BrandonY

Are you suggesting that it should be illegal to rent an antenna via a recurring fee?

Phones do that now?

Nope. This is also a disaster. I typed "daft punk" into that box. Daft Punk has four full albums available for prime music. None of those albums are in the search results. Instead I get a "Daft Punk's Top So..." playlist, and "Hot, Sweaty Summ..." playlist, and "Janelle Monáe and Mo..." playlist.

I can't fault free new music, but this interface feels like it was poorly bolted on to a retail sales website, which is exactly how the web video service has always felt.

Edit: I just realized that 3 of the albums are in the search results. I turns out the right tab is scrollable, and after 15 items, it switches to showing matching albums, which includes 3 of the 4 Daft Punk albums, and also some Macklemore.

I did not expect that article to be nearly as long nor as interesting.

Sure, it seems like every time you get to the whole truth, the truth just divides itself into smaller and smaller pieces and falls out of your hands. Eventually, though, there must be some fundamental smallest unit of truth that is much smaller than an entire truth. We should come up with some sort of name for this smallest possible division of Bitcoin truth....

I remember being in a computer vision class some years ago where the professor was explaining to us how RGB fails to capture a wide range of colors. I was annoyed that his presentation didn't show any examples of these other colors, and then I realized how I was an idiot.

Much of the technical advice in Steve Yegge's article boils down to this: "Study a data-structures and algorithms book. Focus on complexity, graphs, discrete math, operating systems, and algorithms."

While you could consider this advice on how to game an interview, I would argue it's also excellent advice on how to become a better software engineer.

> big list of salutation options, including awesomeness like "Baroness"...

That's interesting. Including titles of nobility makes things much more interesting. The appropriate thing to write on an envelope for a Duke is "The Duke of PlaceTheyAreDukeOf", and the letter starts "My lord,", but a baron is handled differently. He gets "(The Rt Hon) The Lord PlaceTheyAreBaronOf." And that doesn't even begin to cover all the cases.

Trying to foster? No. Fostering? Yes. What Apple intends to achieve with their policies is an interesting but academic discussion. Policies, laws, and features can have all have plenty of bizarre side effects.

For instance, I'll bet ya that allowing people to share their moods on Facebook leads to measurably different and likely less accurate mood graphs.

> Since the new system was implemented, involuntary departures have increased by 50%: this is because...the new system requires executives and managers to have regular “tough discussions” with employees...rather than putting them off until the next performance review cycle.

Hrm. 50% increased firings seems kinda high to blame entirely on frequency of review. Were these guys bad and the managers just didn't realize it under the old system? Or do they always fire one unlucky guy every review cycle and just do the same thing but more frequently now?

Smalltalk also is rather famous for giving developers enough freedom to more or less destroy the environment with the terrifying looking command "Smalltalk := nil"

For me, I have a young kid and am the sole breadwinner at the moment. My goals are to a.) generate money reliably for my family, and b.) be with my family as much as possible, and c.) not die of boredom at work. Startups are risky and can require very long hours, and I have very low risk tolerance and limited extra time.

User community as testers presents some interesting pros and cons.

Pros:

* Tests are self-updating. Add a new feature: tests come in for free. Change a feature: tests automatically update. Fail to document a change: tests fail.

* Tests are unusually thorough

* Eventually consistent testing. If nobody ever complains, it probably wasn't a bug worth fixing.

Cons:

* Tests cannot be run offline. Feature must be committed and deployed before tests can be run.

* Potentially large quantity of false positives (bad bug reports)

* Potentially large quantity of false negatives (nobody notices particular bug, release considered good)

* Does not work for non-user-visible features

So basically you trade the reliability of your tests for a substantial build/release speedup. Some users experience each bug, but they are the users who are actively using the meta-community and have signed up to experience more bugs. Still, lack of pre-release unit testing must radically increase the importance of VERY careful code reviews.

Not the decision I would have made, but definitely has the sorts of advantages that a small team of engineers drool would drool over.

I'm not a financial expert, but I might suggest that paying off you credit card debt is probably the strongest investment you can make right now.

Edward Snowden on this ruling: "Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans' rights. It is the first of many."

Well said, sir.

Elsewhere in the thread somebody mentioned that a particular location in China around when you got your phone is likely the phone being tested before being shipped to you.

I'm certainly no lawyer, but for me the argument goes like this:

We all agree that math isn't patentable, so let's assume that. As math is not patentable, no mathematical theorem, proof, or function is patentable. All processes that exist entirely in software are representable as a series of mathematical operations. Therefore, software methods are math. As math isn't patentable and software is math, software must also not be patentable.

Indeed, there are over 4 MILLION top secret holders. That's almost twice as many people as are in prison.

Are you thinking of Aardvark? I think Google bought that a while back and then discontinued it.

> it's a banana republic

Milk republic? Potato republic? Egg republic? Atlantic salmon republic?

The RSA patent, 4,405,829, was pretty innovative and also quite useful, although even it had been invented in secret a year earlier by the British.

That said, I don't think there's any evidence that the existence of the patent system prompted its invention, and so I wouldn't call this an argument in favor of patents.

The hardcopy has EXTRINSIC value. You own it, and you can resell it. The softcopy has very little extrinsic value. You neither own it nor can give it away.

There is some intrinsic value to the softcopy, but mostly convenience and being freed to sell your hardcopy.

This is precisely how Feynman got the patents on the nuclear submarine and the nuclear airplane.

There's a hot new technology for accomplishing this called the Common Gateway Interface. Apache has an experimental new module that supports this, but I'd wait to see if this mod_cgi thing sticks around for a while before relying on it.

In his example, he did not suggest that there were any downsides to voting yes. What was your basis for voting no?

Yeah, that makes it really convenient for me if I have to decrypt an important message from a public computer.

AES is really great compared to RSA, so I put my AES key on my website instead of my RSA public key. It's made it very easy for people to contact me securely.

I don't know much about biology, but I imagine that if your legs were very lightweight and bumpy, and you pressed them firmly against each other, they would probably stick together pretty well, and so if you tried to move them both in the same direction, but with differing amounts of force, they'd probably stay together and therefore press down in sync.

One of those pornstars is wearing a shirt that reads "@eat24 is the official sponsor of my muchies." I'm not sure how that could be less organic without removing all the carbon.

Apparently WebGL doesn't work on Chrome for certain types of hardware, including Intel Mobile 945 Express, NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200, certain very old drivers, and a variety of other certain pieces of hardware/software, see http://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/BlacklistsAndWhitelists#Ch...