jfager

56 ms·

481.
by jfager 17y ago
As of about an hour or so ago, it still wasn't fixed. Clicking "No, thanks" on the first Buzz popup screen means nothing - Buzz still gets enabled, still auto-populates a big list of followers and followees, and still makes that list publi
482.
by jfager 17y ago
This was their first interaction with Buzz. There was no opportunity to set any privacy settings. They are both Reader users, and did have limited sharing enabled there, but under what logic should those permissions ever extend to a comple
483.
by jfager 17y ago
This morning, I've watched two coworkers open their gmail accounts for the first time since Buzz went live. In both cases, they clicked "No thanks, take me to my inbox" instead of the button to "Check out Buzz", and in both cases, Buzz was
484.
by jfager 17y ago
It flies in the face of a mantra at HN: Fail early and often. It goes against the idea that you learn by making mistakes. When you're a young, tiny startup, you can fail early and often because the costs of doing so are outweighed by the
485.
by jfager 17y ago
The problem is that Buzz automatically adds email contacts as followers, and then publically displays who all of your other followers/ees are. So, if you were sharing items in Reader with a small group, once Buzz went live, you were also s
486.
by jfager 17y ago
When you sign up to twitter, you know what you're getting into, and you act accordingly - maybe you use an anonymous handle, maybe you only share certain things, maybe you keep your account private, etc. When you signed up for Gmail and Rea
487.
by jfager 17y ago
By default, the people you follow are shown on your public profile. Couple that with the auto-follow bullshit, and suddenly you have a giant privacy flaw: http://www.businessinsider.com/warning-google-buzz-has-a-hug... And it's not as si
488.
by jfager 17y ago
Are you seriously suggesting only one person has gotten wealthy without contributing to society?
489.
by jfager 17y ago
A man was paid $6b for winning a bet against homeowners and the entire financial industry. It is relevant to point that out, because it directly contradicts the idea that a person's wealth is proportional to what they've contributed. An
490.
by jfager 17y ago
Well, the United States government has it because it ratified an amendment to the Constitution saying it does, via the Constitutionally defined process to do so. 1.) Right, I'm going to give up on my dream to get rich because I'm paying a
491.
by jfager 17y ago
Your claim is that John Paulson is contributing 5 orders of magnitude more to society than teachers, social workers, police officers, firefighters, construction workers, engineers, nurses, and soldiers?
492.
by jfager 17y ago
Rich folks are only as rich as the society they inhabit recognize them to be. Ask white Zimbabwean farm owners how wealthy they are now (only one recent example). The wealthy benefit the most - by far - from how society is structured, if
493.
by jfager 17y ago
Why shouldn't the people who benefit the most from how society is structured be expected to pay the most for its maintenance?
494.
by jfager 17y ago
I didn't mean that they were the only people on the site, I meant that whatever the people on #startups are doing, they've been doing for a long time. Far from staging a coup, they're already an embedded power and have been a fundamental p
495.
by jfager 17y ago
What coup? The folks on #startups are the HN community.
496.
by jfager 17y ago
The drop-off from year 1 to year 2 can largely be attributed to defenses having had a year to figure out how to stop him. His first year he had some huge games simply because defenses weren't prepared for a rookie to come in and dominate l
497.
by jfager 17y ago
You know you sound like you're trolling, right? Clang, MacRuby, launchd, WebKit - that's just off the top of my head.
498.
by jfager 17y ago
"Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names." A giant "citation needed" needs to be attached to this. A quick sear
499.
by jfager 17y ago
3000+ lines is what you're calling an ad-hoc Python script? Or your sum total output of Python is 3000+ lines?
500.
by jfager 17y ago
Why should a javascript library defer to the abbreviated name of a minor python-land command line tool?
501.
by jfager 17y ago
Um, okay, so what? Re-read the article. Where, exactly, does it claim that dropping DRM is responsible for the increase in sales? The only thing I see is blurb pointing out that dropping DRM didn't result in everyone copying instead of b
502.
by jfager 17y ago
The whole point of the article you linked to is how to avoid summing floating point numbers in a simple loop.
503.
by jfager 17y ago
Summing floating point numbers in a simple loop is just as bad. It's not an issue of efficiency, it's an issue of accuracy.
504.
by jfager 17y ago
It's not an efficiency issue. Adding floating point numbers naively left-to-right can introduce huge errors, even in small data sets. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#Accuracy_problem...
505.
by jfager 17y ago
def sum = series.map(_.sum).foldLeft(0.0)(_+_) Gah, no, stop. Remember, kids: everytime you use naive map-reduce for floating point arithmetic operations, God kills a kitten.
506.
by jfager 17y ago
The DMCA is of particular interest because it's a potential counterexample of your assertion that other tools or intent are necessary to make distribution of a number illegal. The whole point is that it's a bad law, primarily because it's
507.
by jfager 17y ago
it is the number plus the necessary meta data required to turn the number into something that has been outlawed. Where in the DMCA does it say that? And even positing that it does (though I'm pretty sure it doesn't), would that mean my p
508.
by jfager 17y ago
The provision in the DMCA that this addresses says you can't make or distribute anything that is designed or primarily intended for breaking DRM tech. A DVD decryption algorithm obviously is designed and primarily intended to circumvent DRM
509.
by jfager 17y ago
It was a document sent to thousands of people at airports and airlines internationally, it wasn't classified, and it describes what millions of passengers are going to experience firsthand going through security lines. In other words: not
510.
by jfager 17y ago
But Rosenberg's blog post never says "Google is always open no matter what". Relevant quotes: These are the things we should be doing. In many cases we aren't there, but I hope that with this note we can start working to close the gap bet

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