Bobby_Tables

If you're in danger of getting fired over a commit mistake, you have more and bigger problems than this article can fix.

These are good tips, nonetheless.

The iOS App Store does the same thing with changing the rules in the middle of the game, but it is not subject to potential irrelevance because it is the only place to get software for iOS devices. So the obvious solution for Apple is to make the Mac App Store the only place to get software for MacOS.

I'm actually a little surprised this didn't happen in 10.8.

If every user makes the same error, it isn't user error...

Am I the only one who thinks Carreon wants to be the new Jack Thompson?

They need these sort of things to cover their bases in case the real reason for firing you isn't something they'd want to explain to anyone outside the company.

(At least that was the case the one time I was fired.)

I don't know that it's possible to make such a comparison, since the people who are fighting for these intrusive government checks and databases ARE religious terrorists.

Ok, now I don't feel so bad about having worked on a system that was confounded by people having the letter ñ in their name. (Surprisingly, it had no problem with someone else whose middle initial is the number 8.)

It could very easily be real. I was in a Fantasy Football league on Yahoo a few years ago, and there was a player named Keith Null who played briefly after another player was injured. His name just showed up as Keith.

When AOL first started allowing screen names longer than 8 characters, I knew someone who registered the name "My Documents". That got some ... interesting emails from people trying to save their downloads.

I'm in the process of learning Backbone and just read about Meteor, so I might be completely wrong on this. But it seems like Backbone and Meteor are trying to solve different problems, and aren't mutually exclusive. Backbone is server-agnostic, and Meteor is somewhat client-agnostic, so you could use Meteor to do the data synchronization and automatic updating, while structuring your client app using Backbone.

He wasn't cracking their DRM so that he could watch content he purchased at his leisure on the device of his choice, or so that the information could be free, or anything of that nature. He was cracking their DRM to put a competitor out of business.

Nice attempt at a straw-man argument though.

Having worked for both a content farm and a news organization, I'm not sure what is so revolutionary about this. The content farm I used to work for was making semi-automated publishing decisions based on future popularity of the content over a year ago...it was only a matter of time before news organizations got into that game.

If they're going to try to put actual numbers on the pageviews, that might be new and interesting, but it doesn't seem like it would be more useful than relative rankings. It matters that Story B is going to get more pageviews than Story A or Story C, but it doesn't really matter by how much if the goal is simply to draw traffic in the most efficient way.

If the goal is to change the future, than actual numbers become more useful. If Story B is only ahead of Story A by a small margin, and News Org has an interest in pushing Story A but not Story B, giving Story A top billing could swing the balance...

This isn't a partisan thing. Some Democrats pretend not to support SOPA/PIPA as well.

Why do I have the feeling that he's still going to vote for it when it hits the floor?

GOOD CALL. This is why I should not post on HN while waiting for my tests to run.

What annoys me to no end is that the counter-argument to the "Google is smart enough to build it" canard is legal, not technological. Child porn is illegal in this country, full stop. If it exists, it's prosecutable. An MP3 of a Justin Bieber song isn't necessarily illegal, and determining whether a particular copy is legal requires information that is not readily available for financial security reasons. So nobody can build a detector, regardless of how smart they are.

Which is exactly the point of SOPA...since we can't stop the flow of copyrighted media on the internet, we can't have the internet.

Actually, he probably didn't have any other option to watch the game on TV. NYC (and especially Manhattan) residents very rarely have a choice of cable providers. If you're in a Time Warner building, no other cable company can provide service there, and it's very rare to live in a cable building where DirecTV or Dish service is also available.

So really, his choice is to move into a building with a different cable provider and hope that provider doesn't get into a similar spat.

I'll believe they "OPPOSE" SOPA when I see a commercial during SportsCenter with Danica Patrick talking about the evils of internet censorship and telling us to contact our Congresspeople.

There are lots of people on the internet with lots of money. The internet needs to lobby as hard as the MPAA does.

Lamar Smith needs to be sent a very clear message, in the form of a landslide defeat in the next election to someone along the lines of Darrell Issa. What would it take to make that happen? How do we (the tech community) recruit someone that has the poise and fundraising ability to win an election? What do we do once we find someone?

Smith seems to be Public Enemy #1 on this issue, and I believe he represents a part of Texas with some tech presence (Austin). There may be others who are good targets as well...if the message is "support this anti-technology bill and you'll lose your job", maybe other Congresspeople will think twice about supporting MPAA-written legislation.

(Or maybe they won't. But we won't know unless we try.)

I'll believe it when I hear it from Regretsy...according to their blog (http://www.regretsy.com/2011/12/06/breaking-news/), they know as much about the resolution as we do...

You say that like it's a bad thing!

This doesn't make a lot of sense for Manhattan, because the grid doesn't have a center point; there's no numbering convention for streets south of Houston or avenues east of York/A. It would make more sense for cities like Miami or Salt Lake City, where there is a quadrant system and (for the most part) consistent spacing of streets

Sort of. It does have some publicly-traded shares but the Ochs-Sulzberger family has majority control and their shares are not publicly tradable.

At the very least, a successful criminal prosecution would make you feel better. And it would likely advance your cause...I'm not sure if an extortion conviction would be admissible in a civil trial for something like this, but even if it weren't, the fact that someone was convicted of criminal extortion would make it far more likely you'd get a good attorney to work on contingency for the civil complaint. Even if you only recover $1m, 33% of that is a decent payday for a lot of lawyers.

Depends on your intent. If you quit your day job to work on it and were hoping to make a living, then it's absolutely a failure. If it was a side project you were working on in your spare time, and you made it to learn and/or have fun, maybe not. I'm working on a project of the latter sort...it's not the kind of thing that can generate a significant revenue stream. But it was fun to write, it will be fun to use, and if it can pay its own hosting costs, that's an added bonus...

This isn't a big deal in terms of being revolutionary. I doubt they're doing anything differently than anyone else...load-balancing web servers is a pretty well-solved problem at this point. What's a big deal is that Linode already has many fans around here and this makes their product better for a significant portion of their users without adding a lot of cost.

5mbps? You're lucky. I live in a densely populated area of another major city in the US, and I can't get anything faster than 3mbps from anyone, no matter how much I'm willing to pay...

Depends on how you define "help". The reason there are so many unemployed JDs is that there are too many lawyers, and allowing people who didn't go to law school to take bar exams would make that problem even worse.

On the other hand, if people could become lawyers without taking on $100,000 in not-dischargeable-under-any-circumstances debt, they would be able to make a living at a much more reasonable salary than is currently necessary, which would allow the market for legal services to start correcting itself.

What really needs to happen is that the bar pass rate needs to be lowered significantly in markets that are over-saturated (pretty much any big city). It should probably even be lowered to zero (ie stop offering the bar exam) for a couple of years in states like New York.

Nitpick: you're referring to at-will employment, not right-to-work. Right-to-work laws mean that you can't be forced to pay union dues as a condition of employment. At-will employment means that you can (theoretically) be fired or quit at any time for no reason.