randomtask

Having used Eclipse for 6 weeks now I still despise it. Give me Visual Studio any day.

Learn to sail and buy a boat. Ultimately I want to do solo expeditions. Inspiration -> http://www.bigoceans.com/

My biggest roadblock is that I'm broke. I haven't really started on this goal in earnest yet. My intention is to finish my PhD by the end of the year and then freelance for a while to earn enough money for lessons and boat.

You might find the datasets/opendata sub-reddits interesting.

http://www.reddit.com/r/datasets http://www.reddit.com/r/opendata

I don't feel like you're comparing like with like here. TC, HuffPo, Drudge, etc are all content providers/aggregators. Newstilt on the other hand were going to provide services and software to journalists of which it seems aggregation was only a part.

From this outsider's perspective at least they seemed to be in a good position starting out. They had seemingly recruited established journalists and other people from the industry who were able to tell them what they needed.

I don't think it's far fetched to think that a startup like this that marries software and journalism could form the basis of a successful startup. I do think this could be done with mostly if not entirely technical founders. I think others are betting on that too: http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/admissions/page.aspx?id=5...

No, but (s)he does seem to be of the opinion that they shouldn't be trying to solve this one:

"I just wish people stop thinking that journalism is a technology problem.It doesn't matter how good your platform is."

Maybe that's true. Maybe the Newslab guys were doomed to fail from the beginning. However, who's to say they shouldn't have tried? There's nothing wrong with trying out an idea no matter how slim its chance of success might seem to be.

"This hacker culture of thinking everything can be solved with guru developer skills needs to stop."

Why? I don't see a downside to self-assuredness, even downright arrogance, when it comes to tackling problems. Sure, maybe every problem can't be solved by every person who tries, but why should you or anyone else care if they are willing to give it a shot?

Someone posted this on reddit a while back:

http://www.reddit.com/r/java+haskell+scheme+forth+groovy+com...

What's wrong with it being written in c++?

ditto

FreeVPN

What do your users hope are your plans for the iPad?

Hilarious. The equivalent of someone putting "amazing attention to detial" on their resume.

I was at the talk. He didn't claim he cracked GSM and went over the history of the development of A5 attacks. He explained that their work is the first time the data necessary to crack A5 has been made public.

This work is important because it is a major step towards producing a working open source real-time GSM cracker.

Interesting that this was posted shortly after the discussion about developing on handhelds prompted by RFS5. The hardware used by the MIT system, excluding the projector, is mostly provided by mobile devices these days anyway.

There could be an interesting way to take the RFS5 idea and combine it with an approach similar to this. Targeting developers in that case would be a smart approach since they're more likely to be early adopters.

I don't know much about stock markets, but I did a consulting gig for a large currency trading company a while back where I was doing a bit of work on their algorithmic trading platform. I learned that unless you are trading at least a million dollars a trade it's very unlikely that you will make money.

The reason for this is that the large companies won't talk to you unless you're trading at those volumes since they charge pretty high transaction fees. The smaller companies that will talk to you all have accounts with the larger companies and make money by increasing the spread between the bid and ask price they receive from the large companies. The expected return on a trade is usually somewhere in the region of 1-10 pips (where a pip is one ten thousandth of a dollar), with 10 pips being a really good return and 3-4 being more realistic. The smaller companies usually increase the spread by up to 3 pips in each direction on the price they get from the larger company which swallows up your return.

While millions of dollars per trade might sound like a lot the leverage in this market is also very high at 50-100 times meaning that with your 10k you could trade 500k-1M though on a sum that low you might get less leverage. However if you lose money on a trade you could eat substantially into your capital. So if your $1M trade goes against you by 10 pips you'd lose 1k.

I'm not ruling out making money on that market, but I'd say it's very unlikely unless you have a lot more money to start with. I am not an expert in this area though. This is just what I learned from the small amount of time I spent working with the company.

To be fair to the chap he did do without money more than most. If his ideal is to absolutely avoid the use of money then he was significantly closer to that ideal than most.

I think you're getting too hung up on the title. The point of the article is not that all web developers can't code, but rather that often they cannot and do not value the skills of people who can.

If anything the title does a pretty good job of getting people to read it. Even if it does that by annoying a significant part of its target audience ;)

Puma was 10.1 no? Also, Clouded Leopard and Bornean Clouded Leopard ;)

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

With enough money to live on for a few years he's hardly a beggar.

