alecdibble

He is analogizing the fact that pipes are usually inaccessible behind walls, much like code is inaccessible from the executable standpoint. People running programs don't know what is going on underneath, generally. The same holds true for the average person turning on the hot water at their sink.

One quote caught my eye:

    He said those employees need to understand malware and techniques for fighting it, such as deep-packet inspection, which involves a very detailed examination of traffic on a computer network.

    They must also have a deep knowledge of what network traffic should look like. "There are probably only 18 to 20 people in the [U.S.] who have those fundamental skills," Mr. Paller said.

His numbers seem WAY off to me. Can anyone support/refute this claim?

This is great news. I'm hoping SpaceX's recent success has put a fire under NASA.

Cost, durability, ease of use, and battery of life are some things that come to mind when comparing with your solution. Furthermore, I feel that to be as useful, the helicopter would have to implement autonomous or semi-autonomous control which is not trivial.

How do you make the helicopter rotors so that they don't break the first time they hit something and also don't cut people's faces up. In many situations, have a flying helicopter in a small space can be much more dangerous than a ball on the floor.

Agreed. Original comment edited.

That is exactly what the video shows.

EDIT: When I read photosynth, I was thinking of Microsoft Photosynth[1], which sketches pictures into panoramas. I should have read the parent comment a little more closely.

1: http://photosynth.net/

The interface is excellent. If you had NBA statistics, I would be willing to pay for this.

Bamboo is an amazing plant. My parents buy, sell, and grow many types of exotic bamboos. I have personally witnessed a giant variety grow about 1' in a 24 hour period. It would definitely make for a great stop-motion project.

The idea is that BY LAW, you should not have to be subjected to that kind of environment in the workplace. If you don't like it, then get the law changed.

I don't feel that he is was trying to convey a literal conspiracy. It seems to me like he is saying that he does not like the racial culture of that area and that some African-Americans contribute to the culture in such a way that helps keep the negative dynamic going.

I found and was reading this article just yesterday. What a coincidence! This article is great resource.

The point I was trying to make is that if there is no HR department, lines have to be drawn about what behavior is appropriate. Sometimes the topic never comes up and then it becomes an issue when there is a misunderstanding or offensive conduct occurs.

"joking and acting in a way towards other employees that society finds reprehensible"

It really isn't that black and white though. Almost anyone can be offended by any joke or comment, as people come from vastly different backgrounds and experiences. An example is the rape joke made by Notch. Half the people were pissed about it while half couldn't understand why the other half was pissed. It is those kinds of misunderstandings that can create problems in the first place.

I think this story brings up an interesting point about startups and "startup culture". It's nice to have an environment that is friendly and comfortable, but at the same time, lines have to be drawn. Unfortunately, some people see having no HR department as an excuse to disregard inclusiveness or respect.

That's a good idea! Have you thought about making Chrome/Firefox extensions as well to interface with your service? I feel like the extensions would be more integrated and provide a better user experience. I would use this service if an extension notified me that the article had been "tldr'd. Having to remember to click it is inconvenient and I will probably forget.

Overall though, it's a really good idea and I am interested to see how you flesh it out.

I have tried both the Wiki and am now trying the mindmap method. For me, mindmaps are much easier to visualize where content is and where content isn't. Also, traversal is much less cumbersome. These two factors make a huge difference in the overall usability experience of each. With a Wiki, it isn't as intuitive which "areas" need to be filled in.

It's great to hear success stories using these methods. Do you think you could post example mindmaps (with personal information removed) that showcased how you used them to achieve those goals?

I use mind maps for mapping out venture ideas because once you are finished, it is very easy to visualize what areas of the idea still need to be planned/hashed out.

However, I never thought about using it for programming. I would like to complement you on that idea. After reading your article, I completely understand how powerful of a tool this can be.

One of the biggest reasons I haven't completely jumped on mindmaps is because I used Evernote extensively for organization. However, it does not do as well for this kind of application, especially where visualization is important. I currently sort all sites, services, and articles in a tag tree in Evernote. To integrate it with this system, I will probably add note links to the maps under the relevant nodes.

Thanks! I enjoyed the way you approached the explanation by exploring the problem instead of the solution.

Note: Within the same dialog, you can usually set who is allowed to view the posts. I typically set the option to only allow "Me" to view them.

