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mbca

90 karma · joined August 12, 2014

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mbca··on What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon
Public mudslinging between big names ... does that make Medium the new Twitter?
mbca··on Exposing NSDictionary (2014)
> I’m fascinated how simple the __NSDictionaryI turned out to be.

There may be other cases where one gets something entirely different than the __NSDictionaryI class, depending on how the dictionary was created or how much / what kind of data it contains. There is some evidence[1] that Apple switches implementations of its collection classes based on various conditions, even something very simple, such as when an array contains more than X elements (where "X" is some threshold where the optimization characteristics change). Being able to dynamically change implementations is the main benefit of class clusters after all.

[1] http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/array.html

mbca··on Square files for IPO
Years of their skills and labor that could have been spent working at another company (including competitors).
mbca··on Uber Is Taking Millions of Manhattan Rides Away from Taxis
The quality of Uber drivers in San Francisco has dropped all the way to the point where I simply will not try to use Uber anywhere near downtown. They will accept the ride and the app will show they are "1 minute" away, however it will often take upwards of 15 minutes for them to reach me because they don't know their way around the city and are confused by all the one-way streets in downtown. I promise I"m not exaggerating, it really does take that long. I've stood there and watched them on the map spending 10-15 minutes driving very long distances away from me before finally turning in the right direction and painfully, slowly, starting to get closer. It's ridiculous.

If I'm in downtown or SOMA, I will use a taxi (either hailing or using Flywheel). It's usually a huge time saver (and there's no "surge" pricing either).

mbca··on Adblock Sold to Mystery Company
This is what happens when you have an "app store" with no approval or review process. Google should be cracking down on this, just like those ads they were displaying[1] which would serve up malware-infected versions of Firefox whenever someone searched for "Firefox".

[1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/IFl...

mbca··on Energy
Indeed. The essay mentions "predictability" as a problem with solar, but that becomes moot with good enough storage & transmission.
mbca··on Freedom Act Passes: What We Celebrate, What We Mourn, and Where We Go from Here
They will find a way to opt-out instead. One set of rules for them, and another set of rules for everyone else.
mbca··on Rent Control Creates Higher Rents in SF
> there was regular black market where one could buy contract for cheaper rent

A precursor to AirBnB!

mbca··on Adopting Microservices at Netflix
While this isn't nearly as bad as companies like Valve which go around claiming not even to have any managers, let alone any policies, it still means you're going to run into this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessnes...

mbca··on How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers
Yet another chance to call out the highly relevant essay "The Tyranny of Structurelessness":

http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

It should be required reading for anyone pushing the "we don't need managers" line.

mbca··on A Digital Edition of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755)
For those who've watched the show Black Adder:

http://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/?p=8712

mbca··on Lyft Accuses Former COO of Stealing Confidential Docs Before Joining Uber
> [I]t's only going to become easier and easier for competitors to enter the same space.

Not going to happen. Those "regulators" they decry so loudly? I'm sure they have plans to buy a few once they get big enough and use them to put barriers in place to put a stop to any competitors. Combine that with their size (and thus their ability to undercut any new competition), and I don't see anything but an Uber monopoly on the way.

mbca··on Andy Rubin Leaving Google
Android is only a "success" insofar as being the only game in town for an open-source iOS competitor. I'm frankly amazed it ever gained any traction at all, but when your competition is non-free garbage like Symbian, Blackberry, and Windows mobile, I guess you can just win by default. Especially when you have the might of Google's multi-billion dollar support behind you.

Android has already gotten miles better in the year since Rubin is no longer involved, seeing long-needed improvements such as Chrome for the browser and WebViews, radically better runtime, more unified UI design, etc. Overall, Android is much better off without him and I look forward to whatever comes next (for Android, not Rubin).

mbca··on Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking
Were these sodas sweetened with cane sugar or high-fructose corn syrup?

(I did look at the abstract of the actual paper, but it doesn't seem to specify. The full paper might say, but it's paywalled.)

mbca··on AIs are now re-writing history
The middle paragraphs are just further proof that talking to a blowhard like Cory Doctorow is a complete waste of time. The "all photos are fake at some level" slippery slope argument is beyond tiresome. The fact that something like white balance introduces a small amount of post-processing into photographs does not mean that all levels of photo manipulation are somehow equal. That's nonsense on its face and should be called out as such. You need a trampoline and a net to make that kind of jump in logic.
mbca··on The Apple Watch
Ever since the days of the original Firewire-only iPod, they've done 3D renders for extreme closeups like that. They are usually very accurate but still, it seems like it would be just a bit more honest to use a photo.
mbca··on Pump and Dump: How To Rig the IPO Market with $20M
Great comment, pretty much agreed on all points. One minor correction -- it's "toeing the line", not "towing":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line

mbca··on Uber's playbook for sabotaging Lyft
And yet if you post about AirBnB's history of spamming Craigslist users, you'll get downvoted into oblivion. Playing dirty is considered okay on HN so long as you're a YC company.
mbca··on Show HN: Stellar – Git for PostreSQL and MySQL
So it's yet another toy project with grandiose, overblown claims ("git for databases"? seriously?!)

An honest update to the README would be to take the whole thing down several notches, if nothing else then to avoid the kind of confusion the post you're replying to expresses.

mbca··on BPA-Free Plastic Containers May Be Just as Hazardous
> My wife and I sleep on the floor, with a few blankets, and have slept with our daughter between us since day one

And when your daughter is old enough to talk, she'll tell everyone she sleeps on the floor, and CPS will come take her away (this sort of thing is a major fear of mine -- some minor idiosyncrasy or eccentricity will be taken out of context and misinterpreted as a sign of an "unfit" home, and they'll come a-knockin').