Your attitude here is very naive. Did it occur to you that perhaps he doesn't want to live in Central or South America? Sure living expenses are cheaper there, but the fact would remain that he's still unemployed. Now in addition to that he has to potentially deal with the language barrier and a higher rate of unemployment and if you're not happy living somewhere then what good is a bit of extra cash?

To me it makes more sense, if he can live for 2-3 years off savings in NYC, to live there. Also, he didn't just seek a job in the "dying financial sector" (are we really naive enough to think it's dying?), but rather applied for over 600 jobs in a range of areas including supervising admissions at a college.

Applying for jobs can be soul destroying. A good friend of mine has applied for a lot of jobs in the past 6 months, but when there are only a few in your chosen field with a large number of people applying for them, and applying gets you no replies it can feel like pouring time into a black hole. It's easy to point out what somebody should be doing, but it's several orders of magnitude harder to actually do it yourself.

The trip to the store seems to be a reference to the plans he has each day, that is he has nothing he has to do each day that will get him out of his flat. On the other hand at the end of the article it mentions that he's written a book, is actively seeking publication, and has started to think about his second. So he is in fact being productive. His statement about adapting was to an interviewer who asked about pay. He may just have wanted to make it clear that he doesn't expect to earn anything like what he was on before. Taking a massive pay cut requires adapting. Going from a $225,000 lifestyle to a $30,000 one is a hell of a difference.

His idea is ridiculous. If I were to put money in a bank like this it would cost me, because I'm not getting the interest another bank would pay me and inflation would devalue my balance every day it sits there. That's not "safe" for the customer at all.

The goal was apparently not to "cut their food budget" or save money at all, but merely to challenge themselves. From http://onedollardietproject.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/it-star...

"When we first started talking about doing this, we didn’t really have an agenda, or any developed sense of why we wanted to do it. It just seemed like an interesting challenge; one that would force us to see things differently."

Perhaps the Social Justice discussed on Wikipedia is different from a social justice class. After all they say they're social justice teachers.

For instance this (http://www.gonzaga.edu/Academics/Diversity/Academics/Social-...) description of a social justice class sounds a lot more about raising awareness of social issues than a "LITERALLY beyond-communist ideology". Another example -> http://www.fatimahs.org/pdf/Teacher%20Syllabi/Sister%20Lisa/... So it would seem unclear what exactly they mean. I'd imagine that term is quite overloaded.

"The reason that $1-per-day eating is tied up with this is that social justice folks want to redistribute ALL resources, across the entire planet."

Perhaps actually reading what they have to say, beyond the line where they mention social justice and the 3 line description of what that means in Wikipedia, before jumping to conclusions, losing your head, and seeing "LITERALLY beyond-communist" bogeymen everywhere would have been a far more constructive use of your time?

"TC faces no such risk and can publish anything it damn well likes without having to estimate the value to the public interest of its actions"

Isn't that a consequence of free speech?

It would seem to me that you are effectively treating society as this single entity and saying that so long as an action benefits that entity then it is moral even if the action itself would be considered immoral in another scenario.

However society is not a single entity, but rather a collection of individuals that can be affected by an event in different and often opposing ways. To some it may be beneficial, but to others not so. Sure the group that benefits may be in the majority, but to ignore the minority group and declare that to "society" the outcome was good is to ignore the different views and interests that make up a society.

In other words, because in the case of Techcrunch the end doesn't justify the means it's immoral?

The initial chance of survival, after hearing that there is a chance, (for Prisoner A) is 1/3, since any one prisoner dies out of three. If he now knows, after consulting with the guard, that Prisoner B is sure to die that means that it's death for either A or C. Hence the chance of survival (and death since P(Death) = 1 - P(Survival)) is now 0.5. This results in a smaller chance of death (for him) 1/2 rather than 2/3. Hence the rejoicing.

What happens to shares when people stop contributing? Are they recycled? If not then how do you deal with the possible eventuality that there will be no more shares to award? Printing more on the other hand means this would be a currency, not shares.

On a related note the Capitol Hill Baby-sitting Co-op paper is well worth reading. This has been posted before, but in case you missed it: http://ideas.repec.org/p/kud/kuiedp/0335.html

I don't like it either. If you want to be notified about version releases go to Freshmeat. This isn't even a proper release. It's the first release candidate. Are we going to see a post like this for subsequent release candidates? Ah well, at least it's not a major problem (yet). I'll continue to flag these as I see them though.

He makes fun of Opera for one of their applications not working. I then click on the link to the website of the company he is co-founder of and get a page telling me that "an error has occured". Oh the irony.