T-R

> except in ultra-rare occasions they do not happen in first world countries

...That sounds a lot like you're implying that rape and assault don't happen very often in first-world countries... which would be a statement quite divorced from reality. Care to clarify?

I don't think his intention was to characterize all men as thinking/behaving that way, but to point out that those men exist, and that there is a historical/cultural aspect to the prevalence of that behavior.

That is, I think he was just trying to assert that they are effectively a minority, and that their concerns have a legitimate basis, despite the fact that many outside their group may have trouble empathizing with them.

> kids were not allowed to say "he" or "she" when talking about person but rather had to use [a gender-neutral pronoun]

At first, that struck me as excessive, too, but on the other hand, I can't help but wonder how much of an effect language has on the way people think, and gender-specific pronouns are something that really reinforces the concept of "other".

There's no logical reason for encoding gender into the grammar of a language, particularly as opposed to some other construct that would be better at distinguishing between multiple subjects in the same passage.

Of course, I wouldn't go to the extent of forcing children to use non-standard language, but I can't disagree with the idea that we'd be better off switching to gender-neutral pronouns.

As with other minority issues, I'd imagine he's speaking out on it because he feels that:

- The population he speaks for is a minority: they aren't yet well represented within the group

- Those who are in the group may feel uncomfortable speaking out about it, particularly because they're a minority

- The issue is important enough to that minority that it may lead them to leave or not join (and so continue to be underrepresented), and the group and the minority are important enough to him that he thinks it's worth addressing.

The "long rant" serves to bring attention to the significance of the issue, as does the fact that someone so well known is taking the time to make it.

Sounds like you're looking for Hackruiter: http://www.hackruiter.com/

There was a somewhat related discussion a while back; you might find it interesting if you missed it. Granted, it's for a different demographic (25+ US citizens), and doesn't cover the gender aspect, just education level.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2525621

There was also another discussion earlier today on youth unemployment in the US:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2730268

which argued that youth unemployment is related to the 55+ demographic retiring later (as opposed to minimum wage laws).

When I last worked on a Java project, I ended up going back and forth between Sublime Text and Eclipse.

ST makes navigating the code more quick and smooth - the minimap takes away the feeling of looking at code through tunnel vision, you can preview files much more quickly, and view more code at once with minimalist full-screen mode settings and multi-column layout. The regex search with active highlighting in both the minimap and the file is also nice, and multi-select is pretty helpful for refactoring repetitive code.

That said, ST is just a text editor, not an IDE - while some features, like autocomplete, are partially compensated for, it doesn't do type checking or follow references across files, so other features that stem from those will be missed; e.g. refactoring across multiple files is usually faster in Eclipse. I would usually do most of my editing in ST, and then type-check, compile, and debug in Eclipse.

Have you been having a problem with a particular language? I've been using Sublime Text to work on code with comments in Japanese without a problem for almost 2 years now (well, the fonts were squished at first, but that bug was fixed a long time ago).

There's been a bit of backlash against that, though - while it does set an upper bound on the negotiation, it also couches the range of the whole negotiation (i.e. the other side is unlikely to make a significantly lower counter-offer, since their perception of a reasonable counter-offer is based on the initial offer).

Still, the typical advice is probably pretty solid for situations where you don't know where to start.

His class at Kansai Gaidai? Every time I read another one of his blog articles, I regret even more not taking his class when I had the chance.

But for Android consumers, hardware manufacturer is usually a secondary choice. I won't contest that Apple's ahead, but all this survey really points out is that Apple has more control over their branding - consumers have no need to distinguish between Apple, iPad, and iOS. Sure it's not beneficial for manufacturers (in terms of market share) to be competing within a single brand, against a company that controls its brand entirely - that's pretty obvious. It doesn't support a conclusion that "customers want iPads, not Tablets", however, since customers mostly aren't framing their purchasing decisions around hardware manufacturers.

Again, I'm not saying Apple isn't dominating, but it does seem like the question was written with the conclusion already in mind.

