joseph_cooney

This is the first thing I've read in this thread that explains the VC involvement in a way that makes sense.

A friend of mine works in a trading company. He said all the traders want to become devs, because it is the only skill that they've seen up close that translates outside of the mad-house of trading, and they (the traders) all know eventually their number will be up.

And also the ability to run on Windows XP, where DirectWrite doesn't exist.

Yeah, it looks just like a nabaztag without ears.

I thought exactly the same thing. Those books are very educational, as well as entertaining. The main/only problem is it is sometimes hard to know where the fantasy starts and the facts stop. I suspect the non-titular/non-noble characters (Shaftoes, the slave galley crew that become Jack's boon companions). Plus there is the whole island of Qwghlm. Also fortunately it has its own Wiki http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle_Wiki.

Because if there's one thing the MS ecosystem needs, it's more dev fragmentation....

I heard a choir of discordant voices, and pictured something smooth, rectangular and black.

Depends on your demographic. 20% of our site visitors use IE8 :-(.

So if I bought an extra 2 years of applecare for my MBP do I get half that credited back, since it is only one 'extra' year?

Have you ever developed mobile UI? Sometimes there just isn't enough pixels.

You forgot the #firstworldproblems hashtag.

Yes. I read "The Master Switch" and being crowned "The New Bell Labs" to me was synonymous with incredible innovation, which is the buried for decades to protect and entrenched position, which I don't think is google's play. For example, see the history of the answering machine and magnetic tape.

http://io9.com/5691604/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60...

Who says I haven't.

I never realized until recently how the high mobility of goods, flexible trade system etc. brought about by the rise of the Mongol empire a few centuries before, allowed the Bubonic Plague to spread from south-east asia through to the middle east and europe in a relatively short time. Your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness.

Seems about right vis a vis the need for algorithms to be correct. Good enough is, by definition, good enough.

There is a Japanese restaurant not far from me that uses a system like this. Your table/booth has an ipad you place orders on. Staff bring out the food to your table. You walk out at the end and pay. It worked really well.

Time to name and shame.

Your example worked fine for me, and returned a list of search results from HN for me with the words 'foo' 'bar' and 'baz'.

My take on this. Not to say some people don't 'do' software engineering....but it is still nascent. http://jcooney.net/post/2012/02/27/What-Other-Engineering-Di...

Yesterday when some apple users said their Macbook battery life had been impacted by the Mavericks upgrade the consensus on HN was that "people blame all kinds of problems on software upgrades". When some Dell users say their laptops smell funny, then Dell has a QA problem.

"by far the most benevolent hegemon in the history of the world" - I dunno....Great Britain/the commonwealth did a few good things. Pax Romana wasn't too bad. The mongols were pretty benevolent and accommodating.

In the absence of any evidence in the article to the contrary, I think point #1 is pretty suspect.

A friend of mine built a business that was very much aligned with his personality and interests, but he did so in his spare time, until it was bringing in about 300K/year in profits, and he literally didn't have a spare minute more to devote to it. Only then he quit his well paying day-job.

really? how do you know?

Drones.

It's in TFA. You should probably read it before asking.

re: The lean start-up - does it matter? I'm sure you can 'go deep' understanding the cognitive science behind why the smiling girl works, and that might give you some insights, but without perfect knowledge of the whole world you could never perfectly understand why, and instead of spending that time with deeply understanding more about the why you could run 50 other experiments to find other things that worked or didn't work.

It's called a joke. There is probably a few TED talks that you can listen to to explain it.

Ted Turner?

I had to drill into the PDF linked from the article to learn that SA (in this case) refers to the Republic of South Africa.

> All the people from the article seem to be carefully selected socialists big time who just couldn't wait to give up on the US citizenship no matter what

"survivor" bias? Maybe those are the only kind of people who want to give up their U.S. citizenship?