The effects of marginal tax rates materialized in the 70's and early 80's. It was often smarter to have just one person work in a family because the take home from a second job would be entirely absorbed in taxes and the costs of working (car, gas, etc).
I agree, C doesn't itself explain "how things work."
But I think the process of learning C can (but won't always) lead to a pretty good understanding of how things work.
I'm admittedly not a very good programmer, but I love the ideas of programming, and it's probably my second best creative outlet. I just struggle with some of the higher level concepts... it seems the more abstraction that goes on, the harder I find it to understand. Closures, for example. Sometimes I think I understand them, and sometimes I don't.
I work in hardware design, and perhaps it is only because it is what is familiar to me, but it seems to be a very concrete way of thinking. Certainly not just because it's physical, but that probably helps too.
As far as programming, I think C and Assembly have to be my two favorite programming languages. By that I mean real C, not c++ or objective-c or whatever. And a "purer" form of assembly on simpler CPU designs.
Assembly is great because the operations are so simple. Move, Load, Store, Add, etc... My problem solving has always been to take the problem and break it down into smaller problems, and Assembly seems to be an extreme view of that.
Assembly is naturally close to the hardware. (Although how close varies with CPU design and can be argued in light of micro-ops, caching, out of order execution, etc...) Vanilla C translates so directly to Assembly, that if you know Assembly, it's easy to envision what Assembly could be generated by the code you are writing in C.
If you have an understanding of the hardware involved, there just isn't very much mystery to C. As such, it can provide a springboard to understanding higher levels of abstraction.
This is coming from the point of view of someone who doesn't dwell in the world of programming to any significant degree. I don't always understand or use the jargon correctly.
I was really put off by the contrast between declarative programming and imperative programming. Honestly I didn't understand the declarative example at all. It seemed to me that all the author did was move functionality into some functions and then not bother showing the implementation of those functions.
I work in hardware design, so my perspective is bound to be pretty different, and maybe that is where I am having trouble. We have declarative tools, and what they consist of is stating a bunch of things that need to be true about something. It's not at all what this supposedly declarative example looked like. I could see no difference between the imperative and declarative examples except for refactoring some functionality into functions that then were glossed over in the imperative example.
I don't know if I'll find it here on HN, but I'm interested to hear from fans of Microsoft, or at least people who follow Microsoft.
I check out some news on windows 8 periodically, but I don't follow them like I do Apple. So while I knew nothing of Surface before MS did their reveal, most of Microsoft's stuff is that way for me anyway, because I don't follow them.
So did it work? Did it pack a punch? Was anticipation built up?
I've done much the same with my 2009 MBP. I love that laptop.
However, something to keep in mind here is that the upgrades we have performed are built in to the retina MBP (SSD/Ram anyway).
The drive will be upgradable by third parties before too long, just like the Air. Ram is an issue... no real answer there except to max it out to start.
Well, shucks, wuts a load balancer? Sounds like some kinda doofus trying to keep a pile of shit on their head from tipping over.
Jargon is jargon, and in my part of the world, you're what we call a dumb-ass. Or is that too retarded for you? Nah, I expect there ain't a name too retarded for you.
Read up on the heroku architecture. These are the terms used.
The manual garbage collection wasn't the problem. An unexpected data structure created by garbage collection wasn't handled in a fault tolerant manner.
Yeah, flash is still super pricey. I run a pair as well in my mbp. The ability to configure lesser options to make it cheaper counts for something as well.
With Apple you are stuck with very few yet pricey base configurations to start from.
They come in a lot cheaper than those new MBPs, too
That is simply not true.
Configured approximately the same as the cheaper Retina MBP, the verix cost $200 more than the retina macbook pros.
I say approximately because the mbp has 1600MHz ram vs 1333 in the verix, but I had to choose a 300GB SSD in the verix vs 256 in the mbp. As well, the verix option was for a 2.2GHz vs 2.3GHz of the MBP.
That was the cheaper MBP. Configuring the verix to match the costlier Retina MBP puts the Verix at $500 more.