davidp

This takes me back to 20 years ago when I was studying Japanese. Their traditional (pre-Arabic-numerals) system uses four-digit groupings instead of three: There are characters for ten, hundred, thousand, and ten-thousand. (I assume Chinese is similar.)

Sometimes we use the number "1 million" to mean "a lot"; in that system it would be written as 100 ten-thousands. A more "natural" way to express "a lot" in that system is ten-thousand ten-thousands, or 100 million in our system.

I loved learning little "weird" things like that, and discovering that our own way of doing things isn't the only way. Studying other cultures also teaches us about our own.

Any better-qualified Japanese speakers please correct anything I've gotten wrong, this memory file was just swapped in from 20 years ago...

Similar to Scott Hanselman's "Your Words Are Wasted", a more impactfully written (IMO) piece about the same problem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4403558

> without paying anything

directly.

Whether it's better/cheaper to pay directly or indirectly is a separate issue worthy of its own debate, but either way TNSTAAFL.

> "I have no idea of this stuff, can anyone of my constituents explain to me how and why to vote on that"

That is precisely the primary function of lobbyists, as distasteful as it sounds when that word is used.

Many lobbyists also buy access, which is a separate problem.

Can you imagine the disastrous mess Congress would create if they knew even _less_ than they already know about the areas they're legislating? This is why regulating lobbying is hard; at root it's just citizens speaking to elected leaders (again, until money gets involved).

When using github, do you keep all of your code in a single repo? If not, have you found any solutions to the "fragmentation" problem where it's hard to get a big picture view due to issues being scattered across different repos? We're looking for solutions for that at my workplace.

I haven't used bitbucket for larger projects yet, any insights there also appreciated.

The first job of the respondent is to validate the input so that the right problem gets solved.

> I've lost count of how many times I've seen the Can't Happen mindset delay resolution of an issue. It's a genuine problem.

Agreed.

> When you say "It's not possible", something in your understanding is obviously mistaken.

Not necessarily. Bear in mind that the "error" data itself can be wrong too, for many reasons -- some benign, some not so much. People can and do lie and make mistakes.

In the public sphere things are even more fraught. There are people who loathe $COMPANY and would love to see their services discredited. On the other hand, $COMPANY's legitimate success depends to some extent on people's perception of their reliability, so they have a right to defend themselves.

I think a reasonable response from $COMPANY in this case is "1) That's impossible", to reassure skittish customers, and "2) We'll work directly with the person having the problem and report back, stay tuned" to show respect and responsiveness (and potentially humility later).

If you were running your own company, paying the salaries of your employees and serving your investors, would you do otherwise?

That quote was the zinger for the article for me too. But electrifying claims like that one should automatically be received with a healthy amount of skepticism; I was disappointed that the author presented the quote bare without any balancing commentary or promise to validate the claim.

If the claim is true it's revolutionary; if it's false or exaggerated, it substantially reduces the credibility of the speaker. In the latter case, this article's credibility would itself be weakened. Hence my disappointment.

I think it's simply a suggestion to compensate for the lack of social context that we all know exists in text-based communication.

If we were working down the hall from each other I could pop my head in and ask you a quick question with enough extra social context (tone of voice, energy level, volume, facial expressions, etc.) to let you know I respect your time and just need a quick answer on something, not a full conversation, and that if you look busy and give me a short response, I won't be offended at all.

If I delivered that very same question via email, since you're a nice person you would wonder whether I would be offended by a curt response, and to err on the safe side you might spend more time answering it than I intended to ask you for. Then I feel awkward for having asked it, and there's awkwardness all around.

The problem is the age-old textual deadening of social cues, not this poster's solution, I think.

You disagree that this is a systemic problem, while finding people to blame throughout the system...?

"The idea that Aspie individuals are paragons of logic and reason is misguided."

I certainly agree with this; I was simply offering a positive take on some of the "hyperlogical" behaviors described in the article and elsewhere, e.g. building a snowman inside because it's too cold outside.

Amplifying your different-not-worse theme:

I sometimes wonder whether the human species would be better off if everyone had a strong case of what we call Asperger's.

So many tribal/cultural conflicts arise because of people's ability to connect strongly... Consider religious zealoutry and jihad, and other culturally-derived sources of conflict.

Our ability and willingness to be led (at a scope unique in the animal kingdom) has been a great organizing force in human history; but it has also been very destructive. The jury's still out as to whether it's a net positive.

If we all had strong Asperger's, would logic and reason rule the day more often than it does? Would that in turn be net positive?

Food for thought: Would we then need to treat non-Asperger's people as having a disorder of their own? The question sharply illuminates the true purpose of medically treating someone with Asperger's and other autism-spectrum "disorders": To help them fit in better with the majority and hopefully be happier. Not to "fix" them.

App Engine has support. We've found them to be helpful so far.

https://cloud.google.com/support/packages

Such a rule-of-thumb needs a crucial caveat (said by others better than I'll say it here): You need N years of steadily, deliberately advancing full-time work.

There's a fundamental difference between gaining 10 years of experience, and gaining 1 year of experience 10 times.

It's harder than one might think to sustain continual real advancement over such a period; generally the employer paying the bills needs us to occasionally "take one for the team" and do scut-work for a while, simply due to normal business unpredictability; or the work dries up completely and you have a hiccup while you start somewhere new.

A source of work where opportunity continuously keeps up with ability is a precious thing.

I was curious so I went and looked: Mostly true, according to their SEC filings[1]. On page 28 of their 2012 10-K[2] we see their net earnings:

2012: $76M 2011: ($276M) 2010: ($677M) 2009: ($1088M) 2008: ($454M)

So they juuuust squeaked back into profitability last year; probably mainly due to the slowly improving economy (games are luxury items and folks are only now cringing less when they spend on them).

It's hard to know yet whether this ugly launch was actually a bad move for them; dollars don't lie and they appear to be paying enough to get some heavyweight execs.

[1]: http://investor.ea.com/sec.cfm [2]: http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ERTS/2357335259x0x590...

Because technically[1] the US comprises 50 independent states[2]. Each is free to conduct its affairs freely except for specific powers reserved for the federal government[1].

Today people think of "the United States" as both a singular noun and a singular government, but that's not the formal legal structure.

Your point is well taken, though: All laws ought to be open and freely available to the public. Anything else would be Orwellian.[3]

[1] If you hold the 10th amendment and its juridical descendants to have meaning.

[2] In the 18th-century sense of the word, i.e. a sovereign jurisdiction.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22 [4]

[4] Yes, I know Orwell didn't write Catch-22.

The killer feature is that nontechnical Mac and Windows users can click a link emailed from anyone on their team who is already using the app, and get seamless group chat across platforms, without calling the IT department to set up a server and/or open firewall ports, or committing someone on the team to managing anything XMPP-related. It just works.

Even Linux folks can participate with additional work (e.g. dozens of packages to install if you're running Ubuntu 64, since Adobe AIR is 32-bit only; annoying).

That said, I agree that the barrier to entry is pretty low.

Names don't normally survive intact when crossing languages; even more so when crossing multiple languages (original -> Greek -> Latin -> English).

Examples from Wikipedia:

- The Greek name for Alexander is Alexandros (Ἀλέξανδρος).

- The Persian name for Alexander is Iskandar (اسکندر).

- Porus is a similarly Latinized version of the Greek version (Πῶρος) of the Sanskrit name Purushottam (पुरुषोत्तम).

What if lockdown worked in such a way that you could lock it down to only run your Linux kernels? E.g. load up your own certificate in the TPM and use that for signing when you build.

In that case it would be a security feature -- another line of defense against bootloader malware and/or adversaries in physical possession of your machine.

(I don't know how technically feasible that is; I know Canonical and others are looking at having their own cert so at least their unmodified kernels can run, but I don't know the mechanism for how that interacts with already-released UEFI machines.)

The point is that technologies like this are a double-edged sword, not evil in themselves. A similar argument is made by Linus himself for sticking with GPL v2 instead of moving to GPL v3, which outlaws certain DRM-related uses; he's more interested in providing a functioning mechanism, and leaving the policy-setting to others.

> It's weird that they start with Github.

I don't think it's safe to assume that they started with Github.

> "We were just following orders" and "We were just doing our jobs" and "We were doing what the law told us to do" aren't the indefensible moral positions you seem to think they are.

Careful; that's a double-edged sword. Would you prefer that individual prosecutors have the authority to ignore the law? That didn't work too well in the pre-civil-rights South, when lynchings went unprosecuted.

It's far better to have a government of laws and not a government of men; then you can assign responsibility where it belongs, with the people who write the laws.

If you said "results" instead of "effort" it would ring even more true. In the real world effort doesn't matter as much as results. "Trying your best" is just a means to the end of getting maximum results, and doesn't in itself earn much reward.

If someone tries their best but still raises a rotten child because they're just not good at parenting, do they deserve as much praise as someone who raised the same child to be a great man or woman?

Well,

> "... the hackathon’s goal is to come up with technological answer to the problems of meat supply, processing, distribution, health and ultimately consumption. One of big problems the group will tackle is how — simply put — to get people to eat less meat."

That said, it's true that meat production (beef at least) is a very inefficient use of arable land, in terms of nutrition per acre.

Curse their tasty hides.

Here's the thing, though: You have to assume that they are correct. If one believes that they are incorrect, he is effectively stating that he (someone thinking abstractly in the absence of any hard data) is better at pricing the value of the work than the manufacturer (who is directly affected by the outcome and has a wealth of hard data).

Several commenters have basically claimed that the manufacturers are behaving irrationally; a claim like that requires some powerful arguments to credibly support. I haven't seen much of that yet here.

I suspect that the truth is that manufacturers would be willing to pay to train workers if they could be reasonably sure that the investment would have time to pay off. But thanks to Moore's Law and everything that comes with it, manufacturing technology is changing far more rapidly than it used to when everything was more stable.

It seems likely that it's more cost-effective for the manufacturer to lower that risk by training lower-paid labor elsewhere and letting those workers go (or retraining them, if it's cheap to do so) when they're no longer suitable, than it is to do the same thing in first-world countries for much higher cost.

It's better to treat matters of law as orthogonal to matters of morality, since the latter depends very much on the subjective judgment of the observer.

Example: A company, acting "morally" as you define, pays more tax than it is required to under the law. In so doing, it incurs a loss so severe that it must cut staff in order to remain viable. Among those employees cut are some of the more vulnerable - those with low savings, poor health, or babies on the way.

Has the company acted morally?

Consider another issue: Should the same company pay more than its legal obligations in every jurisdiction to which it is subject? How should it allocate its extra giving? What if, in some of those jurisdictions, there's a good chance the extra money will simply go into private pockets via graft and corruption, instead of serving the public good? (There are such jurisdictions in the EU, yes?)

These issues are not as clear-cut as you suggest. It's far better for the tax law to best reflect the morality of the citizenry, and then fully excuse the citizenry (including business entities) from seeking to legally minimize those taxes.

> It's that the price you're paying for the product is too low for them to provide general support on an individual basis.

Exactly. It's always puzzled me why they don't offer a higher tier of support for more money.

The only reason I've been able to come up with so far is that they want to keep the flexibility to rapidly evolve their services. Customers who pay more money tend to get bent out of shape when you do that. But I think there ought to be a happy medium where 1) it's understood that things can change, and 2) you have at least email support for the service you're buying, and maybe even phone support. Peace of mind is worth a lot of money for some things.

Yes. Basically it's giving 3rd parties (content owners) a self-service account in Mega's admin tools so that they can take down items without involving Mega, and in this case to verify that the content is infringing they'd have to have the keys somehow.

It's fairly routine for large media sites to supply this access, since it's more about administrative efficiency for the hosting site than anything else.

My inner civil libertarian cheers at this, although one wonders how useful a public storage locker is without any associated content discovery tools.

But my inner policeman hesitates. If actual bad guys (organized crime, drug cartels, spies, terrorists, governments, script kiddies, or anyone else working outside the law) can communicate and operate with impunity, the technology is not an unequivocally good thing. The broadly accepted way we deal with this is to have warrant-based interception and eavesdropping; it's hard to argue that our law enforcement services would best operate without any tools other than direct physical surveillance. So presumably even Mega would need to comply with legal wiretapping requests. Happily for Mega, and unhappily for law enforcement, doing it at the server doesn't get them anything with this scheme. But that simply compels law enforcement to get much more invasive, in a way that's hard for citizens to monitor: Find a way to install eavesdropping tools on the suspect's machine so access is gained before encryption.

I'm not sure where all this is headed; it's a brave new world.

(Heading off potential replies about the growing use of warrantless wiretaps -- of course those are unacceptable. But wiretapping with a warrant is a vital, crucial tool, and that's all I'm discussing here.)

> Was Lucas trying to say something about the inevitable result of the military industrial complex?

You're giving Lucas far too much credit.

Exhibit A: "Nooooooooooooooo"

Edit: Agreed, TIE Fighter was a stupendously great game. It captured the feel perfectly.

Your second sentence is true: Private censorship isn't the same as public censorship; you have no fundamental right to free speech in a context owned by someone else (private website, physical business, physical home, etc.).

But your first sentence needs adjustment: Free speech is something a government takes away from its citizens. It's a fundamental right held by everyone in the world. There are governments that fail to protect it, and of course many that actively violate it.

That's when you turn to using multiple data streams/connections/endpoints. Funnelling multiple data streams with different needs over a single mechanism (TCP, or UDP, or smoke signals) only yields misery, sadness, and death.