alanctgardner2

I'd just like to comment, because this comment hasn't attracted any replies yet, and it is:

a) moronic

b) completely tangental to the point under discussion

The list of "things that people could do" is quite long. You, for example, could go live in a hole far, far away where there is no internet. To qualify for this list, things do not have to be: profitable, rational or feasible. However, when a company like Microsoft creates a product, they consider all of those things, likely in that order. Thus when you propose that "a thing Microsoft could do" is to find every game created within every calendar year, then, at great expense, replicate the antiquated equipment on which that software ran, then market and sell it very cheaply despite the costs of research, licensing and quality assurance, I think that is a thing which Microsoft is very unlikely to do. I don't think it would be a very clever thing for Microsoft to do, nor would it be good for gamers, because after the inaugural release of a million games from 1993 nobody cares about Microsoft would cease to exist as a commercial entity, having wasted all of it's resources on this terrible, terrible idea.

On the other hand, why were you even compelled to write this? The most imaginative, creative scenario you could imagine was that if software copyrights expired very quickly, you would like to pay someone for that software? Which is totally already a thing you can do, and the proceeds (in reality) would go to the creator of the software?

In conclusion, the internet has broken me. I have no more will to live, and I can only hope in the distant future a giant, faceless corporation will populate different planets with clones of all the people born in each year, so that my clone can go and live happily on the planet 1991 forever. Hopefully your clone will not be present.

It's kind of interesting, but damn this guy cannot communicate effectively. Was the point that > 8 bits of colour in HDMI is a good idea? That modern displays can't show them (I don't think this is true). Is his example image really suffering from being 8-bit colour, because it looks like it was exaggerated by setting the quantizer steps really big. There's also no real discussion or example of what chroma subsampling looks like.

The point is that democracy is not always good if you want to be exposed to new and interesting things. A million people will listen to Justin Beiber, or Katy Perry, but how does a new/obscure band get traction? It used to be radio spins, but radio is a dying medium. Beats is trying to give you something like your favourite local radio station, with an interesting mix of old favourites and new tracks that haven't reached a critical mass of listeners on other services.

In other words, if you only use people's listening preferences, you can only recommend established tracks well. Adding an editorial component lets you get ahead of the curve.

If you nofollow the links you won't be penalized.

You don't happen to work at Cloudera, do you? I noticed you have some submissions about Impala and Oracle being evil, which seems to be a pretty common view among the ex-Oracle DBAs there

In the next year I can imagine most people deploying Spark will be doing it on Hadoop, since Cloudera 5 will support Spark. It's a natural fit, most people don't hate HDFS but their use case doesn't naturally fit the MR programming model.

Buffet isn't a bad guy per se, but it's worth noting that a lot of the businesses Berkshire Hathaway owns are benefiting from inequality. Wikipedia mentions jewelery and uniform manufacture as two industries they're involved in, neither of which has a squeaky clean record. Does anyone know if his companies are involved in any activism?

The problem is that SO is not for entertainment. It's not even really for education. They (the site's operators) want it to be an injective mapping of google queries to solutions. You don't need to become a better programmer. You need to keep coming back to SO to ask more questions. On the other side they need to supply a steady stream of middling difficulty questions, because everyone isn't John Skeet.

Nobody is going to be working on a project and say "My client requires the use of obscure data structures, better Google some!". You can bash the multitude of jQuery questions, but having worked in a variety of settings, some people need things spelled out for them. You need a lot of simple questions with alternate wordings, different permutations of libraries, etc. Even though you can generalize these answers, they're hard to find from Google, and a lot of people will read "Undefined variable foo? Nonsense, my undefined variable is baz. Better open a new ticket".

To me, $.50 a page for a list of links to other resources seems like selling shovels to people trying to get in on the coding "goldrush". That said, I'd be into doing a review for my blog if you care to send a copy.

Flagged, because this is a complete non-story. It's not interesting, it's not well written, they probably feel like they've come out ahead by getting lots of views for their crappy blog. I know everyone on HN wants to pile on and show how smart they are that, but it's basically just long-form flamebait and we've been sucked in.

As far as I can tell the content of the update is never sent back. I just went on FB and started typing a status update. The status box expands, and loads some extra assets. But you can type and erase repeatedly and no extra HTTP requests are sent. I get the feeling their methodology was "Did the user request the status update assets? Did they subsequently post a status update?".

On the one hand, FB isn't doing anything evil. On the other hand, it shows how much clever stuff you can do by looking at people's intent based on information you already have.

On mobile (KitKat, Chrome) the actual annotations obscured the text, and I couldn't figure out how to actually see them. It was easy to scroll through the unannotated bits though.

If you need some help with developer events in the Ottawa area feel free to get in touch. I typically do Ottawa Javascript, Ruby Tuesday and sometimes the ArtEngine Modlab as well.

edit: I get that this is a personal issue for you, and you got piled on for giving an anecdote that didn't fit people's expectations. I wasn't following the whole thread, so I didn't see you already answered my questions below. That said, you were kind of a jerk considering you gave no detail (not the province, not the illness, not the complaint, nothing but "Canadian healthcare sucks").

