mquander

41 ms·

421.
by mquander 15y ago
I think it's fair to say that nobody at Universal has any idea if Grooveshark is actually raising or lowering their profits. Nobody has conducted any kind of inquiry to see whether the sales lost via Grooveshark are compensated by the valu
422.
by mquander 15y ago
Isn't a race to the bottom on price the desired outcome? The presence of a race to the bottom on functionality is independent of whether or not the contract is open. If they don't have anyone competent who is vetting the proposals or e
423.
by mquander 15y ago
So if we can make it through the next 20-25 years, the people in power will protect technology for us, not fear it. Remind me how well this has worked out for the War on Drugs.
424.
by mquander 15y ago
What is the deal with people's obsession over the word "psychopath?" I don't understand the point of taking characters whose personality and motivations are very clear to us and trying to apply or not apply this somewhat vague label. What
425.
by mquander 15y ago
Regarding #1, I found these statistics from: http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/credit-card-indu... Approximately 74.9 percent of the U.S. families surveyed in 2004 had credit cards, and 58 percent of those families carried a ba
426.
by mquander 15y ago
I assume it's on the front page of YC because it's an good summary of an interesting topic, which is more than you can say about most stories. I don't use Bitcoin or care whether it succeeds but I upvoted the submission because it got me t
427.
by mquander 15y ago
Yes, and just like illegal drugs, the government will have yet another unrelated crime it can arrest you for when you happen to antagonize it or do some other legal-but-looked-dimly-upon thing. What a utopia.
428.
by mquander 15y ago
I appreciate the tradeoff, but I don't think that's the case. There are probably only a few thousand people who are on a level of notability to this audience as the young founder of a heavily-hyped project like this. There are many thread
429.
by mquander 15y ago
Why have a thread full of condolences from strangers directed at strangers and shun any actual discussion? Because this is how people deal with the existence of death, and they appreciate having a place to pay their respects independent o
430.
by mquander 15y ago
No, you must not respond; you are not obliged to make any comment on his death. In fact, it would be nice if you specifically refrained from making a comment arguing about whether his death was important in the middle of a thread where eve
431.
by mquander 15y ago
The HN title is ten times more descriptive than "Fucking Your Way Out." Nobody would have any idea what the article was about if he used that title, whereas his replacement title is succinct and accurate. You can quibble about whether it s
432.
by mquander 15y ago
Well, I agree with that, so I suppose I won't argue any further about it.
433.
by mquander 15y ago
Most programmers write code that other people have to read, maintain, or extend at some point. If you write repetitive, shitty code, you may be qualified to write some useful programs for yourself, or write a web app that doesn't have to s
434.
by mquander 15y ago
I suppose most of us would give a similar answer as what Joel gave, but I found this nice pair of comments: Is this really the only way to be a good programmer? I'm someone that wants to study programming in my spare time and that's a bit
435.
by mquander 15y ago
Oh, you mean the sentence about how the eccentric scientist has been persecuted by the establishment for his contrarian work? To me, that sounds so much like the output of a journalist's nearest-cliche algorithm that it's impossible to say
436.
by mquander 15y ago
No, you couldn't. Did you look at that link? You have to wrap all this OO ceremony around it. I don't think it's optimal to make someone type class Cross extends TurtleGraphicsWindow { public void myTurtleCmds() ... at the start of
437.
by mquander 15y ago
I like Newsblur more than the last time I tried -- I just signed up for a premium account. However, I'm still slightly frustrated because of this: In Google Reader, I liked to look at all the feeds in a category and just see all the posts
438.
by mquander 15y ago
At the risk of making meta-noise, why, oh why, have five different people replied to this thing in a single hour? Does anyone think that some kind of lovely discussion is going to bloom by "refuting" this comment? Half the page is now abo
439.
by mquander 15y ago
This is getting quite off-topic, but I agree; I think passing the second test means that there are big industries and a great deal of labor devoted to trying to brand and distinguish slightly different wines, which strikes me as negative. B
440.
by mquander 15y ago
Wait a minute, aren't the expensive wines a mechanism of "hack[ing] by making people do things they wouldn't?" The wineries engineering this are the ones taking advantage of human nature -- the same position Farmville's in. The "clinical t
441.
by mquander 15y ago
If you or anyone can provide actual evidence that manufacturer software increases sales or gets consumers to tolerate higher margins, I'm all ears. But short of that, I don't believe it. I've never met someone who said they preferred a ph
442.
by mquander 15y ago
For example, to filter an array is lovely: filteredArray = [allRecords filteredArrayUsingPredicate: [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"someField == %d", someFieldFilterValue]]; A four-word name for filter and filtering for eq
443.
by mquander 15y ago
I did not drill down into the individual listing. Now I know! Cool.
444.
by mquander 15y ago
It would be nice to be able to see an optional list of just what hardware is in each laptop that you tested. First benefit: The user could check that hardware against what he purchased or is purchasing and have a moderate amount of confiden
445.
by mquander 15y ago
I disagree. I feel that knowing what might happen demonstrates that the individual has considered the design of C carefully and taken the time to find out how it is, and why it is the way it is. I think that sort of knowledge always leads
446.
by mquander 15y ago
The level of the inequality in pay is at most a factor of 2. I am so, so confident that the woman in those slides will be more than twice as productive, on a range of metrics, than the man. There's a big difference between being competent
447.
by mquander 15y ago
If that were true, then flagging would not sink things to the bottom. I click the buttons that do what I want, not ones that are supposed to do what I want.
448.
by mquander 15y ago
Maybe this is too pessimistic, but perhaps the challenge is just serving to filter out people who don't know what version control, EC2, or caching are, or who can't form a mental model of the problem based on the short description provided.
449.
by mquander 15y ago
That doesn't make much sense to me. If you assume that their score tends to improve when taking the test more than once, which seems reasonable, then taking it more would push the average higher.
450.
by mquander 15y ago
See, when you say it like that...Obviously Stephenson is well aware that the setting and characterization is sort of over-the-top. But I'm pretty sure his fundamental motivation was just, fuck it, if people write Star Trek / Star Wars cross

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