poet

Please do write that blog post!

On the positive side, adding a yes to the bottom of the list as well as the top was a key refinement. I felt that was missing when I viewed the photo of the original and was pleasantly surprised when I scrolled down to see it added in your version.

Hero worship?

My heroes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Kennedy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Powers.

People I'd place in the category of scientist based on the fact that she co-authored a paper with one of the pioneers of developmental psychology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Portman.

That's a far cry from being a hero. Please, let's be reasonable.

Not just a PhD. He had a Fullbright at MIT. You'll find his biography either incredibly inspiring or depressing.

She has published peer reviewed research: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi... (her actual name is Natalie Hershlag). One of the co-authors is Jerome Kagan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Kagan. Seems good enough to me. Certainly not a career scientist; very few would be with another venture making millions. But she has walked the walk. There's no hype here.

What gave you the impression that the paper was supposed to have relevance outside of a classroom? The paper has practical applications to teaching, which should be self evident given the content and venue of the paper. If you don't care then don't upvote the story. But don't try to pass off your point as a valid criticism of the paper.

Krishnamurthi has also done some really great work teaching introductory programming. He and his coauthors wrote a book meant to occupy a similar space as SICP, available here: http://www.htdp.org. The reasons why they felt an additional text in place of SICP was necessary can be found here: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/scheme/pubs/jfp2004-fffk.pdf.

Krishnamurthi and his colleagues also maintain Racket (http://racket-lang.org/), a first-class development environment, and excellent documentation. All and all just a really great example of academics who simultaneously care deeply about teaching, publish top-tier research, and release real-world tools.

Agreed. I'm canceling my Netflix subscription the second Amazon increases their selection.

EDIT: And holy shit. A video player that works beautifully and I don't have to install anything. I get a nice big message about installing Silverlight when I browse Netflix with Chrome. Although after further experimentation there are a bunch of things that annoy me off the bat. First, pressing escape while in full screen stops the movie, instead of just exiting fullscreen. Also, exiting fullscreen appears to close GChat windows that I have popped out of my browser. Obviously still some kinks to work out :P

It's not popular because it's odd, it's popular because these types of freak situations happen to regular old homeowners all the time: http://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/Corporate-Responsibil.... Only this time the tables have turned and it's the bank that is getting foreclosed on.

The existence of a technical solution to a security problem doesn't mean that it gets implemented in practice. Sure the security issues are theoretically solvable, but that means nothing when you're talking about a system with hundrads of millions of users. Aside from issues of magnitude, the financial incentives are all wrong if the goal is to have credit card companies implement the security solutions we would like. Currently financial instituions implement whatever security solution is financially optimal, taking into account the cost of a breach (reputation, customer satisfaction, impact of future sales, etc) and the cost of implementing the security measures. If you want something more than what the credit card companies are already doing, you need to lobby for increased regulation or financial incentives in terms of fines.

It's possible that it is all a work of fiction, but Greg Hoglund is an accomplished security researcher. It's certainly a realistic scenario that Hoglund discovered them himself, or purchased them from someone else if he didn't have time to do the vulndev. That being said, if it is fiction it wouldn't be the first time a contracter mislead the government about competency.

Do you really think he doesn't exercise this restraint? I have a hard time believing the President steps out side for superfluous reasons.

And to be honest, stepping outside for a hot dog isn't a trivial thing when you're overworked and the most stressed human being on the planet: http://i.imgur.com/PpJek.jpg. If going to grab a hot dog helps the President feel a little more human and helps him do his job better, people just need to put up with the inconvenience.

Let's also put sitting in traffic for one hour into perspective. You're already paying 1/3 of your income in taxes, you can be called for jury duty any time, you could be drafted, etc... the utility you lose from that hour is trivial compared to the other costs of being a citizen. People who complain about sitting in traffic for an hour for the President just aren't thinking rationally.

I don't think there's anything to be done TBH. In previous discussions about the community's slipping quality I was always encouraged by the fact that submissions stayed approximately the same. That's not the case anymore. And what that means aside from less useful content is that a critical mass of news users and complacent old ones represent the majority on the site.

Did you stop programming in Ruby before 1.9.1? Most common performance issues were fixed in that release. If you need something faster than 1.9.1, you probably should be dropping down to C anyway.

This rant seems misplaced. Rubinius adopted a test driven approach for testing Ruby compatibility because Ruby doesn't have a spec, merely a reference implementation. The spec is being worked on, but the fact that it doesn't exist has more to do with Matz and Ruby's culture than Rubinius. Further, your other objections also appear to be rooted in a misunderstanding of Ruby's culture. The fact that there are lots of choices in the Ruby's ecosystem is what Ruby is about. Hell, choice is built right into Ruby with its inheritance model. Python is the opposite, and I'm guessing that's what your background is in.

Beautiful example how a combination of open source enthusiasm and commercial interest can generate some first class software. There's no way this could have happened without Evan's initial enthusiasm or Engine Yard's support. TBH I can list off dozens of open source projects that are one sponsor away from another level greatness. :P

What HN used to be above is this stupid pedantry. 300 lines of code is a euphemism for a simple system. That's it. Who gives a shit if the actual system was 800 lines, or even several thousand lines?? The system they made was simple.

