enry_straker

Sadly true.

Give me Shakespeare for tragedy, Shaw for wit and Wodehouse for light-hearted comedy with some bacardi and coke, and maybe an island in tbe caribbean any day. ( I prefer a warm bed for my nights though ;)

Wow. Such childish behavior.

To be so jealous of a dead guy that you would use his name in such a manner and to be such an attention seeker that you would dis-parage Aaron with one liners.

Pathetic.

Nice work, dude.

The simplicity of both the html and the js is neat - and, oh the colors are so sharp. it's a pleasure to play.

Though it might come across as 'dealing in absolutes,' Zed is making the broader point that when one starts learning programming, it's not good to put any book on a pedestal and blindly follow their style - without working through the code.

It's similar to literature where people tend to ascribe the word 'classic' and yet rarely bother to read, understand or appreciate them.

Your example of unsafe functions might work for you but might not be the best example in a book which is being revered as "the classic book on C" and which influenced almost every major language and book thereafter.

Tilting at windmills, don quixote?

You are damn lucky. It's a rare professor who focuses on the needs of the student at the expense of his own ego inflation.

This is not about enhancements but about the patentability and prior art of common concepts

Wow. Companies colluding with incompetent governments to tresspass on its citizens with impunity.

To those who knock groovy, just give it a try.

As a long time java user, i was very reluctant to learn groovy and it took grails for me to really tune into groovy. Now it's really hard for me to go back to java. :)

I also personally feel that static compilation is more of a marketing sop to the hard-core java crowd to help move them over to the dark side but what the hey, if it works, it's good for groovy.

Congrats, Holland. Way to go.

Hopefully this will spur europe to move forward, as a union, to enshrine net neutrality into law, and hopefully prod the US into action.

That is a sensible idea - but i would go one step further.

Ideally you want to learn about a potential candidate's design/coding/debugging/bug-fixing/testing skills. Github project collaboration over a week or so would go a long way towards that.

But you also want to see how well the potential employee communicates with other members of the team, on a day-to-day basis. Some Developers, even good developers, have strong opinions that might rub other employees the wrong way. The key is to look at how well they work as a team.

Having them spend a day or so onsite with your existing team is invaluable. You might also want to consider paying them a nominal amount for the amount of time they would spend on the project. That just adds a professional touch to the whole experience.

Apologies if this came across negetively.

My goal, at the time i started my company, was to build a really hard-core team. I am sure that is one of your goals too, aside from providing a really intensive training program for your participants.

I would suggest focusing on good habits and good attitude to learning and problem-solving and having fun in the process. Don't allow them to burn out short-term.

I used a similar approach when i wanted Windows internals programmers in the early 90's. I just called it a internal training program, though.

Irrespective of the number of hours put up, i still think a person new to rails will get a chance to pick up a lot of knowledge and be mentored in the proces - and is a good deal for collage kids.

Ruby Creator and chief Designer - Yukihiro Matsumoto Rails Creator and Maintainer - David Heinemeier Hansson

You have put into words my thoughts exactly.

To be sure, i am a bit of a woz fanboy, having lived through the 80's and poring over his work.

Though i don't begrudge Jobs the fame and fortune, i do think a lot of people overlook woz. To me, he is probably the single most influential pioneer in the history of personal computing.

I beg to differ.

When one first starts out, it's ok to just sit in front of an interpreter or a compiler and start trying out small programs, make mistakes, learn from them and go on.

But one vital quality of good developers is being able to read code, understand good code, borrow good coding habits and using them in your work. Many excellent books are available where what shines through the pages is the author's experience in writing good code, explaining the logic of how he or she arrived at it, and then solving small problems which might come as exercies at the end.

University degrees, learning on the job, etc will only get you so far ahead, but to leap ahead in your productivity, it's best to learn from the real giants in the field.

Programming is a field that constantly changes. Reading, Applying, and learning new skills, and new techniques is part of the skill-set needed to survive. Great books are a complement to hands-on experimentation in this regard and cannot be over estimated as more and more learning is often self-learning since it's difficult to always find good mentors.

Though i am inclined to agree with you i do think this distinction might be appreciated in the context. What i mean is, when a person is starving he doesn't really care if his food is from a 2 hat or a 3 hat restaurant.

Having said that, i view programming as a tool which is to be used for solving problems. But i would expect a CS major who wants to work in the industry to be really proficient with his or her tools, and that includes programming.

