jwecker

Well _I_ thought it was witty enough. cheers (:

You can download it by going to justin.tv from your android or here: http://www.justin.tv/p/android . Looking forward to seeing what people do with this live. Ammon flew his phone from a kite the other day http://www.justin.tv/ammonb/b/269125517 (it was better live ;)

Edit: or from the app store now. sweet.

I doubt there's a correlation. Facebook is engineer-driven and was founded to solve a social problem. And the problem google solved was borderline social. Don't mean to be argumentative- I just think that it's a choice that leadership tends to make early on that's unrelated to the problem being solved, and that one of the two choices/cultures seems to do far better than the other. (could be confirmation bias, but I kind of doubt it).

I'm not as dubious. Unlike someone's random blog entry, the NYT does do fact-checking, and had at least one source they deemed reliable, as per TFA: "The comments caught the attention of Skype executives who became concerned about their new hire, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who was not authorized to speak with the press."

I would also recommend quickly getting in the habit of using ctrl-[ instead of reaching clear over (on most keyboards) for the escape key.

I'm not sure what his definition of intelligence is. Obviously not the same as mine. He states that the reason "triumphalists" annoy him so much is that he used to be one- and then goes on to explain himself programming something very unintelligent in form and function that took him 20 years to fix. I would paraphrase the post as "I used to be dumb and arrogant, but after 20 years I realize how dumb I was and why don't we all stop being arrogant?"

I would pass on someone with an attitude of hard-work and responsibility for someone with real programming intelligence (the whole package- product to interface to maintenance) in a heartbeat. The last thing I need is someone diligently corroding a code-base.

Best story of a lawyer trying to run a software startup (Loki). http://web.archive.org/web/20020418225227/http://www.linuxan... Not for the feint of heart.

Similarly- it's idiomatic in bash scripting and very common (execute the first command and the second if the first one succeeds). I think it's funny that he naively assumes that because it's unfamiliar to him it must be the less-clear way to do it.

The vast majority of the difference in that particular comparison is housing- which must apply to buying houses, because comparing rents certainly doesn't give 45% difference. So... this data is meaningless unless you own your house here and plan on buying there, from what I can tell, which probably excludes most of us.

Edit: OK, I'm finding some cheaper rents, but I think my main analysis stands.

If I'm reading this report right there are several that hit 97% with low false positives. http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/ondret/av... The methodology is linked in the document. I mean, it's certainly at least less of a conjecture than your "he doesn't know anything because these things are obviously BS" argument.

yes. I don't mind dups in general- good to get a refresher once in a while- but when it wasn't even a whole month ago...

7. Put change in their cup- or go the extra mile and help them find a job. (journalists reading- I mean this in good humor ;)

You know that unless something fundamental changes with how congress is extending copyrights, this never happens these days, right?

The _kids_ need sleep as well. One thing we realized was that the constant waking up was not just difficult for us but seemed to put strain on the baby as well. After a usually very short adjustment (3 days or so) our babies would sleep through the night, and so would we, and the babies seemed so much happier and more rested during the day. So anyway I totally agree.

On another point, I would point out that in general adults are very, very attuned to having emotional responses to crying children (the younger the more powerful the response), whether we have our own children or not. That's why a baby crying on a red-eye flight can have such emotional reactions from total strangers (often negative, unfortunately). It's a wonderful human instinct that I think serves us very well in general. But those who aren't experience parents need to remember the following (_please_):

* Every baby has a different temperament and personality.

* Babies sometimes cry to get attention and not because they are actually in any way uncomfortable or scared. The different sounds are easy for the baby's parents to hear and difficult for other people to distinguish. (as mentioned, newborn infants are easier in that they always have a reason when they cry).

* They sometimes cry for a while and there's nothing you can do. Seems to always happen in public. Leg aches, colic, gas, etc.

I agree except the utterly mundane. It's mildly interesting to see how the government does threat analysis.

The wikileaks summary on the first page implies that the government actually tried to carry out a contingency plan to get rid of wikileaks (and that it "appears the plan was ineffective"), which is beyond silly. Surely wikileaks of all organizations would understand that these sorts of _analysis_ documents, enumerating even the mildest threats and then pinpointing potential weaknesses and then basically trying to get permission to investigate further (probably unsuccessfully but who knows) are a dime a dozen (not implying you should ever pay for one if offered).

The word "planned" in the phrase "planned to destroy..." has a very different meaning in the context of government contingency planning than common usage suggests. In most contexts a plan to do xyz implies a course of action the organization intends to take. The US government, at least, generates layers and layers of "plans" that it never intends to act on, or knows that the probability that they'll need to be acted on are very remote. For the most part then the actual dispatch of some combination of plans are left up to non military elected officials.

Whoops, assumptions about linux actually. When using ubuntu I always turn off the top bar first thing. Most of the people I know that use ubuntu do the same, but I have no idea if it's representative. I turn it off specifically because the quick window actions are far more valuable to me. In any case I run crunch-bang, which is ubuntu based but doesn't have the top bar, so I forgot about it when posting.

I may have confused the issue. It's not about the flick of the mouse- it's about not having to aim (e.g., can you perform this action using your peripheral vision?). It sounds like you've become accustomed to aiming at everything and therefore don't see what the big deal is. Obviously the designers in question feel as you do, so it's certainly widespread.

As for the research, just to further clarify- they rigged a mac so that there was a second monitor above the first monitor (and above the main mac menu) that the mouse pointer could move to. When mac users sat down to use it, even knowing exactly what was going on, they consistently overshot the menu by an average of half a screen. I'd be highly surprised if resolution was even minimally relevant.

