sedev

36 ms·

331.
by sedev 15y ago
Bell's research sounds fascinating - I wonder if it leads to any suggestions to getting over the moral panics more quickly? They're almost never productive, and they harm far more than they help. I'm thinking especially of the political ang
332.
by sedev 15y ago
The picture is even bleaker if you look at wealth instead of income - bleak to the point of 'hmm, I wonder how long we have before a violent kill-the-rich outbreak like those at the tail end of the 19th century?'
333.
by sedev 15y ago
Being on this site implies disagreement with the idea that hard work correlates to better pay in a typical company. HN, to a great extent, reflects the ethos of startup culture in general and PG in particular. That, in turn, means that th
334.
by sedev 15y ago
That is a good value of 'usual,' and I agree with it - but I think it's also, sometimes, valuable to consider those characteristics in the small. I actually have a specific person in my life to whom I'm going to repeat this story, with the
335.
by sedev 15y ago
In this scenario, I think that the 'three skulls' result was about as likely to come up getting in the car and driving to the public location as it was during the actual confrontation.
336.
by sedev 15y ago
The State, like Twitter, is good at some things, and not at others. People insist on using it for things in both categories. So 'give the police more money' is not always a great idea for reducing crime - I'm from an area where the police h
337.
by sedev 15y ago
"Small agile group of clever people produces results far superior to large, calcified, bureaucratic organization that ostensibly should be performing the task." That narrative is usually an easy ticket to the front page of HN.
338.
by sedev 15y ago
Thank you for that clarification. That has improved my understanding of the situation.
339.
by sedev 15y ago
While the improvements they're promising are certainly a Good Thing, one bit jumps out at me: "introduced a significantly improved about:memory page with buttons that can manually trigger garbage collection (GC) and cycle collection (CC)...
340.
by sedev 15y ago
This makes the cynical parts of my brain howl with laughter. Apparently problems with the law aren't real problems until they inconvenience rich white financiers! I mean, if they end up throwing out business-method patents, I'm all for
341.
by sedev 15y ago
I'm one of the people perennially angry over 'I disabled JavaScript and your website broke,' but that's limited to sites that should work fine with JS off. Like this guy's - it's a blog post. A blog post should not completely break with J
342.
by sedev 15y ago
Or people with screen-readers, or w3m, or actual security concerns. There are lots of sites where JS is an essential part of their functionality! It is a feature when these sites break with JS off (even though it is best when they provide
343.
by sedev 15y ago
On the just-out-of-reach thing - I notice also that this is another clever motherfucker whose site completely breaks with JavaScript turned off, even though all it has to do is display text. As far as I'm concerned, an idiotic web design de
344.
by sedev 15y ago
It does that because the alternative is even worse: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/11/10/25504...
345.
by sedev 15y ago
'Shameless self-promotion' is both (a) what Mr. Calacanis does and (b) an essential skill for entrepreneurs in general. So I'm actually not willing to ding him for that - he is doing something very normal in two senses.
346.
by sedev 15y ago
Welcome to grown-up computing (c.f. marco Arment http://articles.marco.org/145 )
347.
by sedev 15y ago
That tactic, "reputation bankruptcy," is far more effective for individual persons than for a business, and in this specific case, it's pretty easy to programmatically detect. So I don't think much of that scenario. However, yes, it's easi
348.
Things you need to test in your iOS app(blog.testlabs.com)
2 points by sedev 15y ago|0 comments
349.
by sedev 15y ago
Part of the point of the review model of Yelp (and Amazon, for that matter) is that you don't have to trust a review. You only have to trust the consensus of all of the reviewers - which, at best, is very, very hard to spoof. When I see
350.
by sedev 15y ago
You are eliding the difference between selling a lot of devices and selling a lot of apps. I notice this ecosystem over here that's running on Objective-C that's doing a very good job of selling apps and directing money towards develop
351.
by sedev 15y ago
And if you visit it with JavaScript turned off, you get a "Fuck You" popover. If all your site is doing is giving me some text content, and your site completely breaks with JavaScript off, you're a bad programmer and a bad person.
352.
by sedev 15y ago
That was my very first thought, too - "wow, this is going to be a boon to criminals in uniform!" Think of it the way Bruce Schneier would: what could a malicious person accomplish with this technology? There's no effective way to keep it o
353.
by sedev 15y ago
This is a good example of why specialists shouldn't talk to the media. Generally, the interests of (for example) the New York Times are opposed to the interests of (for example) a particle physicist. The incentive structure of mainstream
354.
by sedev 15y ago
Point of information: that's a point of information, not a point of order. http://www.apdaweb.org/guide/rules
355.
by sedev 15y ago
In practical terms, you can fire someone for any reason, just so long as you list an acceptable reason on the paperwork. The power of an employer to fire you at any time is definitely not equal to the average employee having the power to l
356.
by sedev 16y ago
The employees, as people, probably do want to provide good customer service! There are other good points in this thread about PayPal's risk mitigation model. I think that this basically deepens the parallel to Google. When the service w
357.
Making [Applications] Faster (2009)(sirlin.net)
2 points by sedev 16y ago|0 comments
358.
by sedev 16y ago
I've stopped being surprised at this genre of story showing up - on HN or elsewhere. This story basically serves to illustrate a couple of things about Paypal that are definitely salient, but haven't changed in years. * Banks are still shi
359.
by sedev 16y ago
I think that this illustrates a point that's worth making about the difference between Android devices and iOS devices. There is no 'better' - there is a tradeoff. This is the same tradeoff that Linux elsewhere offers, really. This is the
360.
by sedev 16y ago
Your comment essentially assumes "someone who disagrees with me so much, couldn't possibly be sincere!" Please don't do that, that's bad discourse. <em>Brands like Costco and Amazon make a huge chunk of change, but you don't see th

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