korch

For me "Rockstar" is now a shibboleth.

If you have to call yourself, your company, your product or your programmers "rockstars" then none of you are real rockstars. If you have to ask "what's different about rockstar's lifestyles compared to the small people?" then you definitely have no idea what you're even talking about.

It's just like being called a "hacker", or a "gangster" or similar. You either have legit street cred, and thereby are automatically included amongst an elite, meritocratic subculture, or you don't.

While I agree with this point completely, I also think bitching about Apple's iPhone and Ipad "apps" is a moot point. 5 years from now it's all going to be html5, and all of these apps will run on any mobile device web browser.

Apple now has such a head start on their app platform that pretty much the only reasonable strategy their competitors can do is collude and standardize on html5 for all apps.

Then Apple has a very big problem—they will be in direct opposition to Google and the rest of the organic, growing web. Never, ever bet against the web, nor face the web upstream.

If you discount 3d games, image manipulation programs, and some other specialized software that really can't "just be a web page", then what is even left for "apps" to do that the web can't?

Apps should have been the web the entire time.

I don't think anyone knows whether the entire Internet could be shut down. It has never happened, so there is zero empirical data to build an expectation. Obviously, the decentralized nature of the Internet makes it nearly impossible to shut it down 100%. Perhaps we'll get to test this empirically in a few years when the predicted increase in Solar storms fries a big portion the World's electronics.

However, I'd bet dollars to donuts that there exists a highly classified plan to shutdown the majority of the Internet if truly necessary for an extraordinary emergency. The DoD make plans for everything they might need to handle and they get $500+ billion a year carte blanche. If you had 100 cruise missiles, a dozen nuclear subs, thousands of special forces teams and around 50 spy satellites, how hard would it be to shatter the Internet into countless disconnected networks?

This is a fun and practical math problem in optimization and graph theory: What's the minimal number of cut undersea cables, missiled satellites, bombed microwave stations, and blown up peer exchanges and telecom backbone data centers to cause the maximal number of disconnected networks?

What if the exact answer is 42?

(I won't say "42 of what?", since it could refer to any number of things, but what if 99% of the Internet could be reduced to a finite list of attack targets, given the logistical ability to attack them?)

Does the US gov't have the resources to pull off these kind of logistics in a true WTSHTF emergency?

Yes, I think so.

At the very least, they need to know how to stop any potential enemies from shutting down the Internet, so in order to know how to protect it they also need to know how to destroy it.

This is an incredible hack, kudos!

And for the Apple fans who might consider this a dangerous act of hardware sacrilege, I hear ya! But please consider this as not so much of a practical hack, but rather as a protest hack against the stupid, continued exclusive hardware lock-in to the low quality, over priced phone service of the Death Star Orifice—AT&T.

Everyone knows AT&T simply can't provide the same high level of innovation, service and quality as Apple. It has ceased making sense for AT&T to get exclusive bottom line say-so on what Apple can and can't do with the mobile platform. Apple needs to embrace polygamy because AT&T represents the antithesis of Apple's core mission: beautiful software.

All AT&T can do is fuck up software. (Bell Labs doesn't count.) And it's usually done by imposing stupid, consumer-unfriendly restrictions on the hardware so they can stick to their old telco monopolist business model of nickel and diming all of their customers.

Apple needed AT&T to get a toe in the door to the telco's monopoly. But now that iPads and iPhone are spreading all over the place like a blown out BP oil well, and the entire mobile industry is playing catch up to reach or emulate Apple's tight UI & design in software, it's time for Apple to throw AT&T to the Feds over something. (As much as I despise AT&T, I recognize they are so entrenched that the only way to change them will be another Federal breakup of their monopoly).

I find it hard to believe this is true! Maps or GPS coordinates, or it didn't happen!

The state of the software tech world according to a skeptic, misanthropic, curmudgeon BOFH who is definitely buying iPhone 4:

Software is mostly on cruise control today, and much like pop-culture endless eating itself, dying, and shiting itself forth again, software is fast converging into a bland, daytime TV amalgam of Facebook-Apple-Amazon-Google. (Or as 4chan'ers will call this new multi-corporate-entity: "new FAAG".)

Exciting!! The kind of software just around the corner makes you want to nerd rage, amirite? I mean, can you imagine, by 2020, we will still be writing HTML, CSS, JS, arguing about browser standards and Canvas2, while struggling against the Telco's crippled, quicksand-slow network speed, and juggling an ever changing incestuous brood of gatekeepers who hoard our data to scrape pennies from the advertising equivalent of the world's biggest penny cup. 2020, welcome to 2010. "Innovation" is the biggest weasel word in software.

