mithaler

Oh, don't get me wrong--I agree. It's not their fault that women at hackathons are genuinely uncommon, and they're not bad people for acknowledging this (though I would argue that they shouldn't gawk and draw undue attention to them, and this is admittedly a fine line to walk). But by the same token, it's not her fault either that that's the case. It feeds an unpleasant vicious cycle.

It's a good example of the fact that it's very hard for people from an underrepresented group to break into something that's traditionally not "their field". I feel a lot of respect for the ones who are brave enough to be among the first ones (and who aren't naturally the sort who enjoy the extra attention they get, be it positive or negative--which I'm going to guess from this post that the OP is not).

This is neither true (I've personally known plenty of computer geeks of both sexes who aren't interested in hackathons), nor evidence of some sort of gender difference, since if the statement in the first place were true, you would have exactly one data point with which to correlate gender with being a genuine computer geek.

That's not quite true--there is this bit:

> I'm actually pretty flattered that you'd like me to come to these events. There's just little in it for me, while you guys get some good publicity with me and my fine lady coder friends in attendance while you take the obligatory geek girls are cute picture.

I can understand not wanting to feel like she's on display (since regardless of how true it is that she would be--which I personally don't doubt--it sounds like she would feel that way).

> The biggest feature the interface adds is the ability to restrict the results by whether or not a recipe contains a particular ingredient. I don't think that this is very interesting or useful. Did anyone who really cooks use this?

This is, in fact, exactly the way I cook: "I want to make something with couscous and feta cheese", or "I want to make something with pasta and chicken". I find this search extremely useful, since it's the sort of search I've never felt was adequately implemented on other recipe search sites I've tried.

You're right; I've updated the post, thanks for the correction. :)

Well, one who thinks that the GPL's wishes are a good idea could certainly feel that they deserve heat for being what the GPL was meant to prevent in the first place. But, that's no comfort to less ideologically zealous developers who want to use a [AL]GPL-licensed library they're used to using and can't.

...and if your profit margin is close to that 30%, as it is with many businesses, you are now required (should you choose to develop an app for iOS) to sell your product to users whom you have to support and stand a very good chance of gaining nothing from.

In other words, such a business would be required to offer an option to hand off all of its profit to Apple, should it choose to offer a native iOS app. Apple gets a better experience for its customers, and the third party gets more customers it gets zero profit from. I can understand if such a business would find this unacceptable. (And look at it from a user's perspective: if given two options, one-click billing through Apple or time-consuming credit card entry through a web portal, which do you suppose the majority of users will take?)

So how exactly is that understanding flawed?

Edit: More details added, and some wording correction.

While the OP comes across as a tad hyperbolic, this is what I've thought for a long time: if a business is dependent on the good graces of the provider of a platform it's built on, it simply does not have a working model. It happened before with Facebook credits, and Apple making a similar move is no surprise to me.

> Kindle is practically the reason I was going to buy it.

Then why not just buy a Kindle?

Facebook may be displacing marketing and social traffic, but without evidence that the search market is similarly decreasing, this article doesn't have much of a case. facebook.com/starbucks displaces starbucks.com, not a Google search for 'starbucks'; it's certainly possible people are using Google less as a "portal" to the Internet, but again, we'd need evidence of a decreasing search market to come to that conclusion.

Our company's PHP framework has a system like this in our database logic.

We only use one implementation of it. Ever.

As an Ubuntu user running the exact same hardware he describes (Dell XPS M1530), I don't understand his frustration, since literally everything in Ubuntu Just Works for me on it. I haven't had a single bit of trouble on that hardware in all the time I've run Ubuntu.

But then, Ubuntu has made tremendous strides in recent years on that front, and I wouldn't be surprised if other distros haven't kept up (though he doesn't say what distro he'd been using).

Be warned: it doesn't appear to be the same server. I'm logged into news.ycombinator, but I'm not currently logged in to hackerne.ws. I can only assume it's a different server mirroring it, and unless I know it's run by the same people I'm not willing to type my password into the latter.

One of the reasons why I like Google Voice on Android so much is it handles texting through data, which is free if the plan is unlimited. And that's not even counting the additional benefit of being able to get threaded texting through the web interface.

On another note, here's some cost analysis from 2008 that doesn't appear to have been linked yet unless I missed it: http://gthing.net/the-true-price-of-sms-messages

Can someone please explain to me whom exactly it harms to use "HTML5" as an umbrella term for new tags, CSS3 and new Javascript features?

I mean, many of those tags aren't even useful without hooks to manipulate them. What's the point of a <canvas> when you don't have JS bindings to draw on it?

I'm using its nightly build PPA. I'm consistently amazed at just how rapidly new features are appearing in it.

You're probably right; I can't imagine that Google would have been careless enough to not have an army of lawyers look over everything before releasing it.

