lolcraft

Narcissists with skill sometimes seem to be good founders. Look at Howard Hughes, Steve Jobs, Julian Assange...

> He didn't look at the Internet and say, "gee, I want to be an entrepreneur, what company can I start here?"

By your own quoting, he did exactly that. Maybe rephrased slightly, so as to frame "I wanna be an entrepreneur" as "I saw an opportunity", et c.

The point is, Bezos wasn't suddenly awestruck with the epiphany that the Internet was going to change selling books, which incidentally was one of his great passions.

I understood the article said that SPDY would be the next version of HTTP 2.0, just standarized and not in control of Google (in theory). Which makes a lot of sense, for both server and browser implementors, and Google. I guess they wouldn't want to be the next Microsoft, not on purpose at least.

Early Google was an experience. It gave you a few links in a very minimal layout, and that was it. Yahoo and Altavista gave you incredibly big portals with lots of features that didn't really go to bed together. They lost, because theirs were a shitty experience.

The iPod is an experience. Most early MP3s had the same or more features, but the iPod killed them, because it provided an interesting experience of listening to music.

Amazon is just another Walmart, too. But with a buyer experience that's much better than anyone else's. Same thing with Facebook vs. MySpace. Or Steam vs. Origin vs. your local videogame shop.

Well, at least users have to add them to the dropbox list manually. The cool thing of Google Docs, for me, was that it didn't allow many options, to avoid the mismash of informal, unchecked styles that happens in Word.

With this Office-ification of Docs I see a potential disruption. Maybe a LaTeX-like collaborative WYSIWYG editor? That is, one that has only four or five possible document types, and is very opinionated and consistent in how the document is styled. Like TeXmacs, but online and simpler.

Facebook was implemented in PHP, and still is (though now compiled, whatever). Google was, at a time, implemented in Python. Twitter was built on Rails, probably even ran on MRI. Maybe they switched to Java, who knows. Hardly hardcore-optimizable languages.

Not to mention that premature optimization may be bad, but even when you need it, it's better to just write a few algorithms and test them against real data.

TLDR seems to be: we may pay a much lower tax on profits than most individuals do on income, but at least we have so much profit that we still pay a lot. Also, it's technically legal, so it must be ethical. And we donate to charity and stuff, so whatever.

Funny that they recognize in the response that they are primarily an US-based company, with US labour educated in the country, but instead want to pay Irish taxes. Or maybe they do get 30% of their worldwide profits from Ireland, who knows...

OT: I find very funny that 80K Hours singles out "banker" as a positively socially impacting career. I guess all those people that were evicted after the housing bubble collapsed don't count :)

This is probably the best summary of functional programming, written by the best "pragmatical" programmer of the world. I wonder how much Haskell code Carmack must have written to reach this kind of knowledge... and whether it is open source. It would be a good read for the weekends.

BTW, I think the pure keyword in C++ would be great. I wrote some C++ in school, and even I can tell that const, as applied to functions, could use some retirement. It's nonsense to keep this unmodified, stateless so to speak, but allow global variable assignation, and so on.

Iran is under an international embargo on military supplies, thought. The GP might be overstating the case or trolling, but I suppose getting the materials to build a replica, communication gear and fuel will be difficult for the iranians. Specially when some western country with the biggest military-industrial complex of the world is angry at you because you broke one of their toys.

And they would've had bigger profits and a solid business model, as well!

As a showoff hack it might do, but I have the feeling that this system has combined the conciseness of assembler with the ease of manipulation of Minecraft blocks...

The NOT gate might be difficult to build ;)

The same thing that gives any person the right to do whatever they want with their money. Contrary to popular belief, companies don't have the obligation to restrict themselves to a particular business nor do profitable things. They can donate the amount they want to the charities they want. If, as a shareholder, you don't like it, vote the board of directors out.

> Also I'd imagine the only reason any major company donates to charity is to strengthen its brand in some way.

Not everybody who bites their nails does so because they are sexually repressed. Not every bourgeois makes organized and self-conscious efforts to push down the workers' revolution. Not all people feign compassion and altruism, but are just jealous of the strong-willed nobles.

The first Fortran compiler's creation took 18 person-years. Now there are C compilers which were written from scratch in person-weeks, like TCC.

The question that the article is trying to answer is: why did Facebook pay 1 billion dollars for Instagram?

We can't, of course, argue that, since Facebook paid 1 billion USD for Instagram, Instagram is worth 1 billion. Simple circular argument. So, why did FB pay 1 billion dollars for Instagram?

Now, the article compares the New York Times, a well established, global corporation, which reaches millions, has lots and lots of world-class talent, physical assets, and a defined business model with profits, as an alternative buy to Instagram. Which consists of 37 million users, most of them in Facebook already, and no clear business model. For roughly the same price.

And it asks us to consider what choice we would make, supposing we were on FB's board of directors. That's it. No deep questions on the fetishism of commodities or the marginal social value of this transaction.

Not very convincing. According to this logic, everyone is a bisexual who wants to have sex with all of their friends, or either need to redefine 'man'/'woman' in this (all?) contexts. Unless assuming essentialism as related to sexuality, which has some problems, such as how to explain the fact that most people are neither entirely heterosexual or homosexual, for example (citation: Kinsey report).

By the way, I would argue that man/woman are more than sexual definitions. They are also social, moral in some religions, biological...

