sgentle

48 ms·

361.
by sgentle 15y ago
Sure! (Joke's on me, you already quoted it in the comment.) I can't lay any claim to the coder-as-cowboy metaphor in general - it's almost as old as actual cowboys - but I came up with it in the sense that I didn't rip off any one particula
362.
by sgentle 15y ago
I thought this was great. Very clever. Every frontier seems like it will be a frontier forever, until suddenly it isn't. Perhaps software is going to settle down, start a family, and quit this cowboy nonsense. I don't think it'll happen by
363.
by sgentle 15y ago
Hm. So is this a leak or a "not strictly public but if it fell into the hands of a bunch of people we want to hire then I guess we'll just have to deal with it" sort of thing? With this and the recent Michael Abrash blog post, I get the fee
364.
by sgentle 15y ago
I'm not generally a fan of overblown border security, but there is another angle here: it's now harder for foreign governments to conduct unilateral spy operations in your country. I'm not sure to what extent that actually affects me, but i
365.
by sgentle 15y ago
Well, good for him. I hope he has the presence of mind to send a statement out, because this article makes him sound crazy rather than fed up with ineffective, privacy-invading bullshit and brave enough to get arrested naked in an airport f
366.
by sgentle 15y ago
Absolutely. Anyone you do business with can do anything not forbidden by the law. But competition is a great reason to avoid doing things that make your customers unhappy. If there was another cloud email provider that was as good as Gmail,
367.
by sgentle 15y ago
Oh, I don't think Amazon is cheating. The whole point of disintermediation is to be more efficient and drive down prices. I'm certain prices will be lower under King Bezos, and perhaps payments to authors will stay high (though that's far l
368.
by sgentle 15y ago
Har. Nice article and a well-made argument. However I suspect that the big 6 are going to accept a world without DRM the same way as the MPAA and RIAA before them: kicking, screaming and fighting until the last breath to prevent anyone from
369.
UnQL-node: a SQL-like command line for CouchDB(github.com)
1 points by sgentle 15y ago|0 comments
370.
by sgentle 15y ago
It's not about competition between products, it's about competition between distributors of the same product. To use your app store example, you would need to imagine an alternate universe where there are two competing iOS App Stores: one r
371.
by sgentle 15y ago
I found this really interesting. I've never seen an interview in this style before, and I don't know if it's a haaretz thing or just this reporter, but I liked it. Most interviews I read feel very polished and on-message; more like a spoken
372.
by sgentle 15y ago
Could well. I've heard a lot of larger companies have a policy of only providing references of the form "X worked here from Y to Z" for that exact reason.
373.
by sgentle 15y ago
I can't speak for everyone else, but it wasn't the honesty I had an issue with, it was the reckless disloyalty and willingness to publicly burn people who've worked for you. For sure, this guy called Zynga evil and said he didn't want to wo
374.
by sgentle 15y ago
Hah, yeah, for Australians the US seems like something between hacker mecca and inescapable black hole. Nice video. :)
375.
by sgentle 15y ago
That guy has one hell of a mixed Australian-American accent. Reminds me a little of Des Bishop's mad Irish-American brogue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFE_G1i-d90 Do all the Aussies in the valley end up sounding like that?
376.
by sgentle 15y ago
I was curious about the "More people now speak Klingon than Esperanto" thing, but from what I can tell it's emphatically not true. The number of fluent Esperantists is somewhere in the tens or hundreds of thousands, whereas the number of fl
377.
by sgentle 15y ago
I thought this was a really great article. I remember _why's disappearance with sadness, but even his info-immolation could take nothing away from how much his work meant to me. It was 2005 or so and I was at university, feeling a bit overw
378.
by sgentle 15y ago
A question for anyone who quit their career as a patent lawyer to work on formal methods (or vice versa): Since mathematics isn't patentable, can you invalidate a patent claim by showing that it is equivalent to a mathematical formula? And
379.
by sgentle 15y ago
This is a nice article, but I don't really like the ending. "Everything is really complicated, so don't try to predict it or think about it too hard" isn't a particularly uplifting message, and there's not even much reason to think that it'
380.
by sgentle 15y ago
Heh, does anyone remember the outcry when Google Desktop turned up and, if you installed it, your search results started including local files? If this happens the way the author predicts, then perhaps the solution wasn't to dial back the s
381.
by sgentle 15y ago
It's not illegal to be a member of a communist organisation, or a Nazi, but it is illegal to lie on those forms. Asking those questions is a way of upping the stakes; you either admit you're a commie and they don't let you in, or you lie an
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by sgentle 15y ago
My god, that website has the most amazingly civil and constructive comments I've ever seen on a blog post. I wonder if they're moderated, or just getting traffic from a very narrow section of people who write well.
383.
by sgentle 15y ago
Ah, my mistake. I Googled for it but misread the results.
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by sgentle 15y ago
That's pretty interesting. WebKit-based browsers currently have about 30% of desktop browser market share, and basically all of the mobile browser share (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia, but not Windows Phone). Combined with Firefox's 25%,
385.
by sgentle 15y ago
Not equally bad at all. Holding back Chrome versions means you need to keep track of Chrome vulnerabilities to stay safe. Holding back Chrome updates and cert revocation updates means your security surface area includes every SSL website yo
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by sgentle 15y ago
I had a long comment about security of old browser versions that I just deleted because I misread the article. By "Chrome will instead rely on its automatic update mechanism" it means there will be a separate update stream using the same sy
387.
by sgentle 15y ago
Reminds me a bit of FeynTube, which replaces YouTube comments with Richard Feynman quotes: https://github.com/CodeFarmer/feyntube
388.
by sgentle 15y ago
On a related note, I once had a dispute with Valve about a buggy game I bought on Steam. Their support wouldn't say anything except point me to the subscriber agreement, which says that they could send you a copy of notepad instead of the g
389.
by sgentle 15y ago
Only related in the sense that they reflect US government priorities for white collar prosecution. Their state department has been leaning on Sweden for some time to clean up The Pirate Bay [1]. And there's, of course, the recent MegaUpload
390.
by sgentle 15y ago
It would appear that it's a mistake to commit white collar crime without being an American bank. [1][2][3][4] [1] "70% of early payment defaults had fraudulent misrepresentations on their original loan applications" - http://www.anu.edu.a

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