whopa

Python does the right thing under the hood for you. The signal handler you register in Python isn't run in the dangerous context. There's an internal signal handler which just tells the interpreter a signal happened and when control is returned back to the interpreter outside of the signal handler it knows what to do:

https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/c7d45da654ee/Modules/sign...

I try Hipmunk every so often, the last time being about a month ago. Every time, Kayak shows more flight options for the same query than Hipmunk, and often cheaper ones. I don't get it, they both use ITA on the backend.

I'd use Hipmunk more often if they actually fulfilled their functionality promise as an aggregator. A pretty UI isn't enough.

Where'd you get a "new" one? I'm in the market for a new laptop, but I'm highly disappointed with the changes made to the current Thinkpad line.

Rdio also uses The Echo Nest for their radio feature, and it's great. I always chalked up Spotify's radio sucking vs. Rdio's radio being so good due to Spotify having shitty integration with The Echo Nest... maybe that will change. One thing that always struck me about Spotify is that they never seemed to put a priority on anything around actual music discovery.

"original inventor and heirs" seems reasonable.

I don't follow the chemist example. The patent is still valuable to companies who do want to productize it, or even companies that don't. Companies can still buy and hold patents without doing anything with them, it's just that they are barred from litigating them. They can still resell the patent to someone else, potentially for a profit.

A "practicing" entity has either brought a product to market, or uses the invention themselves in the process of building a product on the market. Someone who is planning on building a product but has no funds doesn't get to litigate unless they are the original inventor. Your last example seems to imply that they are the original inventor.

What if the law was that NPEs are barred from litigating patents, unless the NPE was the original inventor. Wouldn't that solve this?

I agree with everything you said, except that there is one thing missing from Peninsula/South Bay that SF has: lots of choice of bars and nightclubs. That appeals to the single twentysomething demographic that startups are trying to hire from. Hence the demand.

If you want to stay out late drinking and whatnot, public transportation isn't really an option because it doesn't run very late or very frequent. And if you're drinking, you shouldn't be driving so... you live in SF.

To answer the grandfather post, if bars/clubs aren't your thing, no, you're not missing anything.

You're right to be skeptical. It made the rounds last month, but it turned out to be a hoax:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/07/01/quake-3-arena-wor...

So I heard a bit differently about the FB Chat thing. Facebook likes to move its engineers around to different teams from time to time (if only temporarily) to spread institutional knowledge around and prevent bus factors from being too low. This also is a way to alleviate burnout. There simply weren't enough engineers at FB who knew Erlang to make this practical for chat, so they rewrote it in C++. The Erlang bits were reasonably written and working fine, but it didn't fit into this policy. Any non-mainstream languages wouldn't fit, this isn't something about Erlang in particular.

Erlang is a great fit for a number of problem domains, but if you silo it into a small part of your organization, you're going to run into issues such as these. You have to be willing to train people in it. It isn't that hard to pick up if it's someone's full time job to do so, as long as they're smart. And you want to hire smart people anyway, right?

Yeah, zCloud only came into fruition late last year. Before that they were using AWS, and handling the same scale they do now. Private cloud is saving them money, but some other company could use AWS just as Zynga did before and handle millions of users absolutely fine.

Rdio has Arcade Fire. Strange that Spotify doesn't....

But yeah, I agree, subscription music services are the future. The holdouts (Beatles, Metallica, AC/DC, etc.) will eventually license their stuff, otherwise their fan base will erode. I already think that their tardiness to the digital download party has hurt them already.

Most of Zynga's games differ only very superficially though. It's weird that they can't launch games fast enough to stave off attrition.

Rhapsody doesn't have a free version, other than the trial period when you sign up. Spotify does, but has to pay the labels for their usage too. So Rhapsody in all likelihood paid out the the labels a lot less than Spotify.

Google advertising for non-Chrome/Android isn't common, but it does happen. For example, I was in Vegas a few months ago and the airport had a bunch of ads for Hotpot.

Judging from this sentence from the article

> The Cupertino, Calif., tech giant has agreed to pay the labels between $25 million to $50 million each, as an incentive to get on board, depending on how many tracks consumers are storing.

sounds like what Apple is launching is also a music locker service akin to what Google Music is now, and not streaming arbitrary music. Perhaps the author is referring to when Google may remove the invite-only aspect for their service, or maybe just confused.

Despite the facetious nature of the comment, there's a kernel of truth there: Twitter actually did hire 3 people just to work on Cassandra.