Most new software is going to be an incrementally trivial variant of something you've already seen, probably decades ago. And it's all because we've nearly reached the inflection point of "peak hardware." Like the prescient chief of the US patent office back in the 1800's, I will now modestly paraphrase and state that 99% of all software that could ever be invented has already been invented. The rest is just "filling in holes." Caveat #1: that hardware doesn't break out and improve at a faster rate than software for the next few decades. Caveat #2: it may not even be possible to quantify "the rate of improvement of software compared to hardware."

You want to get me excited by some software? Show it to me but running orders of magnitude faster than everything before it could. All that matters at this point is better hardware because the software doesn't have much more room to radically change.

I know that 'round these parts daring to ask "what's in the software startup kool-aid?" gets down votes. But I don't really care about becoming the biggest, most profitable ad-spammer in the world, nor video chat, nor overvalued and pointless web startups, nor browser animation recreating the state of the art from the 80's, nor the ability to play CD-ROM multimedia content, or Apps, or whatever you want to call them this decade. (This is the part where you get off my lawn.)

The only thing that can prevent software from ending up in its own post-apocalyptic "Nuclear Winter" of suburban doom is a big bump up on the hardware:

a) better batteries.

b) more ram.

c) faster CPU.

I have come to believe the only purpose of controllers is to impose a callback structure on top of a deterministic set of resource-models. The more simple and lean the better. CRUD just happens to be the most useful subset of callback structures, so it's the default. If you're putting code in your controller that isn't for one of the 7 resource actions, then it probably ain't controller code. (To be glib, you should instead move that code to lib/util.rb, the smartest next mistake).

On the flip side, if you remove all the non-REST code from your controller to the extreme, like what you'd see when using the inherited_resources gem, the only code left will be your callbacks. DHH said this presentation needed to show some code to make the claim hit home. So the only code left to remove is the callback code.

How could the controller callbacks be made better, and more invisibly integrate with the routing muck? Rails 3 is getting the state machine gem added to core, so no doubt about this time next year someone will have re-re-re-written the routing code using the state machine api. Could the routing muck be made to be the controller callbacks? I always liked the idea of how the Seaside framework did it using continuations, even though in practice it wasn't quite as good. Everyone knows that creating a zen-simple state machine api using continuations is not fun by anyone's measure of the word "fun."

Apple hypocrisy at it's finest!

So it's okay to make VNC, Citrix and other kinds of apps that can connect you to remote Windows and Linux desktops, but any app that looks too different from or too similar to Apple's Springboard faces automatic bannination? At this rate, Apple is going to need to start employing teams of Theologians and Talmudic scholars to interpret and administer the Kafkaesque Laws of the App Store. Never mind the fact that Apple, nor any software company should ever be in the position of censoring the content of any software that runs on their machines.

What did Steve say on the D8 video yesterday—"companies don't have to be rude to other companies" That's the Apple we want, not the Sith Inquisition.

Big corporations bend the rules all the time to help other big corporations—everyone knows and accepts this. But when big corporations make the rules secret, and then use them to help each other while hurting the little guy, well, that's just as rude and arrogant as it gets from a company!

Wow! AT&T has to be one of the dumbest fucking corporations in the world.

I'm sure Steve is thrilled that AT&T just took a crap on his lap by significantly changing the way the average person can use their iPad. It's even better that they sneak this in 1 month after the iPad launch, after Steve has fully demoed the iPad to the public, showing the most common uses as bandwidth intensive. It's almost like AT&T wants to lose Apple, and finally resorted to personally embarrassing Steve. (Golden Rule: You can never undo what you have demoed.) If this doesn't break the deal between Apple and AT&T, then nothing will!

Doesn't the FDA regulate the specific words that can be legally allowed to describe the stated effects of any medical treatment? Which is why all of the non-regulated pseudo-science drugs have to use generic terms like "you'll feel better, have more energy and be more successful."

If Oprah pitches one of these products, she's a paid spokesman for it, so wouldn't drug laws trump free speech here? i.e. Business are not allowed to flaunt the laws and claim they have free speech, but individuals of course are given far more leeway.

Isn't it a little too convenient that the Universe seems to prefer 3d for physical processes, and that almost any kind of phenomena we need to understand can be framed in a 3d model? Or is it us the whole time, unable to see beyond our own limitations? When we see grandiose contrivances in a film plot, we naturally suspend disbelief in order to enjoy the story. I think those of us who have learned university math and who think we understand higher dimension are doing likewise—telling ourselves a story so we don't have to walk out of the theater.

