jd

That's perfect. Thanks for the clarification.

The sign up button says "try for free", which implies it's a trial signup. But I can't find the price for the subscription anywhere on the website.

Don't forget that many people have trouble understanding something as simple as a variable. You have to learn to execute code in your head to not be completely surprised every time you run the program.

Programming really doesn't come naturally to everybody.

Tests are supposed to measure understanding of the subject material.

Therefore tests should be open book iff open book tests are better at measuring understanding than closed book tests.

Are open tests better? I remember from my university days that you can simply look at questions in the book that look sort of similar to the question on the test and apply the necessary substitutions. With open book tests it's remarkably easy to create an answer that looks intelligent about a subject you don't understand at all. With closed book tests this isn't so easy.

Even trivia questions can reveal fundamental gaps in people's understanding. For instance, if a student answers that dinosaurs existed 3000 years ago they must think within a frame of reference where 3000 years is a plausible answer (so no understanding of evolution). So it's a question that is easy to ask, easy to grade, objective, and one that can function as a great litmus test. When all tests are open book you can't ask these questions anymore.

So I'm pretty skeptical about the claim that open book tests are better, period.

As for the argument that people can look things up in books after they graduate, I don't buy that at all. The logical next step would then be to also allow students to ask questions on web forums during exams. Copy question to forum. Get coffee. Copy answer to test paper. After all, when the students get a professional job they may also consult web forums to get their work done.

Most of the time though the issue is we don't trust links in comments/posts on websites we otherwise trust. Those websites don't allow people to inject javascript code in their comments (but they often do allow people to change the link text).

Of course, once you're willing to run arbitrary javascript code you can't trust any mouse click anymore. Doesn't matter if the click is on a link or a button or anywhere else. Disallowing href attribute modification doesn't help one bit.

So the "hover" hint you get for links is still highly useful, especially on sites you trust.

In comparison to other yachts (E.g. http://list25.com/25-most-expensive-yachts-ever-built/) "Venus" looks pretty minimalist to me.

If pg is correct and hardware startups are making a renaissance then we can expect to see startups soon that sell shovels for hardware startups. For web startups we see shovel-style products that help with customer support, A/B testing, virtualized servers and so on.

In the same way we can expect startups to pop up that make life easier for hardware startups. For instance startups that make prototyping hardware easier. Or that simplify shipping goods all across the globe. Or startups that make it easier to find the right suppliers and get good deals with them.

Pretty exciting!

Remember that every iPhone/Android has an SSD drive in it and how many are DOA? Very, very few. We're talking about hundreds of millions of SSD drives sold per year that are used all day every day. So it's not early-adopter technology in any meaningful sense.

There's no reason at all to extrapolate from personal experience.

Looks cool, but if you ask me a monthly subscription model isn't optimal for this kind of thing because the churn[1] rate will be so high.

Why do I expect a high churn rate? Well, there are two options. Either the splash pages created with quicklytest.it get some traffic or they don't. If they don't get traffic the user will get demotivated and stop. Cancel subscription. And if the user does drum up attention for his idea? Then he's going to replace the quicklytest.it page with his own thing. Again, cancel subscription.

I like the idea, but it will be very tough to make money from it.

[1] Percentage of subscriptions canceled each month

Wait a second, you consider price-fixing of (e)books in France a good thing?

Where I live it's cheaper to buy books online in the UK and have them shipped over than to buy them in the local bookstore. So that's what people do. And local bookstores are dying. No surprise, given that it's illegal for them to drop their prices to a competitive level.

If you consider $7 (or $12) a month a lot of money for software then you're probably not in the target audience for any (SaaS) software product. A lot of people are willing to pay some money for a SaaS product even when there are free alternatives.

I can't think of any piece of software I use regularly that doesn't cross the "worth at least $7 bucks" boundary.

Or more generally: it's much easier to excel in the intersection of two (or three) disciplines than to excel in a single discipline.

Programming + Biology. Programming + Economics. Business + Comic book writing. Programming + Business. Cooking + fluency in Japanese & English. You get the idea.

> But technically, he was required to send Mike his files and decompresser. Instead, he put them on his server and sent Mike their location. Mike then had to get the files. It goes both ways.

