delackner

Some of us simply can't sleep on our backs. When I try, I end up feeling and hearing my heart thumping loudly in my ears and have to roll over onto my right side.

Considering Wallace and Franzen were friends, and Franzen's the Corrections appears to have been published about 5 years after this article, I enjoy thinking that the article influenced the book.

I appreciate that you went and asked someone for the clarification that this issue is about the preference being set in a cookie and not in user settings, but this doesn't solve the problem for many of us.

For YEARS, on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, always logged-in, always with preferences set to english, it is infuriating to routinely end up receiving results that conflict with your explicit language settings.

What, concretely, do we have to do to get someone at google to push a change from using cookies to a real user-setting to fix this absurdity?

You said they did it for speed. Giving me completely incorrect results in a language I can't even read 1 millisecond faster than giving me results that I actually care about is a win? This is over-optimization.

From an App. You have no option to remove such stories that Facebook generates itself, without any apps.

If you click the X it removes the specific story you clicked on. It does not (at least in the fb version I am being served) block all stories of the same type, nor do I see any option to do so.

There is no facebook ipad app. Just a poorly implemented mobile site. It would be perfectly easy for them to have done it right.

Let's see, 349 friends today. I personally know every single one of them. Do you really care when one of your friends adds someone they met last night at a bar? Or when they change their profile pic, again?

Congratulations to those who gain benefit from this, but I can't help but feel that a little bit of introspection is all that is really needed. Listen to your body. It is always talking to you, reporting how it is doing. Most of the time we just aren't listening.

Are we talking about the same service? The User experience is horrible. I am not just talking from a hacker perspective, as most of the people I know that complain about facebook are very NON technical people. They just complain about the same things that I also hate: That facebook makes it impossible ( by design ) to hide the endless stream of inane auto-generated SPAM that fills your news stream. The worst is that this spam is directly from facebook. My news stream is now 90% "X is now friends with 10 new people", "Y and 15 other friends changed their profile pic", "That book you [Liked] has a fun factoid to blather about".

The iPhone app is worse. You can't even see your own lists at this point, and clicking on youtube links doesn't just play the video, it opens an embedded browser that gleefully suggests that you try adding youtube to your Home screen.

The iPad optimized site is so useless for reading anything a friend links to that I don't even bother clicking anymore, I just wait until I am at a PC.

The message viewer makes it impossible to quickly mark as-read or delete the vast numbers of messages that I never open because the popup notification on my phone contained enough information to never need to open the full message.

The reason that facebook is still going strong is not good user interface or experience, it is that it is incredibly sticky. They managed to become the new email for a lot of people, and that utility is enough to force a lot of people to grind their teeth and ignore the horrible parts.

When I saw that aerial three-quarter image of the building, I started to imagine crossing from one side of the campus to the other via that inner garden. Somehow the burning man city layout popped into my head, along with memories of crossing the vast open middle on foot (not recommended. Only attempted a bicycle-free year once).

You didnt read the fine print. free for american citizens. i dont know any country that treats non-citizens well, but there are many who treat them better.

This is a difficult and really deep problem with no clear answers. Sure the local population are doing their best "building a future for themselves", but they are also driven to build structures that are totally unsafe in a serious earthquake. This is the main difference between one country's 7.0 quake killing tens or hundreds, yet another country's 7.0 (or even 6.0) killing tens or hundreds of thousands.

The solution is definitely not just marching in and offering a new cheap design for a single family house. The solution has to include an answer to the question: how do you get the local government to see the real equation. (economic cost of reduced economic output from early death from early mortality) MUCH GREATER THAN (cost of making sure everyone has a safe and secure home).

I searched through this whole thread looking for 'alias' to see if anyone else also can't stand anti-aliased fonts for coding, and I see that there are a few of us. I also always end up back with Monaco, but 10pt black on white. Perfectly readable and easy on the eyes.

Seriously? .28s is 280 milliseconds, for a result with zero content. That is already at the outside acceptable threshold for being perceived as slow response, and that's before we spend any time at all rendering the page. Certainly a VM of some kind could boot faster, but milliseconds count.

Of course leaving where you are won't fix what's wrong inside your own head, but likewise, no matter how hard you try to cleanse your mind, the stench next door will not disappear.

I know both totally honest and trustworthy sales people. I also know others that seem trustworthy but actually don't know what they are talking about, lie constantly, yet so far after 10+ years in their respective careers somehow manage to get very far ahead of the game. You may say they are simply effective self-promoters and I should not be envious, but I disagree.

If you don't believe in a product, it is wrong to tell others it is great. If you have no idea how to do something, sure, say "No problem, I'll get right on it", but it is wrong to say "I have done that tons of times".

With products it is fairly easy to see what the truth is: An advertisement for a product may say it is magical. A reviewer may agree. You try it yourself and find whether it is true or not, for you.

With people in the workforce though, especially in fields where the cause of a particular team's success or failure is quite difficult to quantify, detecting the bullshit artist from the solid player can be extremely difficult.

