ef4

44 ms·

391.
by ef4 12y ago
The $2B satellite is equally absurd, and only costs that much for the same reasons that the launch costs $400M. Everything is bespoke and produced in the maximal number of congressional districts, with no meaningful competitive pressure to
392.
by ef4 12y ago
> you need to strip and re-build the thing That's how politically-designed boondoggles like the shuttle work. It's not inevitable, if you actually spend the engineering effort on reliability and repeatability. If NASA operated
393.
by ef4 12y ago
This whole comment thread is completely missing the context. Tokaido was marketed so well that it raised $51,000 on Kickstarter and has been discussed on HN many times, which is why it's not unreasonable to assume people around here kn
394.
by ef4 12y ago
I fought with those and eventually gave up, because their implementations were either broken or missing in the browsers I was supporting. But that probably 18 months ago now. Maybe they have improved.
395.
by ef4 12y ago
Its absolute wealth, not relative wealth, that determines whether your kids are likely to live to adulthood, how much leisure you're likely to have, what you'll eat, where you can live. Capitalism has obviously excelled at raisi
396.
by ef4 13y ago
Unfortunately, printed media support in CSS still sucks. I have a web app that needs to generate printable official documents, and it's really not possible to do a good job with CSS. I resort to generating PDF in Javascript, which is l
397.
by ef4 13y ago
The author is missing the fact that good developers can actually automate away a lot of those "lower on the totem pole" roles, or at least reduce the amount of repetitive stuff down to the point where the remaining work is quite
398.
by ef4 13y ago
The Last Psychiatrist is something of a performance artist. I find a lot of his (or her?) writing hilarious and insightful. This particular article even self-consciously responds to your criticism: "You know, you could use an edi
399.
by ef4 13y ago
It still obviously does work this way, just very informally. That is, such cabals clearly exist and clearly get early access. If things seem different now, perhaps it's because the timelines are shorter or the cabals more consolidate
400.
by ef4 13y ago
>Did she not put in long hours? Did she not sacrifice her personal life, etc, in a way commensurate with the developers? So why do the developers get paid more than other (white male) workers who work longer hours doing harder work? Beca
401.
by ef4 13y ago
What that tool says is irrelevant to the question of whether those certs have been compromised. The risk is that before the vulnerability was patched, somebody used it to grab the private keys associated with the certs.
402.
by ef4 13y ago
I've grown keenly aware of the gender disparities in tech and it's an issue I care about fixing. Which is why I want the "tech undervalues non-coders" meme to stop getting dragged into these gender discrimination discuss
403.
by ef4 13y ago
At that point, speed isn't really the issue yet. Heartbleed was in the wild for two years . Would a day or two have made much difference? Highly unlikely. Speed matters after the disclosure, when every petty criminal and script kidd
404.
by ef4 13y ago
> Because Cloudflare is possibly the biggest and most vulnerable target due to the enormous number of websites and businesses relying on it. AWS is at least as important, as is Akamai. My point being, it's not enough to hand-wave ab
405.
by ef4 13y ago
That really doesn't illuminate anything, because you'd also need to explain why open source has been spectacularly successful generating other public goods (linux and others). The economics of open source are pretty clear at this
406.
by ef4 13y ago
Then you may want to consider staying out of the software business. It's layers all the way down. The relevant question is only how leaky each layer of abstraction is.
407.
by ef4 13y ago
Yeah, I'm all in favor of compiling better languages into Javascript, but it requires a degree of maturity and completeness from the surrounding toolchain.
408.
by ef4 13y ago
If you're still suffering that pain you need to switch to better build tools. Source map support is pretty mainstream now. If I open Chrome Dev Tools on my production site, it automatically grabs source map files from my server (access
409.
by ef4 13y ago
One of the big drivers for car leasing is tax policy. From my cursory understanding, you can generate bigger short-term, tax-deductible business expenses with a lease than a purchase. Since computers presumably depreciate faster than cars,
410.
by ef4 13y ago
This is one of the terrible things about the iTunes store. Thankfully there's now a really nice alternative front-end for browsing their content: https://fnd.io/#/iphone-app/845405123-deafalarm-by-alex-reid...
411.
by ef4 13y ago
This is one of the reasons that programmers who haven't read much of other people's code are a liability. They're as lost as novelists who don't read books. The difference comes down to empathy: if you can get inside the
412.
by ef4 13y ago
> In practice I find most upper-middle-class-and-wealthier Americans just don't walk anywhere, especially not after dark. We're actually in the midst of an urban renaissance. Being able to walk everywhere is one of the perks of
413.
by ef4 13y ago
> I would think that for people engaging in an inherently risky endeavor such as entrepreneurship, the most important goal would be to hedge against failure. The thing is, social safety nets aren't especially relevant to that kind o
414.
by ef4 13y ago
Nice, thanks.
415.
by ef4 13y ago
That's not true. It's a "single page app" with built in support for both pushState and hash-based URLs, so there's no reason anything needs to reinitialize just to update the URL. I have written an Ember app that ma
416.
by ef4 13y ago
I would like to see a credible open source alternative to Campfire, etc, so this is nice work. But if it's an Ember app, why don't the different rooms present as different URLs?
417.
by ef4 13y ago
> If you read the article again, notice how the fast majority of those millions of dollars have gone to private companies who failed to deliver working systems. Each of those companies passed multiple rounds of competitive bidding, too.
418.
by ef4 13y ago
As long as the resulting record is truly public, I agree. If only some people have meaningful access, they get tremendous power over everyone else. Which is the real problem with surveillance as it has usually been done.
419.
by ef4 13y ago
Your story sounds much like mine: using modern software to solve a complex problem for business customers. One difference is that we've been out talking and selling from day one. Our first customer was willing to be an early adopter an
420.
by ef4 13y ago
I see an awful lot of people dramatically under-valuing their own time in here. Anyone who's capable of building and launching a successful software system necessarily commands a pretty high rate. I value my R&D cost based on what

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