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Was anyone else, after seeing the title, expecting a satirical piece about eating babies?

byuu is also doing this for the SNES with bsnes - he's even had all of the enhancement chips like the DSP-1~4 and CX4 decapped to achieve cycle-perfect emulation.

http://byuu.org/snes/donations/

I'd imagine bsnes is somewhere between interpretation and dynamic recompilation.

Static recompilation would be really difficult on systems like the SNES and GBA, which have two processor modes (8bit 6502 emulation/16bit 65816, and 16bit THUMB/32bit ARM respectively), so the width of any given instruction is dependent on the processor state. Dynamic recompilation would be faster than instruction-by-instruction interpretation, but full dynamic recompilation (with subroutine caching and all) would probably get pretty difficult to time (I could be wrong), and cycle accurate timing is a stated goal for bsnes (to the point where byuu had the enhancement chips like the CX4 decapped).

bsnes has taken the low-level route because a decent bit of the software for the SNES is really timing sensitive - even that black circle effect at the end of the level in Super Mario World is done by changing values between scanlines. For systems like N64 on the other hand, where the software is less timing sensitive, high level emulation techniques are more common, for the sake of speed increases.

All the linked articles in "further reading" are about graduate school in the humanities. Does that mean that it doesn't apply to science, engineering, and business, or that it does, but humanities is just an easier target?

We had that, too, but it wasn't really clear cut. We also had a bunch in the middle, who, while they really did need to go through most of the 101 material, they also did their share of intimidating the fresh starters - probably more so than those who really knew the material, who mostly just skipped class.

Since my university had large Korean and Chinese populations, it kind of struck me as parallel to the problems the Asian Studies department had weeding out native speakers looking for an easy A - it was hard to tell them from the kids who could speak but not write. Putting them in a separate section kept them from driving the class, and things went much smoother.

I liked what my university's Chinese classes did - they had a special "advanced 101" class. This way, hot shots who still really needed to go through the 101 coursework weren't intimidating those just starting; those who really knew what they were doing could just test into a higher level. Korean classes, which didn't have the "advanced 101", ended up catering to the hottest of the hot shots, and saw a good number of both the hot shots and the non-native speakers dropping out before the 200 level.

I was with him at first, particularly bringing up college as a motivator, but the author pretty quickly loses focus and takes the analysis a bit further than he really has context to support, particularly since he's analyzing strictly from the WSJ article, not having read the book. I don't think he really needed to make tangential and dubious claims about her beliefs and her world view to make his ultimate point that the WSJ chose this article to support theirs.

I remember reading somewhere on Stack Overflow that Scala development on Android was less than optimal. Do you know if the situation has changed at all?

Edit: Here's where it was -

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/476111/scala-programming-...

And some more information:

http://riddell.us/ClojureAndAndroidWithEmacsOnUbuntu.html

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3242034/android-without-j...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2832773/alternatives-to-j...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3002566/can-i-program-for...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1994380/substantial-andro...

Maybe something more like:

えっ？全然興味ないんだけど。日本にいるんじゃん？

Sorry to kill the joke, but if Google translates it into grammatically correct English, the source was nothing resembling Japanese.

That was my initial thought, but I'm gonna have to cite Poe's Law on this one.

Sarcasm? Not Sarcasm? Purposefully ambiguous?

I've been using GIMP for prototyping instead of Paint Shop Pro lately, and while it works well enough and I've gotten used to it, I have to say, there are dozens of small issues that add up to a UX disaster.

The Toolbox isn't dockable, but "brushes" is both a dropdown button on the toolbox and a dockable window. "Show Grid" and "Snap to Grid" are in the View menu, while "Configure Grid" is in the Image menu. The Color Tools are in both the Tools menu and Colors menu.

It just seems convoluted at first because there's so much duplication and so many areas where the wrong UI element was chosen - it's just a mess. On top of this, a lot of common tasks, like copy-paste-moveSelection, have at least one extra click compared to PS or PSP, and it all adds up to have a dramatic effect on productivity.

