balloot

I completely disagree. Watching a big proponent of SOPA have to scurry away from its position with its tail between its legs very likely gets the attention of people in Washington.

As a Democrat, I feel there is way too much Outrage over all kinds of relatively minor things. If you read a site like Daily Kos and see all the action going on there, it would seem that any successful legislator would have to necessarily build a tolerance to negative emails/letters/calls.

There are not, however, many issues that cause a large corporate donor to beg for mercy and forgiveness for taking a certain position. I think this action towards GoDaddy matters quite a bit in separating SOPA as something that really, truly angers people.

At the very least, I think GoDaddy put namecheap.com on the map this week. I know I had personally never heard of namecheap before the last few days.

GoDaddy probably won't release how many customers they lost, but I bet namecheap will be happy to tell us all how many transfers happened after all this is over.

Agreed. They were totally for SOPA yesterday, and even went so far as to publicly antagonize people who disagreed with their position. Their general counsel was also an architect of the bill. Forgive me if I don't quite buy that they're going to stop pulling strings in SOPA's favor behind the scenes.

Too late. Their petulant and dickish responses from the last few days show their true feelings on the issue.

Just in case you thought there was anything that couldn't be trolled, here is the guy who managed to come out against giving earnings to charity. Why couldn't Louis just spend the million on hookers and blow like a normal entertainer?

Berners-Lee is British. He has been working with the British government on internet issues. I know this is crazy, but they actually listen to him.

I highly recommend contacting your Representatives/Senators immediately. It amazes me that both of the California Senators are cosponsors of this turd. I would think they are among those who can be swayed.

I dunno. I definitely consider Palantir evil no matter how many open-source goodies they put out.

I have lived in SF for 5 years, and seriously have no clue WTF you are talking about. The crime rate in SF is quite average as far as big cities go. You make it sound like some post apocalyptic hellhole.

Anyone who raves about the great weather in SF is clearly not qualified to give judgment on the city.

Absolutely. I am an experienced software engineer in SF, and you would have to pay me WAY more money to live in Texas. The number is high enough that I would never realistically move there.

This math is much harder than the math on the current SAT test. There are no geometry proofs or trig/logarithms on the SAT. However, most admits into Harvard nowadays have either a solid AP Test score in Calculus and/or a SAT2 Math score, so that's sort of an unfair comparison.

Absolutely. But it appears that the fault falls clearly on the NC state government, which according to the article debated for less than a minute before awarding Apple $46 million in tax breaks.

The irony is that Apple basically used Republicans' blind allegiance to Job Creators to get huge tax breaks that will allow them to hire hundreds of people in the Socialist tax-happy hellhole of California, where most of the best knowledge workers live.

If they're counting jobs at Apple HQ, there are FAR more than 50 jobs associated with this data center.

They're talking about the people who report to work in the actual data center building. And that's an incredibly stupid way to measure the job creation of a cloud data center, given that its entire purpose in life is to allow remote access of its information.

Yes, we all yearn for the days when cloud computing data centers were run by thousands and thousands of operations engineers. Sadly, those times are no longer here - mostly because they're a figment of your imagination.

But don't let that stop you from assuming for no good reason that the software industry is about to die. People have been making that assumption for 10 years or so now, so you have plenty of good company.

It is incredibly short sighted to say that the sum of the jobs created by a data center is the people reporting to work in the building. This data center likely created hundreds, if not thousands of jobs. It's just that most of them aren't in hicksville, NC.

There are hardware engineers designing the facility, software engineers maintaining the software infrastructure, product managers scheming of ways to use Apple's cloud facilities, etc.

This seems like a deeply flawed study. Their definition of "talent" is "performance on tests of working memory"? That just appears to be totally bunk.

I also think that the "spend 10,000 hours" thing is flawed, in the fact that you generally only spend 10,000 hours on something you are very interested and talented in. Basically, it is very hard to separate "hard work" from "talent", because most people only really work hard at things they're talented at.

Incorrect. Salt and hash your password strings so they're all the same length.

That's my thought too. If you're susceptible to this kind of attack the problem is the lack of basic salting + hashing to create a fixed length password.

I don't know where this claim comes from, but as a Stanford CS grad (MS) I never heard of such a thing. Stanford definitely offers loans.

Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned, but I think it's slightly premature to brag about your great company culture before your company has done anything of note.

On that note, the "only hire entrepreneurs" thing is just stupid. Yes, everyone wants to hire creative people that can do everything well with little direction. But here in the real world, most people don't meet that description, and many that do want want to work for you. Then what?

That's my takeaway as well. Who cares how long a webserver takes to do a Fibonacci loop anyway? The point of a web server is to process lots of relatively small requests quickly and concurrently. Testing node.js with a Fibonacci loop is like testing a Ferrari by seeing how much weight it can tow.

Which software was it exactly that was so great and just worked? MS-DOS? Windows 3.1? Windows Me? Some specifics would be nice, because across the board it seems everything is MUCH better now. It used to be that you would buy a computer game and 75% of the time it would not work out of the box.

This guy just sounds like you run-of-the-mill crappy programmer.

"I can't get things to work! It's the fault of The World - it couldn't possibly be me! I've had a game in the App Store!"

As a rule, the worse the programmer, the more convoluted his solutions to problems. Maybe instead of writing huge rants on his blog, he should re-evaluate the way he does things so the world doesn't seem so horrible. Or get a new job.

You remember when most things "just worked"? When exactly was that?

I remember when you would buy a new mouse and sometimes it just wouldn't work and then you actually had to take it back to the store because you had something slightly different about your computer and there wasn't a released driver yet.

I remember when Blue Screen of Death was more than just a joke, and it was an actual thing that happened on a fairly regular basis.

You know how everyone thinks IE6 is teh devil? I remember when it came out and was awesome and it actually killed off the competitors for good with all its sweet features.

That's the world I grew up in, and the current state of things is MUCH better.

That policy is crap.

Any time someone takes vacation their team is going to move a bit slower on the current project. Commitments should be built around vacation, not the other way around.

I'm not a huge fan of the "unlimited" time. I've never worked somewhere with that policy, but it seems an unintended result would be that nobody knows exactly how much time is considered "reasonable". The policy likely sounds way better than it ends up being.

I say pick a number that you think no productive employee should exceed. Make that the yearly number, and make sure everyone knows that they will be encouraged to take ALL their days. Make the days expire after a year, so people don't feel the need to "bank" days. Then, everyone knows where they stand in terms of how much vacation they "should' be taking.

For the record, If I were starting a company now, I would make the number of days in the aforementioned system start at 20, and then increase with seniority.

I'm sorry, but if you have a startup and you decide to spend your time producing a fancy video for your 404 page, you probably aren't the best at setting priorities.

It's not bad to give all kids the "gifted" classroom. It's just impossible. There's not enough "gifted" resources to go around. It's a zero sum game at some level - to give "gifted" education to someone you have to take it away from someone else.

This study doesn't tell us anything we didn't know. Yes, when you give kids the best instructors and best resources, they do better.

The "success" in this study is that regular kids in a regular class end with 10% of kids testing for gifted, and regular kids in a "gifted" class show 15-20%. That simply is not that impressive or surprising.

The problem is that good instructors and resources are limited. And while those things would help anyone, you maximize their value by giving them to the kids on the gifted track. We, as a country, would be worse off if we didn't do this because we would be letting the truly talented go to waste in the name of "fairness."