DrSprout

Open source only works when you have massive competing companies contributing.

>It works great for them on their Neckbeard 9000 Triple Quad Dual X Neon Nvidia NIOPIATE computer with SSDs in RAID-26 configuration.

That sounds a little more epic than my Core 2 Quad with 4GB of DDR2 and an Nvidia 9800GT, but I can't imagine the Flash performance is any better on The God Box. And Hulu, while it does run alright, definitely leaves something to be desired on every machine I've used it on.

Which ones do you keep around? The yes men, the indifferent, or the naysayers?

>Provide only high level access to the graphics capabilities of your platform

In other words, no.

Is there really a way to make OpenGL development simple and consistent across a wide range of GPUs and screens? It sounds to me like he's complaining more about how hard low-level cross-platform graphics programming is, not Android itself.

I would say it's a tribute to Android that it has such wide applications. It's a cheap and mostly functional device. Android devices aren't fashion statements; they are commodities.

The entire planet would have been with them. You want to die lonely, you can do that anywhere.

Redirect. Not link.

Personally, I prefer raw elisp to calc.

Increasingly their users are going to be using Macs and Android, and I really do expect Linux distros to start to see an upswing as data becomes accessible on more and more devices.

I prefer having unobtrusive ads for everyone. I'm not a "no ads" person, just a "ads should not get in the way of the content."

The worst thing for me right now is that when there's a question, there's an ad located right where the header should be.

I wish Google would take this one step further and redirect to maps when I enter a string that looks like an address.

I don't necessarily have anything against ads, but less obtrusive ones would be nice, and more importantly the core data should be free.

I don't see why something closer to Reddit (but with a slightly more evolved interface) couldn't function as a non-profit in StackOverflow's place.

What really turns me off to StackOverflow is how much the ads flow into the content and are really difficult to ignore. I know that they've got a user-base that needs some extra coaxing to look at ads, but it really diminishes the site's utility, and fundamentally I think this sort of thing should be an open repository of knowledge like Wikipedia.

>We aren't talking about the "rare" individuals.

The linked article specifically talked about a case where the woman's doctor told her there are genetic reasons for her obesity.

Also, there is a limit to where losing weight is an unquestionably good idea. I certainly have enough excess body fat that no one wants to see my bare chest. That said, I'm not clinically speaking overweight, and I have very low blood pressure, and I'm fairly active. I certainly would benefit from cardio (as would most people) but focusing on fat rather misses the point, which is primarily keeping arteries clean and your heart strong. This is actually quite possible for an obese person.

Naturally, if you consume 25% fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. However, you will be less healthy as a result. There's a very narrow band where you can actually lose weight in a healthy manner. It varies from person to person, and furthermore, you are making yourself weaker and more vulnerable to disease if you are eating less than your caloric requirements.

So you're saying "you're fat, that's your problem, you should just eat less." The issue is that eating less causes its own problems, and for some people those can seriously outweigh the benefits of being thinner. For some people, their ability to metabolize fat is so retarded that what you suggest really isn't feasible. They will likely starve to death before they get rid of their fat.

These people are, of course, rare, but the same issue exists in lesser values for other segments of the population.

It's a lot more complicated than that. The human body is not a simple engine with a fixed metabolism. Even if we switch to a more variable metabolism model, simply scaling your eating to your activity will not necessarily cause you to lose weight. The body first looks for equilibrium, and then when equilibrium is a problem it will start looking into stored energy. It's not just a question of "activity x burns y calories." Some of those calories are burnt in healing - our muscles strengthen by tearing, and then healing larger. You don't eat, your body may delay that maintenance, waiting until energy is available. So you haven't actually lost any weight - you've just prevented yourself from gaining weight, which is actually a bad thing, because that muscle would make you healthier.

>The reality is that distributed decision making in many instances yields better decisions. And hopefully fewer instances of people getting rich on the cheap.

Like charging millions of dollars per megabyte of text sent over cell networks?

Clearly, a shakeup is needed. The major wireless carriers are not distributed decision makers. Their power is so concentrated, they really are your philosopher kings.

So add one more to the dungheap, I don't see how it will make things worse.

>Universities are the last place where people actually attempt to expand human knowledge through research and are willing to teach you their subject. It's the one place where you can go study something entirely and totally useless like Art History or History and Philosophy of Science and nobody is going to ask you why.

And then immediately thereafter:

>Except for a few places like MIT, Computer Science is a pointless discipline with no culture.

While I agree with some of the points made in the article (do go to college, because you'll be a better person for it, regardless.) This is where the article completely loses cohesion.

The way I see it, there are two ways you can teach computer science, and in both it is useful to you as a programmer, provided you apply yourself.

1. You are taking software engineering, learning to code. It may not broaden your horizons, but you spend four years looking at code and writing code in a structured environment, you're going to get better at coding.

2. It is a hopelessly abstract mathematical endeavor that has nothing to do with programming. If that's the case, it's just like philosophy of science. Despite its apparent inanity, simply the act of dissecting the how and why of computing will affect you as a person, enhancing the way you look at the world.

Well, they would have better battery life if someone would build one.

The ultimate coding/writing machine for me would be a full-size Lenovo chassis/battery with a 7 inch screen and a 500mhz arm CPU.

Plus maybe some solar panels on the back of the screen so I could conceivably go a summer without plugging it in.

I'm seriously considering hacking one out of one of the cheapo Android tablets, but if Lenovo would just release the Skylight already I'd just buy one of those and probably plug a real keyboard into it.

I like how the 1940 census lists "Indian" and "Hindu" as separate races. I'm pretty sure I know what they mean, but just the same...

The key value of Facebook is mass-opt-in messaging, including photos/videos as a sort of message. So if I'm going to such and such a party, I don't need to seek people out, I just post it on Facebook and people will know what I'm up to if they want to join.

Until a service exists and I can migrate there with all of my friends, I need Facebook to fill that role. Yeah, I could just restrict myself to those who seek me out (or I seek out), but that would likely mean discarding some people who might have been great lifelong friends.

HN needs to scale up the voting arrows for mobile. That was supposed to be an upvote.

Yes and no. I just made the mistake of looking at /r/pics, and it's a sty.

That said, there are a variety of good communities on Reddit.

Tynt was the primary thing that drove me to install NoScript.

They were talking about this spill on NPR the week the spill came out. There are plenty of news outlets doing good journalism and it would seem that you yourself are not paying any attention to them. So stop blaming the media.

In any case, this disaster isn't over yet, and we don't have good enough figures to say with any certainty that this is smaller than the Ixtoc spill.

Well sure, if you go to a big degree mill. I went to a small liberal arts school in the States, and classes were participatory, and it was very difficult to attend without changing the dynamic of the class.

I think the lesson is choose your professors, classmates, and class sizes carefully.

I think my favorite character of this variety is John Francis, dubbed planet walker. [http://www.planetwalker.org/]

That he spent years under a vow of silence never once setting foot in a motor vehicle and still managed to get a PhD and actually teach in that time is just awe-inspiring.

Yeah, I'm saying that from what I'm reading they must have intentionally been looking to create a completely native app that is worse than the Flash-compiled one.

That or the descriptions of the app are somewhat overcritical.