Sorry, but no. This is OKCupid, or whatever, for fax machines. Which is weird, you know. Taking the "corporateness" and Extreme Seriousness connotations of fax, and the sexy fun vibe for dating, and mixing them... Sort of funny, if you asked me. I guess I'm not that eager on dating women who use faxes, in 2012, for dating. Total turn-off.

Now, first thing I thought was, this could be some app in which the user writes something, or draws something, scans it and it goes to a random's user printer. That's cool like ChatRoulette. It has all its penis-in-your-face potential, and all its ephimerous-beauty potential at the same time. I was dissapointed :(

Oh, and the SSL certificate is wrong. It's associated to a *.herokuapp.com . Please fix it.

Of course they are not a bad thing. It's just that Go has character. It doesn't have generics or C++-style classes just because every other language has them. I respect that.

I have written a bit of Go. It strikes me as sort of the Unix of programming languages. It's very opinionated, takes some overarching concepts, mostly channels and interfaces, then proceeds to thoroughly not care what you think about it: refuses to have generics, lambdas and tail-call recursion like a pro. The polar opposite of design by committee. It even enforces a True Brace Style to keep the parser simple!

Technically, it looks good to me. The toolchain is excellent. It looks ready for production. Programming in it is fun. It fixes most issues of compiled languages. Go has mostly replaced Haskell, for me.

View > Document view > Compact

Yeah, Google made a mistake in changing the default to Paginated. Still, Docs is light years ahead of Word + trying to emulate git's CVS via file names and mental notes.

You should need to know whether you require the lambda you're accepting to return some value or not, and its type.

This looks like a insanely juicy target for pirates and drug lords. Incredibly easy target to take hostage, with lots of cash, rich people, passwords, intel, hardware, and lots and lots of real state to grow coca or poppy. Static, big, protected by few and very stressed PMC, and no fear whatever of retaliation. If they resist, just threaten to sink it down with one torpedo, or a cheap SCUD.

Hell, this is looking like an elevator pitch for a "counter-startup". Anyone interested?

First, please don't force your ideology down my throat. Specially, not through guilt. You are better than a Viagra salesman or a priest.

Second, please don't dismiss my own fucking problems as ``first world'', as if you know shit about other people's life. Again, you are not a douchebag, so don't behave like one. Yes, I know there are Foreign People suffering now. They can suck it up. We are all grown-ups now, we have problems too, and we have to take care of ourselves. We can not spend all of our life feeling sorry for others.

Third, you don't understand very much about hedonism, morality, philosophy or living. Let's try to be humble and not spit "morally bankrupt!" at every lifestyle with which you disagree. For example, Kant didn't arrive to the conclusion that, to be moral, he had to give all his belongings to the poor. Figure why.

If my work's performance requirements were so tight as to make that an issue, I would use C. Or numpy. CPython is slow. CPython is so mind-numbingly slow, for many many reasons, that each numeric variable could be a bigfloat and it would not matter the slightest.

Now, let's talk semantics. Not converting to floating point is precisely the kind of hidden computation that should be avoided, at all costs, in a language. Haskell is efficient and rigorous, and its division operator does floating point conversion. So, no excuses.

In regards to 3: I can tell you want to succeed. And I can tell you've never had depression, confidence 95%. Maybe you live in some kind of posh suburbia, where pseudo-"depression" is cool, whatever, and thought that depression and demotivation could be somehow comparable.

Let me welcome you to clinical depression. You can't concentrate for five minutes, and I mean it. Your productivity will be 0.01x the normal. Your error rate will be 100x. Half of your day is a struggle for not jumping out of the fucking window, right there, right now. The other half, you will spend crying in the bathroom, pushing through the pain. (And then some smug bastard tells you "what pain? suck it up", and you fall into suicidal ideation again.)

If I were your boss and discovered you were clinically depressed, I would pay you to go home and not work until you got well. Damn, I would pay your therapy, even. Simply put, depressed workers are bad for business.

Of course I am pissed off. Don't tell me that I should have worked my ass off when I was on SSRIs, and anything less is being a loser. Don't trivialize it. Shit, I can't fucking believe I made it through. And I wasn't even that majorly depressed.

> RealDolls are fine, mechanized RealDolls are fine, but as soon as they start resembling humans too much to your untrained eye, they must get rights?

Yes. That's the point of Turing's test.

The argument makes a lot of sense economically: patronage of banking vs resource reallocation.

This tells us, of course, that bankers didn't add (enough marginal) value. Which was probably true, given that they defaulted. Iceland profits from not calling with a shitty hand (i.e. bailing out stupid banks). No "bankers are evil" morality needed.

Um. So, I've read the article. My TL;DR:

There is no scientific research on the adequacy of the current working schedule, as it was adopted arbitrarily by managers. Furthermore, it was established by men for men, without asking women for input, which makes juggling family, career, relationships... difficult for women.

Yeah, there's a wonkish phrase in the middle of it, which reeks of pseudo-evo-psych. I'm talking about "it’s well-established that men perform more effectively under routine and structure." So what.

Not to mention the sheer bigotry of blaming piracy on "foreign criminals", which makes this the pure nuts. Is the average US pirate kind of tanned, has a really tacky foreign accent, or conveys in any other way a vaguely menacing ethnicity?