Not only is this a violation of Fitt's law- it's practically the canonical example of how to violate it. That is, when an application is maximized the exact upper corners of the screen become incredibly valuable because a user can get there without aiming but just by flicking the mouse in the general direction. Flick it to the upper left and click for all window controls, flick it to the upper right and click to close.

I remember when Microsoft made it so that you had to go to the corner but then pull it back several pixels, thus destroying forcing you to aim the mouse cursor. It may sound like a silly little thing, but I thought at the time that it was a good metaphor for how they could get something to _look_ similar (to, say, a mac) and yet still get it completely wrong. When I switched to linux around the same time I thought it was so refreshing that the UIs of the time (minus some skins people had made) didn't violate this example of Fitt's law, and also that if anyone were dumb enough to change that in the future, we could all just fix it.

I usually disregard comments about linux desktops copying window's mistakes, but this is just very irritating to me, mostly because it's elective- it's like you actually have to _try_ to get it wrong.

Larger exposition. This has been on the most emailed in nytimes for at least a day now so a lot of you may have already seen it. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/opinion/11schmidt.html

There are certainly reasons to be skeptical. In addition to age, consider for example the fact that it tends to be highly correlated with automatics vs manuals.

Some of this is fine, if a bit dogmatic (but what do you expect from a manifesto). However the section on SEO is a potentially bad idea. It seems borderline black-hat and very similar to cloaking.

Actually I think it moves away from philosophy at this point and becomes a question of practicality- at what point in a detailed copy is it "close enough to be you"? As humans (and with the rest of life) we're in that weird state between being totally static (like a frozen crystal) and being completely chaotic (like the center of the sun) - at the "edge of chaos" so to speak. Life is in that border-land where it's just stable enough and yet just chaotic enough. So when the temperature of the room changes there are atoms and systems that adjust within us in order that certain critical atomic structures stay in-tact. It's like a controlled slide into chaos- chunks being stable enough for just long enough to create other small islands of somewhat-stability.

If it turns out that the thing critical to our being is deep within our neurons, and that the computations that take place are similar to quantum computing and rely on sub-atomic processes, and that the rest of the body (among other things) keeps its environment stable enough to "keep state," then the machine needed to copy the mind would end up destroying the original. Or, if it doesn't read atomic information at that level of detail, the "copy" will have a similar infrastructure but will instantly be divergent from the original because the "current" thoughts of the original will not have copied.

I mean, putting aside philosophy and actually getting down to the brass tacks so we can start building this machine. (:

Just the other day I watched a very experienced programmer who already had an IRB session open (not to mention a bash shell and the availability of a python repl, I'm sure) start up that very calculator to do some quick calculations.

While I agree about being faithful to expectations and see value in that, I also believe that metaphors can sometimes continue to live past the time they should be expired due to sheer laziness. There's only been one generation (ish) exposed to that physical interface for a calculator- it's not like it's a permanent beginner metaphor.

Nice Arram, thanks. I was just thinking the other day about how nice it would be if more people spent time once in a while refining their thoughts into an essay rather than barfing up conjectures as blog posts.

Interestingly, it may be that Heisenberg uncertainly requires that if you extract all of the information out of Riker in order to reform him, you must necessarily destroy the original Riker, saving you a bullet. (IANAP, _obviously_).

The post spends a lot of time talking about flash not utilizing / partially utilizing / fully utilizing graphics cards and makes a lot of conclusions and even takes a dig at apple about it. But then never bothers to ask the same questions about html5. e.g., which browsers are natively using hardware acceleration for H.264, if any? Apparently the author didn't find it relevant. "I didn't contact any other companies because the tests are objective and straightforward."

If flash only beats html5 when using hardware acceleration and html5 browsers haven't introduced hardware acceleration yet, his conclusions end up backwards, or at best completely irrelevant and speculative. shrug

“73primenumbers is a refreshing model of humility in an industry ruled by hype and buzz.”

Worth it for that quote alone. Thanks (:

"Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: you understand it better, but the frog dies in the process."

—Mark Twain

Biggest. Dissection. Ever. (as a ratio to the size of the original joke, including the edit and at least 2 comments). You win ;)

If the venue is privately owned the second part doesn't scare me. I believe any privately owned property has the right to refuse entry to anyone they wish, and that that right trumps civil liberties. WHICH is why the first part of the story is a terrifying encroachment on liberty. No warrant? No laws broken? To have them simply enter and dictate what you're allowed to display on your own property? No way to refuse entry?

Hypothesis: That's when something triggered inside of Google and it started tracking the trend (based on a build-up of volume? news? sitting in the queue for a while), and the steep initial slope is not real but a relic of the graph going from 0 to whatever their first recorded data point is.

shrug

No, and I don't know if he split that driver, but I like to think that Linus took the message to heart (regardless of how he felt about it). The two+ years that followed saw the arrival of a lot of "meta" structure fixes, like bitkeeper (and then git of course), etc. that address many of ESR's concerns.

This entry scores very high on the crackpot index ( http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html - replace some scientist notables with computer-science notables) and is generally just funny.

It did make me start to think though about one reason I enjoy computer science (or the engineering side more specifically) - it tends to be much easier to get traction on good ideas than many other fields. For the most part, good ideas in computer science are self-evident, and easily adopted by practitioners. Too easily sometimes- without enough scientific method being applied. Of all scientific fields, computer science would be the _last_ one I'd accuse of engendering blindness to obviously good ideas. A cadre of older programmers dictating to the younger generation how to think about programming? Seriously, lol (: