ef4

82 ms·

721.
by ef4 14y ago
It's true that their profit margins can be vanishingly thin, but that doesn't mean they don't make money. For some classes of items, they can sell at cost and still make money, because their operations are allegedly so good that they can tu
722.
by ef4 14y ago
Sure, but I wasn't the original poster above, give them the credit for the code.
723.
by ef4 14y ago
The real question is: at what level of abstraction are you passionate about your work? If you're passionate about writing great software that people love, the world is your oyster and there are lots of ways to make money. But if you insist
724.
by ef4 14y ago
Even side-effect free constructors can make this pattern painful. Consider the case where we're trying to maintain the invariant that all Points always have valid numbers for all their coordinates: var Point = function(x, y) {
725.
by ef4 14y ago
Promises are not great -- I'd much rather have real coroutine support. But given that we don't have real coroutine support, promises are absolutely essential do writing sane, fault-tolerant Javascript.
726.
by ef4 14y ago
The blog post doesn't have any statistics to ignore. Graphs are not statistics. Why doesn't he give us a correlation coefficient on his big blue blob graph?
727.
by ef4 14y ago
The authorized_keys and known_hosts are nice to be able to share across machines. But of course you also want to be real careful about authenticating them (a signed tag in Git can serve that purpose).
728.
by ef4 14y ago
And remember folks, just deleting the file doesn't solve the problem, because this is a version control system . Github has published instructions on how to actually purge sensitive data that's been accidentally committed: https://help.gi
729.
by ef4 14y ago
It's a bit smarter than just using an http tunnel. Skype is capable of direct client-to-client connections, despite intervening NAT. It's pretty clever -- with the server's help as coordinator, the clients both initiate the connection, ca
730.
by ef4 14y ago
There's a misconception that actually plays in your favor here: most people dramatically underestimate the execution risk of building a new product, particularly software. If you can communicate very clearly what the product is going to loo
731.
by ef4 14y ago
It certainly works when you're selling to a business and you're showing how you can take away some real pain, or make them some real additional revenue. I have gone in with a demo and come away with a deal for real money. Then we built the
732.
by ef4 14y ago
An analogy: Bank runs are like forest fires. If you prevent all the small ones, eventually you get a giant one that's too big to stop.
733.
by ef4 14y ago
I really don't consider myself a typography expert or designer, but I found that easy and got a perfect score. There are obvious tells in almost all of them -- mostly lowercase "s", "c", etc, in which Helvetica is has perfectly level edges
734.
by ef4 14y ago
You have some good examples there that I personally agree with. But I think it's important to note that our economic value judgements are our own, and the fact that many of these products continue to be successful means that other people ho
735.
by ef4 14y ago
Teleogical thinking is a problem when we ascribe motive and direction to the unthinking universe. But the changes in human societies that are commonly called "progress" are the result of purposeful decisions by individual human beings. So i
736.
by ef4 14y ago
> it's too think of the human costs behind progress, not just the benefits for the factory owner or "future generations". The changes they fought against were demonstrably beneficial immediately , not to future generations, and to a v
737.
by ef4 14y ago
This alludes to one of the key problems with central-bank managed credit: you don't get accurate price signals about how much real capital is currently available for investment. The return on capital obviously does depend on the supply -- m
738.
by ef4 14y ago
I think the author is showing a bias common in technology circles: assuming that the limiting factor is technological knowledge. But history is full of examples of people who had all the necessary knowledge and yet didn't execute. The ancie
739.
by ef4 14y ago
Hello Joseph, we've exchanged emails before. No, I meant fax, not signing.
740.
by ef4 14y ago
> They may not be trying to keep everyone out Which was exactly my point. That's why your original comment about "that laptop should've been discovered within 15 minutes" doesn't make sense. Their network model deliberately doesn't care
741.
by ef4 14y ago
I'm still looking forward to when HelloFax has an API. My existing providers have terrible APIs and pretty bad reliability.
742.
by ef4 14y ago
I don't see an email in your profile.
743.
by ef4 14y ago
The moral of the story is: route your Chinese subcontractors through your own VPN first, so they appear to be coming from your house. Also, use your freaking time to do something more interesting than surf Reddit and Facebook.
744.
by ef4 14y ago
You're forgetting the context. The network is open and freely available to anyone. They're not trying to keep anyone out. That's precisely what Swartz's defense team has pointed out -- there was precious little "hacking" involved because
745.
by ef4 14y ago
The data don't really support that theory. Some countries that are often held up as positive alternatives to "North American business culture" (like France) have higher suicide rates than the US. Whatever our business culture's failing are,
746.
by ef4 14y ago
People mean different things when they say "local storage". Some of the storage APIs prompt the user, some don't, some only prompt if you ask for more than a certain amount of storage space. The various browsers are not consistent, especial
747.
by ef4 14y ago
To elaborate on kapowaz comment: Star Wars was directly inspired by an earlier era of space opera. Most likely, so was this ad in Vogue. Even the idea of starting at "Episode 4" makes Star Wars feel like one of the older serials -- they wer
748.
by ef4 14y ago
There's a growing area where I see a lot of people starting to get involved with distributed system who didn't have to deal with it before: rich in-browser apps with their own permanent storage. Once you have a Javascript application with s
749.
by ef4 14y ago
The vast majority of US pharmacies are already able to receive prescriptions electronically from physicians. SureScripts [ http://www.surescripts.com/ ] is the leader in that space. If you don't already have e-prescribing, it's probably bec
750.
by ef4 14y ago
As somebody who's trying to build a startup in this space, I'm not surprised. The root problem I see is that emphasizing "records" is completely backward. Making health records electronic is about 5% of the real work. The real value is all

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