younata

> getting involved in nuclear weapons

Pretty much every western country has nuclear weapons. If you're referencing the fact that the US is the only country to have dropped nuclear weapons on another country, keep in mind that it wasn't until 30 or so years later that we realized how bad nuclear weapons are.

Hell, in the 80s, at my uni, there was an experiment to see if you could use nuclear radiation to clean toilet water.

Don't get me wrong though, I agree with your other points.

Wow, am I glad I chose to read the comments on this article before opening it up. Thanks!

I have friends who had to take an intro to C++ as their first (and only) programming class.

I heard them talking about passing arguments to functions as "call by reference" many times, and it was obvious they had no idea what they were talking about, just regurgitating what the instructor said.

I like Sal's stuff. I've used his videos on math to review stuff I didn't quite get during a lecture (given the quality of math professors I get, this is often). I've watched his other stuff because they're generally interesting (and really cool, I wish I could draw/write like he can).

I watched the video, and enjoyed it. I'm going to recommend it to my friends. It's rather high quality (not going to talk about the download that goes with it, I didn't look at it), and it gets across a good thing about computer science: You can easily verify the results with your own computer.

I see that their's a lot of criticism on this, but this is already loads better than what current uni students are getting (I just went through my first year of uni, and I can tell you that I've not learned anything [1] in my CS classes).

As I've stated previously, I would recommend this to my friends, as well as to people just getting their feet wet in programming. Good job Sal, you're pretty awesome.

[1] Except for an x86 assembler class. That class had an excellent professor, and I now understand pointer arithmetic.

This is not new stuff, just your list in a more readable format:

  - website analytics
  - logs processing
  - business intelligence
  - extracting data from third parties
  - exposing data to third parties
  - security alerts
  - website error alerts
  - comments system for getting user feedback

I think his point was that it's better to work for yourself, than be some nameless peon at GS.

As I'm sure just about everyone here would tell you, we'd be more than happy to help you.

I just finished my first year of Uni.

I'm spending the summer at an intership, where I'm writing very low level code. (For example, right now, I'm writing a utility to arping an address range. I've learned all about OSI, ethernet interfaces [I'm using BPFs [1]], etc.).

In my free time, I'm playing with opencv. For example, here [2] is an image I took of myself, ran through an edge detector, ran again through a distance transformer. I'm thoroughly enjoying myself.

I also know how to configure a LAMP [3], but that's nowhere near as interesting as the previous two paragraph.s

[1] http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bpf&apropos=0&#...

[2] http://michaelbrindle.com/images/meDistTrans.jpg

[3] in my case: FreeBSD, Lighttpd, mysql, and python, so... FLMP

tcpdump is also great, and I prefer it to wireshark.

I've learned how to read the packets coming through in real time, at an office environment. I can tell people "I don't even see the code anymore, all I see is blonde, brunette, redhead."

I think that, as part of the clock, a sign should be placed near it that states "not predicting the end of the world."

wasn't a startup, tweeting machine. The guy posted a 2 part writeup on his experience [1].

[1] http://tbbuck.com/building-a-web-application-that-makes-500-...

http://tbbuck.com/building-a-web-application-that-makes-500-...

on computer vision? (judging from your profile) Any chance it's up so that we can see how it was edited?

I wrote a script to do that for you. [1] (and am having my server download the first fifty listed in the xml file). I'd like to point out that there's a little bit under a thousand talks, so I highly recommend you only download a few videos at a time. (each video is about 40 mebibytes. [2] Roughly 40 gigs of video.)

[1] http://pastebin.com/RXzTpbGt

[2] Average obtained by downloading 50 videos, and averaging those.

Edit: fixed bug in script.

They're releasing the source. From the third paragraph of the second page:

"Other Web browsers could also employ Instant Pages, because Google has released the necessary code for all to use. "We are opening up the code because we want other browsers to implement it—it is good for the users and for the Web," said Singhal."

Even if this weren't the case, as drivebyacct2 said, this doesn't do anything to make us dependent on them, especially when compared to gmail or google docs.

ah. right. they weren't blue, so I didn't identify them as links. Thanks!

All the links (Disclaimer: I didn't test all of them) go to http://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_on_averting_climate_crisis.... which happens to be the first video in the list.

Not precisely. Firefox and Chrome have enough marketshare that games with WebGL can just detect IE, then throw up a message "your browser does not support WebGL, click here to download a browser that does.".

It's amazing how much awesome tech can be traced directly back to Xerox PARC.

> This place feels more like Reddit every day.

That's why I downmodded you.

There are places where it's a criminal offense to go deface some person's facebook?

First reaction: AWESOME. I won't see any spam about that in the feed (which I rarely view anyway).

Second thought: This cannot end well. It's so easy to spoof stuff that a lot of innocent people will have to deal with similar situations before the law gets repealed (if it gets repealed, most likely it'd just stop being enforced).

Unfortunately, most people would never think about how bad it could end, just about how people won't be annoying them on facebook.

For my internship this summer, I actually write code! I've found that I do little to no non-work programming during the week. However, I do spend a lot of time during the weekend programming.

But... how will I know to buy it if Billy Mays (RIP) isn't shouting at me to buy it?

I don't get the reference, and google doesn't help.

"I wasn't trying to hack you, I was giving you guys a free impromptu penetration test!"

well, looking at the cost of going out to eat every night, vs. buying the ingredients at your local grocery store, it makes sense to learn to cook - cheaper food, you know what's in it, etc.

scooters: because cars and motorcycles exist. Why waste human power when we can waste gas?

motorcycles have the whole "one accident and you pretty much die" thing going against them.

Of course, this changes around places like mountain view, where there are a lot more people on bicycles.

I second that. The BeagleBoard is amazing. It can do real time (the original one can handle roughly 25 fps) computer vision, thanks to its built in DSP. The newer one should be even better (but I've not heard as much about it).

Archduke was incredibly disliked by the people he was governing. Why none pulled out is a mystery to me. The terms basically crippled Germany until they decided to call the allies' bluff.

I have yet to take a college level history course, so I probably have errors.

From the guidelines: "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

So far, the only device (that I'm aware of) from Apple that had a wait between the product launch and the sdk launch was the original iphone. Everything else, as far as I know, had an sdk launched way before the product was launched.

As for your downvotes: I'm sorry, but as has been stated previously, we value technical accuracy.

The entire reason acts like the PROTECT IP act even get this far is because NO ONE understands the internet, and the potential of it.

Yeah, we're slightly more enlightened than the politicians, but that's not really saying much.

All we know is that it'd be better to just leave the internet alone for now, until we have a better idea of its potential (which, I acknowledge, may never happen).

Of course, as other commenters have said, the idea that the US can basically say "follow our law, or you have no internet" is disgusting. Unfortunately, this threat will hold until some country decides to call the US's bluff.