neilk

79 ms·

721.
by neilk 13y ago
The article opens with an example of someone seeing how life broke down in postwar Italy. But there is an alternate view of how humans behave in crisis, well-articulated by Rebecca Solnit in "A Paradise Built in Hell". She notes t
722.
by neilk 13y ago
With this second installment, I'm pretty sure this is fiction. Kudos on the concept, though. The posts are both very well written and have dramatic twists right on schedule. But s/he's using web marketing writing, with bolded
723.
by neilk 13y ago
What technical organization could you name which didn't have those two aspects? What about Facebook? I think we could all name things they do which are brilliant, and things that are... not so much. How much worse would it be without t
724.
by neilk 13y ago
Well let's get our dystopias straight. That's precrime, not thoughtcrime. :) Seriously though, I am not a lawyer - isn't that what injunctions are for? To get a judge (or in this case, the A-G) to put the brakes on something
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by neilk 13y ago
Thought crime?
726.
by neilk 13y ago
Not exactly. Google has never advocated these kinds of questions, but they also allowed engineers to ask whatever they wanted (within certain parameters). I know of one guy who did get a "cannibals and nuns crossing a river" quest
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by neilk 13y ago
It is very common. But it's also the lifestyle that forces this. I was continually perplexed at how all of my colleagues seemed to be able to afford to go to all these conferences (not always on company dime), buy the most expensive co
728.
by neilk 13y ago
It's not quite fair to say Java lacks polymorphism, it just doesn't extend to primitive types.
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by neilk 13y ago
When you see an institution reacting in ways that you think are completely backwards, you shouldn't immediately assume that (a) they secretly think like you (b) they are being pressured to say otherwise. Institutions filter out people
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by neilk 13y ago
Greenwald may be out of his depth in interpreting what the documents mean. But that's not the same thing as saying the story is completely bogus. Lately it's emerging that the Guardian released their story pretty soon after Snowde
731.
by neilk 13y ago
You forgot the Bayseian weight of negative one million, for revealing his identity and what he's been doing to the international press.
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by neilk 13y ago
You're acting like this stuff isn't confirmed. Political leaders (both supporting and condemning) have come right out and said this stuff is genuine and even routine. Your theories seem to start from the premise that Greenwald is
733.
by neilk 13y ago
I am a fairly savvy computer user, and I use Facebook lists. I always have trouble figuring out who is in what list and which list I'm talking to, and how to add and remove people from that list. Facebook has proved over and over that their
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by neilk 13y ago
There's a difference between a situation where boundaries are not respected (driving on the sidewalk), and a situation where we choose not to orchestrate people's actions (lack of traffic lights).
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by neilk 13y ago
Okay, so if I understand correctly, the benefit here is that I can run some kinds of SQL queries on a large collection of heterogenous JSON documents. Is that right? You're still speaking Postgres-internals-geek, not I-want-to-get-something
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by neilk 13y ago
The survey is very focused on "firsts", like, "what was your first program?". It's weird, would you ask a marathon runner what their first steps were like? A lot of people have dabbled with code, and the first programs are always the same.
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by neilk 13y ago
If you can't hear it in Zooey Deschanel's voice, a desk clerk with extravagant vocal fry was a gag in the movie Young Adult. Here's just a part of the scene (2nd clip on the page) http://www.nextmovie.com/blog/young-adult-clips/
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by neilk 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Image_Labeler
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by neilk 13y ago
Conway's Law: "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
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by neilk 13y ago
I did my own tests with Google+. Some results: - Google+ queues images for recognition. Results improved steadily over 72 hours. - Google+ does not use OCR of text in the images. That surprised me. But perhaps it's a privacy issue. - Google
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by neilk 13y ago
I don't think so. The neural network in Google+ was trained on labeled images and now finds similar objects in unlabeled images. The technology discussed in that article is about deducing the existence of a common feature, in this instance
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by neilk 13y ago
It doesn't look anything like a public bus. It looks like a sleek black monolith on wheels, with no markings or indications where it's going. Other private companies advertise themselves (Yahoo) or are more obviously what they are. But Goog
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by neilk 13y ago
Same here. I have a degree from a Canadian university, but not in anything CS-related. I can pass a coding interview fairly easily, but getting into the US is a tremendous pain in the ass. And once you're there, you won't be able to get a G
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by neilk 13y ago
Wow. When are you going to post a comment that isn't about Our Malicious Overlords? The people who promote careful programming methodologies aren't trying to make people miserable. In fact I'd lay half the blame with the OP, who needs to re
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by neilk 13y ago
In 2007, danah boyd posited that teens don't get stuck to social networks. The theory was that they didn't need to maintain a giant extended network, because they saw their friends every day anyway. Besides they are shifting friend groups c
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by neilk 13y ago
Flickr has reasonably fine-grained privacy controls. There are a lot of people who do post the occasional NSFW picture right in with their regular photostream. You can mark it private to yourself only, or family, or contacts, and anyone not
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by neilk 13y ago
"The Nag Factor": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi63rXnuWbw You don't have to accept the position of the documentary, that the corporate form is intrinsically a bad thing. But tell me that the marketers behind the "Nag Factor" report do
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by neilk 13y ago
Probably because you're making it a joyless enterprise. You have high expectations, and you're making it a test of your worthiness as a person. So even starting to work on it reminds you of many personal regrets. You also have the problem t
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by neilk 13y ago
The modern web app has gone way beyond the simple HTML page - now there are components in all but name, handling their own libraries, network connections, establishing model-view-controller separation, and communicating with other component
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by neilk 13y ago
This framework looks really cool, but "built by Google" is a misnomer. Software like Closure, or the gold linker - these deserve to be called "built by Google". Internal tools, battle tested over years, released to the public. Angular and P

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