I have never turned back from a sign-up because of this fact, but it is very annoying how often I see it. I wish developers would take the time to realize that most people DO NOT want you to post on their Facebook.

I think it is important to realize that MANY people believe these things and think like this. Going to a university and then becoming an engineer has caused me to take for granted the fact that there are MANY people who believe or can be convinced by this kind of stuff.

"The second law of thermodynamics, which states that energy cannot remain perpetually in motion in a closed system, doesn’t apply to the torus, Mr. Gamble argues on the Thrive blog, because 'a torus is not a closed or isolated system.'"

Wait, what? If I put a box around a torus, it can somehow exist outside of that box?

You call it a marketing ploy. I see it simply as a reaction to anti-competitive behavior. What should Uber do? Not make a big deal about it? You really think they designed their business model just to bait cities to ban them so they can get a little "free press"? I think that if a business is trying to get another one shutdown using any other method than simply outperformance, that is a story that deserves to be on the news. It shows that there may be unethical or even illegal actions on the parts of legislators.

And you don't think corporations themselves lobby government entities? It is a little silly to generalize this down to unions. The problem is government influence, not who did the influencing.

Wow. The UI is slow and clunky, the layout gave me a headache, and everything seems to move a lot longer than it should.

The fact that they need the tutorial on the topbar should have been an indication that the design should have been scrapped.

So Uber should pass out flyers to all competitors before it moves into a town?

As long as good ethics are used, it is called business competition and is generally a good thing. Do you think Uber is doing anything unethical? From the parent link, it appears not, and some of the rules Uber pointed out seem arbitrary and downright anti-competitive.

What really pisses me off is when people try and use legislation as a competitive advantage. That is unethical and it does make them look like your description: "By the time the city & existing cab and livery drivers notice and want to do something about it, they've look like the bad guys, are anti-competetive and they've turned the public against them."

"And yet, where are the hunter gatherers? Seems the agriculture people won, for the most part."

There are no hunter gatherers because agriculture will guarantee a more prosperous and growing population. There is absolutely no doubt about that.

However, just because hunter-gatherers died off doesn't mean their average health was less than the average health of the agricultural population. In fact, the hunter gatherers that were proficient enough to survive were probably much, much healthier than agriculture population. (This is assuming both populations are getting enough nutrients that malnutrition is not a factor.)

Even though the average health of the agricultural population may have been lower, the methods allowed more in the population to survive. In a food constrained world, this is the optimal solution for health.

We don't have the problems of food constraint (at least in the first world provided you have an income). That is why now we can look back out or diets and selectively pick and choose the most optimal combinations because there is no longer a problem of food scarcity.

Ok, then let's take that part out of the argument. Either way, for a LONG time, humans ate one way. Once humans discovered agriculture and processing, they started eating completely differently. Most "traditional" knowledge comes from the latter period.

Even if we were "created", I would assume we would be created with some kind of optimization for the environment we were created in.

The reason why your argument doesn't make sense is because of optimization. Evolution is a process that has optimized our bodies to certain conditions. So, in theory, learning about traditional eating sounds like it would be the perfect answer. However, what we think of as "traditional" eating is not what our bodies are optimized for. Agriculture, grains, and cooking are a really new thing in the scale of human evolution. Thousands of years ago, humans started doing things and eating things that they hadn't before.

What the studies (should) be trying to do is figure out what our bodies are optimized to eat. Additionally, it would be helpful to know if certain genetics adapted to different environments (foods) or if everyone roughly follows the same "optimization".

This article annoys me. Here seems to be the general structure:

* Generalize PG's statement until it is basically irrelevant to the point he was trying to make.

* Fill in a whole article speculating about the generalized interpretation of PG's comments.

* Say what PG actually meant in the end without showing any indication that the author actually understood what he was talking about.

* Paste a badly edited "primer" trying to explain the argument because the author obviously doesn't get it.

You are making a lot of assumptions about how Amazon implemented ads. I would be VERY surprised if they kept the screen on after locking just to display an ad, especially when battery life is such an important metric for tablets.

Also, many other comments (and people I know) have indicated that the ad experience on the Kindle is "nice" because the ads are usually actually coupons. If the ads on the Fire turned out to be Amazon Deals, that could be a handy feature.