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shithead

62 karma · joined May 17, 2010

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shithead··on A Note of Appreciation From the Rich
They forgot to mention that they really appreciate that taxes are always discussed in terms of "income".

The truly rich have no pesky income - that's for the servants. They just have property and expenses, which their accountants, lawyers and politicians keep safe.

Hints: tax-free foundations are great, intellectual property is tax-free.

(There's a reason putative class-betrayer Gore Vidal spoke of "our owners", referring to the U.S. aristocracy.)

shithead··on Facebook claims it does not track users, but files patent to do same
The f_c_book brigade will be here soon to downvote you.

They really hate to be called out as creeps and liars.

shithead··on The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School
used her father's address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts

Slightly insane, eh, what?

I can think of a few people roaming around foot-loose and fancy-free, and even pocketing scores of millions of dollars, who should be doing that.

shithead··on Ask HN: Software Engineering with no post-secondary degree?
Depends on what you want to be. An artist or craftsman needs a good apprenticeship, or perhaps to build a good portfolio, and can easily blow away academic credentials.

But an engineer should have the chops one gets from doing the academic obstacle course.

Good luck.

shithead··on Brutal Dishonesty
[Arrington's title was changed to the more explicit "Facebook: Brutal Dishonesty"]

I did not expect better of that company. Crooked is as crooked does, and that sorry bag was born crooked.

What I'm really sad about is Google going down the drain chasing after them.

shithead··on It’s official: Google+ will be connected to everything
http://uncrunched.com/2011/10/01/brutal-dishonesty/ :

"A method is described for tracking information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain." – Facebook Patent application dated September 22, 2011

Creeps and liars.

Google must be shooting for just sincerely creepy. Competitive advantage there.

shithead··on It’s official: Google+ will be connected to everything
That creep Zuckerberg must be laughing his ass off. He could not have bought such a dumb move to help keep users on F_c_book.
shithead··on It’s official: Google+ will be connected to everything
Google+ is Google itself.

Hey, Larry Page, read my lips:

    DO NOT WANT!
No one wants Big Brother watching their every move, forcing a single ID on mail, maps, search, videos, blogs, etc.

Asses may well just have signed the Google death warrant.

shithead··on Facebook's complexity will be its doom
I posted the link to the comments because they're even better than the piece, which was not bad (and is linked at the top of the comments page).

The one titled "Too many developers" may be right: [...] My John Harvey-Jones fix: bin 90% of the programmers (pay them a million each), keep a small team to maintain and slowly extend the core, and leave it at that. After all, once your house is finished you don't keep the builders and architects on retainer, but you might hire in a decorator once in a while. [...]

Also, three slots down: I easily manage my facebook content by never reading it.

shithead··on Apocalypse Later: The End of Europe Has Been Delayed Indefinitely
Banksters have played it like drug dealers: "Have a loan" . "Buy our stuff" . "Interest rate is now 30%" . "Tut-tut, we have to call Bruno" .
shithead··on Moot: "sterile Facebook comments over provocative YouTube comments?"
One score and twice four years ago (more or less) some guys brought forth a few modems, that they screwed to computers, which then conceived Usenet in liberty, dedicated to the proposition that on the net nobody knows you're an ass (unless you make it painfully clear yourself).

Thus came B1FF@PSUVM to roam the land of newsgroups, whence comp.sources circulated programs, rec.sf-lovers hosted epic flame-wars apropos nothing much, and alt.sex (ably assisted by alt.sex.anal) told tales titillating the prurient interest of the readership.

Since then we have learned nothing much, which is why Google is climbing up its own ass chasing the social butterfly, and there are pundits like Shirky milking this tired teat over and over.

A no-prize to whoever brings back the kill-file that was feature #1 in Usenet readers. Not to mention decent threading with color-coding of postings read, but I suppose that's too much to ask in today's morass of PHP BBs with twitching avatars and stupefying 'emoji'. Ah well.

shithead··on Facebook fixes logout issue
Q. How do you know that Mark Zuckerberg is lying?

A. His lips are moving.

shithead··on Anonymous Correctly Predict The De-listing $1B Company
That turd already stinks so bad the banksters will give it a wide berth upon flush, lest they be slammed with lawsuits for negligence.
shithead··on After 24 centuries, Google puts the Dead Sea Scrolls online for the world to see
Also good for fixing timely releases of source code ... the Amazon guys are sticking the public with an old version fork ...
shithead··on Size is the best predictor of code quality
[...] my hypothesis that the number of bugs can primarily be predicted only by the total lines of code [...] I still haven’t found any studies which show what this relationship is like. Does the number of bugs grow linearly with code size? Sub-linearly? Super-linearly? My gut feeling still says “sub-linear”.

