Err... No, they won't. Switching ISPs is the most time-consuming thing to do when all you want to do is visit a site that is being blocked. There are many more practical approaches.
You should preferably not use a computer you don't have complete control over for sensitive stuff at all. Even with two-factor authentication, a computer you don't control can still store the emails you access, etc. etc.
It's email, people. You won't die if you don't check it for three hours. And if you do... well, then you should probably've brought your own laptop (although that may make system administrators sad).
As you noted, the x86_64 sorted out some of the mess.
Personally, I think a big issue is the whole backwards-compatibility thing. It causes all sorts of nastiness, and a complete overhaul of the architecture is impossible because everything depends on it! (Which is one of the reasons the IA-64 never really became a hit.)
I vote we design our own processors, and write a new kernel to boot. ;)
As a matter of fact, I agree. The fact that x86 won the consumer market is, IMHO, very much one of those clever-marketing-and-quick-standardization-cases.
The x86 is actually fairly straightforward, as long as you don't try messing around with A20-gates, GDTs and legacy modes (i.e. not staying in protected/long mode the OS has given you). It's only when you try to build things such as bootloaders that x86 starts getting nasty. Backwards-compatibility can be quite evil.
I think it's a rather misleading post. He cites a paper from PLoS Medicine, and I suspect that those without a good background in research would rather quickly jump to the conclusion that "it's in a science journal, so it must be (very likely to be) true." However, it should be noted that this is an essay, which PLoS Medicine defines as opinion pieces on a topic of broad interest to a general medical audience.
More importantly, lets look at this from a pragmatic point of view. Are there things that can be done better in science? Absolutely. Does science somehow 'not work'? Not at all. Does it need fixing? No, why should it? Anyone who suggests that science is fundamentally broken must've lived under a rock for the past decades, or at least hasn't been keeping an eye on what science has achieved.
I also disagree with the blog author's 'solution' to the problem. He (or is it a she? I don't know) argues in favor of a centralized approach to science, whereas one of the reasons science is so successful is because it's so decentralized!
The content of such a course also varies by university. I recently came across some university that did offer a compiler course, but it was all theory. Being a geek, I didn't really like that.
This is quite obviously untrue. There is no reason to assume that if people need a technical solution for problem X, X can involve house-kitchen-'n-garden solutions but can't involve solutions for cultural or political problems.
Not to be a cynic, but is this anything new? It seems to me that these are the 'reasons' the MPAA thinks TPB and other torrent sites are (supposed to be) illegal.
The low level programmer is obviously not gone, as other people have already mentioned. Rather, what I think most of us who've been through a few decades of development can see, is that the hobbyist has become a different kind of person. Years ago, all the hobbyists would go "Oooh! I finally managed to print ASCII on the screen. Ok, now let's spend another day trying to get it working in color!" In 2012, there is (in most cases) very little point in doing this, and the 'hobbyists' we see now are mostly building websites 'n stuff.
Not to sound like an ass, but getting a good programming job in the game industry is hard enough as it is. After all, the supply-demand ratio for these jobs is much lower than it is elsewhere in the IT industry. I would advise him to get another programming job first, learn some C/C++ in his free time, and then start looking for jobs in the game industry.
I think most of us agree that the TSA is very ineffective at what it tries to achieve. That being said, saying they've had zero success is a little unfair, because this would be very hard to measure. After all, in the case of 'success', nothing happens - had they not been successful, something might have happened. We can't even compare the number of things that happened before and after a change was made by the TSA, because that presumes that there are always an equal number of people trying to make things happen.
It's probably correct, actually. In the past there have been a few links from HN to my own site, and I was surprised to see that a LOT of people were using OSX.
Yes. Another way to see this is that few (perhaps even none at all) other ships are constantly firing at maximum rate. If this were multiplayer, that'd be what most people would be doing.
I'm somewhere in between 'I don\'t use Stack Overflow' and 'I use Stack Overflow as a resource, but don\'t participate'. It's not that I avoid it as a resource: if I stumble upon the answer to my question at SO via Google, I'll use it. However, I can't really say I've ever actively searched the site, either.
You see, sometimes debates can get a little heated. I'm sure you've experienced such debates yourself. Are you also talking about these debates, when people say something is 'stupid' but are still capable of having a rational discussion, or are you mostly annoyed by plain old hating?
The reason I'm asking is that I'm relatively new to HN, and thus can't really comment on any changes. However, I also think that in the time I've been here, I've seen some hatin', but definitely not a lot of it. Again, this could simply be because I'm used to communities where this is much more common, and haven't been able to see changes in HN itself.
I didn't mean you had to use lightbulbs, I just wondered whether the difference between using a notebook and a netbook was actually significant. Do you by any chance know how much of a difference it makes (in energy)? I would be interested in knowing. :)
A relatively low percentage of users * the total number of people who buy smartphones = a heck of a lot of users. If they manage to pull those people away from other companies (and such a future would do that), it's a big win.
What's with all the 'Boo! College is bad!' posts these days? Don't get me wrong, if people find good jobs and educate themselves without going to college, more power to them. However, I dislike the tendency of some(/many) of these posts to present college as a waste of time. It's not. And that's from someone who dropped out the first time around. ;)
"Lastly I'd leave everyone with this thought: The value of an education isn't a career unless you are studying business. The value of an education should be to make you a better and more rounded person."
Note that we aren't all living in the American system where everyone does a major and takes a bunch of general courses. In the Netherlands, for example, if you major in X you don't necessarily become a 'more rounded person'. I major in math, which means that all I get is math, math, math and more math - if I wanted, I might be able to get some physics or CS courses as electives.
Yes, that's sort of the point. ;) Most textbooks that contain a lot of math and science-y stuff are that way. Also, you don't have to read a textbook cover to cover - I know I didn't in college.
I think this poll might be slightly misleading (just like the other poll about favourite languages sometime ago). Quite simply, people are more inclined to vote for languages they've used themselves, because they've experienced the annoyances and wonderful things first-hand. Personally, I find it rather hard to believe that someone would dislike PHP and Java more than, say, bash scripting (which I presume falls under 'Shell' here) or ASM.
I quite agree. The article seems to say something along the lines of "It's Red Hat! But it's not Red Hat!" I really don't see what's so great about this distro (having used it myself once). If it works for the people at CERN, that's fine of course. However, I think there's little reason to call SL a 'great distro'.