In that case Patrick could just argue he hadn't sent the files at all (since Mike refused to accept them by refusing to download them) and that therefore the bet was still on, so he can still send the files by email or whatever.

Exactly, I consider Mike to be acting in bad faith here. Mike was willing to accept $100 (which in most of the world constitutes many hours of labor) not just once, but every time people wanted to play again. He was willing to accept real money for something that he believed was literally impossible. Mike didn't hint at the impossibility in any way. E.g. if he had said "Have you read the FAQ and you still sure you want to play?" I would view it in different light. But no, Mike seemed all to eager to accept the money.

So yes, then when a taker appears he's either not very bright (and therefore you shouldn't take advantage of him) or he's trying to out-hussle (and playing legalese with the terms is then fair game). After Mike got beaten at his own game he then continued to (a) weasel out of it (b) threaten legal action (c) attempt to deflect.

Not exactly a class act by Mike.

In your blogpost you said that you used to refer to what you were doing as a startup and don't anymore. So either your organization wasn't a startup in the first place (and now you started labeling it correctly) or your organization is a startup, in which case that's exactly what you should call it.

You quoted a pretty good definition of a startup. So why not do the obvious thing, and call something a startup iff it meets that definition? Why encourage using a different and more generic word "business", if that doesn't clarify anything?

Next we're going to get a blogpost claiming that a startup with massive growth but no revenue model shouldn't get to call itself a business (because real businesses make profit!!). And so we go in circles again and again.

Yes, many people don't know the difference between a business, a business spin-off and a startup. The solution is to label things accurately, and to explain the difference when you notice people are confused. The solution is not to use a less accurate label in protest of people using labels inaccurately!

In the Eurozone real GDP has contracted since the crisis according to this graph:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/more-coulda-been...

So a lot of the "growth" is just the economy recovering from the austerity/crisis-related policies. The Eurozone's real GDP contracted 5%, so even if we then outgrow the US by 0.5% every year it will still take us ages to catch up.

I think you're trying to do both business and charity at the same time, and that doesn't really work I think. If you run a great business and make lots of money (by providing even more value to customers) you can then put that into any pet projects you may have. It will even go much faster.

You can now commit to help 10% of all your customers for free, for now into the future, and charge a sensible rate to everybody else. Your business will do better and it will grow more quickly. The 10% portion you help for free will soon be much larger than your total customer base now.

You recognize that the accuracy of a statement is a scalar, and that every statement is part truth and part lie (but often not in equal proportion). So then why obfuscate language by using the same word for a statement that's 95% true and 5% lie as for a statement that's 5% true and 95% lie?

You could do the same for morality. Nearly all actions have good as well as bad consequences and nearly all actions have benefits and downsides. You could then decide that every action must be called evil, because the downside of the action is nonzero. You'd also have to defend that position by stating that "Doing evil is good" (for otherwise we'd be paralyzed by inaction). Another person might bend language in the exact opposite way and call nearly every action good. Those people probably would use opposite language to describe the exact same ideas. How convenient!

You started the previous post with "Lying is good.". We, of course, have no reason to assume you have a private definition of lying that classifies statements we would consider true (or half-truth at most) a lie. Okay, now we know.

But hold on a second! If nearly every statement is a lie, then therefore we should interpret your statement "Lying is good." as "It's okay to speak if you're not 100% certain you're 100% factually correct". Which makes absolutely no sense as a reply to somebody who says "I don't understand lying", because that person clearly uses a more regular definition of lying. Something like "stating falsehood with intent to deceive". We know this, because if the other person also believed that nearly every statement is a lie then, of course lying makes sense (for otherwise we would not be able to speak at all except in mathematics).

I don't think regrets are necessary at all. No mistakes means no learning. But of course mistakes -/> regrets.

If you make the best decision with the information you have at hand you shouldn't regret the decision you make. Retroactively the decision can turn out to be a mistake, but those mistakes you can easily accept: at the time you believed you made the right decision.

There's no need to second guess yourself, beat yourself up and ask "What if?". You can make a decision and if it turns out to be a mistake, just say "whoops" and move on.

The bottom line is still that many lives are saved by organ donors. From a moral point of view it's also pretty clear cut. If you want to accept an organ when you fall ill then you should also be willing to donate your organs.

