ballard

So I know this article is BS whining for two reasons:

0. Someone I met acquired the charter of a failing Midwestern local regional bank in order to save a ton of cash on moving funds into the us. This person was under 30 at the time. And it was tax and banking legal considering the law firm.

1. Defensibility of a business model is your friend, not you enemy. Look to how incumbents do it. What can you improve on? Just remember that the harder it is for you the harder it is for everyone else. If it were easy, everyone would do it and the competition would be even more cutthroat elsewhere (patents, distribution, connections, etc.).

To potential investors they probably signaled lack of hustle to find creative solutions to get past their current and all other future dilemmas. Without an unique, defensible, competitive advantage there's really no for an investor to throw down on a venture.

Her quitting was like a superhero retiring.

It was military-grade sec with valley-grade marketing.

The problem of a company providing a privacy service being a SPOF necessitates a more distributed approach that can "route around" attempts to shut it down. Any current or future entrant in privacy app space needs to also consider that one of several lessons to avoid the same fate as Lavabit.

For now, even with GPG are there any good/cheap email services that just don't log anything, don't append IPs or correct time headers and are outside US jurisdiction? (Friend's server in Thailand doesn't count... More than one box plz)

Just in case anyone is wondering, it is possible to compile Java to native code without a VM. I had to write a Java to MIPS compiler in uni, once in C++ and again in Java. Painful and hard without the luxury of LLVM but doable.

Has anyone used RubyMotion and RoboVM?

Personally I love my Northgate Omnikey, some love their inherited IBM keyboards. Whatever.

Since you bring up Docker, it's the ease of use and sharability that are the big wins outside of how it's implemented. Heck, if you want to get real, it's a wrapper around lxc. Folks I know that are serious Windows hackers with zillions in funding decide not to compete with Docker because it wouldn't be differentiated or better enough to bother... They're on track for acquisition and it wouldn't have been worth lost momentum.

People need new things to love as they fall out of love with the last that didn't fulfill an inner existential emptiness. (Chronic retail addiction.)

Also people love to tear down the works of other people, because either they didn't think of it, they wish to justify their own laziness or are afraid of being abandoned.

Neat. A friend of mine evaluated them pre-money and wrote them off initially, but changed their mind considering how far they've grown.

How can you judge something with blanket FUD you haven't seen, smelled or tasted yet? Give them a chance before condemning them.

I don't eat meat as I don't agree with either how it's produced or the suffering necessary to extract it.

Right now, I mostly consume quick oats and protein powder for bulk caloric needs. Vitamins are a generally a waste of money so daily requirements are met by a balance of vegetables, nuts and legumes.

If Soylent were viable and cheaper than Ensure, I'd consider it. But I'm unwilling to pay more for convenience as I can do better on my own for far cheaper.

Plus getting distribution will be cutthroat savagery. Direct-to-consumer is a huge amount of work and limits growth. Costco, Whole Foods, Trader Joes and Amazon should be hit up at the same time.

In addition, it came off as a politically-manufactured "moral panic" more than anything. [0,1] The gay friends I polled were like "meh."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

I think we need a witch hunting API, that way mob violence can be faster and more efficient so as to preclude any sort of defense.

Headline$.

Yeah I think your interpretation is fair. Taking a leadership stance takes on a higher level of responsibility to do the right thing and be just, and to appear to do that.

It signals the approach that will be taken with dev and user relations, and personnel issues.

I've worked some politically-sensitive .edu and .com, it looks more like it was a setup to get him out of the org.

No one works those kind of places without having sharpened their Machevelli playbook.

Clearly he failed at that and so should be out on that basis alone, irregardless of appearing to hate the LGBTQ community.

That's what I like about Ruby. ;)

Even in C, Go or Python, I column align any text that is remotely similar, so differences are obvious.

Clean code might be extra work but the net work (maintenance) should amortize less. Reducing cognitive load for large supportable production codebase cannot be underscored enough.

Agree a bazillion times.

Go or Java on top. Coding in C is like juggling chainsaws to say you can juggle them. C is certainly better than old school Fortran where memory management wasn't developed until later, but platforms like Erlang, Go and JRuby are really hard to beat.

The only problem is convincing people to migrate to different tools and transition codebases to another language. It would take a large project like FreeBSD, LLVM or the Linux kernel to move the needle.

Some nice folks that built Heroku explain how app support on both sides of Devops can be made easier and more scalable by following a few basic rules.

Hear, hear.

If I had a few million to spare, I'd support individual hackers and collectives as well. Because we need people that aren't under the pressure to deliver something for profit.

I wrote x86 assembly demos for fun in the golden age of asm between the eras of 8088 and p6... It became so much about putting random instructions here and there to get better performance, one almost needs like a QuickCheck-like sythensizing+benchmarking hybrid compiler that automagically mutates code to find what is actually fastest by genetic algo-like heuristics.

I think we should call it what it is:

distributed fascism.

But I'm hearted by the long-term trend of progressive gains... Check out Pinker's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...

Yup. A friend of my mother worked on the No on Pro 8 campaign and the subsequent challenge. It was an uphill battle most of the time to protect the right of those some feel others shouldn't have. Too much of a false moral panic by those with too much time to invade other people's lives.

This whole scenario can be avoided. Instead, a constant contact system over low bandwidth satellite should permanently archive plane vital stats to multiple geographically-diverse datacenters to remove the absolutely unnecessary and antiquated dependency on losing a physical "single source of truth." The blackbox is as obsolete as a library card file system, but should be kept as a secondary system.

The Wikipedia page on prediction markets storied history and interesting bit. Curious that USM had a prototype that was shutdown for being a "terrorism futures market."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market

VICE is amazing. That's real journalism. Getting out there getting to the front lines and asking uncomfortable questions.

The interesting bit would be reconstructing the right face memory rather than one of the interviewers.

Actually, there's an obvious scifi plot: investigator is a serial killer but excluded from memory extraction because the witness just saw them (again).

Yup. Consider it a cheap lesson in trust and that their reputations are blown. It's a small valley and word will get around.

Another example of Google building whatever they want today instead of building what customers need right now. Same thing happens on Googles other product lines, so it's no shock.