mckoss

I'd call BS on anyone saying the investment climate is going to be markedly different 3 to 6 months from now. no one has a crystal ball, and neither does he have inside information unavailable to everyone else.

Why not use a lotery? I don't see why any public district shouldn't be available to any state resident. What would be the rationale for any preference to residents or district workers?

Any other policy serves only to preserve the inequality of the education offered between districts.

This seems like a gross privacy violation to not honor the logout button, and continue to track the account ID of the user. I would be very surprised if Google were doing this too. And I would be surprised if Facebook were not hauled into court over this (at least in the EU if not in the US).

Many users would be annoyed to lose their persistent login. Disabling 3rd party cookies globally will break many sites that use 3rd party services and may be against the site's TOS as it would negatively impact their ad revenue.

What do you call someone who continues to believe a falsehood in the face of all evidence, reason and logic? "Stupid" seems pretty spot on to me.

Unlike astrophysicists, climate science has some very vocal members trying to form policy decisions. The result of these decisions can mean spending Trillions of dollars.

So we don't get to have dispassionate debate in the facts, as the stakes are extremely high and incorrect conclusions can have enormously expensive consequences.

POST semantics can be used to CREATE as well. And PUT can also be used to UPDATE.

PUT semantics are more like "update_or_create". POST is like "create_child".

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/630453/put-vs-post-in-res...

If you can invest capital to increase productivity, demand for labor goes down, and wages will be kept down.

The only way to increase wages is then to proportionately increase demand for goods and services so that, despite the productivity gains, there is an increasing demand for labor.

We are also seeing automation (capital) and (cheap) overseas labor substituted for domestic labor beginning in the 80s. Consumer demand did not keep pace, so wages stagnated.

Lacking tangible skills, it's hard to evaluate whether someone is a "great computer scientist".

Can you be a "great artist" if you can't even draw? How about a "great architect" if you don't know how to build a house?

Possessing the basic skills in your field of study, I think is a prerequisite for acquiring the advanced skills and the ability to contribute to the state if the art.

The article reads like a press release from Strobe. Is there any Journalism involved here?

Very fun thought experiment. It reminded me that we did a problem in calculus to compute the effect of gravity inside a hollow sphere. It turns out to be ZERO.

So, if the Earth's mass, was all densely concentrated in a, say, 1 mile thick shell, you could drill a hole through the shell and experience total weightlessness when you popped out on the "inside" (assuming a total vacuum on the inside - if not - you'd experience a very small gravity toward the center based on the mass of the contained atmosphere).

Thanks for the insight. I think most people want to do the "right" thing. The competition to be "THE" way people play media was very intense between Real, Microsoft, and Apple. There was a lot of trickery on all sides uninstalling other people's players, making them not the default, etc.

Too bad this all devolved so terribly and not in the direction of the best experience for users.

Digg really shot themselves in the foot when they tried to make the site "personalized" - most in their audience wanted there to be just "one" primary home page.

Reddit seems to have been able to create many successful smaller communities around sub-reddits.

It's another lesson that trying to be all things to all people usually satisfies no one.

I agree. Why are do so many people need to weigh in on what the "numbers" must be telling them. The process seems way more subjective than analytical.

This was pretty typical at Microsoft too. Many groups (Windows, Office, Exchange, etc) had a leadership group hold a regular "war room" type meeting at which major decisions were made. From 10 to 30 participants was common at these (usually weekly) meetings.

It's a sign of bureaucracy, not trusting important decisions to individual contributors, and an ass-covering vehicle to remove blame when mistakes are made.

Some of it reflects a needed amount of "care" - but it can easily lead to bad organizational dynamics.

What's the spin here? Google is trying to project:

    - Search is a hard, interesting problem - and we have really smart
      people working on it (come work with us).
    - Search is a competitive business (don't regulate us).
    - We use a scientific process (don't investigate our practices
      as a potential conflict of interest).

The video is interesting. But one thing NOT addressed is how much is the search experience improving? Yes, they've made "500 changes" to the algorithm last year. By what measure is search quality going up (or down)?