The concept of organ donation is a little freaky, and the idea admittedly makes me a bit uncomfortable. Especially as I visualize it. But surely selfishly hanging on to something I don't need anymore (being dead and all) isn't the right solution.

I think this article is essentially some elaborate rationalization. The author can't reconcile being against organ donation knowing it saves lives. Hence the absurd stuff about doctors cackling evilly as they chop up their live patients to harvest the organs for fun and profit. Right.

I don't think it's fair to say the author's reasoning is terrible. A blogpost is always written for some specific audience, and in this case it looks like the blog post was targeted at programmers generally, not C++ experts. I agree that constructs like std::some_container<T*> are almost never the optimal solution. And yes, with RAII locks can be freed in the destructor, which rules out a class of mistakes.

The main things to take away from the blogpost were, I think, the concept of intrusive lists, to think about what objects look like in memory, and how you can construct code so that an object can be part of multiple containers and can remove itself from all of them when it's destroyed. Those are certainly concepts worth talking about, and so I think the blogpost was pretty great.

It can be insanely profitable. NPR on how some lobbying efforts yield returns of 22,000 percent:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/06/144737864/forget-s...

Given that the iPhone 5 will be announced next week, a lull in 4S sales isn't so strange.

It's a shame they publish such an obfuscated status update.

A "hardware failure in our primary encryption hardware device"? "corrupted encryption keys"? Not exactly reassuring!

Did a hard drive fail? If so, why aren't they using RAID? And if changes automatically cascade to backups, then they're not backups. If changes cascade it's called redundancy.

From the rest of the status update it looks like they're now restoring CC data from an older set of backups. But are they? No way to tell.

It's surprising how many technical terms the status update uses and how little it actually tells about what's going on.

I'm sure that they'll come up with a more complete story of what happened in a couple of days, after they've got everything under control. Given how critical Recurly is to their customers, I think they should worded everything a little more carefully. Explain what happened in normal language. Explain what percentage of accounts is affected. Explain what they're doing now. Explain what measures they're going to put into place to prevent similar things from happening in the future. Emphasize with the customers (who completely depend on Recurly for their business). This shouldn't be rocket science.

Those are fair points, but I don't agree with your general point of view. After all, it doesn't matter much if the product is just slightly lousy or awful. You don't end up using the products so the money is equally wasted in both cases.

Let's suppose 30% of all products are duds (i.e. you wouldn't buy them after playing with them for 10 minutes or reading a few reviews about them). So when you buy a product a launch day you pay a premium for getting your hands on it 2 weeks early. The kindle fire was a $199 device, I think, so you're then paying a $60 premium for having it a week or two early. Whether you want to take on that risk is entirely up to you. I personally wouldn't take on the risk, because I know myself well enough to predict I'll feel disproportionately bad when I waste money on a gadget I don't use. It looks like you're the same way. Most people aren't suited to gambling like this.

So you have to take a look at all the anticipated consequences of buying early. And the sour taste of ending up with a dud is part of that. By blaming Amazon for a lousy product you lose sight of the more important conclusion: that this outcome was completely predictable and avoidable.

I agree that the Kindle Fire is awful, but the Kindle 4 (the small one without the keyboard) is brilliant. And I'm eagerly awaiting next year's version.

And if buying a dud upsets you, why buy fancy new gadgets on launch day in the first place? Just wait a week or two for the reviews to come in. That's just common sense.

Carmack talked about VR too, but I'm referring to the comments he made about framerate and latency in the context of Rage.

See http://www.computerandvideogames.com/videos/e3-2011-john-car... - around 16 minutes in he mentions how a few frames latency makes a big difference.

A lot of console games indeed have pretty awful latency, and don't get a smooth 60fps either. And TVs can add latency on top of that with the postprocessing they do.

You're right about the latency. I think latency matters a great deal for any game that aims for immersion. And here we're dealing with a clearly visible delay between the large and small screen.

It looks very cool, but I must say I'm skeptical about their claims about the latency. Judging by the video, it's at least 200ms, perhaps as much as 500ms. Contrast this with John Carmack, who has recently talked about the importance of low latency for an immersive experience. And Carmack talks about the impact of just 1 or 2 frames of lag, which is the equivalent of 3 miliseconds!