skimbrel

It's amazing how easy it is never to take time off in this industry. We move so fast and there's always another problem to solve, so you never think you have time to take a long vacation. I still have to force myself to pick a week to go on vacation.

Also, it's not like NGC7000 is about to go anywhere. Do it again tomorrow night!

I almost cracked up at this. As much as we'd like to say that's how we behave, I'd say just about all of us are more likely to try to answer anyway.

There was a small kerfuffle over HuffPo's treatment of volunteer contributors back when Aol bought them, but it seems to have fallen completely off the radar.

Is it just a matter of publicity and convincing everyone in the field not to do free work? Or do we as a society really value the written word that much less?

(For the record I support both designers and writers getting paid enough to make a living on their work. To borrow from Mike Monteiro: "Fuck you. Pay me.")

Okay, reading further down you only get very basic data types. Still, nothing in the spec appears to prohibit very long rows, and I'd imagine performance starts to fall off once you're throwing around tens of kilobytes per row. Any plans to support pushing the projection operation into the read phase so you can work with massive individual records?

And where's the source? I want to see exactly how much this differs from a modern SQL engine.

My guess is the author of this article owns RIM stock...

Repeated studies show caffeine to increase panic and anxiety symptoms in people with depression, panic disorder, and related mood disorders.

I stopped taking caffeine when my psychiatrist told me it was contributing to my anxiety problems. Went from several sleepless nights per week to falling asleep at the same (reasonable) hour every night.

Just because it's socially accepted doesn't mean it isn't one hell of a drug.

(If you want a citation for caffeine's anxiogenic effects: http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/145/5/6...)

Huh! Never knew that. I wonder what their reasoning was when they decided that. Behavior in this case is all over the map in other languages: C and Python both consider function declarations and definitions as statements, but C allows you to provide a forward declaration of a function that you define later, after invoking the function, while Python doesn't. Perl allows forward references to subroutines without a preemptive declaration; Java considers method declarations as separate grammatical entities from statements but doesn't care what order you put them in within a class; Ruby behaves similarly to Perl.

PHP (as always) is a total odd-man-out: it considers a function declaration to be a statement, doesn't allow forward references to functions, and it exposes nested function definitions to the current namespace as soon as the parent function has been executed once. That is, if you define a function foo() and inside its body define bar(), you can access bar() from outside of foo(), but only once you have invoked foo().

Is there anything I can start saying to recruiters that could plant the seed of this idea in their minds? I know it's hard and that I have to compete with a $25,000 fee, but everyone has to start somewhere.

If I can ask one question, though: Why do some recruiters seem keen on ignoring the phrase "I'm not interested in new opportunities at this time"? I have set my LinkedIn profile to say this, and it's the first thing out of my mouth when I get cold-called, but there are some who are not stopped by it. It'd go a long way in my view if recruiters would simply take it at face value when I tell them I'm not interested at the moment.

My state, like a few others in the US, has voter initiatives that become constitutional amendments. The last one that made the news was the one that made it illegal for me to get married.

Another initiative from a few decades ago is a major part of why California can't raise enough money to fund itself now.

So yeah, I'm not a huge fan of ballot initiatives.

Just last week, my co-worker had to waste two days debugging a two-year-old Sphinx setup (the person who implemented it no longer works with us) because a Japanese user of our blogging service wasn't seeing the post he was looking for in our search feature. The problem was that the conduit feeding the Sphinx indexer was handling Unicode incorrectly (to be specific, it was deleting certain bytes wholesale because this guy believed them never to be valid, and this broke multi-byte sequences horribly). Those two days would have been much better spent working on his current project.

Additionally, not handling Unicode correctly can leave you open to certain types of security holes!

The biggest of these is probably that Unicode means _a string is not an array of bytes_, so naïve allocators for languages with byte-array strings (read: C and its brethren) are susceptible to buffer overruns when handed multi-byte Unicode sequences when they're expecting ASCII.

Here's another one: the Unicode character space contains many, many glyphs that look almost (or in some cases exactly) like ASCII characters. RFC 3492 defines a framework for internationalized domain names (IDN) that encodes non-ASCII code points using ASCII characters, and the most common implementations of this transparently go between the two. This means that you could register "bаnkofamerica.com" (actually xn--bnkofamerica-x9j.com) and put a phishing site there, and people would happily click on the identical-looking URL and give you their bank account. This was pointed out several years ago and most modern browsers have mechanisms in place to defend against it, but your custom application might not unless you're careful to check what you're doing.

There are plenty of blog posts and articles out there designed to tell you how to be safe when dealing with Unicode (and you should assume that you will be). I highly suggest you go read one.

That said, Groupon has something like 8,000 employees, most of whom were hired in the last two years.

So we'd need to triple the amount of spectrum allocated to each base station to realize these gains. Well, we can hope.

Is there still progress to be made on increasing the utilization of currently-allocated spectrum? I'm lazy and don't feel like computing a Shannon limit at the moment...

It would have been nice to see at least a paragraph or two on the Bay Area's versions of these problems.

Python 3 is well-defined, with a stable and usable implementation. You can port your code to it today, and even big projects like Django are getting ready to shift over to it.

Perl 6's definition continues to change, with no clear spec, and the leading implementation (Rakudo) doesn't have half of the features built. Even if there were a feature-complete implementation of it I wouldn't dream of starting to port my code over to Perl 6 yet.

Perl 6 is really a different language, and should be named as such. With that out of the way, Perl 5 can then get rid of its "5" and move on to release 16 in a year.

Western society is at odds with itself in the way it handles drugs, and aside from incremental progress on marijuana, it doesn't seem to be getting any better. People need to accept that these substances exist and that kids and adults alike will want to experiment with them or even use them on a regular basis.

It still feels like a cheap knockoff of Flipboard, and I don't need a Flipboard knockoff for every blog I read on my iPad. The iPad display is big enough not to need a special layout, and finding a poorly-implemented one like this just frustrates me.

I keep meaning to start using one, but I don't know which to try. I'm an Apple user all the way (home and office Macs plus an iPhone and iPad) and some sort of sync would be great. Additionally, what are the different models for storage, encryption, and retrieval?

Here's a better way to construct a strong, yet memorable password:

Take a full sentence, including punctuation and capitalization. Use the first letter of each word as your password. For example, "I should go on Hacker News less frequently, because I'll be more productive." becomes "IsgoHNlf,bIbmp.". We now have three character classes in what appears to be a random sequence.

(Yes, this still has patterns due to being constructed from English. But we've effectively taken a longer English phrase, with higher total entropy, and compressed it into a string that doesn't exhibit the low per-character entropy of the full words.)

At least Chrome's interface for this makes it less obtrusive than a pop-up dialog.

Plus it has --thpppt.

Which is a shame, because I really love the service and it just has to be driving loads of traffic through the affiliate links to iTMS and Spotify. Hopefully one of these days the RIAA will wake up to the possibility of alternate revenue streams and realize how valuable discovery services like Turntable are. Until then, I'll use Turntable until it gets shut down, and then I'll jump to whomever springs up to replace it.