fendrak

I think he's referring to python object's use of "self" in class methods. What exactly he's talking about, I'm not entirely sure.

Imagine the possiblities the future holds! What if we could use a 3D printer to build collagen (or similar) base strucutre, then simply deposite the raw cells onto it and expect it to grow into a new organ? Organ donors would be obsolete!

Ben Franklin's essential liberty/temporary safety quote comes to mind here. Sure, it's in place for noble reasons (protecting children), but what happens when "feature creep" starts to set in? "Just one more site can't hurt, can it?"...

It's all well and good to say that it's just for filtering the One Thing, but once the door's open, there's no shutting it. Hillary Clinton's recent suggestion that the US view freedom of information as an essential human right and impose sanctions to encourage (enforce?) it doesn't sound so crazy. What are the upsides of this (besides the obvious child pornography thing)?

True; nobody can be an expert in every field. Our job in that case is to make the tools/resources necessary to be proficient easier to access (done, thanks internet!) and to spread the knowledge that computers are really hard to break permanently. Hopefully the next generation grows up without this particular fear!

Well, that saves me a bit of work!

I can sympathize with the author's lack of understanding of people's fear of breaking things, especially of those that are tech-related. Take computers for instance. It seems that to the average Joe, they're magical black boxes; they put in passwords, discs, and mouse clicks, and out come YouTube videos and tax returns. To this person, if they don't click on the right series of "OK" buttons, they can put the computer in a permanent state of hopelessness from which it can never recover. It's like they're in some finite state machine with no idea what states the state transitions take them to. To someone in the know, they can be sure that any state in the FSM they go to was intended to be visited in that manner, and they can surely get back to the state they came from by simply exploring. But to Average Joe, the next state could lead him off a cliff or set his pants on fire. This "fear" of exploring could simply be the manifestation of a deep-seated misunderstanding of the concept of software in general. It's really no different than the kettle corn, despite its apparent complexity; it just looks prettier and makes different noises.

You know, I thought the exact same thing about a third of the way into the document, and noticed that he used most of the common symbols you'd need, even a capital Z and exclamation point. Maybe I'll make a spring break project out of it and post the result on HN.

My software engineering professor always used Code2HTML for the code samples he posted online:

http://www.palfrader.org/code2html/

While I never used it myself, it produced nicely formatted results.

The art is very cool, but the demo is entirely too easy. The "shooting" feature's kickback allows you to fly, bypassing any obstacles. Unless this is a feature, in which case the obstacles need to be designed with that in mind. Other than that, pretty neat!