Not insignificantly, though, Sega dropped the ball on their (already limited selection of) first-party software before they dropped out of the hardware business. Nintendo has multiple franchises that are all at least as strong as Sonic was in the Genesis days. Nintendo's console sales have always been held up by first party franchises - they burned bridges with 3rd parties long ago by charging extortionate license fees on the SNES. It'll be interesting to see how far they need to go to tip the scales against them.

Good point. There was an absolute dearth of games where mouse-like control would make sense, which is what the controller was actually good at. A few mediocre FPSs, a port of Pikmin, and I don't even remember any Tactical RPGs or RTS games.

They seem to be trying to position themselves so that they're not viewed as competing with App Store games. Granted, they still, to some degree at least, have to compete over developer resources, and their attitude toward indie developers is incredibly ill-advised.

I really don't see the controller as gimmicky, though, at least in the sense that touch screens in general aren't really seen as a gimmick anymore, and other aspects of the controller have been done before. Moreover, someone upgrading this time would actually have to buy fewer peripherals than for previous systems.

Harsher things were said of the Wii, and it was ultimately pretty successful. I'd wager Nintendo will stay relevant precisely long as it continues to produce quality first party titles, but not a moment longer.

I wholly agree with you, though I think what he may have meant by "squandered potential" was their decision to target their marketing (and many of their first party titles) at more casual gamers, seemingly abandoning their core audience.

I don't really understand all of the characterizations of the new controller as "novel", "risky", or even "innovative", for that matter. It's essentially an application of the concepts behind the (very successful) DS, and the idea of having a separate screen for one player has been done before on a home console with the Gamecube's Gameboy Advance connectivity - which mostly only seemed unsuccessful because it was non-standard (Pac Man Vs. was great, but no one had all the hardware to play it).

The concepts aren't new - the same is essentially true of the 3DS (aside from the occasional game that uses Augmented Reality, which hasn't, as far as I've seen, been heavily advertised). The bottom line is - are customers ready to shell out for a hardware upgrade, and does the ratio of price to quality/number of good games convince them to do so? So far with the 3DS the answer has been "no", but whether or not the same will be true for the WiiU is anyone's guess.

I want to give some concrete, actionable advice, because when I hit a similar roadblock, I didn't know where to go for advice, and ended up not getting anywhere for a good while. What finally got me where I wanted to be was learning Design Patterns, but there are other ways to get there, too.

When I started out, I mostly focused on the UI, and then hacked together whatever was behind it. Because my focus was on non-portable code, I spent inordinate amounts of time digging through library documentation, so progress felt really slow.

Design Patterns solidified my understanding of OOP, but more importantly, it helped me focus on the parts of my programs that were device/OS/Framework independent. This was helpful because it meant digging through documentation was the last step, instead of the first. My code was more readable and more testable, so I had an easier time planning, making changes, and finding bugs, which meant I was more productive.

You'd get similar mileage out of learning Test Driven Development or Functional Programming - they all emphasize similar concepts that will boost both your understanding and your productivity. Aside from that, they're all very practical (more so than algorithms), and more or less language agnostic, so if you're programming, they'll help you no matter where you go from here.

Perhaps you could return an Either from the constructor, and then either have a special construct to handle Left:

    myObj = new Object() :{ cleanup() }

or require dummy objects in case of failure:

    myObj = new Object() ?? new DummyObject()

Admittedly less than optimal. The more I think about it, the more I think it's a bad idea... The first still means that you need a separate catch block for each statement. The second is essentially swallowing the exception.

Aside from that, using Either in the return kills your ability to do method chaining, unless you build method chaining into an operator and have it propagate the Either (similar to bind).

Forgive my ignorance, but what about this method saves us from having to use continuations to unwind/rewind the stack, as Exceptions do?

If you were to implement this in a procedural language with side effects, what would you do about "finally"?

> the idea of canning someone for working too hard seems pretty silly

I think you're taking the article too literally. It seemed to me that he was taking the (decidedly silly) polar opposite position to emphasize the extremity of Jason's suggestion, and that there are perfectly legitimate reasons not to follow it, to the extent that the exact opposite could be argued. I don't think he actually expects anyone to fire someone for working overtime, just recognize that expecting overtime has negative effects.

