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emjaygeeon Kindle Paperwhite

Which regular Kindle? The built-in backlight was the selling feature to me. My old Kindle had the light built into the cover which worked OK but was too bright for my wife. The paperwhite is great for reading in bed.

emjaygeeon How the Tudors Invented Breakfast

Yes, but Tolkien invented Second Breakfast. No comparison.

emjaygeeon The Performance Cost of Integer Overflow Checking

Modern processors can generate different micro-ops depending on whether the flags are observed. In old non-pipelined/non-speculative/non-rewriting processors what you said is true but all bets are off in the world of massively funded x86 processor development.

emjaygeeon Introducing .NET Core

It would be super difficult to represent value types, generics and the reflection metadata in the JVM without building some kind of giant abstraction layer. MSIL is rich, maybe overly rich. If you get rid of value types and generics from C# you're basically left with ... Java.

emjaygeeon Is My Startup Burn Rate Normal?

I find this disturbing. I realize that startups are usually associated with non-linear returns but assuming the burn rate in the OP is about gross expenses, not just net burndown of the funding, I think that there's a huge problem with hiring the cheapest engineers hoping to make big bucks from the IPO rather than the best engineers who can solve the problem in a reasonable manner.

This speaks to the problem with demand for entry level (meaning cheap) folks in the tech sector as well as the disruption culture over delivering long term customer value.

emjaygeeon Is My Startup Burn Rate Normal?

Revenue per employee is certainly interesting but isn't comparable to the topic of discussion. It would be very interesting to see what the run rates for each of these enterprises is. I suspect you could compute this from the annual statements.

It would be even more interesting to see it broken down by employment category. Amazon's 132,600 employees probably includes a large number of pickers and packers diluting the comparison, whereas Oracle's, Microsoft's and Google's staff are predominantly technical.

emjaygeeon Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

Will you buy the newer products without the newer UIs? I didn't think so, so the manufacturers are motivated to keep changing.

emjaygeeon President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

It's a trap! I want net neutrality as much as the next person but having the federal government oversee it like it oversees utilities is a cure far worse than the disease.

emjaygeeon Why Silicon Valley Works

Except for the phone observation, he matches what I saw in say '90 completely. And replies like yours were also common even back then.

I'm inclined to agree that it's about the money.

I'm not sure that it's a good thing but it's certainly an engine that's spinning hard.

emjaygeeon Optifine dev on performance problems in Minecraft 1.8

Some people have built string processing libraries which operate on struct which have a string object reference and an index to the first character and a length. This lets you slice etc the strings without forcing any heap allocations.

emjaygeeon Apple Accidentally reveals iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad

Retina came in the 3rd generation.

emjaygeeon How to Squeeze a Huge Ship Down a Tiny River

You have to type it three times.