Analysis on this score has been done by an x264 developer (this came out around the same time WebM was announced): http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377

Money quote, from the conclusion: "With regard to patents, VP8 copies too much from H.264 for comfort, no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free. This doesn't mean that it’s sure to be covered by patents, but until Google can give us evidence as to why it isn’t, I would be cautious." There are examples given throughout the post.

Not surprising, considering Justin Bieber uses up 3% of Twitter's infrastructure.[1]

[1] http://mashable.com/2010/09/07/justin-bieber-twitter/

If I copy the URL of your site/blog into my RSS reader's Add Subscription dialog, I don't know of any RSS readers that wouldn't scrape your site for the link tags I assume you put in and discover the feed for me.

> Carriers still "own" customer contact in most countries. If they decide to be really afraid of Google, they will stop helping Android adoption.

I wonder how they might do this. Possibilities I can think of:

A) Stop releasing Android phones and use WP7 and such (similarly risky, if it's actually something the market wants).

B) Keep using Android but make more deals like the one that put Bing as the unchangeable default search on the Galaxy S.

C) Fork/rebrand Android and make their own derivative.

B seems most likely--same platform so they can benefit from Google's development, but with Google services blocked.

Your emoticon indicates you were joking, but in all seriousness, in the context of discussion about this article, Zed himself makes it a real issue.

I'm no libertarian, but I don't see why those statements make the article terrible. After all, are they not true, and do they not underscore his point--that both of those constituencies benefit from government intervention in society as it is and was in the 20's, and therefore would not theoretically be amenable to principles of less government?

If there's anything that makes the article terrible--which I don't think it is, it's well-argued for the point it's making--it's the blind assumption underlying it that less government is always better. I think that's a silly principle to argue for, but then I haven't read anything else he's written; for all I know he's made efforts to defend it in the past, so I can't assume he considers it a matter of faith.

I'm perfectly fine with zsh, it gives me all that except syntax highlighting (which I don't really need)--I just use the GRML zsh scripts with some of my own personal aliases (and I don't have to learn a non-bashlike syntax). http://grml.org/zsh/

Sounds awful until you click on the Reviews link at the top and find many mixed opinions on the same subject. (I stopped clicking through the reviews when it made me log in to keep looking at them though.)

A bunch seem to agree on the high turnover thing, but some don't seem terribly bothered by that, citing it as a great experience nonetheless (and I haven't seen any others claiming the same stressful don't-screw-up-a-single-time-or-you're-fired attitude).

Interestingly, the main thing I'd known before about Netflix's employees was their famous vacation policy, and I haven't seen any reviews there mentioning it: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnol...

I will not dispute that those are problems. I will dispute whether they're issues with all colleges.

I went to a liberal arts school, and a good one. I was never in a large lecture class (my CS101 class had 12 students in it), professors were mandated to have regular office hours and email availability to meet with students outside of classes for extra discussions and help, workloads were reasonably balanced over time, and no one really cared about grades or GPAs as long as they weren't so low that you got put on probation. (It goes without saying that we also didn't have anything resembling class rank, which is an awful concept in all possible ways.) In other words, none of those were issues in my college experience.

Thus, to me, that sounds more like an argument that "X College is broken" than "college is broken". Do some colleges offer sub-optimal educational experiences? I wouldn't doubt it. Do all of them? Clearly not, for those reasons at least.

I really resent the unexplained blanket assertion that "college is broken".

If it's hard-hitting enough for you to post as a rebuttal, it's hard-hitting enough for you to explain your reasoning for. I had a useful, fulfilling, transformative college experience that challenged my preconceptions and taught me how to reason and appreciate complexity; I will readily admit to the financial privilege I enjoyed going in, but I couldn't have done it without financial aid and I knew plenty of other people who went in with much weaker financial backgrounds than me who did just fine (i.e. without debilitating debt afterwards).

So please, explain to me how "college is broken". I don't mind challenging it, and I would certainly agree on an anecdotal basis at least that some colleges and external systems surrounding them are broken (e.g. SAT), but asserting "college is broken" without further explanation isn't a meaningful challenge--it's a provocation, and one I will gladly take.

That's a great point, and it really gets at the heart of the difference in design goals between iOS and Android.

'Course, I would argue that all of the listed apps fit all four of those criteria (even if some of their features exist in other apps on iOS), but I'll admit there's some room for disagreement there. ;)

That definition assumes that there is such a thing as an "app worth buying a phone for" that holds for a majority of people. That will always vary by person. I've listed killer apps for Android for me; as I said, I can make no claims about killer apps for everyone, nor can you, or for that matter, Gruber. So I guess the term is kind of silly in the first place when applied to third-party mobile app offerings, no?

The only point I really care to make with my list is that Android's app offerings do not lack superb content, no matter how much other catalogs may have. Does Android appear to suffer in comparison to iTunes? Maybe, but that doesn't stop me in any meaningful fashion from finding apps I love on my Droid.