This article speaks at the heart of online bullying and how mediums such as HN promote it even without being aware of it it seems.
I am quite saddened that persons such as jacquesm[1] who are otherwise respectful individuals want to shove a fist in the mouth of persons who have been victims of bullying (such as he does on this thread).
And this post has disappeared from the front page in less than an hour. I am disappointed by the HN community reaction.
I think you're mistaken about my intent, besides, calling Zed the 'victim of bullying' is in a way humorous given that Zed has personally driven a couple of good contributors away from HN.
I don't think leaving this post up does Zed any favours, it shows him as caustic, uncivil and downright hostile. For a professional that translates into 'hiring risk', and that's something Zed probably does not need more of.
Feel free to be disappointed but my memory regarding Zed's interaction with others on HN is definitely not lacking in resolution.
Zed is a fantastically productive programmer that is super sensitive to criticism of any kind and will come out swinging with all manner of insults whenever he perceives one of the conspiracies against him (for which I have yet to see proof), and this blog post is a nice example of that. It's a pity that Zed feels the need to periodically tear down the reputation he's building for himself but that seems to be his nature, this is just a re-run.
Is there any guide about what it takes for Stripe to launch in a country? From this article it seems that it was entirely Stripe's choice to launch in Japan (rising culture of startups apparently) so why not entering the Eastern Europe (Poland. Croatia, Romania etc) too?
Take Romania for example, we would love to have a decent alternative to PayPal, are there any legislation impediments that prevents Stripe from entering here? Also, what exactly are the costs for Stripe when launching in a new country?
Japan is the second largest and most homogenous consumer economy in the world, and everything works here (infrastructure, payments, etc).
That was the rationale that the cofounder of a different major Silicon Valley payments company told me when they chose Japan as the first country outside the US, and it seems like a credible rationale for Stripe to put Japan high on their list.
There's also a very low rate of fraud here in Japan, which should count for a lot.
AMD's issues have mostly boiled down to single thread performance as well as power consumption. I am not sure how exactly simultaneous multithreading will help in single thread scenarios.
As for the 40% performance improvement, I don't know if people remember but AMD's K10 (Barcelona/Phenom) was so hyped, hardware forums at that time (2007) exploded with fictional test showing outrages numbers. Bulldozer sadly had been for quite some time even slower that K10.
I have never owned an Intel CPU and I hope I will never have to buy one just because there will be no one else to buy from. :(
"The technology that was used for writing me is a fascinating topic which is relevant to whats available to learn on the Wikipedia article about Australia (redirect from Technology in Australia)."
Sending someone to Australia like that... Sheeesh! I am glad it didn't send me to another hot place with lava and tridents and all of that. :)
I apologize for the off-topic, as much as I absolutely love coffee the serving process to me always seemed ridiculous. This clip expresses my feelings pretty accurately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfuX1rypN4Y
Indeed, (and I am only mentioning this because Plantronics is also on the chart) I bought a pair of Plantronics GameCom 367 and they were absolutely abysmal. They were hooked to a Yamaha RX-V373 audio receiver which in turn was optically connected to a PC so it couldn't have been a question about the configuration. Anyway, the sound was completely flat, almost no bass - certainly no punch whatsoever, the highs were absurdly cut and the middles painfully mediocre to say the least. The entire range was so bad that I was really frustrated I couldn't return them due to a hideous store policy at that time in RO. Not to mention that when you would pass the 75% volume mark the sound was completely distorted. What a complete disgrace. :(
The big takeaway: always test the product before you buy it never fall for the hype.
Youtube has a new 'Add Music' button to the player (left to the 'Watch Later' button) which spices the experience I suppose! :) Oh and it's action based of course, some kind of a storm inducing experience.
> She completely misunderstood how functions and function invocation work.
How can that be? I remember learning about functions such as f(x) = ax + b in the fifth grade if I am not mistaken and learning about functions in programming was extremely natural. I studied programming in high school taken from the very basic and nobody had troubles with how functions worked. It was so math like that it was simply a non-issue. I am really interested to understand what the problem was and how did she figure it out eventually.
> And his way of teaching boolean logic is to memorize truth tables
But isn't Boolean algebra based on exactly that? Isn't this the pillar field covered by the mathematical logic, how can it be wrong?
She understands function on a theoretical level. But keep in mind, she knows nothing about the cpu and jump commands. So, there was no intuition about functions being pieces of code being stashed somewhere for later use. That the interpreter would read a call and jump to that piece of code and send arguments to it. Instead, she developed her own theory of the interpreter reading a function definition and searching for calls in the code. The book did nothing to develop a healthy intuition about the flow of the program.
Why would you need to memorize that not true == false? All of the others can be deduced by simple reasoning. One example:
not (True and False)
True and False is False
not (False) is True
Instead of teaching people this (basic algebra), he recommends spending a week memorizing stupid tables?
The same thing with spending first ten chapters having people write print statements with convoluted string interpolations. String interpolation is a hard concept to grasp for beginners. Unpacking variables before learning about objects, introducing what he calls "commands" like raw_input(), before even mentioning functions. I could go on and on.
I see what you're getting at, but when you're talking about a high-level language like Python your comments about the CPU and jump commands seem really off-topic. You don't need to know anything CPU instructions or memory management to write competent Python (because that's all handled automatically) and knowing about them doesn't necessarily help you have a better intuitive understanding of Python code (because again, lots of stuff is happening under the hood automatically).
No, operators have English names resembling their semantics for that reason. AND(x, y) is only true if x and y are true. OR(x, y) is only true if x or y is true (inclusive). Etc.
If you're just going to remember truth tables, throw those names to the wind. You might as well call them P and Q. But we don't, because OR and AND and XOR make sense.
It looks like he introduces these truth tables (sec 27), where, to be fair, he does say this:
> The terms (and, or, not) actually work the way you expect them to, just like in English.
And then he asks you to practice memorizing the tables until you know them intuitively.
I am quite saddened that persons such as jacquesm[1] who are otherwise respectful individuals want to shove a fist in the mouth of persons who have been victims of bullying (such as he does on this thread).
And this post has disappeared from the front page in less than an hour. I am disappointed by the HN community reaction.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacquesm