tingley

Like most MT engines, Google Translate quality varies wildly by language pair. When MT is used for pre-translation in professional translation settings, it's pretty common to cherry-pick particular engines for particular source and target locales.

Reason #2 ("they make you sign the contributor agreement") is basically a declaration that the author doesn't understand US copyright law. If you are serious about keeping your code free, up to and including the ability to enforce its license in court, there are legal reasons to do this.

At least, so says the FSF (and so do the IP lawyers I've talked to about it):

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html

RSS is not dead, but as a technology it is fairly stagnant. There were a solid five years when little was accomplished other than repeated version forks based on the dumbest sort of squabbling imaginable.

I don't think it's dead, because at this point it does solve a problem reasonably well, and it's still a problem many people are interested in solutions to.

It's quite possible that Google already owns some. We will find out when and if they find a counter-suit. Counterclaims of patent infringement are a standard tactic.

I assume Oracle is angling for a settlement here. I can't imagine they want to make Android apps not be written in Java, they just want a piece.

I am more of a builder than a pure entrepreneur, so YMMV.

I quit my job when my son was seven months old, took a month off, then went back to work three days a week. I'm a stay at home dad the other two.

Eight months later, this seems very, very easily to have been the best decision I've ever made.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red/Blue/Green) has this sort of development as a backdrop.

Nothing good comes of it.

It makes me happy to see how much success Dropbox is having. It's a great product.

I'm breaking my own personal rule of the internet by saying this, but I went to Harvard in the late 90s, and I was friends with a bunch of math/physics types while I was there. A good number of them went to Wall Street.

I think a lot of what this says is accurate, but I think it downplays something important. It's not just that there's a lot of money in Wall Street, it's that it's not a great time to be (for example) a physicist in this country, or at least it wasn't when I graduated. I remember a friend of mine telling me how you were typically looking at two postdocs after your PhD, and then your options were either to be an academic or to build weapons. (That guy, ironically, is the one who stuck with physics.)

So apparently a lot of people took the money. Those kids could grind, and it all must have just seemed too easy. I find it hard to judge too harshly. A part of me feels like we failed them as a society, in the way we collectively assign value to human activities. Because their minds are capable of things I can only imagine, but we couldn't think of anything better for them to do than this.

In high school, I remember learned this from reading James Gleick's book about Feynman. Feynman had written in one of his notebooks, as a fifteen year-old: THE MOST REMARKABLE FORMULA IN MATH: e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0

I marched in to my calculus teacher the next day and stammered about how unbelievable this was. A few weeks later he helped us work through why it's true.

(Edit: ha, typo. Thanks BoppreH.)

From what I've seen, it's mandatory in that you are no longer able to edit your 'Info' page without linking everything on it to pages.

Also, it seems this is being rolled out to different people at different times -- I saw it a couple days ago, but other people still haven't gotten it.

This is wonderful. I've "been thinking" forever about trying to write a book to teach children (in particular) how to program in python. But among other problems, I had never come up with an approach that made sense. (That is, one that didn't start with something stupid like "data types".)

So, I really like the approach here, and I really like the tone.

Jesse Ruderman's zap colors bookmarklet (https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html) cleans it up nicely as well.