I'd be surprised if the majority of their web properties were built in-house. A large chunk of the Japanese software industry is composed of companies that fight over contracts from the MNCs to do those kinds of projects (websites, software for embedded systems, customized software for internal use).

In this case, 'who' and 'that' are mostly equivalent. If you're talking about a specific person, sometimes 'who' is the only choice, but here it probably doesn't matter.

'Which' wouldn't be used here because 'are studying language pedagogy' is restricting/filtering 'students', and so it's essential to the meaning of the sentence. 'Which' is used for clauses that add non-essential information.

    My shirt that is red is upstairs.
    My shirt, which is red, is upstairs.

The first sentence is contrasting the subject with other shirts (..., but my blue shirt is not). In the second sentence, there's only one shirt being discussed - it happens to be red, but even if that information was left out, it wouldn't change what shirt you were discussing.

"The" is very much a sticking point for native speakers of languages that don't have a similar construct; i.e. a Spanish speaker wouldn't likely have trouble with it, but a Japanese or Korean speaker more likely would.

The issue is 'a' vs 'the' vs nothing:

    he went to the school
    he went to a school
    he went to school

All have very different meanings - "the" is effectively an adjective describing the specificity of the noun. The first describes a specific school, the second describes some not-yet-defined school, the third describes an abstract concept.

'Chocolate' is another example of this, where the issue extends to the use of words like 'some', 'how many', and 'how much' (countable vs. uncountable quantities). Even if a person understands these concepts, it's still difficult to propagate it through a sentence so that everything type-checks (subject-verb agreement, etc), especially if you're coming from a language that doesn't have this kind of redundancy. It gets even harder with hypotheticals, where sometimes one might switch between both singular/plural and non-specific/specific mid sentence, all while English lacks gender-neutral singular third-person pronouns.

On top of this there are cases where the use of one over the other really just comes down to philosophy (whether native speakers of a language consider something distinct, concrete, or countable, or not). Similar issues come up with prepositions - which preposition goes with which verb differs even when describing the same concept in two very similar languages. (Best example I can think of at the moment is that in Japanese, people say "I bought it to her" instead of "I bought it for her"; I know English<->Spanish has similar issues, but my Spanish is rusty)

One thing I've noticed as I've learned other languages is that I've become very keenly aware of, for example, all of the different definitions/parts of speech of the word "that" (each translates differently and takes different parts of speech as its object), and consequently how I structure my sentences.

Of course, part of that could also be a result of my tendency to think about grammatical correctness in terms of type systems.

This is presented as though it's an instance of regulatory capture - which it may be - but I don't think we really have enough information to draw that conclusion.

It's entirely possible that there was concern for contamination or the like in the methods used, which would be a fair concern. On the other hand, the current manufacturing methods don't strike me as sufficient reasoning to pass on the concept as a whole, if that's indeed what the final recommendation means, as the article seems to imply.

For places with runaway population growth that might be interested, a temporary, effective, and low-maintenance method might be more politically palatable than the alternatives.

My commute in Tokyo was usually fairly nice - As long as I avoided rush hour, I could get a seat and spend the trip reading. It was even better when I moved to Yokohama (longer commute, but more space and fewer stairs). The commute ended with a view of Tokyo Tower, an Egg McMuffin, and a ridiculously expensive coffee. Not to mention the trains were spotless, and there were vending machines everywhere.

Still, I'd have happily given up my nice commute for a shorter one any day. Particularly since catching it at the wrong time meant not only that I had to worry about being late, but that I'd be crammed like a sardine against the door.

This also meshes well with this article from the other day:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2591367 ("The problem is that we don't understand the problem")

Perhaps we need to iterate over potential solutions faster.

That's a fair argument regarding PSX4Droid, but I doubt that's the case with this group of emulators. Sony doesn't have any relationship with the SNES or the Genesis, so with the exception of maybe a few ported games, it's doubtful they'll be selling that IP on their own store. In fact, the controller on the Xperia Play would make those emulators a pretty compelling reason to buy it.

I'd wager this was related to either ROM distribution or violating the license on the emulator code.