irreverentbits

Modern pushrod designs aren't "sloppy" - when you don't need to rev as high to generate adequate power, you don't need the added valve stability that an overhead cam arrangement provides. Not to mention that a single camshaft actuating pushrods is more space and weight efficient than a set of overhead cams.

But then, that's just my opinion as someone who races a modern, fuel injected, naturally aspirated, RWD vehicle. A vehicle which has a pushrod V8.

This is exactly the sort of condescending attitude that pisses me off about the CS program I'm currently concluding. Why should software engineering be considered "petty" in relation to, say, the study of formal languages and automata?

The vast majority of students in my program honestly don't give a flying fuck about the academic opinion that CS shouldn't behave like a vocational school - the intent is to go into software development, and CS is the only offering that touches on it. Yes, we're all capable of learning various things on our own (including the theoretical aspects of CS, as instructors in these fields are typically so incredibly incompetent that students are required to teach themselves, anyway), but that's not a justification for providing an education that is largely irrelevant.

If I really wanted to study theory and computational mathematics... I would have studied computational mathematics.

Were it not for the perceived value of a CS degree, I suspect a substantial number of students wouldn't even bother, and probably flock to Coursera, etc.

> I don't think individualism would be a major factor.

There are many countries which satisfy your former criteria yet lack this; none of them have the same innovation economy that the United States possesses.

While condescending, this analogy isn't terrible for user-facing applications of the most trivial complexity.

But equating developers to line cooks in domains where actual engineering talent is required seems a bit ridiculous.

I'd guess PayPal would still be a competitive advantage if it were quicker to respond to competitors like Stripe.

Honestly, this is ridiculous.

1. The vast majority of the games industry borrows heavily from titles which have come before, so Zynga isn't unique in this regard, nor should it be singled out.

2. The establishment of addiction-creating feedback loops is practically a games industry science. Again, this is hardly unique to Zynga.

3. Subjective statements about quality aside, I think it's safe to say that Minecraft has highly addictive qualities, and therefore Notch can't really be put on a pedestal here in the context of your second assertion.

... so you're telling me to find data before extending data-less guesses in an attempt to refute my assertion?

Seems legit.

Yes, exactly. Disincentivizing innovation and the financial machine that backs it is an /excellent/ idea.

Yeah, see, here's the thing: for many projects of noteworthy complexity, it'll be easier to gain an understanding of how to make use of it through a clear set of docs than it will be by slogging through source code.

Good documentation provides context and use cases. Good comments in source code provide clarity as to what the code is doing. They are in no way equivalent.

One of the benefits of encapsulation in software is that it enables individuals to program against a documented interface without spending (although in many cases I'd say wasting) time to understand the intricacies of implementation. You lose that benefit if you're forced to dip into code to understand how to use that code.

You do have a point, though - as an open source dev, it's your time to spend as you see fit. But a quality open-source project is more than the sum of its code.

OOP isn't intrinsically bad -- the problem is that developers have tried to graft an OOP model on software architectures that have never actually needed to be OOP. Also the disgusting abuse of inheritance. There's a conflation of "OOP" with "modular" for large software systems when it's perfectly possible to write modular code in a structured imperative language or a functional language that might actually provide more elegant solutions to the problem at hand.

I've coded some data processing systems in Lisp which were elegant and modularly structured, and I'd avoid OOP in that domain. Currently doing game development, though, and for top-level game logic that is largely about manipulating the state of entities in a world, OOP shines. Different tools for different jobs.

C++ is pretty awful, though, and many of the systems built in it that I've seen are pretty awful.

WebSocket protocol is pretty easily implemented in pure Python; my co-founder and I did this just recently to support some of our game client functionality.

I can't help but feel as if all of the claims made regarding "real innovation" in this post grossly undervalue the strides Apple has made in UI/UX and overall product design in favor of elevating more immediately self-evident technical advances.

The strength of Apple's innovation has always been in delivering complete, cohesive products. In that regard, user interface details and interactions which seem trivial technically are hardly trivial in terms of user experience.

As a competitive entity, there's no reason for Apple not to leverage every technique at its disposal to ensure its competitive viability - and one of these techniques is using patent litigation to prevent competitors from carbon-copying its innovations.

Moral and ethical arguments should be made with regard to the integrity of the patent system itself, not a single corporation's lawful use of that system. Decrying Apple's behavior either speaks to hopeless naiveté regarding the nature of competition, or self-congratulatory moral posturing.

Maybe. On the other hand, it seems like a fair amount of these opinions are "fuck this noise, I'm going to Reddit/etc."

Don't get me wrong - I would absolutely love to see the new Digg rocket into popularity again... but I'm just not certain that's going to be the case.

Oh, fair enough.

I am curious, though... what sort of operating costs might go into that?

Moderators, curating content?

The new Digg doesn't look terrible, by any stretch. But - the developers' insistence on an arbitrary six week push deadline when there clearly remain unsolved problems is fairly amateurish and reeks of self-indulgence.

Users /with existing expectations/ (which Digg invariably presents) do not care about "release early, release often." They want something that kicks ass and gets it right on the first try.

I find it challenging to believe that individuals incapable of basic, entry-level algebra are really qualified to attend a university in the first place.

Having many good friends in disciplines which will never require the use of any sort of mathematics, I can safely say that none of them have had trouble with high-school level algebra.

Portions of the article strike me as a depressing appeal to entitlement amongst the lowest common denominator of students to a university education.

And so the Valley demonstrates its fixation on wealth through deliberate contrast to "those other places". Just demonstrates that pressure to conform to behavioral expectations associated with financial status affects everyone, even if in different ways.

Octopress (http://octopress.org) is a good static blogging framework built around Jekyll.

Instructions for deploying to GitHub: http://octopress.org/docs/deploying/github/

This argument is, and has always been, ridiculous. The GNU user land is no more an operating system than the Linux kernel or the K desktop environment. It's just one component of a larger software system which most refer to by the convenient moniker of "Linux".