Yes you can. It just requires sufficient karma.
132 karma · joined March 4, 2009
Also, rating GPUs based on their pixel fill rate stopped making sense around a decade ago.
It's way more versatile than signing up for just VPN.
Judging from later parts of James Hague's series, he was working with Erlang which doesn't seem to have this feature. He also complains of lacking a good map structure — not a problem with Clojure.
Nikodemus Siivola used it to fund SBCL threading improvements: http://www.indiegogo.com/SBCL-Threading-Improvements-1
I was comparing the level of primary and upper secondary school teaching with university teaching, not different universities. Seems like university rankings have little to do with that.
For what it's worth, I maintain that the quality of teaching drops by a whole lot in universities, if only because there are way fever universities around in Finland. My personal experience (some of which you share) is that in some common subjects (like maths) the group size in lectures more than quadrupled in the first year—way too many students for the lecturer to spare any individual attention, apart from answering some questions that came up in the class. Even the word changes from teacher to lecturer, reflecting quite well on the changed focus.
This duty of individual attention falls on TAs in smaller student groups, who usually have no pedagogical studies behind them and often resist taking any share of responsibility in how their students perform. The lack of attention to students is known and acknowledged, even marketed as 'academic freedom' and 'having to take responsibility for one's own studies'. While it's imporant to learn how to do that, the quality of teaching should not suffer as markedly as it does. Some struggling students banded together to overcome the steeply increased difficulty curve and others dropped out from the courses, often after the very first few weeks.
Speaking of catering to individuals, it would not take much to improve the life of an advanced upper secondary school student by a whole lot. Let the advanced students advance to freshman level concepts. Instead we faced the "it's not in the teaching plan" paralysis. It feels stupid to do three years of upper secondary level physics without touching vectors or calculus. Or bring out the matrices and linear algebra in maths (instead of showing a small glimpse in one elective course during the third year). Allow and even recommend some more advanced books on the topic. It must be better than playing Tetris on your Ti-83 calculator all day. Many currently bored students would regain some of the lost morale and momentum this way.
"People are not much interested in learning in schools" is a gross overstatement and generalization. There are those who are very motivated, those who are not motivated at all and the majority who fall somewhere in between. I saw firsthand how even the least motivated students were engaged by one really good biology teacher. Everyone was interested when the teacher did his job well. On the other hand, with terrible teachers even the best students tended to zone out. I imagine this is the same everywhere in the world.
As for the needs of individual pupils, I couldn't agree more. When I first entered school I already knew how to read and add numbers together. I was not allowed to progress at my own pace, and subsequently got really, really bored twiddling my thumbs during those first few years.
I think this catering to the lowest common denominator and lack of individual care is something that the Finnish school system really suffers from. Sadly with all these articles out many observers seem to think the Finnish school system is infallible, and they're only aiming at replicating the success of Finnish schools instead of thinking how to do even better.
I just can't see the downside. He didn't want to merge it due to the lack of signed-off-by, but at least he knows there's a typo there now and can fix it or let it be if it doesn't bother him.
(For the record, this was not the first typo fix contributed, see https://github.com/torvalds/diveclog/pull/2 for something he already pulled in.)
Moreover, I wasn't searching for the best example -- merely using something I have personal experience of.
Imagine you need to go through a library every time your string includes or might include the letter "s" or "v". Basically you'd need to use this library for all your strings. But then you lose compatibility with 'normal' string type and need to be constantly aware of the difference. You might want to use some other library that doesn't support this Unicode library at all, etc. It quickly becomes a very painful world to live in.
As you might imagine, just having support for Unicode baked in the language is very nice. Defaulting to Unicode for all text is even better.
I can understand why Lua in particular doesn't come with Unicode support out of the box, being so small. My comment was written in response to the more general claim that Unicode support is a strange thing to consider essential in a programming language.
(According to http://www.bckelk.ukfsn.org/words/etaoin.html, s/ä and v/ö are comparable in frequency.)
The fact that Ruby took so long to get real Unicode support is due to Japanese resisting Unicode in favor of their own encodings, EUC-JP and Shift JIS, just like Finnish used to cling to ISO-8859-1(5) for so long.
General rate is almost twice as high as well, so it's not bias. Scandinavians are also generally much happier, according to OECD: http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/05/world-happiest-places-lifes...
$ gem update && gem cleanup
A lot of headache I don't have to deal with at all. I really wish Python would grow an equivalent tool.