lists

Wrestlers have been monetizing their skillset within MMA for years. They can literally walk into a cage and win matches early in their career because they have tons for formal training

Speaking from my experience as a self-taught programmer, IRC convos generally follow the same trajectory as OP specifies.

Looks like the stream just went down

Is that the Gmail UI re-themed?

I've seen this go down in a critical theory graduate seminar where all three of the women in the seminar would routinely be opposed/interrupted by their male peers to the point that they just had to call it out.

That's almost how twitter's web UI is setup

Did GNOME just make it onto a lot of desktops all of a sudden?

As someone self-teaching their way into software engineering, would you be able to suggest any resources aside from Code Complete for these principles?

>>Yet international rankings now put the country’s students well ahead of America’s in science and maths (the strongest predictor of future earnings), even as the country spends far less per pupil.<<

This sentence is exemplary of most, if not all, of the discussion about education reform. Another cue are the explicit goals of the Common Core standards, expressly designed to further economic competitiveness of America's youth.

But what about our children's ability to make informed decisions using qualified evidence?

This is different from so-called 'critical thinking', which is so vaguely defined whenever it comes up, or 'creativity', which lacks a rigorous method to appreciate its application.

These informed decisions I'm talking about not only affect our youth's ability to make decisions about their own lives (because no matter your education system, practical experience is other than doing well in school), but also their ability to make decisions about the state we live in collectively. There's little out there teaching people how to make informed decisions about areas they have no expertise in, and yet, must make a decision.

Politicians are voted in for dubious populism rather than the sensibility of their policy programme. Most responses to social issues continue to spiral around ideology and prejudice. America needs a lot more than just an effective STEM education regime.

You weren't be referring to Quentin Meillassoux would you?

I don't think the author is responding to Graham appropriately. Graham's argument is against the power structure of Big Media, not the enduring value of narrative. Hence Graham's post beginning by pointing to the industries' push for SOPA signaling that they're running out of ideas, not on how to entertain people, but to constrict people to being entertained on Big Media's terms. This has a negative effect on quality of narrative, as many have noted.

I think the nature of the confusion is that Graham hints at his personal preferences on how people should spend time ("It would be great if what people did instead of watching shows was exercise more and spend more time with their friends and families" [0]) right besides endorsements for products that shift demand for screen narratives ("new media", "things... that have little in common with movies and TV except competing with them for finite audience attention" [0]).

But even with that said, Graham's view is ultimately inclusive of Curran's. Graham:

>"There will be several answers, ranging from new ways to produce and distribute shows..." [0]

Curran:

>"The internet has paved the way once again for a vertically integrated system of production and distribution, and we know that today’s youth is hungry for stories that matter to them. Whomever is the first to put that together will win." [1]

Screen narrative was never in question.

Edit: Forgot to add links

[0]: http://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html

[1]: http://charliecurran.com/you-have-to-beat-the-man-to-be-the-...

They can offer author branding when they reach whatever threshold they've chosen. They can even put branded authors together in a specific collection just to keep in line with their typology. I'm not sure about how they'll resolve your other arguments, but the branding complaint I see a lot on of on Hn, and it's weird to see cause they're a start-up and something like that is when, not if.

Why do you guys make a big deal of Contractor in the article when actual development of the service is rather neglected looking at your milestones for your next release's beta[0] and Contractor's revision history[1]?

On your mailing list you guys are already getting ready to update your Ubuntu Precise base to a more recent release[2], but why? Precise is stable and will be continue to be so long enough for you guys to spend time developing the developer-facing treasures of your platform, and yet it seems you're a little too focused on user-facing niceties. Or maybe the better question is when will you guys sit down and start making the stuff that'll entice third-party developers?

Let me know if I'm getting things confused, I'm actually a big fan of the project.

[0]: https://launchpad.net/elementaryos/+milestone/isis-beta1

[1]: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~contractor-dev/contractor/trunk...

