megaduck

30 ms·

211.
by megaduck 17y ago
I'm not so sure that IE is that important for forward-looking development. It has a rapidly diminishing marketshare on the desktop, and that trend looks likely to continue. Firefox has a staggering amount of momentum right now, and Safari
212.
by megaduck 17y ago
More durable hardware is hard to come by. The Apple stuff is usually pretty sturdy. There's exceptions, but I generally trust Apple hardware over Dell, HP, Toshiba, Acer, etc. The Thinkpads used to be as good or better, but standards hav
213.
by megaduck 17y ago
I do most of my web development using the terminal and emacs, so there's nothing intrinsic to OS X that's an advantage there. The real advantage of OS X is that the rest of the system gets the heck out of your way so that you can get work d
214.
by megaduck 17y ago
You've got the general shape of it, but I've got one minor clarification about your history. You make the GaoKao sound recent, when it's basically the modern version of the Imperial Examination. The Imperial Examination started in 605, and
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by megaduck 17y ago
Actually, I think it's more than just semantics. Stress makes it harder in a quantifiable way. Stress impairs both memory and abstract reasoning. For the language composition portions it narrows your thinking, and strips out creativity.
216.
by megaduck 17y ago
It's brutal because the pressure is amazingly intense. Your test results, quite literally, will determine the rest of your life. College admission is entirely based on your GaoKao score, grades don't matter and extracurriculars don't exi
217.
by megaduck 17y ago
Android kept the Java language, and pitched out the JVM. Does this seem backwards to anyone else?
218.
by megaduck 17y ago
Hear, hear! The sooner we can ditch elaborate long-polling hacks, the happier I'll be. We've got a lot of features on the drawing board that would be enormously simplified by WebSockets.
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by megaduck 17y ago
Exactly. The situation today is exactly what freaked Microsoft out back in the 90s, so much that they went all-out to murder Netscape: Continuously improving standards-based browsers. We've got Firefox to thank for that. Say what you wil
220.
by megaduck 17y ago
This has nothing, nothing , to do with trade or business. This isn't about supporting local Chinese businesses, or shafting American firms. This is all about June 4th, the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. Twitter has proven to
221.
by megaduck 17y ago
Wow. Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google have all spent obscene amounts of money and time building "special relationships" with the Chinese government, ostensibly with the hope of preventing this sort of thing. Fat lot of good it's doing them. I
222.
by megaduck 17y ago
Hey, that works! Thanks a bunch. Much faster than the SSH tunnel I was using.
223.
by megaduck 17y ago
If I do base my business here, what's the upside? As a tech startup, I can make far more money in the developed world for a lot less hassle. Doing business from the Valley also doesn't require compromising my personal morality or professi
224.
by megaduck 17y ago
The growth is mostly because they're selling a lot of exports. They've been building up domestic consumption, but it's still pretty weak. Almost all the growth is from foreign money flowing in one way or another, and once money is in Chin
225.
by megaduck 17y ago
When I talk about theft, it's bigger than the occasional missing laptop. It's more like coming into your office at night to find a bunch of guys armed with tire irons loading your whole office into a truck. Or perhaps you'll just come to w
226.
by megaduck 17y ago
One more thing. If you're doing any kind of social or media business, and you've never had to deal with government censorship before, you're in for a new special kind of hell. I watched Google build up all sorts of Government relationships
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by megaduck 17y ago
She's naive. There's no way that I'd consider doing a software startup in China, and I live here. There's just no good way to make money at it. First, it's damnably hard to get people to pay you for anything software based. With the ramp
228.
by megaduck 17y ago
Yeah. The rap is pretty well deserved, regardless of what happens in the future. I have a friend who's at a venture-backed startup here in Beijing (not software). At a local startup meet-and-greet, he started talking to the founder of a lo
229.
by megaduck 17y ago
To each their own. Personally, I found it fascinating. As a programmer, I've got a lot of respect for the obsessive attention to detail, as well as the time consumed. :) Constructing software is a lot like building that model. You break t
230.
by megaduck 17y ago
Hard to say, since English isn't a tonal language. It would depend on how you said it. Have you seen Microsoft Bing? - Second tone (rising) I don't care for Microsoft Bing. - Fourth tone (falling) Microsoft goes BING! - First tone (Kinda l
231.
by megaduck 17y ago
After doing some research, I think I've completely abused the notion of the confidence interval. Which I think just helps to prove Zed's point. This stuff be hard .
232.
by megaduck 17y ago
You're proving his point, which is that people's intuition is often dangerously wrong. The sample size is actually often nowhere near as important as your sampling method. For an extreme example, I can conduct a billion coin flips with a
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by megaduck 17y ago
The problem isn't that people know nothing about statistics. The problem is that they think they know more than they actually do. It's fairly easy to get past your "intro to stats" class with only a passing familiarity with the subject an
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by megaduck 17y ago
Absolutely true. I hit that point earlier this year. For a while, I was filling every waking moment with something "productive". Going to class during the day, working on the startup at night, listening to economics and political podcasts
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by megaduck 17y ago
I mostly agree, but I think you might be worrying pre-emptively. From the original poster's description, she might not have to be dealing with "everything all at once". A person with a strong math background will have a much easier time g
236.
by megaduck 17y ago
It depends. If her interests are highly focused, there's a few problem domains where niche languages (R, Matlab, Haskell, Fortran) really shine. However, if she wants more general purpose tools, I've got a few strong recommendations: Ruby
237.
by megaduck 17y ago
Gosh, I hope that you're trolling. Otherwise, that's a very lonely and unhappy way to view the world. It's also an incredible misinterpretation of modern philanthropy. Charitable organizations like the Gates foundation aren't interested i
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by megaduck 17y ago
Interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing! From my (limited) experience, it feels like small European languages are particularly susceptible to domain loss from English. Since they all share a common alphabet and the phonemes are "close enoug
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by megaduck 17y ago
Advertising always has been, and always will be, a black art. The percentage of time, effort, and money that works for one company might fail dramatically for another. Just compare advertising budgets and strategies between Pepsi and Goog
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by megaduck 17y ago
Woks are fantastic! It's amazing the variety of tasty food that can be cooked with just a wok and a long-handled ladle. Stir-fry, braise, boil, whatever you like. Fast and easy. A few words of warning, though: First, proper stir-fry tec

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