T-R

It isn't the job of government to ensure that a business model is profitable where it otherwise wouldn't be. The concept that creating music or film (or any other kind of intellectual property) would be predictably profitable enough to merit investing so much in its production is a rather recent phenomenon.

Consider, when musicians and performance artists play on the street, they determine based on the donations they get whether or not their efforts are worth their time, and adjust their future investments accordingly - they don't use law enforcement to force every viewer/listener to pay, claiming entitlement to compensation. On the internet, the sound reaches further, and the street is larger - as are opportunities for donations, and the cost of using law enforcement to extort payment.

Perhaps a better solution hasn't been offered because, for things that travel and are reproduced more like sound waves than physical objects, this model of business/enforcement just isn't scalable, at least without infringing on people's rights.

Great description - sorry, I accidentally downvoted when I meant to upvote.

In Japan, employees mostly start at roughly the same salary - somewhere between $20k and $30k per year, regardless of position, with salary increases reflecting time spent at the company.

Expats often move at the request of the company, and not into entry level positions. Employees who are asked to relocate would expect to do so in exchange for a raise (particularly if their home country has higher salaries and they expect to move back eventually), so expat salaries tend to be significantly higher.

Given that, I wouldn't necessarily expect expats to be offered the same benefits as native Japanese employees.

Whether or not you have to pay for your commute probably depends on who you work for and what your contract is. I worked full time for a Japanese company, and they did pay for my commute; granted, I was also being paid a typical Japanese salary, not an expat salary.

This was my experience, too. Our CEO decided against the advice of all of our programmers that we should write our own CMS, primarily because he felt that it would put us at an advantage over our competitors to be able to say that more of the software that we used was written in-house. I left shortly afterwards.

In regards to violating HTTP, Frictionless Sharing isn't in any way different from every other non-RESTful service/site on the internet. Facebook could have just as easily implemented the same service RESTfully (not violating HTTP), and it wouldn't be any different.

GET requests have the stateless/idempotence constraint so that they're cacheable, and timing between requests, out-of-order requests, and multiple requests don't become an issue. The 'accountability' referred to in the post is about users of the API - they shouldn't be expected to be aware of server state/side effects, in the same way that users of a function call shouldn't be expected to be aware of its implementation/side effects. It's an engineering constraint - it's not about honorably keeping end-users unaccountable for reading your webpage.

The userecho page on Code Folding has a lot of votes, though there's some speculation that it'd be pretty difficult to do with the current implementation of the editor control.

http://sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/19281-syntax-code-fold...

You don't mention any stack/concatenative languages explicitly - is that just an oversight, do you feel there's less to gain from them than the others explicitly listed, or did you leave them out for some other reason?

I'm under the impression that each Virtual Console download includes an instance of an emulator. If that's the case, they may tweak the emulator for compatibility with each game (or hack the game itself). If you want to look into it some more, the guys who do 'Virtual Console WAD injection' might have an idea. ROM Hacking and (NES/SNES) console development sites/forums might have some information, too.

I vaguely remember hearing of instances where games weren't emulated accurately (or even as well as on other emulators), particularly with regard to slowdown on PAL consoles.

Nintendo offers the "Virtual Console" on the Wii and 3DS.

Unless my knowledge is out of date, Nintendo's business model revolves around licensing for publishing software for their hardware, so it's in Nintendo's best interest to sell hardware, and not to support emulation on other hardware.

On a related note, when Sony sued 'Bleem!', it argued that running the software on other hardware destroyed Sony's control over the player's experience, and as a result hurt their brand.

This was indeed the case as early as the N64 - the technique was referred to as High Level Emulation (HLE).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraHLE

I'm in a very similar situation - I opted to stay at 'Treehouse', and it's been tremendously helpful for making contacts in the area. - http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/133974

Glancing through AirBnB, I also see this ad - http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/65031

I know there are a few other Hacker Houses in the area, not sure if they rent/sublet, though. It'd also be worth it to check out Hacker Dojo or Noisebridge

'Treehouse' rents a room and couches out on AirBnB - http://www.airbnb.com/users/show/657637

I don't think he meant for the 3 bits to be per-column, I think he meant 3 bits total - one for each row below the top, meaning "does this row have a hole that is covered? (and as such, cannot be cleared unless a line above it is cleared)". This effectively turns all board states with the same exact topology and potential for clearing lines below the surface into the same state.

I think his overall strategy is similar to a point that I intended to make - that there are large sets of states that are effectively equivalent, and treating them as such reduces the complexity of the problem. Not that dissimilar from alpha-beta pruning or branch-and-bound.

It might be a good idea to look at it as an induction problem - one state leads to another, and since a lot of states are effectively the same, it means the tree can be pruned.

Let's say the player has a row that's almost full - say, one spot left to fill all the way on the right. That means the AI needs to not give the player any block that would let him fill it (I,J,L,S,T) - so the player can force the AI to just give him O and Z blocks. If the hole isn't against the wall, the AI can only give O blocks. There are only a few, if any board states where the player cannot create a line using only O and Z blocks - the player just needs to make sure he doesn't loosen the restriction on the AI (such as by covering the hole).

If the hole is 2-wide, depending on the hole's depth, the AI may only be able to give T blocks, if even that, and for most board states, you'll probably find that T blocks can be used to make a line without loosening the restrictions on the AI.