Notice how it's a self post? It's not some grand ploy to get more pageviews for a blog. What's bullshit is that half of the comments section is being taken up by this contentless debate. That's the actual poison on HN.

Plus, an office in Monadnock is hardly bleak. I was really surprised at how reasonable their rates for starting offices are.

I doubt your average developer knows that Paul and Knuth went to Case Western. You're average developer probably doesn't know that the founder of Paypal and the co-founder of Youtube went to UIUC. I'm not really sure what argument you're trying to make. People in industry typically just don't care about these types of associations.

A PhD is a formal license to do research and it marks the start (not the end) of a lifetime of research. You need such a license if you plan to work at a company with a rigid corporate ladder or in academia.

The only additional reason to get a PhD besides the license is an increased probability of being in contact with peers who you can collaborate with. People often undervalue this but empirically it's pretty clear what the benefits of having at least one research collaborator are.

If you actually do decide to go for a PhD, you're going to need at least one strong recommendation that speaks to your research ability if you want to get into a top program. Your undergrad institution and GPA put you in the running to be sure, but admissions committees are looking for evidence that you can perform research. Recommendations that say "this kid got an A in my class and is a good student" don't really have an impact on your application either way.

I should clarify. I'm not picking on the open source community. I'm differentiating the open source community form the private sector because the incentives are different. There are crypto guys in the private sector that can build secure crypto systems for $600/hour. Now, crypto is devilishly hard to do, so there's no guarantee their system would be secure either. But if you have nation-state levels of funding, you certainly can buy a system that would take serious talent and funding to break. On the other hand, open source communities are motivated by intrinsic incentives. Clearly this is enough to implement state-of-the-art operating systems, but is intrinsic motivation enough to implement secure crypto? It may well be that the bar is too high in this area and I think the next decade will yield some interesting results here. Even if we count OpenSSL as a point for open source (generous), that's one reasonably secure system over the course of a decade.

When even someone like Colin introduces a crypto bug like this, it makes you wonder. Are we ever going to get to a place where crypto engineering is something the open source community can take on? How long did it take to push people to stop writing C programs with trivial vulnerabilities? And that's something you can write a static analyzer for. No so with crypto.

When being pedantic, it's best to be right: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/innocuous.

    1: producing no injury : harmless
    
    2: not likely to give offense or to arouse strong feelings or hostility : inoffensive, insipid

It's not a grammar mistake, I have trouble when I type quickly. Another error that I make: I often type a word that sounds similar in place of what I actually meant. Case in point: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2067123.

Well said.

As far as the donation goes, my conscious is clear. I donate a big piece of my income to charities and my family and I work with thousands of impoverished kids in the inner city of Chicago every day.

Based on my experience, characterizing the poster as having a chip on his shoulder is accurate. I run into this problem all the time when working with those less well off than me and it's a serious problem. It's a significant barrier on communication between otherwise well intentioned people.

Finally, I stand by my characterization of innocuous. There was no harm or offense intended and I'd like to see you argue otherwise. I myself had the same reaction to the title of the submission and it's because of my middle class upbringing. What is importent here is not shaming people for their upbringing but rather to seek an understanding of why people react in different ways.

We can play this game all the way down to the most impoverished society on the planet. A poor Indian could find it reprehensible that a middle class American will throw away a candy bar. A starving African could find it reprehensible that a poor Indian will use comparatively expensive spices in his food. After all, why not eat the most tasteless food possible and then donate the extra money? The point is, unless you are from the most impoverished society on the planet, you are doing something that someone somewhere could find reprehensible because of social subtext.

The question needs to be asked, where does this game get us? Nowhere. All good people are ultimately batting for the same team. Sure, truly evil people should be named and shamed, but that's not what happened in this thread. Guelo picked a fight because he thought he had the right to, and he doesn't. At least, not with Leelin. Hateful dialogue has absolutely zero positive benefit and often hurts the person doing the hating: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2067014.

You're argument is orthogonal to my point. I'm aware of the wealth differences. I see similar differences quite often in the inner city of Chicago. One overarching trend among the less well off that Guelo demonstrates is a venomance that gets in the way of cooperation and progress. As an example, I have seen young children refuse to be taught by quite capable teachers because the teacher is white and wears jeans that cost more than $20. There's an unfounded resentment here and it needs to be named. It's as if an apology is expected for being born into the middle class. The hate here is unhealthy because ultimately the person doing the hating is the one that loses.

Five minutes ago I was looking for a donation link on your site, but I completely lost interest after reading this post. The person you replied to grew up in a lifestyle and culture different than you. This doesn't mean that he's greedy or that his motivations are meaningless. You seem like you've got a huge chip on your shoulder and that's not going to help you in the long run. Why would people be interested in engaging someone who spits venom after a fairly innocuous comment?

This is a misunderstanding of the discussion at hand. The word driverless in the context of this article and the person I was replying to implies the lack of a human failsafe.

Schmidt and Matt address this in their arguments. For example, Matt mentions that the beverage industry will skyrocket because people can now "drive" home drunk. The human can't take over in an emergency in that situation. Pretty much every advantage of driverless cars that Matt listed are not possible if the human is required to be alert enough to take over. Further, the person I was responding to claimed he would never have to learn how to drive. If a human is going to take over in an emergency, s/he will still have to learn. Point being, the discussion at hand is about driverless vehicles without using a human as a backup.