[2]: https://lists.launchpad.net/elementary-dev-community/msg0257...

Completely OT, but when Dijkstra says:

>My second remark is that our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.

He's touching on a crucial point in Immanuel Kant's philosophy. Kant theorized that though humans received their sensations as a constant stream of input in time (which is an internal condition of human beings, not a feature of bare reality), we can't actually do anything with that stream without applying concepts so as to form concrete (or abstract) objects, i.e. chairs, black holes, mothers, etc. But how would our minds know when to apply this concept or the other? Kant's reply was that our minds look for little clues called 'schematisms' which tell us what the most appropriate fundamental concept to apply to a part of the stream is, upon which others could be combined to produce objective representations we can think and act upon.

Almost a hundred years later, Nietzsche will claim (paraphrasing) that a measure of strength in a human being is the extent to which to which they can 'consume' phenomena in time, weakness being how direly one needs to apply a static idea to phenomena (like morals, stereotypes, prejudices, cause and effect, etc).

I'm just noting an interesting entry point into an old philosophical conversation. If it's understandable then I hope someone finds it interesting.

That got worse when I turned the sound on.

'Most educated people are aware that there are limits of reason, such as situations where the facts are so thin that the only honest answer is "I don't know".'

Some of the value of historical study is that you get to discover just how ideas like "limits of reason" and "I don't know" as a valid answer come about in the first place, out of processes that have nothing to do with progress and advancement. This is the kind of historical relativism people start getting afraid of ("what do you mean there's no objective standards for most anything!"), but it's a result of historical inquiry that actually commends us to actually think about what we say, do, and take to be true. We can have conversations with one another only when we drop assumptions. History is key to all ethical conversation.

Suprised Georgify didn't make the list for Hacker News

Weird, controls worked in Firefox on Windows but not Firefox on Linux

For the last ten years I've been coaching a form of high school debate in a Chicago public school. This activity involves arguing for and against federal government action on various issues and so requires, as a minimum for success, reading comprehension, an ability to express thought in writing, and the most basic familiarity with your grade school history textbook.

Let me tell you right now: A lot of kids can't do it. And by a lot I mean almost all, at least with respect to Chicago public schools, and this goes all the way up to the selective enrollment schools, one of which I coach.

As a volunteer with limited time, it kills me to see kids eager to join the activity only to find they lack the aptitudes to present and defend rational arguments, and I just don't have the time to reverse years of standardized education. The problem gets compounded if you're not attending a selective enrollment school, where general neglect at all levels is mandatory.

Now, the school I coach is also my alma mater, and yet, my own aptitude for debate was fostered precisely because I gave two shits about schooling in general and basically attended just to debate. All of my teammates were in the Top 50 of my class but couldn't debate to save their life. I had a student who was the number two student in a class of nearly 1000 and it was the same story - and she went on to attend the University of Chicago!

Slightly off-topic: Though there's usually a lot of support for the idea of knowing Latin in order to understand the history of thinking in the west (Greek as well, of course), it rarely comes up that one actually has to know Arabic too for that some 500 years where Western learning was germinating in the Islamic empires.

I'll go straight out and say it: if there is intelligence elsewhere in the universe, we have no guarantees to say that that form of cognition would in anyway resemble our own since the only models we have presume terran conditions.

Letter grades from A - F would be a good idea. Their meaning and use has been ingrained since childhood.

"A law that applies in every situation" is an instance of empirical universality, which is the weaker species of universality. Kant's entire problem with this is that a principle that has to be applied to a case in order to be true can admit exceptions since the only way to actually prove it true is to intractably observe every situation, so instead the warrant for the principle ends up being a mere inference. On this point he's specifically going after Hume: If I can only infer that the sun will rise tomorrow because it rose yesterday and the day before, I still leave open the possibility that the sun simply won't rise tomorrow. This is how Hume started questioning necessary causality and Kant totally freaked out.