I don't think it's a preference for dedicated devices in that instance - the electronic dictionaries are just better than most cell phones for that purpose. Most people haven't switched over to smart phones, so the screens are small, and the English alphabet doesn't map all that well to a cell phone keypad (compared to a QWERTY keyboard, or Hiragana on a cell phone keypad). Newer electronic dictionaries also have a stylus and do handwriting recognition. On the other hand, the Nintendo DS electronic dictionary is pretty good, and much cheaper than an equally functional 電子辞書.

> The fact something such as CoffeeScript can generate running, valid JavaScript is a testament to it's flexibility.

s/Javascript/Brainfuck

It's not all bad, but even overlooking Standards and DOM issues, the language itself has some not insignificant, bug causing issues, as brought up in some other comments. Compiling into a strict subset of an interpreted language shouldn't be considered a sufficient alternative to a real VM, or a language without those flaws.

The worst part about these issues is that they aren't consistent, and fail completely silently. Global variables cause heisenbugs - you'll only notice when there's a collision, such as after compressing your script. The ==/!= operators and falsy values just put you on the wrong side of an if-statement. The for...in operator sometimes just loops a few extra times. The coercion and overloaded + operator will just sometimes give you a wrong number if you forget to caste an input:

    "25"+5 = 255
    ("25"+5)/5 = 51

I think the issue is that the images are different sizes, so putting size/location into CSS would require generating both CSS and a Sprite Sheet for each request.

With Data URIs, they can convert to Base64 ahead of time, and then just concatenate them into a JSON request as needed. This potentially saves them an HTTP request per page load because it means the CSS can be static. The decoding overhead is on the client, which in most cases should offer better user perceived performance than an extra HTTP request for a dynamically generated stylesheet, so it's just a matter of whether it's outweighed by the increase in file size.

They're sending the Data URIs in a single JSON file, so it gives the same benefit (fewer HTTP requests) as normal CSS sprites. When you just combine multiple images into one (as you do for normal CSS sprites) you lose the information on the size/location of each sprite. An array of Data URIs keeps the images separate, so you don't need to put size/location information into CSS/Javascript/HTML.

Depends a lot on the school, and how much prior experience you have. As far as rigor and workload, that really depends on the professor. That said, intro courses are usually designed to be at least survivable by someone with no background at all.

Strictly talking about the difficulty of concepts, a curriculum based off of SICP (or something with a similar emphasis on functional programming or math) will probably be full of new concepts even for those who've had some experience programming. I'd say this is a good thing for everyone involved, because it both levels the playing field for those without experience, and ensures that those who have some still get something out of the course.

Most schools, though, start with imperative concepts (as does AP Comp Sci), which isn't a bad thing either, but someone with experience won't get as much out of it until later in the course.

If you're applying to schools or about to start a class, it wouldn't be a bad idea to dig through the department website and see if you can find the site for the class to see what it entails.

I could see that, but is that necessarily the case all the time (particularly if you see it a lot)? I'd be surprised if it wasn't ever the case that they just didn't have permission, or the time, ability, or necessity to track down a person, to cite them by name.

I'd definitely go for the classroom. Unless you're living in the country, it can be pretty hard to maintain the discipline to cram vocabulary at a reasonable pace without anyone checking on you. Also, at some point you'll at least need someone to practice with, ask questions, and check your grammar.

If you're looking for tips - when I was taking multiple languages at once (Japanese, Chinese, and Korean), between classes I listened to music from the language of the class I was about to go to, to get my mind switched into that mode. I'm also under the impression that the music helped with my pronunciation a lot (but not with listening comprehension as much as I'd've expected).

That could be true, or it could not be. I had more courses before my OS class, but strictly speaking, I didn't necessarily need to take them in that order.

Either way, it seems that the thing to do would be to get more practice independently. If you're really worried about that particular course, see if you can read up on some of the material beforehand. If the assignments are published somewhere publicly, you could even start on them early.

Also, dropping the course and re-taking it isn't really a dirty trick - they just took some more time to learn the material. You could do the same by getting a head start practicing it. If they finished with a 96% the second time, there's a good chance they learned more from it than someone who got through with a 50% and never touched the material again.

Not that I have any reason to doubt the BLS data, but does anyone know of any other data on the issue? Everyone seems to be citing the same pdf.

I just want to say thanks for the great post. I thought your comment on the other thread was particularly good, I'm glad to see you expand a bit more on it. Honestly, I was a little disappointed to see patio11 reference yummy's comments, since they really leave the impression that he has a horse in this race - it's nice to see a more even handed treatment of the matter.

I agree with your overall points, but sarcasm and characterizations of those who disagree with you as communists isn't conducive to conversation.

I understand how you feel, but I can't imagine Google's restricting the service for anything but practical reasons. Minors are, legally, a special case, and Google+, being in such an early stage of development, might not have the privacy features necessary yet, or they may not feel ready to test them. A legal issue arising from minors using the service at this point in the product's lifecycle would be disastrous PR-wise.

Perhaps not compared to, say, car accidents in the U.S., but that doesn't by any means imply that it's rare enough to not be a valid concern for potential victims.

From the wikipedia article cited above:

"Rape prevalence among women in the U.S. (the percentage of women who experienced rape at least once in their lifetime so far) is in the range of 15%-20%, with different studies agreeing with each other.

I'm personally not aware of any statistics that would justify calling rape an 'ultra-rare' occurrence in any part of the world; perhaps someone will enlighten me.