jaylevitt

No, he really doesn't get it.

From his public "apology"[1]:

"The debate on paraphrasing, rewriting and quoting we should save for another post."

Zee: THAT'S THE PLAGIARISM PART.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M92qqFrK2zlqCoaQV_l_wuxI...

Nope. I actually live in a luxury high-rise, and while the pipes don't leak, the pressure and temperature is about as bad as the OP describes.

No bidets, though.

And as for " I’ve never met anybody who thought that Netscape was a good acquisition for AOL": Netscape could have been a great acquisition for AOL if we had any idea how to properly acquire a company. It brought years of true, native Internet experience at a time when we were just starting to transition away from being a proprietary thick client.

Sadly, we made the classic mistake: Let's acquire this brilliant team that works well together, and then let's split up the team and sprinkle the individuals around our existing organization in the hope they'll influence our old-school thinking.

That's like trying to get a vaccination from a homeopath.

Great story about the Hole Hawg, but... I've had two houses built. For about five years, I spent 8-12 hours a day with some of the best contractors in Massachusetts.

I never saw a Hole Hawg.

I kinda wonder if that's the story you tell yourself to explain why you were hanging in midair from a drill.

And even then, knowing that this won't work:

  mv *.jpeg *.jpg

requires yet another mental model, that of a shell and globbing. I've been using UNIX/Linux for 20 years and that still trips me up - because I started in an OS with no shell.

When I worked on a cybercrime startup idea in 2008-9, every single "cost of cybercrime" calculation I found - even from government agencies - was based on the same original, unsourced estimate from MarkMonitor, which sells various brand protection services to IP holders (e.g. they'll watch eBay for counterfeit auctions of Rolex watches). After a few years, MM was able to cite the more "official" sources with a circular reference.

There's no financial incentive for anyone to say "nah, it's not that bad".

So does it use any unofficial opcodes for performance?

(IIRC, the 6502 decoded instructions by bitmasks; say bit 7 meant "load" and bit 6 meant "move" or some such thing. So you could trigger combination instructions that'd still execute in 3 cycles but perform the work of two instructions that'd normally take 6. This might have been 6510-only, but I don't think it was.)

A path exists from the Semicolon language to Robert Klein's aphorism that "a sigmoidoscopy is just a semicolonoscopy". Someone please do that.

So what I hear you saying is that Semicolon is webscale.

That's also why Q-Link had the signature "squiggly menus" that acted as the AJAX spinner of the day... it drew the menus by changing the background color at a certain raster line, and the Commodore's serial routines (completely implemented in software) had to disable interrupts while they sent or received data.

I seem to recall Ray Kelm worked around this for the CNet/Image BBS sysop console in his custom high-speed serial routines, but I may be conflating stories. (Commodore's serial routines couldn't go far above 2400bps; Ray managed to get 9600 working reliably.)

I bet a provocative non-sponsor could mount a successful satirical ad campaign, especially given the national sense of humor:

"A lot of folks will be visiting to Lon-- (cough) to England this summer. Our proud city is hosting the... you know... the thing.

When you're on vacation, why not stay with someone you know? If you're coming to the you-know-what here in you-know-where, you know us. Hotel Whatever: We don't play games here."

I once failed to beat a speeding ticket by not noticing that the officer had forgot to introduce the ticket into evidence. I introduced it, the judge said "Really? Are you sure?", I missed the hint, and since a ticket is evidence of speeding in Massachusetts, my case was kinda shot...

Except the Hawthorne effect is poorly studied, probably doesn't exist as its own effect, and is useful only as a metaphor for this very "What we measure we can fix" effect.

There are indeed many bogus things, but I do like the idea of an opt-in vs opt-out email.

Reference checks, as they exist today, are useless. Doing them as an opt-in email at least gives you a small chance of getting some signal. No, you can't use it to sort them into your A-B-C rock star instant hire buckets.

But it's a signal. Signals are good.

FYI, all American states are at-will states, though different states have different exceptions to it.

Didn't all that already happen when we created Facebook accounts?

Reminds me of Jon Stewart's great quote: "If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values. They're... hobbies."

As a PalmPilot 5000 owner (and Pro, and V, and a few Clies).. when the iPhone came out, I screamed

"THIS is what we meant!"

And president of Teach for America in 1994? That was a pretty well-known organization even at the time, at least in DC.

And actually apologized: "sorry for what I said", not "sorry if anyone was offended by what I said". I still don't think it looks good for him - apologies only mitigate, not erase - but that's the right response. If he follows up with a "it was a stressful transition and I was afraid that Pierce's understandable legal concerns would sour the whole deal and frankly I drank way too much", all the better.

"If you want a free e-mail service that doesn't use your words to target ads to you, you'll have to figure out how to port years and years of Gmail messages somewhere else, which is about as easy as developing your own free e-mail service."

Senator Franken: I've developed my own free e-mail service (AOL). Exporting from Google is WAY easier.

So the language acquisition stuff could be an n=1 just-so story, but meanwhile:

Deb Roy and Phil Decamp just invented a way to efficiently browse days of multiple video streams - on paper, if you want:

http://video.fastcompany.com/plugins/player.swf?v=2014e22b27...