A CS Researcher might be able to get away without any knowledge of programming in a university setting, but could be out of place in the real world unless he focuses on a speciality which is in high-demand.

I once had the experience of sub-contracting work to one of the best universities in my country and found that both the students and the professors involved with the project were not familiar with coding. Thankfully i could train them on coding with minimal effort since they had a background in rigorous mathematics.

I suspect that the sample size is too small to really draw any reliable conclusion.

Having said that, you are on the ground. You see and talk to them. You definitely have a good idea of what you are talking about. Me, i'm just a guy half way around the world feeling pretty bad about it - and hoping that this is not true.

You touched on so many points that i endorse and recommend heartily. Programming is coding. It's hands-on. People have to sit in front of a machine from day one, hour one of their learning. People learn from writing crappy code, and debugging crappy code till the code starts to work. People learn from making their own mistakes. People should learn that programming cannot be memorized and repeated ad nauseum on exams.

I remember the kind of folks i interviewed when i was starting a company in india in 1995. I was horrified at the nature of rote memorization in many schools and collages. I made a decision not to hire any one with a CS degree as i felt that i would have to spend too much time making them unlearn bad habits. I then decided to go out, hire students with no programming background, teach them coding from the ground up. Teach them to solve problems one step at a time. Teach them the joy of debugging. And they turned out to be great.

I suspect that every country, region, city, place might have to go through an evolution of programming culture, but the internet and it's legions of programmers gives a great way for beginners to short-circuit their learning process.

Let us know of ways we can help, as well.

No, thank you ( and richard and mohammed )

You have no idea how helpful you guys are.

You too - though i didn't have access to too many computer magazines so had to make do with odd listings gleaned from various sources including kermit.

ZX Spectrum rocked my world in my childhood :-)

Wow. You justify the death penalty on the basis of it providing incentive to the police and the prosecutors to do a better job.

Holding their children hostage would provide a really good incentive. Would you then recommend that as well?

I understand where you come from. But providing incentive does not justify murder. Even state-sponsored murder.

Had to laugh cause i had a similar reaction. It's more a reflection of how i view his words rather than the words themselves. Zed was being serious and was talking about how he wants his recruiters to take him seriously,

I suspect that i am spending way too much time on reddit, and should learn to take things at their face value.

Not Always.

The thing we use to communicate rests on an infrastructure called the internet - A US Government funded Project (DARPA):-)

Why the false equivalence?

Are you really comparing the efforts of one man ( for the most part ) who produces free videos for mostly high-school and collage students with the output of a giant global corporation?

Maybe a simple pointer that this does not happen to lie in Salman Khan's area of expertise could probably help.

The whole point of a Summary video of history, and what is tested in class for most students, is the what and when - not the who and why.

Also, from reading the original scare-mongering article based on a single video viewed by the author, i didn't get the feeling that he was complaining about the lack of 'who and why' but rather libruls like Khan and Gates are taking over the world and throws in a irrelevant point about personalization engines in google and facebook.

Who gives a damn?

The Center is run by a bunch of bureaucrats who are generally appointed for life. Not a single person will be fired. Not a single person will own up for being responsible. But now, they can demand more funds in the name of security - which will indubitably go into their pockets

As far as love, and other personal matters are concerned, why do you care what other people think? ( with apologies to Feynman )

If you were to judge Asian women purely on looks, they might feel like they belong to a different class, but more often than not, they are using the 'white' guy to escape the grinding nature of their poverty and a pretty cruel life back in their hometown.

For folks with a western upbrinding, they also seem to like the calm, obedient, slightly docile nature of asian women - though i believe education and other opportunities are making them more outspoken and discerning than before.

If you find yourself dating someone - and sense stigma from friends, relatives etc ignore them initially till they get used to your partner/gf/bf etc. As time goes by, folks come around. It's really difficult to hold a grudge or stigma for a long period of time.

Check out indian politics - for a real taste of chaotic democracy in action. Here folks get to talk crap about a whole bunch of governments - from city, state and national - and there's a whole bunch of 'em to talk crap about - unlike the two-party plutocracy of the US, as one point of contrast.

If she just wrote to Salman Khan along with classmates, i am sure he would be happy to cover the missing areas too.

It's just that he chooses areas to cover based on feedback from students/users - and if enough students approach him, the subject gets magically covered.

This is where the medical community as a whole, including medical-licensing boards should get together and look at the long-term negetive impact of such ethically dubious practises of a few doctors.

If this goes ahead, every member of the medical community would suffer due to the taint caused by a few rotten apples.