r_c_a_d

I feel strongly compelled to disagree with you...

There is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here. As long as most of the popular websites are styled to extremis so that the users think they look nice, then there is no "market" for browsers and/or plugins that have features like sorting tables and "nicer" default styling in general.

If only a few big sites went "vanilla" then you can bet a browser that could "make them look nice" would become popular very quickly.

That's what I thought. But after 5 years I gave up and do not sign my emails any more.

Yes, I did. My supervisor was quite old-school idealistic in that he believed that good work would rise to the top without playing political games. We were both a bit naive in that respect I think... and we've both had modest careers as a result. But I really enjoyed my PhD and greatly respected his integrity.

Other people in our department rose quickly and now have international reputations. But I couldn't treat people like they did and look myself in the mirror every day.

One other thing that greatly helped me in my PhD was the mutual support of fellow candidates. On my own I would probably have had a breakdown in my final year as the intensity of writing up alone must be intolerable. That is why I was shocked to read the comment above where a supervisor pitted candidates against each other: that is criminal in my view.

UK recruiters are frightened of losing their client (the company) to other recruiters. Unless the recruiter has managed to agree an exclusive deal on a particular role, every time they give out the name of that client they risk another recruiter calling the client and saying "I see you are recruiting for X, we have some great candidates, would you like to see them?"

And some UK recruiters play very dirty. They post fake CVs and fake job ads to mine the market. They pose as candidates to get info from other agents; and ask real candidates what other jobs they have applied for.

It definitely could work, but who will make it work? I would really like to see my wife's facebook posts without having a facebook account (or just looking at her iPad which is what I currently do...) and she may be interested in my posts elsewhere.

I can see how it should be easy to send content from foo#twitter.com to bar#facebook.com as individual messages, format issues not withstanding, if foo and bar have agreed to correspond. But which end would manage the existence of that relationship and push/pull the data?

Maybe it needs third-party brokers to do it?

Interestingly I can see some parallels here with the current status of banking in the UK. After centuries of operation as "closed systems" there are now rules to force banks to provide APIs so that new entrants can offer inter-operation services. Maybe in a hundred years social-media companies will be forced to do the same? ;-)

Yes, I wasn't sure if the distractions were there to prove a point or if it was just ironic that the site was bombarding its own article with distractions.

In the late 1990s I was part of a group that was thinking about how cameras might be able to sign images so that later editing could be detected. The motive then was connected to using images as evidence. But I guess you could also use it to mark edited images in some way.

Would apps like Instagram be "improved" if retouched images displayed a prominent "FAKE" icon of some sort?

When I worked remotely 2 days per week this was a problem for me, because all the people I worked with were together in an office. I felt quite isolated on those days and enjoyed going into the office to see people on the other 3 days.

However, when I changed jobs and was almost completely remote it was a lot better. Firstly I was working with other remote people so we communicated in different ways and not just about work. Secondly I made more effort to contact other remote workers nearby and meet up with them for coffee or lunch.

On balance I much prefer remote working to office working.

I was diagnosed celiac in 2004 and the recent arrival of "gluten intolerant pretenders" is something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand it has boosted the supply of gluten-free products (good for me) but on the other hand it has made me more self-conscious and aware that some people think I might just be fussy.

Me too. And since most of my social circle have moved from Facebook to WhatsApp for messaging, I am now seriously concerned that WhatsApp is no longer secure... or wont be in the future under Facebook's ownership.

I agree. And your way I can add the same subtree to multiple parent nodes.

Maybe. $10/month times 1 billion people is $120B a year... that should be enough to run an entertainment industry.

I think you might be right on incentives, that's why I said it might lead to no-one producing anything.

What about a limited period for exclusivity? Do you think, say, 3 years would work? I would be happy to wait that long... in fact I only just recently watched Person Of Interest on Netflix and that has been out for ages.

As to other differentiators like quality of service, I think there is a lot of scope there but channels currently have very little need to innovate because the issue of what content they have dwarfs all other considerations.

There is a lot to compete on. Recommendations and reviews for example, customer service, price, outages, video quality. The problem is that those things are harder to build a marketing campaing on than "We are the only channel that has Game of Thrones".

Exclusives serve only the producer. They are terrible for consumers, as the orignal commenter lamented. Perhaps "anti-competeitive" is the wrong word, since each channel can compete at having the best exclusives ... probably "anti-consumer" is what I meant.

It doesn't have to be that way. You could have multiple providers like Netflix and traditional TV stations competing on quality of delivery, whilst licensing content from each other.

