emil10001

From the article:

"Apple had asked the F.B.I. to issue its application for the tool under seal. But the government made it public, prompting Mr. Cook to go into bunker mode to draft a response, according to people privy to the discussions, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The result was the letter that Mr. Cook signed on Tuesday, where he argued that it set a “dangerous precedent” for a company to be forced to build tools for the government that weaken security."

I would qualify, I've done both servers and Android at Talkray. It's been a while since I have done both in the same day, but basically, if something broke on our Android client or server, I could jump in and get a fix, same goes for new features, and handle the server deployments.

That said, I'm happy that I don't have to do both. Oh, and right now, nobody's going to poach me. =)

That's interesting, I had not come across CompletableFuture yet, I'll need to dig in more, but the JavaDoc looks promising (if confusing). It sounds like RxJava may also handle the backpressure issue, where you provide threadpools for the execution and handling of an observable.

I haven't played with Guava, but I have used Otto a bit, and at one point wrote my own simple observer framework (which is slightly less work than implementing a Java Observer). As I wrote in the disclaimer, there are lots of ways of doing this. =)

I remember visiting the #coffee IRC channel years ago, and really enjoying being able to converse with people real-time on roasting, espresso, and everything coffee (or off-topic stuff). While the IRC channel still exists, I sort of figured that a Slack community for coffee was inevitable, and was a bit surprised that there wasn't one already. Anyways, I hope that some of you will come join me there.

Reads more like satire to me.

Slimming down Play Services just punts on the problem for a while. My view is that Google needs to do two things with this:

1) Split up the Play Services client libraries. 2) Figure out some solution for developers hitting the 65K limit.

I'm sort of assuming that the solution would come in the form of a framework or tooling that we'd have to implement. Such a solution should allow us to build fully working apps with multiple dex files, with some decent documentation. It should also work fine for debug builds without proguard, and also without bumping build times up beyond a two minutes. What's more, we should be able to split off pieces that are defined in the manifest into secondary dex files, and fire intents at them.

That, to me, seems like a reasonable response to this problem by Google. The company I work for has been hitting the limit for the last few months, and some of our other dependencies are becoming more and more expensive with newer releases (things that our users actually like.) So far, we've been able to build with a stripped down Play Services jar, but I'm not terribly happy about that approach.

Regardless, I'm not going to blame Facebook for a problem that Google caused. If Facebook can find a solution, and tell the community how they did it, I'm all ears.

I disagree. Amateurs don't necessarily need pro tools, they need tools that help them do the job that they want to do better than either no tools, or poor tools. They also might get confused and put off by the steep learning curve offered by some pro tools. E.g. PhotoShop (I don't think I need to say more).

Just because something isn't a good fit for the pro or power user, doesn't mean that it doesn't have a place in the market, or couldn't be considered good or useful.

You're correct I was very disappointed about this experience, and it was mainly with the support. I will send you an email.

I'd also like to stop real quick and let you know that I do think that you have a great service with tons of potential. The technology is really cool, and I don't even know of anyone at this point who would come in as a close second. I've also been following your company since you won some startup competition a couple years ago, and was anxiously awaiting the service. I backed the project very quickly after getting the email from you guys that it was available.

The "scam" is that in their upgrade offer, they're claiming to own my device, and then trying to sell it to me a second time. I think that "scam" is a fair word to describe this particular situation.

I have read their comments as to how it's a lease, but they did not make that clear in the Kickstarter campaign. They are relying on some things that may have been implied by what was written as opposed to any sort of explicit statement that the hardware was being leased. I also believe that it was an honest mistake on their part, but that it was a mistake. I think that they're relying on gullibility, and the actual discounts that come with the upgrade to sneak this by people.

I felt like it was important to point this out, since I don't think that there is any sense in which Space Monkey could be considered to be in the right here.

This is not a philosophical issue. The 'scam' in question is them trying to sell me a device that I already own, and is already in my possession. To me, that is a scam!

Right, none of those things are explicitly stating that the hardware was a lease in the flow of someone backing the Kickstarter.

As far as my questions to your staff, there was a consistent back and forth until that point. I'm completely sick of dealing with this issue, and it was pretty clear that I was not getting anywhere. I also didn't want to be dealing with this over the holiday, but I didn't set the upgraded deadline as the end of December! It is pretty frustrating and stressful going back and forth and getting absolutely nowhere. I was hoping to get some perspective by posting it. I think that I've gained that perspective, and have decided to ask for a refund. I didn't want it to come to this, as I had previously been very excited about your company and product.