I don't think Gimp will die, but I'm guessing that, at least for hobbyists, it'll probably be dethroned by whichever web-based solution gets to the head of the pack.

> In reality they are just molding all their kids to look exactly the same on paper.

I wasn't expecting this argument, but it reminds me a lot of how the RECRUIT company has managed to commoditize the workforce in Japan. By unifying applications and highlighting only certain traits, they've created a system where applicants all try to maximize only those specific traits (grades, entrance exam scores, TOEFL scores, etc.). On the other hand, companies mostly only see those traits, so they'll throw out an application if anything slightly negative shows up, whether it's that you've ever quit a job, or that your handwritten resume had less-than-perfect penmanship.

Optimizing for a small set of traits probably actually works well to a degree in the U.S. specifically because not everyone is optimizing for those same traits.

If I were running Facebook, I don't think I'd want to be considered as competing with Mixi, Gree, and Mobage. A lot of people use Mixi almost as a blind dating service, and that's not really what Facebook does.

I'm not much a fan of Facebook, but I could see them picking up there if they really push the photo sharing and contact list aspects of the service, though. For a lot of my Japanese friends on Facebook, I could probably tell you every meal they've eaten outside their house since they've joined. Partnerships with Purikura wouldn't be an altogether bad idea, either.

The first thing anyone does when they meet in Japan is transfer contact info over infra-red. It'd make a lot of sense to integrate it with "friending" on Facebook, since as it is, changing your address means e-mailing your entire contact list, and losing your phone means losing contact with anyone who doesn't e-mail you regularly. There's definitely room for them there - they'll find it if they're actually committed to learning how things work there.

I have to say I agree with you, there. I think there are benefits to be had, but saying "This is going to cause a huge shift in consumer use of the Internet" can only be described as overblown.

Perhaps the fact that I dropped his name is overshadowing my point.

I think the politics surrounding it are likely to create a large amount of distrust from both ends of the political spectrum regardless of its technical merits, and that will put it at a severe disadvantage. This is assuming that its success is measured by its adoption rate, and that its adoption rate is dependent upon the level of trust in the system.

It's not crazy at all, but it seems we've reached a point in the conversation where we can't produce anything meaningful without it getting drowned out by screams of "Fascism" and "Plutocracy".

I think that both Government and Business stand to benefit from it enough that it's possible that there weren't underhanded motivations involved, or at least that they won't come to fruition.

Atwood and others have been praising the idea of a centralized identification system for a while, and tying it to a government identification system makes sense, but tying this to the Obama administration could be a marketing disaster. I can already hear Glenn Beck associating it with Nazi Germany and advocating against its use. Similarly, its association with Verizon, AT&T, Paypal, Symantec, and Google is likely to bring its own breed of distrust. This strikes me as a project that doesn't deserve the politicization it's going to get.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Post ordering doesn't work that way on HN; from the FAQ:

> On the front page, [posts are ordered] by points divided by a power of the time since they were submitted. Comments in comment threads are ranked the same way.

For clarity, this post isn't getting down voted per your request (which would have no effect on your other post), it's getting down voted for not adding content to the conversation.

Very cool. It'd maybe be nicer with a double pane layout, with the code and the preview side by side, using a key combination to reload the preview.

Still, you'd have trouble convincing me to give up my favorite editor, browser, and alt+tab,F5. Might be good for ChromeOS users, though.

We are really all on the same side - the concern on both sides is about centralizing power. Your concern is that we're giving government too much power, mine is that we're trading government power for corporate power, and we each see the power we grant as mitigated somehow - either by the 3 branches of government, or by the free market, and neither has faith in the other's mitigating force.

Starbucks free WiFi is an excellent point, which sheds light on the underlying philosophical debate. If an organization provides a resource (WiFi, water, a job), but only to a select group of their choosing, at what point do we call it supplying a service, and at what point do we call it discriminatory starvation? Is the glass half full, or half empty?

