HN user

sophist

41 karma
Posts0
Comments34
View on HN
No posts found.

So you're saying they didn't intentionally compose this picture in such a way as to increase the likelihood that people will donate?

This is not hacker news. There are lots of kids out there who are in just as much need of help. This one just happens to have a father who works on an open source product.

The classic nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate. The problem with your argument is that it's simply not backed up by evidence. There are plenty of cases of children who grow up in virtually identical environments, yet go on to have widely varying interests. My brother and I grew up experiencing basically all the same stimuli: same parents, same TV shows, same music, same magazines, same everything. As adults we couldn't be more different.

There's more to this picture than just stimulus response/valuation/categorization.

Why are there so many of these "I finally understand [cloures | pointers | misc CS concept]" posts? I mean these are pretty fundamental concepts that any first year CS student should be able to grasp pretty quickly.

Again, spoken like someone who hasn't lost someone. You may become progressively less likely to let any given person become that important to you over time, but losing someone truly important really doesn't get easier.

It's really not that hard to just type "site:news.ycombinator.com <search terms>" into google. Just sayin...

I don't think non-hacker types even know what an interpreted language is.

That was actually my point. When someone doesn't know the technical meaning of a phrase, they generally assume the literal and broad meaning of it. The target audience for the original blog post presumably falls mainly into that category.

And just because something is not of particular interest to you doesn't make it anal nitpicking that "does nothing to further discussion."

I don't think anyone is claiming that Java is an interpreted language. The claim is that "interpreted language" to most managerial, non-hacker PHB types means "a language that at some point during execution requires interpretation."

The difference is that binaries contain instructions that map directly to hardware operations, whereas bytecode is interpreted by a binary. The interpretation is an intermediate step that doesn't take place when a program runs on bare metal.

edit: Of course, it would be possible to build a machine that actually executes JVM instructions directly. It would also be possible to build such a machine for JavaScript, but if someone asks you whether JavaScript is an "interpreted language," the answer would still be affirmative, even if there are cases where it's not true.