I feel that the "public attack" is more pointing out to people the sleazy thing that you did in inserting a new claim of ownership into an upgrade offer. I felt like this was something that your company was completely unwilling to acknowledge and that it needed to be pointed out.

Yep, at this point, I'm wondering about my ability to wipe the device before I send it back for a refund.

Nope. There was no lease or contract. I asked them about that too, they ignored that question.

What is your definition of 'responding positively'? Does that mean taking the offer? Because for some people, they might take the offer, but still be annoyed about it. They might also not have realized the issue that I'm pointing out.

I'm also leaning towards getting a refund at this point. I spent a fair amount of time going back and forth with your CS, hoping that the situation would improve, but instead of admitting that you screwed up on Kickstarter and didn't make your intentions clear, your CS reps dug in their heels and are claiming something that is simply not true - that you own these devices.

I didn't post the correspondence because it's extremely long. I've been back and forth with them over 13 very long emails. My prodding them for some evidence that what they're saying lines up with reality, and them rationalizing it without providing any evidence. I really wanted to work this out with their customer service, but instead, they dug in their heels and made the situation worse.

I waited a while after my last round of questions before writing this up. It was pretty clear that they had no intention of responding, or at least not within their own deadline.

Please have a read and then help me out by giving me some advice, because I’m completely sick of thinking about this:

* Who owns the device?

* Is the offer reasonable?

* Should I be upset about this?

* Should I just send it back and ask for a refund?

* What should I do???

Total real time was under a week, since I did it on the side. I didn't keep track of the number of hours.

Couldn't they do this with any of the sites that they modify? That's what I am sort of wondering about, sure you could redirect the homepage to something dumb, and make it really obvious that the site has been attacked. But, it seems like they could have similarly done a man-in-the-middle and sucked up tons of data silently, without throwing up any big red flags.

Sunnyvale, CA or Seattle, WA

Lead Designer at TiKL, Inc.

TiKL, Inc. is looking for a UI/UX designer with a strong background in the mobile space. The ideal candidate would be able to: * develop our brand * create visual consistency across platforms * work with the rest of the team on direction and features

A little about us, we are a team of less than ten people, split between the SF Bay Area and Seattle. We are working on Talkray (and TiKL) for both Android and iOS. Talkray (http://talkray.com/) is a free unified communications app. Currently, between our apps, we have a total download count of just under 30M. We need a designer who can help us continue to grow our user base. In addition to our apps, we are also working on an API for other mobile developers to leverage our technology, which TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/28/after-raising-2-1m-tikl-ope...) just wrote about. Here's the company's CrunchBase profile (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/tikl).

Contact us at jobs@talkray.com

I wrote a post on why this is a really bad idea: http://www.recursiverobot.com/post/45447666701/facebook-upda...

I'm reading a lot of comments saying that it's not worth it to get a degree. I think that they're wrong, not necessarily because you'll have a hard time finding a job, but because you'll be missing out on a great life experience that will enrich your life and should give you some better tools for analyzing problems. These tools will come not only from CS classes, but also from humanities courses, and interactions with other students.

That said, I wouldn't recommend leaving your job to go to school full time either. Why not take night classes and get that degree over time? I think that, at least right now, in classroom is a superior experience to online, so I would probably go for some place that you can actually sit in a classroom. Even if it's just at a community college to start. I got my BS in Electrical Engineering, and didn't really like my curriculum. So, after I graduated and moved out to Boston, I found out that Tufts University offered classes that residents could audit cheaply. I took a few programming courses to plug holes left by my degree, and a philosophy course with Dan Dennett (because it was Dan Dennett and I had to).

Some of my favorite courses at university were not programming courses. Among my favorite courses were: Free Will, Literature, Nietzsche, Data Structures, Game Development, Differential Equations and Quantum Mechanics. You would miss out on most of those unless you are actively seeking them out.

There are also some soft-skills that come along with education, namely, being able to communicate well. This is one of the more important things when it comes to landing a job, at least for making it past the first level of filters. I've seen some awful cover letters and resumes, it helps a lot to be able to write well, and state things clearly.

Also, I'm not sure what you think the lifestyle of Silicon Valley is like, but for me, it's just a lot of hard work. Don't get me wrong, I love it here, but it's not particularly glamorous. Perhaps the biggest draw, well two biggest draws, would be that, first, you'll never (assuming we don't have another tech bubble burst on us) have trouble finding a job here, if you're a decent programmer. And second, that you'll regularly run into other programmers everywhere. If you're living some place where people look at you funny when you tell them that you build computer programs for a living, and would rather live in a place where people generally have a clue as to what you're talking about, this is a good place for that. Also, you probably won't have trouble finding a job here.

