rabble

Windows? Who uses that?

It feels to me that PG is simply making excuses for not preparing for his talks. There is no reason technical talks can't be fun, engaging, and full of information. If you only read it out loud once, you're not doing enough prep. Sure you could do a funny talk, which sounds great and doesn't have substance. But it's not a zero sum game.

Don't read your talk out once, read it outloud a dozen times. Don't present it unpracticed infront of the conference hall, present it in front of friends / coworkers first.

Speaking and writing, the two, are a major way that programmers get to be known. It's important that we learn to communicate clearly in an engaging way with our community. If you're having trouble, take a monologue class at your local theater.

Well, i think actually, perhaps a call for developers to refuse to participate in software patents, refuse to put your name on it, might be more effective.

My quick check, from a US ip address, the page loads but the flash doesn't stream. I'm guessing it's a geoip block.

To me it seems like the rojadirecta.es folks, who are doing pirate live sports streaming, will love this.

It's not worth linking to the original and updated version of it by the author instead of the wired post about his work?

Get one of the car share services, zipcar/carshare. Then mentally do the jump and stop worrying about the per minute / per hour costs. It really is about the same costs as owning a car or cheaper. Use the zipcar when you need it, and bike the rest of the time.

The deadline for filing for the NY Senate Democratic Primary is May 21st. That means there is real time to find an anti-SOPA candidate to primary Schumer.

I also think somebody should think seriously about launching a PAC/SuperPAC around this. Calls help, but in washington money talks louder. Launch an 'internet pac' or 'innovation pac' with promises to put money in to Primarying or defeating pro-SOPA/PIPA politicians, and they'll start to listen. They know that the tech world has a lot of money, and can organize. We just need to do it.

I mean turning off the internet would put a huge dent in piracy. It's kind of true.

Yeah, kind of like saying you have to count all the time spent on ruby, rails, and all the gems you're using when you do Rails Rumble.

Making construction modular and plug and play is a hugely important innovation.

Posting a press release to hacker news?!? Really? Your own press release?

For what it's worth, the same basic setup is in place in Latin America. Brazil the effective cost is 2x the take home pay for people as well. Maternity leaves are much shorter, and you can fire somebody, you just need to pay a hefty severance. As somebody else mentioned, the way most companies work is to have each developer with their own tiny company.

They do it because many people and most cybercafes around the world have their language configured incorrectly in their browsers. Most of the time, for novice users, the geo targeting is more accurate than browser settings.

I agree, it's hugely annoying.

Most folks who are fit and 21 just go without health insurance. If you've got a job and aren't contracting, then you usually get insurance through work.

Or where it's easy to fly from one place to another. It explains why there are so many hackers in Portland. It's a nice place to live with noticeably cheaper cost of living than Seattle or San Francisco. I know folks who consider it a bedroom community to silicon valley, only 550 miles away.

New York is perhaps a very big city, where you can be in 'new york city' and still be 2 hours subway ride from lower manhattan.

I'd guess the other thing is that in new york you're exposed to people who are very wealthy. It distorts the perceived cost of living vs actual numbers.

I've not done business in Chile, but i have in Uruguay, which ranks about the same in terms of various transparency / economic freedom / gdp per capita as Chile. Everything he complains about is just the reality of living and working in latin america. Chile markets itself as being different, but it's not so different. Getting stuff done is hard, getting investment is hard, doing business is hard. There are lots of rules and red tape. It's just a part of the game.

My question is what happened the week of September 18th? That was when Google+ went from flatlining to a huge jump in growth, then followup growth. Anybody know? My guess is something to do with android pushing folks to sign up, or maybe them pushing it through gmail or google logins. Something changed and they restarted the growth curve with a big spike.

Gosh, i explained REST to my wife by explaining that it's just HTTP and then sending her a link to Roy Fielding's doctoral dissertation. So frustrating to assume that women can't be perfectly competent hackers in their own right.

I know this sounds over the top, but 500 Startups hires http://www.micro-documentaries.com/ to shoot for them all the time. I'm sure at some point it's cheaper to hire a full time person than constantly be hiring out to a shop.

I didn't know about paid SU... i'm going to give it a try with one of my projects, www.plansharing.com. I've tried Facebook ads and Google AdWords. Neither of which has been very good. Facebook REALY doesn't want to send you off site, and mostly the google ads were run on spam trap websites in my experience.

If SU leads to organic traffic too, that's an interesting alternative.

The video is a mix of two different videos, one from 1987, and one from 1997. The CyberDog / OpenDoc stuff in the second half is obviously not from the 80's as those projects were created in 1996-1997.

No i just have a really crappy WP layout and for some reason i have it set in my CSS to do no whitespace between paragraphs. So the lazy solution, instead of fixing my css, is to do br nbsp br between paragraphs. I know, i should fix it.

Yeah, i think blog posts aren't such a big issue, since often important news gets reblogged and the posts come from there as well. It's more likely to be a problem with the initial announcement of a url as being life. Say, AirBnB.com changes their name to rent.com, for example.

Ok, that's a good point. I assumed poster quality mattered because posts which are highly rated are mostly from posters with high karam. Confusing cause with effect probably.

That said, the quality of the titles matters a lot, and getting some up votes quickly also seems to mater a lot. Users could be bad actors and intentionally do bad titles. They also can try to avoid collect early votes through timing their posts during the weekday morning west coast time. I suspect that hacker news traffic peaks wednesday at lunch time PST.

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I thought that was was google did? Hiring Asbergers (Autistic) programmers is pretty much the norm, no?

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By 1999 there was a lot of heavy java development on the sever happening. But i'd say the most common server environment was perl. A lot of applications wrote out to static html to handle scale.

Remember that Tony's doing this stuff in http://Lift.do out of Obvious. He's to polite to mention it in the post, so i figured i'd mention it here.

Guess it's one of those 3rd screen things, sit back, watch the game, and make bets on your ipad. Not sure it's safe for the pocketbook, or the ipad if you spill beer on it.

Damn, poor java people. 10 minutes just to build! I thought that more than 3 minutes to run the full test suite was so long it killed productivity.

No wonder java developers like 2 week or 1 month scrum cycles and infrequent releases. They work in slow motion.