About two years ago two close friends of mine went on a heliboarding trip in eastern Russia. Before the boarding, they went out and got weird looks when they ordered vodka tonics. They asked what the problem was, and were told "everyone" there drinks it straight.

Any russians in the audience care to clear things up?

This is just an idea, but if the b.d. in your name means bouldering climber, and you go to a climbing gym often, I'd be very careful to wash when you get home. The hand holds are NEVER washed and just think about how many people are touching them continuously.

I'm kind of surprised that anyone is actually surprised or offended by this kind of stuff. The US would be a backwater farming colony if it hadn't wholesale stolen the technologies that allowed New England to compete in the textile industry. That is only the most obvious example.

Somehow this feels like the uncanny valley of human reality. Along the lines of renting a family for the afternoon, or a puppy for a walk, only on a massive scale.

I once had a dream that I was the king of the city, and they marched in parade to honor my name. No wait, that was last weekend in Leichtenstein at SuperBlingFest2012.

Only part way through that article you linked to, but it is fascinating. The part that includes Moore's rant against local variables crystallized an idea that had been bubbling around in my subconscious for some time. Very often the only reason I find I am writing a local variable is to make an expression with several sub-parts easier to see the sub-expression values in gdb. This wouldn't be quite so necessary if the debugger had a syntax for saying "list the sub expressions of this statement" and for saying "print sub-expression #N". For instance, with the debugger stopped just before a line like x = foo(bar(a,b), blat(c,d)); "list subs" -> "0: bar(a,b), 0.1: a, 0.2: b, 1: blat(c,d), 1.1: c, 2.1: d." then just typing something like sub0 would print the value of bar(a,b)."

Of course lacking such a facility I just end up scattering extra locals even though I end up feeling like the output is rather archaic. a = ...; b = ...; c = f(a,b);

Your quote is exactly the part that confused me. I'm not an android developer, so my perhaps naive reading of that segment meant to me that there are two possibilities:

1. regardless of whether you install a custom boot rom, the lowest-level software running on the phone might be impossible to overwrite, so the carriers still have some basic low-level access to your phone to tell android to lock you out.

2. any such feature is part of the code that is itself replaced when you install a custom rom, so would be defeated and you'd be safe (at least as long as the model you buy does not turn out to have become locked down during the manufacturing batch you end up buying).

It sounds like 1 is just not the case, thankfully.

Forgive a naive question, but the way this article is written makes it sound like carrier-provided over the air updates may be forced on your phone even if you are running a custom OS build? Or is that not the case.

I can't imagine sitting in a chair for 14 hours without even a few 15 minute breaks. You are setting yourself up for neck injury and long term back pain. (Speaking from experience, as someone who used to sit in a chair for similarly long stretches and thought it made him tough. No, it made me stupid.)

I'm having conflicting reactions to this article on a few levels. I notice that the entire content of it is simply the cross product of two articles that I read months or years ago, and as soon as he started I was already wondering "is he going to bring up the newspaper experiment...".

So sure enough the whole thing reads exactly as I'd expect. But then I wonder, perhaps it is a sign of my advanced information-hoarding instinct that I have hoovered (dysoned?) up so many of these sort of studies and speeches and clever counterintuitive articles. A mind made up of a vast store of useless factoids.

Finally I throw my hands up and resolve that I am glad to see that this article at least will hopefully expose more people to some very good ideas on living well.

There is a poisonous dosage of ALL chemicals. H2O among them. The question is, is there a dosage of botulism that has a therapeutic effect?

That doesn't make any sense. The vast majority of highly skilled or highly sought-after professions saw modest but nice increases in wealth decade over decade. Only a very specific FEW saw multiple hundred-fold increases, making them the odd outliers away from the general trend.

I'll leave the details there up to people more knowledgeable in sports and music, but are you saying you think the system is working well when many CEOs steering their companies to destruction yield massive guaranteed compensation packages that are totally disconnected from performance?

I'm all for paying people whatever it takes, even if that means some people make previously insane sums of money. But they should have to make their company MORE profitable, not less.

Rising wealth inequality is not in itself a bad thing, but the many hundred-fold increases in executive compensation over the past 20 years have nothing to do with results, performance, profits, etc. They are the result of a broken system of corporate governance that puts the interests of executives and the interests of shareholders at odds.

People often complain about the verbosity of objective-c, but if you have a method that takes several parameters, how is

foo (a, b, c, d) memorable? You have to remember the order of parameters, and the function name rarely makes this obvious, so unless you use this func all the time, you end up reading the docs.

fooWithBarAndBlatAndFazAndFooz(a,b,c,d) makes the parameter ordering obvious, but is to me less readable than:

fooWithbar: a blat: b faz: c fooz: d

Which is just about as concise as you can get. Of course it would be "nice" if objective-c allowed for parameter order to not be meaningful, but that would require dictionaries of parameters, instead of what really happens, translation to a function with a fixed parameter list, which is pretty efficient.

Message passing syntax looking initially complex is a lazy reason to dump an entire system when the alternative has much worse integration and support.