eta_carinae

> Actually, I think that's the exact wrong lesson to take from this. That's what Color did: look for something that hasn't been done before and did that. It was a solution to a problem that doesn't exist: meeting strangers

Color has never been about meeting strangers. Never.

v1 of the application allowed people who happen to be at the same place at the same time to share photos (still a great idea in my opinion, imagine concerts or random birthday parties where you hardly know anyone but everybody is taking pictures).

v2 was about live broadcasting (interesting tech but uninteresting product).

> Thus far windows 8 tells me that it is time for me to shift totally to Linux

This is like saying you're going to sell your Toyota because Toyota just released a car that you don't like.

Why all the drama? Just stick to Windows 7, which will be supported for years to come.

> But really, I wish someone would write an article like "why I switched from vim to Eclipse", but I only ever see ones where the author does the opposite.

You haven't looked very hard, most Eclipse users today came from emacs or vi. And are you seriously arguing that a search/replace is more effective than a refactoring performed automatically with guaranteed correctness?

You are being unreasonably and inexplicable biased against Eclipse (and IDE's in general), it's pretty baffling.

> Eclipse seems to be a program that consumes all available memory to turn its windows grey when you type into it. I'm not sure how you think it's suitable for Java programming.

Considering that about half of the Java community uses it and is quite happy with it, did it occur to you that maybe, your experience with it was not representative?

> The best programmers use either Emacs or vim.

No, only the programmers that you know. One thing that makes a programmer great is that they will always pick the best tool for the job, not the tool that they are used to.

The point here is not that Eclipse or XCode is better than vim, it's that no matter how productive you are writing Java or Objective C with vim, you will be more productive using Eclipse or XCode.

> A few developers I've known have made the case that they just don't see text editing speed as the bottleneck in their day-to-day work.

Right, it's only a bottleneck if you use the wrong tool for the job. As much as I love vi for text editing, it is the wrong tool for HTML editing and for a growing number of other file types for which more specialized editors exist (e.g. Eclipse for Java).

I know that vi experts think they are very fast with vi but they are wrong: if you are using vi for anything but simple text files, you are not being as productive as you could be and you should really consider being more mentally flexible and use the right tool for the job instead of vi for every job.

> And those requirements kept growing. If my calculations are correct, the standard setup for engineers now is a machine with 20 or more gigabytes of RAM just to RUN the software.

Close. In 2011, all the engineer desktops got upgraded to 36Gigs. At the time, the eng department still hadn't figured out how to deploy without duplicating hundreds of jar files everywere.

Annoying as hell, that's what you get when you don't support exceptions.

> I use chrome but this line reminds me of "This site best viewed in Netscape Navigator", which is a tad irksome :(

It depends on the reason.

Recommending a browser because you are using mark up that only this browser knows is bad.

Recommending a browser because that browser is ahead of all the others in terms of spec support is fine.

> It would be a disincentive to get out of the office and away from my co-workers once a day, which is something that I think makes me happier and more productive.

If stepping away from your coworkers makes you happy and productive, your company has bigger problems than charging for meals.

> Complexity of Scala has been debated many times. Just because a language adds some new concepts and is different than other mainstream languages, is not enough to call it "complex".

It seems to me that the JVM community has moved on from Scala and is actively looking for a language that offers most of the benefits that Scala offers without the downsides.

Kotlin (from JetBrains) and Ceylon (from RedHat) seem to be the first two languages with a really interesting take on this problem. Gosu and Fantom are similar attempts, although I think these two already failed to gain traction.

> Because leaving the friggin' docs online costs so much?

It's not so much about cost but about polluting the Google index with obsolete information. For example, look up a Java API and it's very likely that the first link you will get will point to Java 5. Google is not wrong, that API link is most likely the most linked to, but it's very often not the one you are looking for and certainly not the one that the author of the API wants you to find first.

> Asking someone experienced to write the "print a string in reverse" algorithm will naturally insult them.

