davatk

So half the students in each year fail and have to retake the class? That seems hard to sustain over an entire education system. Or am I misunderstanding this?

I would be a lot more sympathetic to teachers if their pay system wasn't seniority based, or if it wasn't so hard to fire teachers.

I mostly agree, but given where it was posted (oppugn.us, a site for "rants"), I would cut some slack. If it was posted on Zed's "real" blog, Shedding Bikes, then I would agree with you completely.

Sorry, my comment was unclear. I meant that vimperator changed in order to make use of the type to narrow system, which was not available with the previous one.

If I'm remembering correctly, vimperator used to use a similar system. I think so that you could narrow the link choices by typing.

What about Conkeror?

Edit: As an emacs user, my ideal browser would be ezbl[1], but development seems to have stalled.

[1] http://github.com/haxney/ezbl

Sort of off topic, but Netflix sends my house snail mail ads, even thought we're already subscribers. I have no idea why, since it seems like it would be easy to fix.

Good point, thanks for elaborating.

According to what criteria?

I should probably stress that I agree with you on pretty much everything except that last sentence.

As for the Miller-Rabin test, it's basically a case where you can get a correct answer with an arbitrarily low probability of error. So I guess the tie in is that just because our decisions are predictable (or at least mostly so), doesn't mean there isn't randomness involved.

I'm starting to suspect that I'm responding to an interpretation you didn't intend, though.

Good point, I forgot about Jaiku. I was counting Orkut as strike one though.

Dodgeball seems like a good candidate for number five.

Strike three if you count OpenSocial. I have no idea if you should though.

Why not? The Miller-Rabin primality test is both random and, for all intents and purposes, predictable.

I think he was being facetious.

For what it's worth, I think you might get better responses if you asked this question on StackOverflow.

Well, the P in LAMP suggests that learning to code is a part of learning the LAMP stack.

One option would be Scheme with Bootstrap (http://www.bootstrapworld.org/). It's a middle school program, but you could probably strip it down for third graders.

This is offtopic, but I'd be curious to hear which five books you chose.

> PLT-Shoes, anyone?

How about Bootstrap? http://www.bootstrapworld.org/materials/

It mainly deals with Scheme, but http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1086393 examines implementing continuations on VMs that don't support them.

Support air to air combat?

It's interesting to note that Google's Native Client has that same goal.

I received this book as a gift, and it's certainly fascinating. But one thing the review fails to mention are the excellent pictures and diagrams. The book is printed on glossy paper, and the pictures are full color and high resolution.

Interesting design, but that's all that's there. Does anyone know what this is actually about?

Also see Larry Wall's fairly odd take on postmodern programming: http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html

Honestly, cheat sheets and the like have never been that useful for me. The only thing that seems to work is to figure out a project and dive in.

I quite like Piet (as in Mondrian) http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html It's a language where programs are abstract pictures.

Also http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/ is a nice site to see some implementations (though not Piet, sadly). Malbolge is especially impressive.

There's a book that this lecture is based on: http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/ and, while not particularly challenging, it does provide a good overview of how computers are structured.

Nitpicking here, but wouldn't it be numeratus and numerata?

HN does have an RSS feed at http://news.ycombinator.com/rss. As to filtering by upvotes: you might be able to figure something out with Pipes (although I'm not sure how).