If there's competition, it's moot, but if there isn't any, we're giving the single supplier complete power over distribution (slippery slope to plutocracy argument). If we ban discrimination, it's also moot, but then we're giving government power to dictate rules for private organizations (slipperly slope to fascism argument).

I think that's his point.

I feel like the author is so caught up in the view of male sexuality being motivated by a desire to debase women (which would be well supported if we consider the extremes of pornography to be normal), that she fails to make a convincing argument that that underlying desire is in fact the norm.

> While sexual aggression and the desire to debase women may not be what arouse all men, they are certainly an animating force of male sexuality.

I think it's kind of a jump, when looking at how something plays out in the bedroom, to make statements about the motivations (e.g. enforcing male hegemony), particularly when applying it broadly to a large and varying group.

Under her assumption that sexuality isn't egalitarian, and that pornography is an "unvarnished view of male sexuality" in general, she makes some good points, but I think the author fails to substantiate the validity of these assumptions.

As much as the debasement of women in pornography offends me, we need to keep in mind that it's a product, and as such it doesn't necessarily provide deep insight on the consumer or the producer - both of whom are just negotiating to find something that more or less suits their needs at the moment.

So in a free market, all entities inherently act in the best interest of their customers, regardless of whether or not there's competition? And they wouldn't use their position to do anything anticompetitive to maintain that position and keep the "free" market effectively closed?

My point is, without some entity establishing rules of fair play, the market isn't a free one, because one player can gain enough power to effectively close the market to any competitors.

Agreed, let's not let government meddle in the affairs of content delivery. But let's not let anyone else, either, because government isn't the only entity capable of censorship. But who would enforce such a rule?

I have an idea - we could make a law that says "no one should meddle in the affairs of content delivery" - we could call it something catchy, like "Net Neutrality".

I agree with you that government should be kept on a short leash, for the reasons you state, but we don't want to strangle it, either - Government has a job to keep others from infringing on your rights. If ISPs are free to regulate traffic, then they have the power to strangle the business of a content provider by preventing their customers from accessing the content. Even if you argue that customers have chosen their infrastructure provider, how is the infrastructure provider not infringing on the rights of the content provider, which doesn't even do business with them?

So rather than take the risk that a part of government may become corrupt, and attempt to manage that risk with a system of checks and balances, we shouldn't give the government any power whatsoever, and instead leave any other organization that gains any form of power free to use that power without restriction?

> This is ONLY a debate about whether control over our access should be in the hands of Internet Service Provider companies (ISPs) or… the Government.

As far as I'm aware, no one wants government to regulate the internet - Net Neutrality supporters just want rules saying that ISPs can't regulate it either. The issue of censorship is irrelevant, and could even be made explicitly so, if that's what legislators who oppose Net Neutrality are actually worried about.

> [ISPs] are regulated by YOU!

Except in areas where there's essentially a monopoly, and the high cost of entry into the market is likely to keep it this way, where ISPs are free to abuse their market position for fun and profit.

> who’s regulating the FCC?

The executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

> which hypothetical scenario is more likely? The FCC overstepping its current authority, or ISPs delivering services that its customers are not happy about?

... I'm speechless.

> Regulation = Freedom only in George Orwell’s 1984.

And Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle".

Avoid fragmentation by just dropping support for older versions of the OS?

Keep in mind, Apple occasionally charges for iOS upgrades, so requiring an upgrade effectively increases the cost of your application by a nontrivial amount. Not all users want to upgrade, especially when upgrades degrade performance and have limited new features for older devices.

This article was posted a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2039427

I was really hoping for a thoughtful piece discussing a situation where requiring that infrastructure owners not discriminate by content had an overall negative effect.

Sadly, the author just Glenn-Beck-style associates rules requiring fair play with regulation of speech and business decisions because they both can be called "regulation", and goes on to describe how fascism can stifle the growth of good ideas.

tl,dr: Author sets up straw man; author attacks straw man; author concludes all regulation is evil.