I don't think we consciously "think" in any dimensions above 3. Like all life, we are neurologically hardwired by default to think in 3d, since that's what has worked for the evolution of all life on Earth. As for formal math, I am no longer even sure there is a connection between the logical, axiomatic and cultural edifice we've built up and call "mathematics", and our day-to-day "neural navigation software" that allows each of us to get from point A to B on the surface of a rotating oblate rock tethered to a nuclear fireball that is hurtling through the infinite, continuous space we call the Universe. The map is not the territory. The mathematical deductions of our neural experience are not the same thing as the experience itself.

From all of the suggestions on Mathoverflow, almost all of them are variants on projecting higher dimensional objects onto 3d and 2d objects, then comparing all the different projections in a clever way to get a "feel" for how the higher dimensional object changes. Even this is completely non-intuitive, as our brain's visual apparatus is optimized to take in a total picture and immediately spot the biggest changes. i.e. there's a predator running at us from over there! That is afterall what eyeballs and visual perception evolved for! If we can't even see the whole visual field at once, but just slices of projections of it, then our finely tuned visual hardware is thwarted and unable to detect and piece together the "shape" of objects. This is why is say nobody can "think" higher than 3d—even if you are doing it, your brain is still imperceptibly and behind the scenes translating your logical construct into a 3d "sensory" construct.

With that said the best way I've come across for visualizing 4d objects is from complex analysis, where you can use color gradients to represent a dimension. It doesn't work so well going beyond 4d, but it's a great set of training wheels. http://www.mai.liu.se/~halun/complex/ http://www.nucalc.com/ComplexFunctions.html

I have long wondered what the impact would be on other illegal drug prices if MJ is legalized and undergoes a massive price drop. Many happy accidents from unintended consequences seem possible. If this removes ~20% of the revenue going to cartels and organized crime, will prices of other drugs go up or down? Will this lead to an up tick or down tick in inter-gang violence? Will local gangs in our communities lose enough revenue to put them out of business? Will there be fewer thugs on the streets committing crimes in general, all because you can buy a pound of MJ for $100 instead of $10,000.

It's time to stop the War on Some Drugs (as Robert Anton Wilson so eloquently put it). I'm glad to see that it sounds like we're getting closer, with California leading the way. The amount of abuse, crime and fraud in the legal drug industry dwarfs the illegal drug industry combined, so by taking the spot light off this silly war on drugs, we can achieve many bigger policy goals in the pharmaceutical industry.

Another plus will be we can finally help to strengthen Mexico. Anything about Mexico is politicized due to the current economic issues with immigration and drugs, so you see very few people calling a duck a duck, and saying the US indirectly caused spill-over failure in Mexico by having the war on drugs at all. Anyone who wants to fix immigration and stop all the rampant crime on the border, well, you need to also be on board with stopping the War on Some Drugs. If Mexico was as stable as Canada there wouldn't be as many immigrants, and if Mexico wasn't run by ultra-violent drug lords making billions off of US consumers, then not as many Mexicans would even want to leave their own country.

100 years from now everyone will look back at the decades of the war on drugs and consider our entire culture as being cruel and barbarous. As a society, we punished millions of people and ruined countless lives because we chose to collectively treat drug use and chemical addiction as a criminal issue, instead of a health issue. To be fair, we simply didn't have the technology to frame it as a public health issue, treat it medically, and thereby take it out of the hands of law enforcement and the courts. But we could have at least not ruined millions of innocent people's lives.

Perl is dead. It's the new Lisp. I can say this as an ex-Perl hacker. But don't get me wrong—they have their niches. I look at this matter with ruthless practicality: code is dead the moment you write it, there is no other way! The only thing that matters is what specific new, awesome code you're building right now in the real world, who is using it, and what they're doing with that code.

So what if folks are speaking a dead language like Latin on a mysterious, magical island that may not even exist, where planes recurrently crash, where time travel is the normal mode of being, and where the line between the living and the dead is unclear. Great! Protect the light!

One thing about the Perl community has always bugged me, and it pops up in any interview with any of the top Perl guys discussing Perl6. It's the notion that Perl code exists in some sort of weird theoretical hacker-academic world, where, like wannabe undiscovered rock stars, or an anointed Software priesthood, they keep saying "this code would be awesome if only everybody would come around, recognize it and then use it." Meanwhile everybody else says "Perl is write-only line noise." If you have to operate this way, I see it as using the wrong tool for the job—code for the living, not the dead!

