jshintaku

If you are friends though shouldn't you be able to work through some really hard problems together and go through the ups and downs as a team? I find that friendship is an added bonus that helps you push through tough challenges that would otherwise make you want to quit. You can't let your friends down when the going gets tough...

Growing and expanding your network is a good thing to do in general. Doesn't hurt to have as many friends as possible with multiple different skillsets. Growing from an idea to a business will require many different people along the way willing to help you out. So start asking around and see if anyone you know wants to setup a little weekend hacking session. Don't worry about the present too much there are always infinite possibilities in the future.

Fair enough I personally do not care what you believe in, if it is the tooth fairy or ganesh or yawheh or nothing at all.

One of the points the article was making was that people naturally distrust atheists due to the fact they cannot derive a morality based on humans alone not necessarily whether or not they believe in a diety. Which is why they often say I don't care what you believe in just believe in something higher than yourself. You are just stating a belief system i.e. I am a secular humanist not where this belief derived from i.e from rationality we derive our universal moral standards of concern and consideration for other humans. Or some form of utilitarianism that suggests that concern and consideration are in our best interests as a whole society.

In reality cultural integration is a bit of an illusion as hegemony rules the law of the land in most cases. Travel to Syria or North Korea right now and you will find that power is the morality people usually follow.

To believe that we are all self-rational actors heading towards some grand path of enlightenment and cultural integration in some far off utopia wonderland of cooperation and mutual self-benefit is to ignore the more animalistic and competitive bit of our nature.

Look that is fine. But part of the article states that there is no basis for morality outside of a higher power. If there is no moral authority higher than humans then on what grounds do you begin to build a belief system. It will just degenerate into one man's opinion against another which is the foundation of the master/slave morality. Or do you believe in some apriori rationality that preceded the universe that man has unique capabilities to discover. That might lead you into the domain of a higher power or some form of deism. Your thoughts?

I think the cultural shift of younger religious folks towards tolerance and liberalism is more a testament to the values of humans changing religion to serve their needs as opposed to a divine creator dictating aprior moral tenants that never change. I think the US is going through more of a cultural shift brought on by the 1960/70s than a fundamental belief/disbelief in creation/evolution.

Does anyone else find it curious that Atheists who disavow organized beliefs end up codifying their own belief system into organizations such as the "insert atheist group here" which act as defacto church for nonbelievers. I am still waiting for Nietzsche's superman to deliver a new morality for the end of the Christian epoch. I guess I will have to wait a while for that to happen...

I'll take a stab at it and throw my 0.2 in I have had Facebook since 2004. Facebook became uncool when it opened up the site to people who weren't in your same college. Once everyone from Myspace and Friendster joined Facebook it became uncool. Then once people's parents and relatives joined it became seriously uncool. The lack of control over your data and pac-man like gobbling up of other companies is just the icing on the uncool cake.

That is your Karma score.

Just thinking out loud I believe wheat and other similiar commodities are traded across state lines and therefore the personal growth of a commodity can exert a substantial effect on the overall industry which because it is traded across state lines is regulated by the federal government. The source code for proprietary trading is done within the state and all for the in-house use of the firm developing the product so I am not sure if you can transfer the analogy to growth of a commodity such as wheat for personal use. A lawyers opinion would be nice to hear though. I assume because there is no substantial market for source code development of prop trading systems and because it is not traded and sold for use by multiple firms across state lines this wouldn't apply?

Personally I agree with him 100% that brand association can be an imperfect signal and predictor of a person's abilities and future success and that people rely too heavily on association and image instead of tangible accomplishments. However I believe he severely discounts the level of groupthink in our current culture and how prevalent this brand association is in people's minds. Especially in older more traditional businesses these associations still act as a powerfull barrier to entry into most groups. However in a more turbulent startup type environment, hopefully, people put more weight on the creation of real value.

The defense that prop trading source code didn't count as interstate commerce because it was for internal use and therefore didn't fall under applicable federal statues is brilliant. However the defense that this was a digital transfer and therefore didn't count as "goods, wares or merchandise" seems questionable. What really is the difference between me purchasing and downloading a song on iTunes and buying a CD online on amazon.com. Effectively I am doing the same thing in my books. I believe that law should be updated.

I maybe wrong but I believe it depends on what you want to do with your degree. If you want to do video game programming I would think that the core physics coursework would be a definite prerequisite. I'm pretty sure more hardware related firms might also look into your science coursework as well. This will probably be less important if you want to pursue web programming or something more high level.

When I was young man, now I feel old just saying that, hacking meant unauthorized access to computer systems. If you were a hacker you were a in general a blackhat because at that point no one knew what pen testing was or a that you could make a living as a white hat. When you got older and realized you could actually go to jail for being a black hat you converted and became a white hat and got a job as a penetration tester or vulnerability assessor.

Now the term "hacking" has been stolen and misused to the point where it has become a synonymous for developer. I suppose no one these days wants to call themselves a programmer or developer as it is a dirty word. Hacker is much cooler.

If they had left out the part about growing a significant other the article would have worked a lot better.

April fools joke aside with the growth of human organs in the laboratory this has to be inevitable right?

When I read that scientists were able to grow human organs for transplant I thought that it was a great step forward for human progress. For some reason I feel this might be a step backward. Though I welcome any arguments that state this could be a good thing after all how is this different from selective breeding right?

My guess is that Foursquare banned this application from receiving data from the API due to its aggregating data with Facebook which is a violation of Foursquare's TOS. I could be wrong but I have seen other applications do similiar things functionally and they haven't' received such a privacy backlash. Any other thoughts?

I was mostly commenting on the old adage that in business you want to offend the least amount of customers to increase your market share e.g. the reason why mainstream news is so bland is that it helps to sell advertisements.

I was leaning towards calling it sexist because it by default chooses one gender over the other and has in its name a specific judgement on gender. "Girls around me" It could have been like Sonar and chosen the "networking" approach and named itself "People around me" and by default shown both men and women.

Perhaps they are like the Fox News of apps and are trying to target a very specific segment of the market i.e. creeps?

This assumes people are faithful in their relationships right? I wonder if any dating sites have quantified the churn rating for their usage and does it correlate with wider trends in dating such as average length of relationships % of people who cheat on a regular basis. Or are the subset of people who use dating apps those who tend to be in and out of relationships more?

I wonder if someone has ever tried to quantify the bump you get from a "shock value" strategy for an app like this i.e increased press and people talking about your app. I would like to see it measured against taking a more general approach such as what the Sonar app did. I wonder if the gain in customers from a more measured marketing pitch would outweigh the increased chatter you get from something as blunt as "girls around me". Any thoughts? Does the old adage any publicity is good publicity still apply in the digital world?

Isn't it also sexist? And by default cutting out a large sector of the market...