Was language a contributing factor? With the exception of Montral Quebec tends to be like a completely different country, and they definitely prioritize French language services. I could see getting an English-speaking specialist would be tough, especially in a smaller place.

My understanding is you get a DropBox-esque directory where you can download n tracks, in addition to whatever you own otherwise. The tracks are all DRMed and log the number of plays, etc. You could have 30 PulseLocker tracks, and they can co-exist with all your other music. If you find you don't like some of your current 30, you can swap them out at any time for different tracks. I think the idea is that you can try out as many songs as you want, but you'll probably buy them if you use them regularly (so you can free up more slots to try out more tracks). Of course, the 1000 tier seems pretty bountiful, but I don't know anything about EDM.

There's a library for a PC to control the wall warts; I've done some fun stuff automating power cycling with it. You could plug the USB-enabled controller into a server, and then write an app for whatever you like: web server, bluetooth, etc.

Can anyone from the Bay Area comment on the frequency of these mass firings among small companies? I'd never heard of it until recently, but I've seen a couple now - at least this one seems to make sense, since there's a change in direction. I've seen others which were wholesale re-orgs seemingly for the hell of it.

Seriously? In my experience (in Canada), the majority of engineering universities offer a co-op program. I get that Waterloo is the shit right now, but they don't produce the majority of the world's co-op students.

Having survived a childhood of OHIP, I find it hard to believe that your son received a significantly worse quality of care because you were in Canada. I don't doubt some doctors are better than others, but that happens everywhere.

Why does AirBnb even allow more than one listing per user? How many people have multiple residences which they can legitimately rent out legally? It seems like it would stem a lot of criticism if they only allowed one residence per user, along with real-name and address verification (which they already use for renters).

Maybe you aren't a native English speaker, so this is a misunderstanding. Despite what it literally means, "to undo" in common English usually just means "screwed over". If he had been convicted and was alive he would still have been "undone" by this video

Does anyone gain anything from these graph visualisations? The first few times I saw one I was impressed, but this one is so huge and nondescript, I think it's impossible to take much away from it. They're kind of like info graphics; you see a few that make sense, but many more are just jumping on the bandwagon.

> CAT is currently at NASA Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 3, meaning we are in the midst of performing experiments to probe its feasibility, thanks to private sponsorship

Clicking on the link, 3 is a really far way from actually flying. Like, they haven't successfully demonstrated this in a lab yet. For reference, there are 9 stages, the final one being "it's in space".

It seems like an interesting idea, but I'm with the other commenters in asking why this needs money from outside the traditional channels. It's the kind of long-winded and technical writeup I would expect from a grant proposal, not a Kickstarter.

As far as I can tell it also helps avoid bank runs. If you can only withdraw a small amount of your balance every day, it may prevent the price from tumbling precipitously when people get spooked - they would have to consciously cash out over many days. It might also allow the exchange to operate with money it doesn't actually have, but that's just speculation on my part.

I don't know why it did't happen sooner. I started pre-roll seeing ads on mobile as well, which I don't remember until recently.

I don't get why it's disgusting. This is how video creators and Google are supposed to get paid. It's annoying to me that people want free content, and they keep pushing companies to "get traction first, then monetize". This is what has to happen, or else Google has to keep subsidizing progressively larger bandwidth bills - and the people who are creating the content have to keep their day jobs.

You can do OpenCL in C, that's pretty bare metal in some areas.

As someone on SO pointed out, the most important thing is to not be dogmatic about "your language". You can start out on C#, Pascal or Erlang, but don't be closed off to looking at or building toy projects in other languages. Especially if they feel weird or difficult, it probably means you need to look at the problem a different way. Learning new ways to solve the same problem is useful for a programmer, and it keeps your brain engaged.

I think what the parent means is that the derivative of the appearances is a lot more interesting than the number of appearances (and possibly as a percentage of the total number of appearances). Google moving from 100 to 105 isn't very interesting, but a new language going from 0 to 10 mentions might be very significant. (edit: and Google owning x% and staying there isn't very interesting either)

In other words, frequency of occurrence is interesting, but statistically unlikely occurrences (more or less frequent than expected) is even more interesting.

Actually, it seems like Fring's bootstrapped company acqui-hires Heisenberg's, but he's not content to be a manager or COO. It's kind of like how Monty sold out to Sun, only to turn around and build the same project again. Only he didn't blow anyone up, which may have been a big misstep.

Just to point out, MapR isn't a slam dunk for a couple reasons. Their HBase implementation is very fast, but it involves using their whole Hadoop distribution. In my experience:

- the management UI isn't as good as Cloudera Manager, or even Ambari in HDP2.0

- 3rd party support isn't there. If you want to use anything you find on GitHub, get ready to add support for MapRFS, and revert the API version back to 0.21

- there are bugs. Weird, specific bugs in the filesystem implementation which will bite you once every few weeks. This is one area where they lag the ASF project: many eyes do make these kind of things shallow. Their smaller install base and fewer developers means these things take a long time to notice and fix.