/anecdotal

I do know I have no reason to go back to any version of Perl after having moved on to Ruby/Rails. It does seem like many more people are contributing code to newer, more bleeding-edge open source projects that have no equivalent in Perl. Especially for the web as it exists in 2010—a lot has changed! Grandma's CGI-style, old-school MVC framework(i.e. Catalyst+mod_perl) won't cut it now. So if you're doing something that requires the new, and you hit up Github or Stackoverflow to see what folks are using, the answer is never "here's a link to CPAN for this awesome Perl module that will blow your mind, help you finish your job, get you kudos from everybody, and get you laid." Instead it's here's the link to Github for this awesome ruby|python|javascript code. (Please prove me wrong here!)

What is an Ad? Can I tweet that I drink Pepsi if Coke is today's official Twitter sponsor? We all can see where this leads. No doubt Twitter doesn't want to a become plain, old, boring ad sponsor. Like on TV. Or like Facebook. They really should do more to create entirely new types of ads, which most people would not even consider as being an ad.

He's playing smart PR by building up this cyberpunk persona of Julian Assange. Considering Wikileaks has gone from zero to CNN front page in under a year, this is the critical period of time when Wikileaks establishes itself as a media "brand."

It's a smart move to make all coverage about Wikileaks and the mission, and not like some celebrity fluff piece about the founder. No matter how much the MSM tries to TMZ-ify everything it touches, information is power, and the stakes are very real here.

In a counter-intelligence sense, the dominant strategy is to hold your cards & remain a blank slate as long as possible. Let everybody fill in the blanks themselves on an empty canvas, introducing their own wrong biases, rather than tell them what to think.

It's informative to flip through history books, and see what has happened to the guy telling the King's secrets.

In almost every instance, that guy ends up dead. (The usual method being suicide via two gunshots in the back of the head.)

With that in mind, it makes perfect sense to publicly reveal as little as possible about one's personal life, just in case pissed off Mossad agents seek vengeance decades later, for example.

Way to go! Also, you sure you want to reveal your office blueprints? On account of social engineering sploits and all...

i.e. pop by for any event held in your new theater, "oh, the guest bathroom is down the hall, left after the door, thanks", instead swing a right after the door, hello electric and server rooms, don't need long, just one usb stick, thanks see you later guyz!

This is life changing. I stopped using utility belt a long time ago since it hasn't been updated, but never heard of the interactive_editor gem.

This is the simplest way to get something in vim that resembles Slime. The only other way of doing this I have seen is the Rube Goldberg contraption that (ab)uses Screen, Vim buffers and pipes.

Haml, Sass and Compass have completely 180'd my POV towards web development. I've gone from hating the view part of the MVC web stack(thanks LAMP!) to loving the abstractions and frameworks being built around HTML/CSS/Javascript/DOM.

If I couldn't use Haml/Sass now in every project I touch, I would go postal.

Great work on Haml/Sass, keep it up guys!

Psst, here's how I think Facebook is going to unravel itself: just like Microsoft not seeing the forrest for the trees, getting blind sided by the Internet and Google, Facebook sows the seeds of its own decline by pushing the social graph everywhere. Facebook has carved out a nice hub for itself, being the most visited site other than Google, but what all these startup visionaries may be failing at is vastly underestimating the usefulness of an open social graph. If Facebook suddenly finds its social graph baby is appropriated by an ad hoc open network that dwarfs its users, then Facebook loses control of the graph.

How might this happen? Browsers sure have changed a lot in just the past 2 years. Local storage is here today already, but almost no sites are doing anything with it. Google Gears had so much potential, but was too ahead of its time to become a trend. What if your browser stored your entire social graph locally, and you could configure your own privacy settings to only share what you want with sites you visit? That eliminates Facebook from being the master hub of the social graph—they are just another federated end point. As Facebook becomes "spammy" more users will want to block Facebook, so they might be convinced to use a local social graph in the same way hundreds of thousands are using AdBlock and FlashBlock. We already know Facebook will kill links to GreaseMonkey scripts that do this.

Alot of mashups and wild Javascript ideas will have to be seen over the next 8 months or so, but I definitely think the Facebook "diaspora" movement will take off once it's dead easy for end-users to run their own social graph programs locally from their own browser. Just like a desktop app. Perhaps even that might be asking too much of end users, the average of whom cannot recognize the difference between their browser and the Internet. Hopefully Apple will start baking new identity features into the iPad, since you know they will nail it as far as being simple enough for everyone to use.

The Techrunch rumor mill does keep whispering about Apple putting Facebook Connect into iTunes, but it seems more likely that Apple would take them on. Facebook will wish they had their own browser to push back with.

It's probably going to be a great tragedy that Apple is so unstoppable now that they can just roll over any other tech company at-will.