Being insulted is the wrong reaction. Either you are a good coder, you will write it down on the board in one minute and we'll move on, or you are not a good coder, you have a crappy attitude and you are not getting an offer.

Some people seem to be immune to it, you might be one of the lucky few.

Make no mistake, though: Dvorak is an aggravating factor in carpal tunnel syndrome. The faster you type by moving your fingers only and not your hands, the more likely you are to start feeling the onset of CTS.

Ironically, the best way to make sure you won't suffer from CTS is by typing with just two fingers.

It's depressing that only one in five of these keyboards is ergonomic. If you're a developer today and you are planning on typing on a keyboard for at least the next ten years, picking any other keyboard than an ergonomic one is a guaranteed path toward painful and permanent pains in your wrists and forearms.

Switch to an ergonomic keyboard today, you'll be glad you did.

The PC gaming world is filled with huge game companies, yet the indie market is doing quite well.

What makes Android different?

The fact that he's such a Emacs fan makes me skeptical about project Grok, to be honest. There is only so far you can take Emacs and for statically typed languages, IDE's leave Emacs in the dust.

I with he were more knowledgeable on IDE's (IDEA, Eclipse, Visual Studio, XCode) so he had a better idea of what modern developers expect from their tools.

I'm hoping Grok will succeed, but I wouldn't be surprised if in the coming year, it gets completely canceled.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that this piece of metal traveled 350 million miles through space and then landed on Mars.

> One of these companies needs to put their weight into getting OEMs to pre-install Linux.

Several OEM's do just that, but nobody is buying.

> Notice that nobody has a problem with Linux on their phone, because it comes pre-installed.

No, nobody has a problem with these because Android has a good UI on top of Linux. Desktop Linux never came close to achieving that goal, hence its repeated failure to break into the mainstream.

> Seeing Knuth talk about tweets feels weird.

Does it make you feel better that he released the book as a .ps?

It's a tough call.

On one end of the spectrum, you have a 100% direct elimination system. No cheating there (you lose, you're out) but you don't get a good feel for who is really the best since so few games are happening (log2(n)). Somebody can win just because they had an easy draw, even when you try to be smart with how you pepper seeds.

On the other end of the spectrum, you can do a 100% pool system: everybody plays against everybody else. The winner is very likely to be the best of all, but it's obviously an organizational nightmare that would take forever to complete (n! games). Again, here, there is zero incentive to lose.

This is why most professional tournaments operate with a mix of these two: a set of small pools first that leads into a direct elimination system. The trick is to implement the transition so that you always want to win all your pool games. Seeds are supposed to take care of this problem, but it's not a guarantee.

Pretty damning:

> One of these phones (the bottom-right one) became the Samsung F700 - a product Apple once included as an infringing product, but later withdrew once it learned Samsung created it and brought it to market before the iPhone

The more this thing goes on, the more it feels like Apple is filing all the possible lawsuits they can more in order to slow down their competitors than because they have valid claims.

I miss the days when they did not need to do this because their products were simply better than the competition.

The fact that it takes so much intimate knowledge of how the collections are implemented to get some decent performances in Scala is probably one of the many reasons why this language hasn't taken off.

> That's only the salary.

Like I said, it's still very low for a CEO salary.

> If I was worth $300 million, I would not be working and I would be spending annoying (to my daughter) amounts of time with my daughter. Fuck work!

Which is probably why you don't have $300M.

Your conspiracy theory about Google planting Marissa as a spy CEO is absurd.

I'm sure Marissa's departure was considered a huge loss at Google, especially to go to Yahoo. No company is ever happy to lose an executive.

One million dollars a year is still very, very low for a CEO of a major public company.

Nice, but it seems to busy wait: my CPU is pegged at 50% even when I am not doing anything.

You were. I didn't find any mention of Jobs, Wozniak, Apple or Microsoft in the few that I clicked.

> I thought the mainstream opinion is that choice has quite little to do with it.

Outside the USA, yes. Sadly, a majority of Americans thinks that being gay is a choice while being obese is genetic.