That's an interesting question. I'd bet the other way - for example, a 500 kLOC program having more total bugs than the sum of ten 50 kLOC programs.

But even if the sub-linear hypothesis were true, there's the yield problem that semiconductor manufacturers know well. Suppose you have, statistically, one fatal defect per 500 kLOC. That means it's hard to get a functional 500 kLOC program done. But you could get right eight or nine out of ten 50 kLOC programs ...

shithead··on Manufacturing "A Minimal Pen" in China, failures and successes
Being a pessimist, I foresee many owners bending the casing just enough to make it useless ...

If not that, a grain of sand down the shaft will probably jam it good.

And, to be a complete spoilsport, "how it will look in fifty years" must be minus the nicks and dents on the sharp edges.

shithead··on Attention metal thieves: Buy BT, get 75 million miles of copper
If I knew what an "attention metal" thief was, or just "attention metal", I'd agree.

Effective sarcasm demands flawless execution, and they're losing that. Nowadays one can often find misspellings and sundry grammatical errors in their texts.

shithead··on Why Silicon Valley Is Running Scared From Health Care
Fifty years ago, a 'harmless' sedative was withdrawn from the market because babies were being born without arms or legs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide

Once bitten, twice shy.

shithead··on HP Names Meg Whitman President and Chief Executive Officer
> sacrificial lamb

Scapegoat, in the vernacular. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating : a she-goat with a silver bracelet hung from her neck was driven forth into the wasteland ...

They'll make it gold, and probably spare the sex change ...

shithead··on Cringely’s second column on the firing of Leo Apotheker
> But he most likely had some strong inside information.

He's been watching the show for a couple dozen seasons now. The scripts aren't quite Coyote and Road Runner class, but it is possible to make good guesses about what the characters will do.

Besides, inside information would probably be wrong anyway, possibly deliberately.

shithead··on Richard Dawkins: A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy
Would this "bashing" be tolerated against any group other than Christians?

The 'intellectual fight' for 'enlightenment' is the thin veneer the anticlerical Jacobins lay on their murderous ideology. Loot the Church, rape the nuns, kill the christians - started here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Vend%C3%A9e, repeated too many times in many places over the last couple of centuries.

And when their legitimate heirs Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot murder a few score million people, these Jacobins start talking about the "crimes of the Inquisition".

Good going.

shithead··on All papers published by Microsoft Research
> the Googlers publication thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3013314

> not a fair apples-to-apples comparison

Speaking of apples, will the next up be "Apple papers", linking to http://daringfireball.net/ ?

shithead··on Pirate Party Germany gets into the parliament for the state of Berlin
The British empire has the distinction of being the first founded on systematic piracy.
shithead··on PG's Rarely Asked Questions
I wish some people would bless us with dates on their timeless essays.

(You too, Peter Norvig.)

shithead··on Home-made bombs are being sent to physicists in Mexico
> Also: what kind of lame anti-technology terrorist group posts its statements on the Internet?

Good question. I'd say it depends where one draws the line. Some people draw it at horse-drawn buggies (and they may be right), others don't balk at electricity but reject some body-invading medical practices, others have very hard lines on human dignity.

I guess we'll find out, sooner or later, where the real line is by the collective "Oh, SHIT!" expletive when the tripwire is stepped on ...

shithead··on Home-made bombs are being sent to physicists in Mexico
> things William Gibson wrote about in fiction 20 years ago

Greg Bear, 26 years ago (Blood Music): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo

shithead··on The lost art of Nomography
First thing in the series of blog articles: http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/2008/01/09/the-art-of-nomo...
shithead··on The Three Slide Rule
Otherwise, it's like writing the introduction to a book before you've written the book.

Isn't that the standard operating procedure?

shithead··on Share of Income Gains by Quintile - Great Depression til Now
Wow. An unfamiliar thought. Masterfully repealed, though. Not very logically, but hey, so what. All is well.
shithead··on Îñţérñåţîöñåļîžåţîöñ
No redirection: http://www.google.com/ncr

Explained here: http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer...

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