I can't code and listen to speech audio at the same time. I can do it if I'm only pattern-matching or doing something that is only visual and doesn't take much conscious thought. I used to listen to audiobooks at an old job whenever I had to do tedious work, digging through spreadsheets for anomalous data. And, I now listen to audiobooks while I'm riding my bike or exercising.

I figured that it was because coding, or writing something like this comment, uses the speech center of my brain, as does the incoming audio stream. Music doesn't have any adverse affects on my ability to code or write comments, since I don't really pay attention to any of the vocals that may be present.

This is why I always make config files for my projects that contain usernames and passwords, add that config to the .gitignore and then create a sample_config with the blank version. I learned to do this after one or two commits containing sensitive data. =)

I had the same thought, here's what I wrote:

I just saw this article on your site: http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/scientology/archive/201...

It is a sponsored piece, which it does state, though I may not have noticed it if it had not been pointed out to me. It makes me very uncomfortable about continuing to pay for a subscription to your magazine. As such, I have cancelled my subscription.

The reason that this makes me so uncomfortable is that it steps outside the boundaries of traditional advertising, and steps into the role of your content. This is not so dis-similar to television shows that are chock-full of product placement, but I think that this goes even a bit further than that. This would be content that has no value at all, except for selling a certain brand beer, parading itself as a television show, dressed in the corporate logo. That is what this is, content of no value, parading itself in the Atlantic brand.

I don't appreciate this. And, I certainly don't appreciate fluff pieces that bolster organizations like Scientology coming from a company that I pay to deliver me the news. By intertwining your content with paid-for commercial interests, I simply can no longer trust that the things that I read from you will be those of journalistic integrity.

Thank you, and goodbye.

-John

The other odd thing about this particular case is that the book's topic seems to include this sort of scenario. Maybe people did read the book with the intention of writing a review, and started wondering if this was some sort of twisted test. E.g. "If I read the book, and follow through with the agreement, will I be tallied among a group of weak individuals?" It seems that if you want to be able to draw conclusions about a social experiment like this, don't screw up the results by introducing a variable (the contents of the book itself) that could alter the results.

I agree, it's a bit confusing how it's written, and I'm not even really sure what using lein would buy you when doing the koans. If anyone is interested in using lein, here's what you need to look at: https://github.com/functional-koans/lein-koan

Specifically:

  git clone git@github.com:functional-koans/clojure-koans.git
  cd clojure-koans
  lein deps
  lein koan run

Here's a question: How is Sony's behavior on this so different from what MegaUpload is being accused of?

Basically, Sony is admitting that they are doing this so that they can avoid complying with the GPL, meaning that it is their intent to violate copyright law, knowing that they probably won't get sued over it. Isn't this a criminal act on the part of Sony?

I realize that it isn't as cut and dry, but I do see some strong parallels.

Further, why are these companies so stupid as to not release the source for their BusyBox implementation without being sued? It seems like it would be much, much simpler than trying to hold onto it and then be forced into a situation of releasing the source for everything that's covered.

While I agree with what you're saying, I think that the main issue here is that the US does not have a sense of humor. This is a major disappointment for upcoming comics hoping for a cushy job with the Fed.

Seriously though, what they said was stupid, and obviously not protected speech (if said here in the US), but it seems a bit overzealous to ban them from the country based on a bad joke. This, to me, seems analogous to those unfortunate people who mention 'bomb' or something while in line at the TSA - usually saying something to the effect of, 'I really can't take my cupcake through security? It's not like it's a bomb or something.' I think that we should be spending our resources dealing with serious threats, not people with a poor sense of humor.

Honestly, the install isn't so terrible. The documentation is pretty excellent, and while it does take about 2 hours for the first install, if you need to install it on a different machine (or you really, really screw up your install), it'll probably only take a half hour.

My main issue is that the rolling release thing didn't actually solve the problem that I expected it to - which is that I didn't want to need to install a new release every 6 months to keep up with changes. While Arch makes it so that you don't need to frequently re-install, if you don't update often enough, you can get into situations where upgrading will break your system.

At this point, I'm afraid to do the upgrade on my server for a number of reasons, first is that I might run out of disk space on root part-way through (I should mount something else to /tmp for this). And, the other reason, as mentioned above, is that the upgrade might bork my system, and that's just something that I can't afford on my server.

I realize now that this was a really poor choice as a server distro, but I am happy that Arch does not get in your way with system config stuff and you can find just about anything you want to install in either the base or community repos.