I sense an improvement over the last 6 months (seeing less low quality or spam links) - but I'd like to see this quantified.

So Microsoft is being anti-competitive here. The question is, are they using monopoly power (illegal) to do so?

I feel for the victim here.

I find it distasteful to see <BIG COMPANY> using such a big hammer against a little guy who just posted a link. "Real" IS an English word, after all - their protections are therefore more limited. "Real Alternative" seems rather descriptive, and not at all confusing to consumers (as well as having a clever double meaning).

On a related note, I consider the early Real Player software to be malware, due to it's Trojan installation of other software and aggressive attempts to prevent removal. I've lost all trust in Real Networks - one of the reasons they've spun off their music service as a separate entity, I imagine.

The market certainly punished them for this. But were they ever taken to court over these practices (and violation of Computer Fraud and Abuse Act)?

Actually, "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 (The Selfish Gene). Although, the meaning in popular culture has morphed from the generic definition (any self propagating idea) to refer to fast spreading cat videos and the like.

I remember the episode of The Screen Savers when Kevin Rose did a segment about Slashdot - and even hinted at morphing the concept more toward what he created with Digg (giving users more power to source stories - voted up purely on their merits).

/. has definitely had a big impact in the way we obtain our news (more targeted, and with social interaction). But I, like most people here, I imagine, left it long ago in favor of Digg, Reddit, or HN.

Each language has its own conventions. I try to use the dominant convention for each so as to be more readable to the community of developers in that language.

So, snake_case in Python and camelCase in JavaScript (with classes being initial Capital in both).

If you remove the nationalistic bias, this story sounds like exactly the "right thing" happened to Dell and Amazon. Work migrated to where it can be performed most efficiently. This is exactly what we want an economy to do.

It's true that Dell did not increase it's ability to design and manufacture circuit boards. But that was never their core strength. I think a firm's managers should be thoughtful about what skills they want to develop internally, and freely outsource as much as they can of the rest. This article would have managers adopt a destructive NIH attitude, greatly reducing their firm's efficiency and competitiveness.

The note is really about the best way to specify a range/sequence of integers, not why we start from 0 as an index.

But it is an excellent example of thoughtful reasoning to choose between multiple (seemingly arbitrary) design options. I think we all benefit when language (and API) designers are as thoughtful as this.

Nothing wrong with open speculation at taxpayer's expense? This reminded me of an excellent essay by Michael Crichton on the rampant increase of pseudo science in our society.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122603134258207975.html

I particularly appreciate his debunking of the Drake equation as "science".

I'm not claiming I could INVENT any machine with a software process. Only that one could take any patent granted for a machine, and build a total software simulation for the described machine. By the judges' logic in this ruling, the software simulation of the machine is unpatentable. But what's the difference if the machine is implemented with atoms instead of bits?

Judges have NO IDEA how to interpret patents. I would claim that EVERY MACHINE is reducable to a (software) simulation, and that every software simulation can be (in theory) executed by the human mind with paper and pencil. While you could argue that the claims in this case are obvious, I find the reasoning used here to be contrary to ANY patent being issued for any machine or process.

A patent holder is not required to license their patent. If found valid by the court, they are free to enjoin others from using their technology for the duration of the patent period.

It boggles the imagination to see one person leading three companies, each of which has to solve enormous problems that no one else has been able to overcome in the past several decades. I find it quite inspirational to see Elon doing this.

Excellent presentation of the library. After reading the source, I am struck with how much of the code here is just one or two line wrappers; "convenience" functions that don't really do anything but pass on the arguments to another function or set or get a property.

I'm not a big fan of thin API wrappers like this. Why not dispense will all that code and let your library users access the underlying properties and methods instead? The library would be smaller, simpler, and faster.

code.pageforest.com is in early alpha now - but we'd be happy to have comments on the system we're building. The goal is to build a site that can allow anyone to not only solve JavaScript coding problems, but also to author new ones.

Actually, hashed password ARE recoverable, technically. Though it would take a VERY long time to brute force the original passwords.