Pure Universality is strictu sensu synonymous with necessity because a principle of this sort is a condition of possibility. This example is technically incorrect, but for illustrative purposes all stones either necessarily fall back down to the ground when thrown up in the air or I'm not able to write this. Kant thought causality in much the same way, either human beings can necessarily conceive of it without any empirical support or experience in toto is impossible.

Kant explicitly wants to derive morality from Pure rather than empirical reason. Self-interest, altruism, pleasure, and even our everyday notion of happiness are set by the wayside in the name of actions that wholly brought about by principle than any expectation of reward, service to a higher cause, or just plain conformity (which are all arguably the same thing).

The key thing to realize is that Kantian morality is really really inhuman: for all intents and purposes, Kant wants to automate morality. Hence my language of "Act as if you were a force of necessity".

"Briefly, the categorical imperative states: “Act only according to the maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” Whoa! That certainly describes the extreme nature of tons of the protagonists/antagonists of these various films. From Bane and Batman in The Dark Knight Rises to everyone in Inception, the idea of finding a universal truth and then applying it (sometimes forcefully) onto everyone seems to be exactly what’s at the core of all these movies."

Philosophy grad here. Absolutely none of these characters are exemplary of Kantian moral philosophy. That goes for about 99% of blockbuster heroes.

The key thing to understand is that 'universal' is a technical term in Kantian philosophy. Kant doesn't use this term to designate a relationship like that between a genus and its species, a class and its instances, or a set and its members. 'Universal' in Kant is synonymous with 'necessary', as in, "all stones necessarily fall back down to the ground if I throw them in the air." So what the categorical imperative really says is, "Live your life as if it were a force of necessity", or a more humanist formulation, "Live your life as if you were fulfilling your duty." If that sounds weird, realize that Kant doesn't think altruism qualifies as a foundation for morality because it's still based on pleasure, which for him brings us right back to egoism.

In terms of blockbusters, Watchmen's Rorschach or The Dark Knight's Joker are better approximations.

I'd like to read some warnings and recommendations targeted at an older, more mature individual who's continued researching her interest after undergraduate but has yet to begin, though plans on, applying for a doctorate.

I remember dating one and meeting many young graduate students in humanities who when asked "What are you working on?" didn't have anything terribly specific in mind. I'd made the decision not to apply after undergraduate because I specifically didn't have a good idea of what I wanted to work on (disclosure: I'm in philosophy!). Now, a few years later, my independent research has come to grips with a real subject and problem and feel much more confident about applying, but now I'm told that I shouldn't disclose how decided I am in the work that I want to do, that I should present my intentions as a little ambiguous and up in the air still. Huh!?

I'd love to collect a small list of sites that cater to beginning web developers like this, could anyone think of a few more?

Did anyone else get really bad font rendering running Chrome on Windows 7?

If you ever encountered modern, continental European philosophy and found it incomprehensible, one way to approach it would be reading this article a little differently, shifting its emphasis and thinking about how effective applications of language are rather than 'willpower' and its determination in particular. The authors are providing evidence that it is indeed a fiction, and its this power of fiction that a lot of European philosophy since the early 20th century has been meditating on.

I'm not sure what the research on that methodology looks like, but speaking anecdotally as someone who's teaching themself how to write dynamic websites, I find that methodology to be very unengaging. '1+1=2' and 'Hello world' console input may hook a younger mind, but I need to see a bigger picture to know whether or not this is going to amount to anything I might be interested in. I shouldn't have felt like I was willing myself through CodeAcademy at times. My time as an adult is limited, so it's important that educational products like these forge a framework for my creativity (and therefore interest) as quickly as possible.

Learning piano, Norman Monath's 'How to Play Popular Piano in 10 Easy Lessons' did exactly this, whereas a lot of the material I ran into did things the classical way, which was entirely boring.

I'm sure it's a perfectly good topic to discuss, but I wonder what's motivating this sudden trend of "You must be this tall to call yourself a programmer" posts?