Don't forget about head and tailwinds. Tokyo to SFO is 9 hours, but SFO to Tokyo is 11 hours. NYC to SFO is 6.5 hours, but SFO to NYC is 5.5 hours.

More importantly though, you can get to a lot of Asia from SFO without changing a plane, that's not true of NYC.

From a cursory look, it appears they wrote all the new functionality in C++ (and ObjC for UI on the Mac). That's a lot of work. Why they didn't do the bulk of it in JS/HTML/CSS is anybody's guess.

Facebook got an exemption from the SEC from that rule (it's 500 stockholders and $10 million in assets):

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2008/tc200...

To nitpick, the surface area of the Moon is roughly the same as the area of Africa plus the area of the contiguous US. Much less than the total land area of Earth. It's even less than the area of Asia.

AFAIK, Pandora is classed as radio, and doesn't have to do direct deals with the labels. They pay royalties to SoundExchange, which in theory distributes the royalties to the content owners. The rates they pay are a lot lower than the rates companies like Rdio, Spotify, and MOG have to pay to the labels directly for on demand streaming rights.

Yeah, non-interactive is radio style listening whereas interactive the user gets to pick and choose what they want to hear on demand.

Interactive/non-interactive in this context are actually widely used terms in the digital music space.

To further the original analogy, you can think of FB users or non-paying dating site users as "inventory". It sounds a bit dehumanizing, but it doesn't have to be: in traditional business you have to manage and maintain your inventory properly as well. E.g., frozen food has to be kept frozen, planes have to be serviced regularly, etc. Maintaining your inventory has a cost, but you need to bear it because that's part of what you're selling. When running a site like FB, you have acquisition costs for your inventory (things you do to get your users to sign up for your site) and maintenance costs for your inventory (things you do to keep your users using your site).

So making sure your users happy is an important part of your business because otherwise you're mismanaging your inventory. But you're free to decide that some of your inventory is too expensive to maintain vs. the value you and your customers derive from it, and it doesn't make sense to carry it anymore.

No, it doesn't do bidirectional sync, at least not yet.

FWIW, Mozilla has an app for syncing your bookmarks to your iPhone:

https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/home/

I've heard this expressed many times from various people: law schools love engineers because they already know how to think analytically and don't have to be taught that. This is independent of whether they learned any form of engineering in school or not.

As far as the bar exam being a joke, if that's true, that's broken. If the more important thing is going to law school for 3 years, then why put so much emphasis on the bar exam t all? There are people who graduate to law school but never pass the exam, or the ones who try and try again and pass it on their 4th or 5th try, if they went to school why isn't that meaningful? Either the schooling isn't all that it's cracked up to be or the metric doesn't measure the right things, but either way there's an impedance mismatch which means the system is broken.

The linked article plainly explains it:

"The main problem with the RSS title element is how to deal with the characters & and <. They have to be encoded at least once as a requirement of XML, but for those aggregators that treat titles as HTML, a second level of encoding may be expected in order to comply with HTML."

They have to be encoded at least once but do you do it once, or twice? That's the ambiguity.

Out of the 3 pursuits you mentioned explicitly, I think only one of them actually truly benefits from the education system: medicine. With finance, the fundamentals are easily learned by self study, and to excel really depends more on personality type and drive than stuff that's taught in school. Law you can absolutely self study, there's plenty who've passed the bar exam without a degree in the past, though it's harder these days now that a lot of bar associations require a degree before you can sit for the test. That's likely due to favors to law schools rather than any real qualification reason.

Some other fields do certainly benefit from the resources a university provide though. With many engineering and science subjects, lab work is pretty key to understanding, and you're not going to have to resources to do that on your own general. Computer science is an exception here, since computers are pretty readily available.

However, with the rise of grade inflation and the general dumbing down of university curricula, for a lot of subjects your average school just doesn't confer much actual value.

Oops. I seem to remember reading comments from the original Ping announcement story that it was. I stand corrected.

My point is still valid though. To do proper comparison for Band of Horses, you have to take # of users in native English speaking markets. For FB, that is not the majority, though it is a large plurality; for iTunes, it may very well be the majority. Apple products aren't a significant part of the market in SE Asia, but FB is.

Couple things:

1) Ping is only available in the US, so a straight comparison of user numbers to FB isn't necessarily valid. You have take the number of US users of both iTunes and FB, and I don't think that breakdown is readily available.

2) Non-mainstream stuff is likely to be overrepresented in these sorts of things, since people who are into to music are more likely to use such new music services and are also likely to have more varied tastes.