hanleybrand

A friend told me recently that they liked Python because it was an easy language to start a project with, but they loved OCaml because it was an easy language to finish a project with.

My point? The best language to learn first is the one you are most likely to be able to finish a project with, and the best approach to figure out which is which is to start learning whichever one seems like the right one. If you're wrong, the good news is it's much easier to learn a second language, and a third, forth, etc.

I started with pascal, and it was the incorrect choice. I'm still not sure what the correct choice would have been, but from here it looks like lisp/small talk, neither of which I have bothered to learn yet. Go figure!

A part of me likes this, and a part of me ❤s this. The rest of me wants to hear what a lawter like Lessig (or someone with a silar amount of experience and stake in the legalese of sharing) would say about it.

My guess is this has as much legal meaning as putting "this is in the public domain" in a readme. (I.e. none)

Hopefully there's a twist in the article, but I'm not going to be able to find out.

I'm going to point out that any good university has a wide range of factors they consider for accepting applicants - there's no reason you should be able to expect that just because you hit the standard high marks (all a's, high sats, college prep -- yawn, step into line with the other 30,000 of those please, we have 200 spots).

And frankly, if the author is blaming external factors like they didn't have better parents and/or were not willing to commit fraud to get accepted, there may be another factor the author is blind to, but that others can see.

Just saying.

It's kind of a shame that two people got fired - but I did think it was weird when the person having a private convo was fired but not the person who used their corporate position to launch a public attack on the former was not.

But for the record I'd have preferred that no one lose their job.

On the other hand - I'm not sure which problem AZ is solving here. Maybe enough women weren't calling the police saying "there's a man in the bathroom!"

I can't help but think gender-less bathrooms are a better solution.

Word.

For the record, not all women insist on a diamond, except reflexively... I actually know few couples that have bought diamond rings (for many reasons - some financial planning (a young couple should be worried about a house, insurance and retirement before a shiny ring) and some ethical (if you buy a new diamond, there is absolutely metaphorical blood on it - terrible juju to kick off a lifetime commitment of love))

Self-interest/selfish alert: if you're rolling in it and get that $30k ring for your spouse-to-be, don't give it to them on their birthday, Christmas or any other gifting occasion, because they don't have to give it back if they decide to ditch you Pre-nuptuals.

In my mind if a marriage isn't a lifetime commitment, then forget any of the other traditions.

Are we sure that Microsoft/Google/Samsung/Etc project managers aren't telling themselves that they're "doing it like Apple does it?"

I also believe that apple has/had a design critique culture that most people in technology and business wouldn't be able to recognize for what it is/was -- including most apple employees. Although there is supposedly an uptick in MFAs getting jobs in tech, so maybe some folks do see it.

The assertion/snow clone "[x] makes you dumber just for hearing it" can sometimes be more accurately formulated "I do not have an adequately developed set of reasoning tools to grapple with and understand [x]."

Usually it's paired with that "doesn't know enough to recognize inadequacy" problem.

I'm curious if home garden farming is big among the "preppers" - but then I think that planning a more self-sufficient food supply is only valuable to non-nuclear/chemical warfare doomsday thinking (such as the author's economic collapse bias).

That leads me to wonder if the kits the article goes over would reveal which scenario is presumed by the owner through deductive reasoning... Does anyone keep a personal seed bank? Or do most people assume the apocalypse will have a relatively brief duration and then the supermarket will have fresh produce again?

The first problem is in the second sentence of the report: "The study lasted for approximately eight weeks."

Based on my limited knowledge of outcomes assessment and the current scholarship of teaching and learning, eight weeks is not a long enough period of time to meaningfully measure the effectiveness if any learning method (at minimum, you want retention data past the learning phase, i.e. it matters less how you score on a final exam at the end of a class than how you score on the same exam 1/2, 1, 3, and 5 years later, etc.)

As someone who's suffered under at least one megalomaniac's attempt to be the next whatever, I would caution any future CEO reading this article and dreaming about following its advice to be careful that you're not building a fantasy brand that exists in your own mind. It's very easy to get blinded by your own bullshit - trust in yourself, but verify that others trust you as well.

I was surprised at how thorough the article was. I went in assuming the article would be an ideological argument, but after reading it seems fairly straightforward (spoiler alert: the basic argument is that people will pirate entertainment they want when it's unavailable for purchase (I.e., when recent movies are only available on DVD, fans will look for torrents), which seems like a fairly uncontroversial position)

'"Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is."' - Charles Dickens

I was super surprised that the "key findings" section of the executive summary in the actual report give a very different feeling of the contents of the report than the summary provided by the Heritage Foundation researchers:

From the actual report:

