smspence

No, your blog post was quite clear, and I believe the parent poster understood it. In my opinion, you were whining about a very tiny and insignificant thing.

Wow, this guy tried really hard to find something to complain about. He has a problem with what was typed at the very bottom of an email he was sent after the course was completed? This is just further proof that people with blogs will find ANYTHING to complain about.

Stanford is offering high-quality coursework and learning tools for ABSOLUTELY FREE, taught by some really great professors, on really interesting and useful topics, again for FREE: better complain about it!

"He's not some poor independent artist that needs help to be discovered."

Nobody said he was....

"But let's not pretend Louis C.K. is not a millionaire, because he is, and we're essentially giving him promotion for free."

Why are you acting like this is a bad thing?

I really do not understand why he spends so much of the article talking about "class warfare" and the difference between "expensive" and "cheaper" things. The iPhone 4S and Galaxy Nexus ARE THE SAME PRICE.

If there can be considered a "main" programming language that is taught at most colleges, and that most students spend the majority of their time with, I would say it's Java.

When people talk about hiring web developers, it always seems like there is such a strong emphasis on them knowing one and only one language. Like Kevin Rose said: "you end up with lots of PHP developers, but at some point, PHP isn’t a problem anymore and you are stuck with all of those developers."

Was PHP the only language these people knew? And they were incapable of learning anything else? I don't get it. I don't call myself a "C++ developer" even though I use C++ every day at work. I know several languages, and I am confident that if I wanted to start learning a new language tomorrow, I could get up to speed on it and its relevant libraries fairly quickly.

Were these so-called "PHP developers" completely incapable of learning Python or Ruby or some other language? I don't understand how you can be a software developer and only ever use one language in your life. But for some reason this seems to be common when I read articles about web development.

I have to completely disagree with this. I think in modern education, it is understood that problem solving and analysis, and being able to learn something and then immediately apply that new knowledge to a different problem, is seen as the most important tool for students today. And I believe that most schools emphasize this today. I found this to be true when I was in high school, college, and also grad school.

I also have a very close friend who is now an elementary school teacher (4th grade), and says this as well (they don't just teach with rote memorization). Recently, she was telling me about the subjects she was teaching and the different learning tools they were employing in the class room, and we were having a discussion about how great it was that they are focusing on problem solving and knowledge discovery and not just on rote memorization.

I believe automatic, silent updates are coming in Firefox 10.

I don't understand how this is related to the article. The article has to do with searching spatial data structures, such as you would make for partitioning the space of a large scene in a graphics or mapping application (or game, etc.). Maybe I'm wrong and someone could enlighten me....

Google is not bullying you into using G+. You don't have to use it if you don't want to.

Just wanted to let you know that it looks awesome. Great work! People on the internet will complain about ANYTHING. Hopefully you just ignore them. I wouldn't change a thing.