If there was no way to measure, there would also be no space.

It's truly a sad day for philosophy when an old man who has lived an extraordinary life is rejected outright by the crowd who won't even bother to examine his words because the form of "truth" they can recognize must resemble a fantasy narrative they learned to believe in through 17 years of the modern classroom education format.

Just because a thing cannot be expressed succinctly as a tautological formula(F=ma, etc) on a chalk board does not mean it's bunk, non-science and therefore worth completely ignoring.

The guy was a friggin astronaut and is a professor of physics! How many people have been to space? Do you think you'll ever go to space in your life? Probably not.

It's wise to listen up when one of just a few hundred human beings who have been to space says "hey, I've spent my life thinking about this based on my direct experience of having gone into space, and I want to share it with you because maybe you'll find it useful, and it might not even be perfectly true."

I'm a philo nut. I've read Hume's Treatise, as it of course is well documented in Kant's into to Critique of Pure Reason, that Kant started his whole journey into creating his system of Transcendental Philosophy because of Hume's deep questioning of the reality of causality.

Sure Ancient Hindu and Buddhist mystics had said this about time using the language of religion, but it was only a century after Kant's era that the holy texts of those religions were translated for Europeans. Before then few Westerners would have even heard of Buddhism. Schopenhauer was one of the first Western philosophers to have read the Upanishads and other Eastern religious texts, and then to also work Eastern ideas into the historical backdrop of Western philosophy.

"It's hard to wreck a nice beach"

Fuck IE, it just needs to be called what it truly is: a failure, a blight on the web, a cynical door stop to lock in the desktop cash cow monopoly.

I hope Microsoft falls for the thousands of hours they've forced me to waste over the course of years of web development. I ain't getting that time back! As much as Apple now holds the champion belt for hating software developers, Microsoft was the original baddy.

I liked this. He has apparently re-discovered Kant's original claim that time is a creation of our own minds, that we are incapable of conscious experience outside of the context of time, and therefore everything we can possibly cognize is bounded by a set of a priori constraints which we can recognize.

As a transplant from Seattle to LA, give me sunshine any day! LA gets 283 sunny days/year, and now I tend to forget what rain and clouds even look and feel like. So what if the total cost of living is higher by a solid percentage. You can be a helluva lot more productive if you don't want to jump off the Aurora bridge every day because the darkness is triggering major depression around whatever else is going on in your life. Paying for sunshine is absolutely essential for some people(like me), it's not even a personal choice.

If you've ever lived through the awful annual Seattle blackout between November and May, where you might see 20 minutes of sunshine per day(they even have a word for it: "sunbreaks"), then you'll have directly experienced what I'm talking about.

Curiously, I would point out this entire SF vs Seattle debate reveals a great example of how we disproportionally compare risk vs. reward in human psychology. Given two equivalent choices, the one that cause us to lose more in order to gain more is perceived as being the "bad choice"—our brains want to gain more immediately. Taking the big risk in Manhattan, SF or LA means you have a shot to get paid far, far higher than anywhere else, just because of how capital pools in urban cores.

Conventional wisdom says to go to a smaller city and enjoy a lower cost of living. That is the optimal choice if you have certainty that you won't be getting those high paying jobs in dense urban cores. But if you think you might? I would say it makes more sense, both economically and in terms of overall well-being, to "go big"—go to the biggest place you can and aim as high as you can.

This might be Myth Busters material, but wouldn't it be more energy efficient to drink water closer to the body's own temperature? Less energy is needed internally to process warm water, than to heat cold water up to 98.6 F.

This is also similar to why it's bad to drink soft drink, the body consumes more water to break it down than it gains from the soft drink.

Is it just me, or is it pretty funny that "pretending to be a God" is illegal under section 508 of the Indian penal code?

This nails exactly what wrong with the tax system. In the history of civilization, the ebb and flow of empires has always consisted of tax disputes wedging factions into alliances who fight for more control. Taxes cause this process! It doesn't matter what the tax is, who pays, or who is paid, just that there's all this extra drain on the natural activity of flowing capital.

The logic is Microecon 101: Taxes are the equivalent to the a transaction+holding cost of using Uncle Sam's currency. Use gold, well, then you're paying to store and transport it. If Uncle Sam was smart about his paper, he would make the Federal Reserve into Federal PayPal, having the Federal Gov't charge, oh say, a 0.001% transaction fee on any exchange of US currency. Same difference, amirite?

This is my new favorite web page, it's genius! What goes around, comes around. I can't wait until 2015 when some comedian creates the web-2.0-izer to what has become of hackernews.