest issues with this system would be that a rich company or individual could buy large blocks of votes on a particular issue.

Whereas now a rich company/individual can just buy a politician.

> Second, if you believe law should only punish us for actually hurting people and not potentially hurting them, then you are against speed limits.

Germany has roads without speed limits, and they're doing just fine.

> Third, taxes are not punishment any more than piracy is theft and abortion is murder.

When did I say "taxes are punishment"? I was responding to the idea that we should take away rich people's money to prevent them from having too much power, which I think is a terrible slippery slope. Direct quote from GP:

> Wealth taxes are about disarming everyone -- good and evil -- for the safety of us all, not about morality.

Edit:

> First, a pretty face, high IQ and physical strength do not translate into power the way, say, a hundred million dollars does. Sure you can hurt people if you're physically strong / attractive / smart, but not that many people.

They do if you go into politics or the military.