Key Findings Looking across the full study period, from the beginning of Head Start through 3rd grade, the evidence is clear that access to Head Start improved children’s preschool outcomes across developmental domains, but had few impacts on children in kindergarten through 3rd grade. Providing access to Head Start was found to have a positive impact on the types and quality of preschool programs that children attended, with the study finding statistically significant differences between the Head Start group and the control group on every measure of children’s preschool experiences in the first year of the study. In contrast, there was little rd evidence of systematic differences in children’s elementary school experiences through 3 grade, between children provided access to Head Start and their counterparts in the control group. In terms of children’s well-being, there is also clear evidence that access to Head Start had an impact on children’s language and literacy development while children were in Head Start. These effects, albeit modest in magnitude, were found for both age cohorts during their first year of admission to the Head Start program. However, these early effects rapidly dissipated in elementary school, with only a single impact remaining at the end of 3rd grade for children in each age cohort. With regard to children’s social-emotional development, the results differed by age cohort and by the person describing the child’s behavior. For children in the 4-year-old cohort, there were no observed impacts through the end of kindergarten but favorable impacts reported by parents and unfavorable impacts reported by teachers emerged at the end of 1st and 3rd grades. One unfavorable impact on the children’s self-report emerged at the end of 3rd grade. In contrast to the 4-year-old cohort, for the 3-year-old cohort there were favorable impacts on parent- reported social emotional outcomes in the early years of the study that continued into early elementary school. However, there were no impacts on teacher-reported measures of social- emotional development for the 3-year-old cohort at any data collection point or on the children’s self-reports in 3rd grade.

If problems is shorthand for "has a lot of cease and desist paperwork to file" I agree.

I'm not clear what Adobe did wrong here, other than actually try to not completely screw people running very old versions of their software.

Sadly, no one would seriously make an accusation that they were screwing up if they had just shut off the validation servers and posted an note to their knowledge base, ID #FU-CS2-15-01734-81-CS6-plz.

It's the same reason I like having a macbook - I can currently also boot into windows natively or several flavors of unix via virtualization - every os has strengths and weaknesses, why not have them all?

If people can run linux, it helps linux. Even if they only "know" they can run linux. It's mindshare at that level.

Given that this has been solved in Spanish seeking cultures for quite some time - well, I guess I'm surprised that either no one at NPR speaks Spanish, or was willing to point out that this isn't an unsolved problem.

Punk is the new black.

I realize that "data" and "thinking" are shorthands for something more fleshed out, but doesn't the title read as somewhat obtuse? Like calling an article "why facts will never replace understanding" or "why Wikipedia will never replace people who know about what Wikipedia pages are about."

He had almost lost me until the section "people buying things they don't need with money they don't have" and the prime example was "education" - then he really lost me.

Cranky crank is cranking, apparently.

I think it's possible to likely that Apple would implement something along the lines of sub-accounts for iOS, so that you could hand your iProduct to your kid without worrying that they could read your email, delete pictures, whatever - but it wouldn't be a real account, more like an alias with different settings, but still based on the same apple id.

It's less likely that apple will do a "family plan" - they seem to be pulling away from that model - there are no family plans on the osx app store as far as I know - on the other hand, the osx App Store is way less constrained than the iPhone store (you can install purchases in multiple macs) - I think Apples argument would be along the lines of "when most apps cost less than $10, it shouldn't be a problem to buy them 5 times if 5 people want them"

You are correct - the 2nd amendment prohibits the US government from infringing the right to "to keep and bear arms" - it does not specify what kind of arms, so knives and swords (and theoretically but not actually) nuclear weapons would all be equally covered - supposedly as a check against tyranny, but this is not spelled out in the constitution, and sedition was made illegal about 10 years after the constitution was ratified.

My personal view, therefore is that the arguments for the 2nd amendment are a ridiculous fiction - as I imply above, US citizens can not actually build up an arsenal of weapons that would enable them to successfully challenge the US Government successfully (see Waco, Move, etc. - build up a big enough armory, you will be taken out).

So in my view gun rights only exist at this point to enrich arms dealers and give the citizenry an illusion of control, at the low, low cost of 80-something of our citizens per day.

How could you unsubscribe an email address without asking which one?

Except that laws that deal with morality and other behaviors that people never agree on (drugs and alcohol, sex, public behaviors, etc.) are political suicide to repeal, so few legislators would ever be willing to try, so (fill in the blank) will be illegal in (fill in State) for the foreseeable future.

I pretty much only work with static pages for documentation, but besides github repos even docs/help is done with a cms or knowledge base app behind it.

People make fun of me for doing it, but I can't stop. It's the one thing that makes google reader hard to use, because I forget and clicking on a news story makes it jump to the top of the page (note to google reader devs - your thing is awesome, probably needs an update, but GOD DAMN I HATE THE CLICK JUMP FUNCTION)

"I'd love to have an easier way to get involved in some open source project for improving my skills, enhancing my CV, etc."

Not to sound trite, but I don't think the reasons you enumerated for contributing to a project would give most people enough incentive to spend the energy figuring out how to contribute to most projects. Find the project that makes you go "yeah!" and you'll find it much easier to get acclimated to whatever it is, because you'll really want to understand how it works.

"Re-rendering navigation is not acceptable"

Why? Does the tiny electronic miracle on your lap or desk that is more powerful than the sum of all computers that existed in the world in 1970 have something important to do or something?

A conceptual problem with this analogy is that when a corporate whale dies in a community the people that live their wouldn't be represented by other separate organisms - they would be the cells of the whale and cells of other whales.

This article is just much like the theory of social darwinism, in that it willfully twists valid scientific knowledge to push a social agenda that has little in common with the analogy. "We need more [vulture capitalists], not less" my foot.