bbq

And also 3 new tablets. Kindle Fire upgrade, and two Kindle Fire "HD" editions.

Similarly, The Making of Prince of Persia is a great read: http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/

Also available as an ebook: http://jordanmechner.com/ebook/

Thanks for linking to the electronica. I've been looking for some new stuff.

Thanks, this makes sense. I've also heard host affinity referred to as stickiness before.

>how to make writes immediately consistent to the originating user and then fan them out to other users over the course of the next few minutes

How is this done?

"I can't run my business/research/whatever"

vs

"This site is so popular it barely works"

That sounds painful.

Stripe's API does look good. I was actually perusing it just now after reading their webhooks post.

Now it's time to give the GitHub docs a good read. Thanks!

In iWoz, Steve talks about developing the Apple I and Apple II while he was still employed at HP. He, too, wanted to be entirely honest and had no intentions of quitting. Basically, he just told them straight up what he was doing. I believe he even brought prototypes in for demonstration several times.

HP had no interest in laying claim to the designs. According to Steve, every department in HP had the opportunity. They all turned it down.

It would be hard to extrapolate from this, but your employer might just not be interested at all.

> the internet is a medium of interstate commerce

Only in part. Only downloaded goods use the internet as a medium for commerce. The rest of the time, it's for communication (speech).

Have you checked out http://domainsite.com

Hopefully in 30 years, 'programming' will be speaking to your computer as if it were your contractor - and so 'programming literacy' is just 'literacy'.

"Charging $5 per profile view ($50 per 10) is simply outrageous."

Is it? How much do (large|small|startup|<in market x>) companies pay for recruiting? In my experience, referral bonuses paid to employees are thousands of dollars for a single candidate. In aggregate (staffing, advertising, sites like LinkedIn and pleasepoach.me that provide some quality of filtering) it has to be a lot.

It comes down to how well pleasepoach.me can match candidates to your organization per dollar versus other methods.

UML? I said 'viscerally experience' not 'be forced to gouge your eyes out'.

I joke of course. But wouldn't you find it weird if two hundred years from now we were still writing and reading code like we are today? If that were the case, I'd say we had done a shit job of developing development.

This is only true because our tools for reading and exploring source code suck. I mean, we still work at the "unit level" of code (i.e. files and functions, classes, what have you). If our development environments let us viscerally experience the relationships of these units (a systemic perspective) we'd be in much better shape.

Wow, this is a great resource. Thanks for sharing.

"What is it about this completely voluntary relationship that is so inherently evil?"

I'm not going to argue it's inherently evil but,

You are right that the service is completely voluntary. However, the opportunity cost associated with not having a Facebook account has been rising by virtue of the network effect and 3rd party services requiring a Facebook account to access functionality.

The fear is: as (if) Facebook becomes more and more a part of society, the cost of not having a Facebook account becomes high enough to make it practically compulsory to have a Facebook account. And if at this point Facebook acts as it does now, well then it's time to start worrying.

Picking up a hoe and tilling a field is completely voluntary, so why did slaves choose to do so? Because not doing so was too costly.

For emacs there is http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InteractivelyDoThings

To be confused with:

    #include <stdio.h>
    
    void foo(int (*x)[5]) {
        printf("%p\n", *x);
        printf("%p\n", *x+1);
        printf("%p\n", x);
        printf("%p\n", x+1);
    }

    int main(void) {
        int x[5];
        foo(&x);
    
        return 0;
    }

Direct link to the USPTO dashboard:

http://www.uspto.gov/dashboards/patents/main.dashxml

Tufte doesn't appear to be exaggerating.

Do eyeglass prescriptions make a normal distribution? If you measured that you could produce a whole bunch of lenses following the distribution.

Then I wonder if you could loosen tolerances in your production process so that the lenses produced follow the prescription distribution in the population. If you can loosen tolerances like that you can potentially save $$$.

Now you have a bunch of lenses whose distribution matches the population. At this point, could the people who need these lenses not simply walk up and try on glasses until a matching pair is found?

"* Getting rid of the nagging feeling there is something I'm missing about differential equations (this despite acing the respective uni math courses on solving them)."

Bret talks about this here (scroll down to 'A Possibly Embarassing Personal Anecdote'):

http://worrydream.com/#!/KillMath

Tangle is just a stepping stone as far as I can see: http://worrydream.com/KillMath/

Right now he's simply playing around with some basic ideas.

Are we not allowed to post brain dumps on the web?

"Its pretty much exactly what he wants, only just proprietary and not on the web."

Which is exactly what he doesn't want. The authoring tools should be accessible to everyone.

Secondly, after exploring his site I'm guessing Bret would reject Mathematica even if it were free & open source. Because even then it's not accessible to everyone - you still need to know how to program.

Perhaps, but sometimes you just have to get your hands dirty, right?

What about the civil rights movement? Break the rules; they're bullshit anyhow.

Well for one you don't have to be in college.

How is a college writing center free?

Indeed. It's all too easy (for me) to fall off the horse and all too hard to get back on.

Well, we all know it takes 10,000 hours of conscious practice to become an expert.

And if you buy the Hackers & Painters analogy, you'll see programming, marketing, bizdev, etc as arts.

It can be hard to observe improvement in these areas; however in the link it's very easy to track the author's improvement.

It's a quite visceral manifestation of improvement - you see the results of daily practice at a glance. It's a reminder to practice, to be better.