Although I do think this guy is naive and should reserve judgement until he has had real time to reflect, I don't think there is a tremendous difference between managing people's perceptions vs. managing a career. As it has been since ancient times, much of your success will be based on family and social ties, which are themselves mostly built on perception. We as techies like to imagine the world as entirely merit based, but of course business remains an inherently human enterprise.
Since most of these laws are written by politicians and not economists it's more likely that they want to appear tough on immigration to avoid "dey took our jerbs!" style anger from the electorate. It's sort of like how clubs force people to wait in line outside even when there is room. If they let everyone in, it might start to feel crowded and less fun.
But then I think you are giving up the main advantage of using mechanical turk over just roughly matching pixels. It is possible matching pixels will get the wrong answer where a human, with the context of being human, will know what the image is supposed to be and get the write answer, captcha style.
Example: an iron fence with a scenic view behind and where the slices are too small for someone to match only two.
After struggling through using sbt and Maven/Ivy I can say it is categorically worse than what I have used in other languages including ruby-gem python-pip clojure-leiningen (a jvm language) and node-npm. When I say worse I mean doing what the majority of developers want from a module system: easily install modules, not provide a complicated mess of configuration and versions.
This isn't to say scala couldn't adopt a better system, but I don't think the community has an incentive because scala's main appeal is that it has a steep learning curve, but after you get over the hump you can do everything you want and more. I just think that high barrier to entry, as indicated by the post, may not be worth the benefits.
This is true. I think couchdb tries to be all things to all people rather than just focusing on being a great data store. It's a database like mongo, it's a mobile database like sqlite, you can use it to host apps with couchapp, you can use it as a map-reduce cluster like hadoop, etc. I would rather have just a solid no-sql database that solves that problem. I like couch better than mongo for the reasons I mentioned, but I know couch also has problems and still haven't found a good third option.
It's interesting that couchdb gets little love (as evidenced by google trends), but it has document storage by index, easy enough to install, copy on write so has no global lock, sharding with bigcouch, and all client access is entirely REST... it may be couch is a little hard to grok, I dunno.
And the arms race continues. I expect this will work only as long as law enforcement doesn't recognize it's a ram only box, after which they'd just keep it plugged in or drop it into liquid nitrogen to preserve the bits if they cared enough.
It doesn't have to be theory. Very basic python scripting could help anybody. For example, my sister wanted to reformat the naming of 500 or so photos.
Time to do this by hand: 30 soul crushing minutes
Time to write a python script to do this: 5 minutes
It hurts people's innate sense of fairness though. When you see the people who manufactured the crises repleting their losses with money from middle and working class american's it is upsetting and does indicate the system has problems.
Although a less descriptive name allows you to adapt your service more easily. If amazon started as onlinebooks.com it would have made the migration to online everything + AWS + kindle + everything else more difficult.
I haven't found Android UI to be that much better than html and the rest, you still have to say where everything goes and then write the code to tell it what to do.
Browsers are at a disadvantage because they need to have a ton of security built in because people casually go to websites, whether or not they are malicious, but are more hesitant to download an app. Also if an app is malicious it can be removed from the store, taking down a website on the other hand is not an easy feat.
That is a very good question, but I think we differ on the answer. The moral of the article doesn't seem like he should have cared more about marketing, usability, business relationships or all the other cruft involved in forming a business, but that his idea, sadly, didn't have traction. So really it was more likely the product. If the minimum viable product is built and doesn't have traction it is entirely possible the idea may not have enough traction.
I'm saying if I wrote a "REST API" and everyone understood what that means, what would it matter whether or not it checks every box laid out by the originator of the term.
It is odd the designer decided to compile to lua. It's probably because it's easier to knock out the language fast that way. Although usually when someone wants to do this they compile to C and use gcc from there (this is what go did in the beginning), but they also usually admit this is a hack, not a feature and that they will later compile directly to assembly.
I'm a logic fan so I like prolog a lot, though for many people admittedly its greatest attribute will be expanding the way you think about programming.
However for some problems you might want to go right to constraint programming as you mentioned if you need speed and ease of modeling. I like MiniZinc for many problems, or if you're interested you could try my constraint programming language (http://sabrlang.org) which is based on spatial and temporal logic.
I don't think the issue is as much technical as it is about the nature of the community. digg, reddit, hacker news, etc. all have similar features, but quite different communities. these communities are generally molded by where they exist in the mind of the user, which can be influenced by the UI. HN only allows up-arrows to create a positive slant, reddit has a functional looking UI for a technical slant, and digg aims for a mainstream look. This is why facebook, twitter, and google+ aren't necessarily direct competitors, because they are all designed to scratch a slightly different itch.
I agree they are cool, but why not just use a similar solution that does the same thing. Require a couple second server wait time in repeated requests from the same IP. Even if the spammers had over 1000 IPs (and most don't) this would still kill the speed with which they can mass request. Doing this would allow slow machines to get the same wait time as everyone else.