billswift

Jamie Zawinski, one of the original Netscape developers.

I've never done any type of film making. I suspect from my attempts at photography and writing (and my reading about them), that the first, most cost effective investment would be hiring a professional editor to put the final film together.

I have seen that one discussed often enough on forums, I believe it is the "Apple Fanboy Android".

"So what has gone wrong? Why aren’t agile techniques scaling? Takes no genius to diagnose that problem: agile, trying to scale up from the bottom, collides with the top-down-imposed conventional corporate habits of death marches, rigid hierarchy, and waterfall planning. And loses, because the imperatives behind all that sludge are wired too deep into the culture of most corporations to be displaced by mere productivity improvements, however dramatic. "

This is related to last week's discussion of scrum and its weaknesses, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510943

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.

- - Charles Beard

That's the sort of thing that happens when semantics meets mathematics; Swizec screwed up his statement of the problem. Swizec and the people agreeing that the answer is yes are confusing the problem's literal statement with the common statement of similar problems.

The big problem with Jupiter is its particularly intense magnetic field and Van Allen radiation belt. It is going to be too dangerous to approach without a breakthrough in radiation shielding for a long time yet. On the other hand, once we get fusion, its containment is likely to be magnetic, which may be adaptable to shielding.

From one of the featured comments:

>Yeah, if it were up to me, 10% of our time would be spent on training-- teaching, learning, research, etc. But the higher-ups will often veto that, because on paper, it looks like it takes them 10% longer to complete their projects. Never mind that well-trained people work better and faster-- that's difficult to measure.

Actually, the effects of training are very easy to measure, compared to most of the other stuff involved in management; the problem is that very few are willing to put in the time needed up-front before you can get anything to measure.

I thought his discussion of the Linux Hater's Blog, http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=628 , was even better.

ADDED: Also the Linux Hater's Blog is still going if only intermittently, http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/

The really scary bit is that most people still support the police, and will probably continue to do so no matter what the police do.

As the post admitted, few supplements have benefit once you are eating a well-balanced diet. As he put it, "these are best used to fill any deficiencies." Though it is sad to see what amounts to an infomercial voted up to the number 2 spot on HN.

Added: Now it's made the top post.

"Aim high, you may still miss the target, but at least you won't shoot your foot off." Mercedes Lackey, I forget which book, but I think it was Tarma that said it.

The larger the team, the more overhead is needed, no matter what system you are using. The real problem is that scrum doesn't scale as efficiently as more structured management systems, so the overhead grows much faster than in most other systems as team size increases.

ADDED: Conversely, with small teams, the overhead of more formal methods doesn't scale down; that is where less structured methods like scrum are most efficient.

This article demonstrates a problem I have seen with many companies over decades. Even TI didn't become what it became overnight. But everyone thinks they can instantly grow to become the next economic giant instantly.

That kind of thing can only happen when opening a new field, and even then it isn't a sure thing. And it helps to have a faddish consumer product, like a lot of the big startup successes of the past decade, though there is no real evidence yet of their long term success (Twitter, Facebook, Airbnb, and so on).

Anyone that is going to compete against established companies, in a difficult, technical field like chip design, is going to face a slow, grueling climb, if they manage to climb at all.

>The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

- - Andrew S. Tanenbaum

I wonder if he still thinks saying that was a good idea.

I switched to yyyy-mm-dd for almost all my own records shortly after I learned about it when I started using Linux in 1996. Having any consistent format helps in searching, and as you pointed out this is the simplest to sort.

That looks like a weak version of "How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think", http://www.speakeasy.org/~lion/nb/ . You don't have to dive completely into Lion Kimbro's system to find parts of it very useful. Especially the use of speeds for quick jottings and the binders for organizing things so you can find them again. No matter how much of his actual system you might end up using though, reading his book about it will open your eyes.

My initial system is similar to his, but I found transcribing everything into computer better, mainly because of easier searching, and because it made sharing information that applied to multiple projects easier.

>Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

- - Jerry E Pournelle

Any large enough organization tends towards bureaucracy, and the tendency is even stronger on the Web, where direct person-to-person interaction is more limited. And the evolution to "iron law" conditions tends to be faster there also, once the bureaucratic (rule-following and rule-enforcing) mindset is formed. Wikipedia, Google, and Amazon are other examples, they have all been getting worse to use over the last few years. Web-based organizations probably need to remain smaller than similar real-world organizations, if they want to avoid the effect.

If you count the long-term unemployed, the number of discouraged workers has grown. U6, which only counts those who are discouraged and have been unemployed less than a year, hasn't risen, but other unofficial counts that include those unemployed for more than a year has.

In fact, by some unofficial counts, like this one http://www.opednews.com/articles/Real-Unemployment-at-23--by... , total unemployment may be as high as 23% right now. Nor is this the only one, this sight is pretty lefty, two recent essays on the conservative site VDare.com have given similar estimates (22%) for current total unemployment.

I would prefer to use only open source, but I am not technically literate enough. I have used both Windows and Linux for 16 years, and had been using Linux more and Windows less for the first nine years. Over the past 7 years, since getting on the Internet, I have mostly used Windows, because I have not managed to get any of the Linux distros I have tried to work over a dial-up modem.

"Books Were the First Open-Source Software"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-roberts/books-were-the-fi...

And as Dawkins pointed out, in the most important point in The God Delusion, the religious "moderates" provide epistemic cover and support for the nutjobs. You are enablers of the terrorists and other extremists.

Already posted - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4496098

There have been cases where drugs were mailed to an address and the person receiving the package, not knowing what was in it, was arrested. That is one reason why no one who has any sense will accept a package they were not expecting.

The fact that Singapore isn't all that democratic from an American perspective might have a good bit to do about why it's thriving otherwise. Go read Graham's Case Against the Democratic State and Hoppe's Democracy: The God that Failed for more (note that Hoppe's book apparently started life as a collection of essays, it is really, really repetitive, even though it's also short).

A bureaucratic totalitarianism. It's not actually run by the lawyers, it is run by the bureaucrats, and the lawyers gain excessive power by being the only ones able to negotiate the system. We're almost to the end state now, another two or three decades at the outside and you won't be able to do anything without official permission.

Unless you are unsatisfied right now, "progress" isn't really important. The most important part of exercising at least semi-regularly is to maintain your condition, and that get more important as you get older. Nobody has the TIME to do everything they might want, you have to prioritize. As Peter McWilliams put it:

"You can have anything you want: No dream is too big to achieve. But you can't have everything you want: We live in a finite world for a finite period of time, but with infinite imagination."

The problem is the "mass" part. While I agree that not needed approvals is a good thing, from the point of view of "massification", mass broadcasting just makes it go faster. You have the lowest-common-denominator on both ends of the communication channel. It strengthens the old joke about calling the TV an "idiot box": It has an idiot on both sides.

The reason the internet won't actually get as bad as TV is the lack of approvals, and relatively low cost even for good quality production. The problem is that it gets harder to find amongst all the bleep. Search engines help, but I have found some useful sites, by following links, that apparently aren't indexed by Google or DuckDuckGo.

Revisiting my comment from a couple of weeks ago, "mass media, which includes Google, however they may try to deny it, lives by the numbers, which means adapting to the lowest common denominator. Just think, as the Internet spreads, Google will evolve (devolve) closer and closer to broadcast TV!"

Just substitute "the Web" for "Google"; the Web is becoming television!!

My Quotes and Aphorisms file is over a megabyte, it's been growing for 16 years. I formatted it so that the fortune-cookie program can pull up quotes at random, or I can search it with various keywords whenever I want.