jeffreymcmanus

The book "The Case for Mars" makes a similar argument (that getting to Mars using mostly Apollo-era technology has always been possible, we just lack the political will).

More importantly it makes a compelling argument that we must do this, because civilization requires a frontier.

Sounds like a good reason to not go with those guys from Croatia

I think this notion that you have to suck up to investors and tailor what you do to jump through their arbitrary hoops is toxic.

Focus on making your business so awesome that investors see value and can't resist the opportunity. Everything else is hand-waving and cargo-cult thinking.

Just because most (not all) programmers are self-taught, doesn't mean that's the natural or optimal state of being.

This is mostly a criticism of academic CS (which aims to produce systems programmers and researchers). The underlying implication that programming is somehow unteachable is bogus.

Twilio just added support for the UK and they've said they'll continue to add support for more European countries.

Testing unproven hypotheses requires, among other things, money.

Pivoting requires, among other things, money.

The point of the original post was that we devalue literary criticism because it's so often taught poorly. But the same is true for a lot of disciplines!

It's not true that literary criticism is only useful for the study of literature. One key reason why we teach criticism is to develop critical-mindedness in general; this has important social as well as personal benefits for the students.

Pot, meet kettle.

Stop saying "leverages" unless you're describing lifting a heavy rock using a stick. The word you're looking for is "uses".

If the elimination of risk were really the objective, they'd require passengers to travel in paper gowns with no carry-ons or luggage. But the fact of the matter is that they make the rules they think they can get away with, not the rules that will increase safety. And one way or another, I think it's vanishingly unlikely that anyone's life is going to be in danger from ten people playing game boys immediately prior to an air emergency.

Fake cyberattack is the new fake terrorist threat.

What's the worst thing that could possibly happen.

Then why didn't GE pay it? Somebody's got their definition of 'minimum' screwed up.

We need an alternative minimum tax for corporations. If this is OK for individuals it should be just fine for billion-dollar businesses.

Referencing Malcolm Gladwell unironically == zero credibility

It is freaking crazy that a progress report concerning a piece of public legislation should have to contain a bar graph comparing which side has spent more money.

When money influences the outcome, something other than democracy is at work.

This isn't right. It's certainly meaningful to own less than 50% (or a controlling interest, whatever) of a company.

I don't get why this expresses stuff in terms of percentages instead of absolute dollar amounts. I can't buy a house with 15% of a company but I can buy a house with a million dollars.

The only question here is what "in the end" means.

I can make a bet that, say, OSX won't exist in its current form in twenty years. But that doesn't inform any particular action I should take today. "The end" can be a long time away, and in technology empires rise and fall in a span of three to five years.

We attempted to do a project with jQM and dumped it in favor of Sencha. The performance just isn't there for anything but the most trivial apps. Sencha has a significantly steeper learning curve (jQM is mostly markup while Sencha apps are mostly JavaScript-generated) but performance is much better. And performance is pretty important on mobile devices.

I got the point of the email, thanks.

You know who's a joker? The guy who "got a top creative designer in there working for a fraction of his normal cost by being very fucking cool with him, and also working out a deal where we refer him business". That's who.

tl;dr: In November only 56.81% of visitors to talkingpointsmemo.com were using Windows. Windows is losing ground to OSX but mostly to mobile.

It would be interesting to compare this to other sites. I'm sure there's a demographic that's influencing things on TPM.

If you're on the international space station, solar is indeed significant.

Another example of a misuse of the phrase "disruptive innovation". The writer marvels at the fact that nearly no venture dough is thrown at the internal combustion engine. But investment in gas-burning engines would be a sustaining, not disruptive, innovation. Hybrid and electric engines are the disruptive innovations here, and plenty of investment is being done in this area.

Let me get this straight: you're taking a stance against reading books? Fascinating.

So their CEO has a list of executives that he feels did so little he considers them "missing in action". If that were the case, why didn't he just fire them for cause? That would have stopped the vesting clocks on their options.

Or was he paying so little attention to who was and was not contributing that firing them didn't occur to him at the time? In that case, who's really "missing in action" here?

If I were going to take my company public soon, the impending litigation shitstorm is exactly the kind of thing I would not want to have hanging over me.

This seems kind of pedantic but the guy gets it.

And if you're a tech entrepreneur and you haven't read "The Innovator's Dilemma," it's quite likely you're doing it wrong.

Something about "outsource server-side back-end" doesn't, um, parse for me.

Yes -- the vast majority of IIS implementations are run behind corporate firewalls -- they won't show up in surveys like this. These stats don't show web server popularity, they show the popularity of public web servers.