mdemare

Nonsense. A cheap currency promotes exports and reduces imports, and will strongly stimulate job grows, which is exactly what the U.S. needs now.

Job growth is also the reason why China is keeping its currency cheap: mass unemployment means instability.

There are two warts - having to declare methods, and the obscure error message. A smart error handler could have seen that frobnicate had been defined further down, and told you exactly how to fix it. And it would be ok when that error handler didn't work in the REPL.

An easier way is to use n-grams. You can download 3 and 4 word n-grams from google here: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/datasets

There are roughly 32 billion of google 4-grams.

No puns, please, we're Serious People.

The problem is that this rule would have locked out you too.

Thank you for your feedback. I try to add as many synonyms as possible (5 for Dutch in the case of "near the sea"), but some always slip through.

Also, any words that are context dependent should have an example that clarifies the meaning: e.g. for "the friend" the example given is "After I told my friend, she started crying." so you know it concerns a woman, not a man.

In general, inglua works much better if you use it as intended, that is, to learn languages you barely speak at all (and that's obviously the use case I aim for).

If you can't wait for Duolingo, you can start learning French, Spanish, German, Italian or Dutch vocabulary at http://inglua.com/en (a YC reject from before it became fashionable).

Norway, Denmark and Sweden are all richer (per capita) than the U.S. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin...).

I think you're too facile in comparing health care with economic goods such as crude oil, for which the laws of scarcity ordinarily apply. Compare this statement:

"Chemotherapy is expensive, limited, and must be rationed. Not everyone can have as much as they want. There simply is not enough to go around." Certainly this sounds silly to your ears?

If you were to say that some treatments are very expensive, and must be rationed, then I'd agree with you. But I believe that there are many treatments that our society can afford to offer to anyone who needs them, without rationing.

>Education debt WILL be made dischargeable in bankruptcy again, there is simply too much pressure.

I'm not sure if that's possible - isn't essentially every graduate bankrupt? Couldn't every student get rid of their debts then?

Good catch, I hadn't read the original.

You cannot explain obese babies by saying they don't get enough exercise.

Also, you're recommending solutions before you understand the problem. Did Americans suddenly lose all self-control in 1980? And if they did, why?

Getting more exercise, and eating more green vegetables and less sugar is clearly a good idea, but the central mystery - why do people get fat - remains unexplained. We should unravel it.

The trouble with this subject is that everybody, including commenters in this thread, thinks they already know what the solution is, even before they have a good grasp of the problem.

I recommend reading Gary Taubes ("Good Calories, Bad Calories", "Why We Get Fat"), not because of what he thinks that the solution is, but to understand the range of facts that a theory of obesity must explain.

When Taubes starts to promote his own theory (carbs are bad, fats aren't, exercise is fairly useless, insulin is very important), he may or may not be right. Nevertheless his book is invaluable for learning about the extremely counter-intuitive facts of obesity.

To name a few: - obese 6-month old babies - morbidly obese mice starving to death - obesity epidemics among native americans in 19th century - lack of obesity among all animals - prisoners on a forced 10K calorie diet barely gaining weight

We won't conquer the obesity problem until we start treating it as a huge, extremely complicated mystery to be solved, instead of as a problem of persuasion, where the solution is to convince other people that you have the obvious answer.

That is a cliche, and an incorrect one. Take autocorrect for instance - hardly a perfect product. (http://damnyouautocorrect.com/)

Great to see this initiative! American companies are usually much too tardy with internationalization. And amazing to see that the Swedes are so active on StackOverflow.

And I applaud the Stack Exchange team for being so sensible in choosing which languages to serve first. Japanese and Korean seem good choices, but the French and the Germans really prefer to communicate in their own language too.

He says he doesn't like bytecode for expressing programs, but he never mentioned what else would work better. I'm intrigued, does anyone know more?

It's not in the article, but the case is being heard by the First Circuit.

Please correct the title. Tanenbaum is the renowned ast of Minix fame; Tenenbaum is the hapless guy being sued by the RIAA.

Please fix typo in title (poweres).

Normal people are people you don't know very well.

Very cool! And if there's one company I admire, and would like to work for, it's GitHub.

This may also work for web-apps, btw. Let your users modify something about your web-app, or create something new, that is not just for them, and I'll bet they'll become much more invested (like wikipedia).

You cannot take life expectancy at birth as a model for how healthy adults are. That statistic is massively distorted by infant mortality (which is an astounding 13.3% for Afghanistan).

Actually, it's: rvm get latest ; rvm reload ; rvm install jruby

Yes, the changes look exciting, but I'm holding out for a better screen too, primarily because of how black-and-white text looks.

Isn't that a problem on the Kindle, which has an even lower resolution? (I've never seen one in the wild here in Europe). I'd love a 200ppi Kindle, but maybe such a high pixel density is unnecessary with e-ink?

Fascinating stuff!

Programmers (good ones) also have a different mindset - always trying to think of all paths, not just the happy paths. But we don't expect malice, just Murphy's law.

Thank god, an app server with an imperative configuration file! Bliss! Declarative languages are not meant for programmers.

Good question, but this is more a stack exchange question - I don't know which stack exchange though...

Looks nice - I'm personally interested in seeing a filtered frontpage based on my personal likes and dislikes.

I change the background of my terminal when I ssh into another server, works great! (http://jeffmiller.github.com/2011/01/10/ssh-host-color)

Apple does not allow that.