Exclusives are by definition anti-competitive. Some sort of compulsory licensing might work. Or it might lead to no-one producing anything...

Writing the book is the easy part. Getting more than a handful of people to read it is hard. Good luck!

As a parent it is really hard to find the right balance between wanting to spend time with your kids and trampling all over their hobbies. Especially if it is a hobby where they need you to drive them somewhere and stay or pick them up later.

My father and I used to compete in the same sport and I always hated it when he did well. Because however well I did, it was always how much ahead of him I got that mattered.

With my sons I have conciously either not competed against them, or only competed in events that I am rubbish at. And I don't go anywhere near their online games and social networks.

Not sure why I am getting downvotes for this. The parent proposed a language feature to support an enforced code execution when a return value was not available:

    foo_t *maybe_get_foo(/*...*/) {
        if (/*foo_is_available*/) {
            return foo;
        } else {
           return NULL;
        }
    }

    foo_t *f = maybe_get_foo();
    if (!f) { /*...*/ }   // REQUIRED or compile error
    do_something(f->bar); // only allowed after NULL check

And I was pointing out that C++ exceptions do exactly that.

    foo_t *maybe_get_foo(/*...*/) {
        if (/*foo_is_available*/) {
            return foo;
        } else {
           throw FooNotAvailable();
        }
    }

    try {
        foo_t *f = maybe_get_foo();
        do_something(f->bar); // f cannot be NULL
    }
    catch (const FooNotAvailable& ex) {
        /*...*/
    }

Sorry if that wasn't the answer you wanted because C++ is not fashionable. But it is a valid option for how to avoid the use of NULL.

Or add exceptions like C++ did,

if (foo_is_available) return foo; else throw FooNotAvailable();

I find it odd too. I was in a crowded art gallery recently and grew increasingly angry at the number of people who were either taking selfies next to the paintings or standing as close as possible to get pictures of the paintings... without actually looking at the paintings directly at all.

The occasional "I was here" picture is fine, but why even go to a gallery to just to prove that you were there? It's way beyond simple vanity.

Well, my reasoning at the time (2007) was that since my areas of expertise were machine learning and parallel processing, then if they wanted to hire people who knew low-level sorting and searching algorithms by heart, it wasn't the place for me.

I was surprised how one dimensional their process was. And I believe it may have changed since then. My former colleague did apologise when I related my experience and admitted that Google knew they had a problem with the process.

You have a perfectly valid point. After a PhD and 10 years of industry experience I interviewed at Google, mostly out of curiosity and because a former colleague recommended me.

I had never done an "algorithms" type interview before, had done no specific preparation, and was a bit baffled by being asked to do a coding exercise in a text editor whilst talking on the phone.

Since I was an "internal recommend" they gave me a second chance. Presumably because they were surprised at how badly I did. But the second interview was worse than the first.

I came away feeling quite humiliated.

You don't need to know anything about a project to spot that the candidate is being very vague when quizzed about the details of something that they claimed but didn't actually work on.

And it is surprisingly common.

I was not aware of RCS until today. Looking at it I can see governments also being very keen to see it take off; since many of them are worried about end-to-end encryption hindering their ability to snoop on private conversations.

It wasn't that the web pioneers did not consider layout important. They came from a background where layout was "external". The important thing was the content. Style was something that was added and/or defined by someone else. Such as with LaTeX.

The first web pages I wrote had no style information at all. And the first browsers I used allowed (and expected) you to define the default colours and fonts for pages to your own taste.

I am still a fan of minimal styling. It would save me a lot of time to write "style = article" on my pages and be done with it... but most people want their pages to look unique and exactly as they think it should.

Yes, before reading Tegmark I thought that MW was silly because "splitting" the whole universe for every tiny event just seemed crazy. Thinking of the multiverse as more like a probability distribution where everything exists in a kind of overlay seemed to make sense.

That's exactly what I thought. Not used it professionally for a while (and then older compilers) and vaguely knew there were a lot of changes around memory management.

But was it that hard before? Constructors, destructors and operators were fine... weren't they?

My tutor at university understood this very well. In my first week he told my tutor group "At school you were all the best, now it is likely that half of you are below average".

Another thing I noticed at university was "improvers syndrome". When I took up some new sport or hobby, I always thought I wasn't progressing very well, because I was comparing myself to the people around me who were all improving too. It was only at the start of a new year when lots of newbies arrived that I realised how much I had progressed.

I think he was quoting The Matrix...