shadowfox

It may be insured to a large extent.

> The worst thing you can accuse Quora of is being very, very granular as to what you can turn on and off

I just don't see how having a good granularity is incompatible with having an easy way to turn the whole thing off. Neither do I see a point in having the settings revert back once in a while.

> Hence why I call it confirmation bias. People have been told the site is crap and so go looking for reasons to confirm it.

> All of this Quora hate is really, really unjustified for the simple difference of having a registration requirement to view their content

You seem to have strong opinions about why other people's dislike of Quora is unjustified. But this amounts to just putting words in people's mouth.

> The screenshot I linked should be enough to immediately disprove any accusations of "spam".

Really? You have to uncheck something like 20 checkboxes to avoid spam. And they used to have a tendency to re-enable all of them each time they add a new option; so you had to repeat the process on and off. (Hopefully that last bit has tapered down)

It is usually the simpler issues that bite you when internationalizing. The separation of first and last names don't always work outside the anglosphere (and sometimes even within it). Some users have 5/6 part names etc etc.

Also people here tend to overestimate the homogeneity of other countries.

This one also seems to require admin rights?

This is a standard textbook on computer architecture across many universities in the US (and if my students are right, outside it as well). So it might be worth a read.

If this is absolutely the first time you are looking at architecture, http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-Fifth-Arc... by the same authors might be a easier entry point.

> Every engineer, regardless of specialty, learns to write code: At least one semester of C/C++

I doubt this is universally true. It certainly wasn't in both my ugrad and grad institutions. Non-CS engg students had the option of taking a introduction to programming style course, but it was by no means mandatory.

Most engg students there had their first introduction to programming via Matlab assignments, which can hardly be called programming.

A less organized version of #2 is available via http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar.

Maybe I am confused. What does GDP have to do with this?

> That's not the only way of making a more educated electorate. Another method would be to limit the electorate.

Care to elaborate? On what criteria would you limit the electorate?

> Think of the starving artists, musicians, olympic athletes, working class poor, the startup set, etc

Maybe you are right and I am just cynical. But I have felt that some of these groups (with the exception of working class poor) are tolerated because of their success potential than for their status as individuals. And even with that a large number of people appear to disdainful of unsuccessful people in these fields.

And about the only people who seem to like the working class poor are politicians who see them as a voting bloc of sorts.

> Med students don't know shit. And don't do shit

That seems like a fairly blanket statement? Care to explain?

Feature-wise you also lose a few more things like OCaml modules and functors (and OCaml style objects, which is not a great loss). You gain integration with .NET (and its classes and objects).

> there's also the MSP430 boards which start at ~$5

Do you have any pointers to good boards at this range?

> If ever a book was written by a true hacker, that one is it, and it will be read as long as there are programmable computers.

Err. Now I do like that book. But this might be overstating the case.

> I would have expected a community of smart individuals to sincerely examine these accusations

From my experience, smartness, sincerity and a sufficiently malleable ego (that enables one to look at accusations constructively) don't always go hand-in-hand. They seem like orthogonal qualities.

> like you not using OpenSSH because you don't like Theo de Raadt

It looked to me like people do this sort of thing all the time? This happens even in non-tech scenarios (e.g. not reading an author's works because you don't like his politics, even when the work itself is non-political etc)

> but I'm sure that's the way Netscape thought of it as well

Don't really think so. At least as far Netscape 6 went, they came up with an entirely different framework and moved over to Java (as far as I remember). I have rarely seen that sort of thing characterized as a refactor (even on their mailing lists).

On a similar note, there is also csvkit [1] for csv files. It is not quite as full featured as I had like, but it is easier than manipulating csv content directly via cut/column/grep/sed.

[1] http://csvkit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

> But stop imposing onto others what is right or wrong

Well. I am not sure anything is being imposed here. The original is just a blog by someone stating that working too long (by his definition) is not something he considers a badge of honor/skill/awesomeness. You don't have to follow the recommendation.

I don't think OP is talking about absolute neutrality. It is more about maintaining a perspective. (Which usually includes understanding/acknowledging the good and bad parts)

Just to add a reference to the parent: http://www.johndcook.com/cplusplus_strings.html

(The article is mildly interesting by itself)

At some point in time, I found this list of C String libraries with some comparisons: http://www.and.org/vstr/comparison

The (different) approaches taken by many of these libraries are interesting.

> Technologies that try to isolate the coder from the machine by creating a funnelled dumbed-down common interface are inherently flawed because the HW evolves faster than the software.

By that count, web apps would die even faster?

For multiple definitions of right (if the top comments are to be believed) :P

> I know nothing about his career, but, after having a closer look at the other two, a pattern of executive placement as an offensive weapon starts to form.

Good Lord, that is some serious speculation :)

But DDG gets its raw results from Bing?

I have to say that Foley, while a good book, is more of textbook compared to something like the black book.

In any case some of the "GPU Gems" [1] books are worth a read.

[1] Available for free on nvidia' website these days: http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_part01.html https://developer.nvidia.com/content/gpu-gems-2 https://developer.nvidia.com/content/gpu-gems-3

You may be overestimating a lot of googlers