Their work on "time worms" is astounding; unfortunately, the video ends before zooming out to the next step: multitrack timeworms with hundreds of cameras; broadband recordings of ALL THE CHANNELS.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE4ce4mexrU&t=11m56s

We can put off the hard problem of CV-driven video search; we can solve the much easier problem of "leverage people's brains to recognize patterns". Visualizations are the new algorithm.

"can often keep long enough to not need planning": I don't think you quite get how bad ADD can be... I just threw out some (almost healthy!) unsweetened applesauce I bought and opened last winter. It was not hiding in the fridge; it was one of the only things in the fridge.

I used to go to the supermarket every week to "buy the groceries and change the spinach". (See, once I have fresh veggies, I want FRESH veggies. No water-logged baby spinach for me.)

And yeah, I actually used to cook Passover dinner for 30, built a gourmet kitchen, Calphalon pots, Wusthof knives, Matfer mandouline, Kenwood stainless-gear mixer with every attachment (did you know there's a potato scrubber?), properly seasoned wok, and a freaking pecan picker (http://ontheroadinthevw.blogspot.com/2007/12/catching-up.htm...).

Now I live in an apartment with a cheap electric stove and that stuff is in cabinets I never open and did I mention how easy it is to grab 10 frozen dinners? But yes, of course you're right.

Looks a lot like him, but my totally amateur 1am opinion is no:

* I can't find any photos of Dyson with hair that long

* The jawline/skin folding doesn't look like Dyson's

* He doesn't look out of place next to two actors, and nearly all non-actors do.

Wow - you're especially lucky given that you said "each side". One of the problems with Commodore floppies was that if you punched a notch to use the unintended "other side", you were taking a few risks:

- That side wasn't necessarily quality tested. Since disks, like CPUs today, were binned, you could often use the "bad" side anyway, as the failure rates went down on the production runs.

- That side didn't have a dust filter, or whatever you call those little felt pads.

- If it DID have a dust filter, it might have been in a position to catch the dust on a true double-sided drive, which would be spinning in the opposite direction, and so would end up being useless to you.

- Or, worse, if the pad was napped, like velour, spinning in the opposite direction would actually release all the dust that had been captured. That would be bad.

Or at least this was the lore that we passed around on BBS's at the time. It could have been every bit as wrong as the truism "When your computer crashes, try wrapping your disk drive in tinfoil" (which was in fact true if your problem was RF from the TV hitting the poorly-shielded-and-filtered serial cable, but otherwise either useless or a good way to overheat your drive).

For some of us who never got into the cooking habit, and can't do anything on a regular schedule (like food shopping), and can't plan in advance in general, and don't even have running water at work (old building), it's incredibly HARD advice to follow.

I live one block from a giant supermarket; I moved here FOR that supermarket. They have pretty good produce; if I walk 5 minutes there's a local food co-op and 10 minutes gives me Whole Foods.

But you know what's easier than going to the supermarket, picking out produce, planning or googling a meal, and [feeling like] + [remembering to actually] cook that meal before the produce goes bad?

Buying ten boxes of Amy's, congratulating myself on the fact that there are actual identifiable pieces of broccoli instead of green flecks, calling it "healthy", grabbing some ice cream and cookies to reward myself for that, and being all set for ten days, plus a buffer of whatever I actually had in the back of the freezer before.

Yes, that would help; in psychology it's called a "costly signal", and whole books have been written about its benefits.

Don't you hate being a font-rendering snob and then realizing you've been staring at something ugly for months without realizing it?

I'm not being snide; it's happened to me. I used to be a typesetter, and yet when I had trouble using Inconsolata in Sublime Text, I reverted back to Menlo, which I hated - and spent the next few months preaching about how hard I'd worked to find the Perfect Programmer Font For Me, not realizing I wasn't actually looking it in the editor. Worse, I was seeing it in Terminal; I had no excuse.

It's the visual equivalent of the classic audio production goof: You spend hours tweaking a particular equalizer setting, everybody agrees that it sounds perfect now, and then realize the EQ hasn't been patched in at all and you've been changing nothing.

Excellent! I will send you a PDF of the money as well.

(I haven't had enough coffee to think this through, so call me out if I'm dead wrong.)

Let's say Facebook (a) didn't offer advertisers direct personal information, only access to demographic profiles, and (b) set some minimal standard so that you can't target profiles that result in fewer than 15 people. (What's that data set that does that already?)

Can't a sufficiently large advertising aggregator run a sufficiently large set of multivariate ads, do Statistical Magic, and discover the real demographics of each of the users - at least enough to reassociate them with their real-world, extra-Facebook identity? Sure, they'd be violating ToS and probably various laws, but we're talking about attack surface, not public policy (yet).

This paper about "k-anonymity" and "privacy-preserving distributed protocol" might yield some clues, but my brain is fundamentally incapable of reading those once-"beautiful" LaTeX fonts. (I would pay good money for an app/Mechanical Turk/whatever that reprocesses text with a modern font.)