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Do you have a link to this?

Edit: Nevermind, I read that as CentOS...

I've never been asked if I was an engineer, but I've definitely experienced the latter of your two anecdotes. Sometimes it just depends on the person you're talking to.

At one point I learned that the best way to get a certain coworker of mine to finally get what I was saying was to pull another person in front if them, explain myself to the third party, let them acknowledge that I'm right, and then finally ask the original coworker once more if their plan was reaaally the right way to go. Only then would they realize that I had a point. It sucks, but if you have to get someone they trust to repeat what you're saying, you might as well have a reliable backup ready.

As for speaking up in meetings, I was recently told in my review that I needed to be more assertive, because I feared I'd experience the same thing you did. Hopefully I can find a good middle ground between meekly watching people march down the wrong road, and shouting about crack pipes... I haven't found it yet, though.

I got my wife and my current job from IRC. Good to know I'm not the only one ;)

Maybe it's just me, but having a bunch of strangers staring at me on the landing page was a pretty poor user experience.

They have: m.facebook.com

It might not be entirely 'snappy', but it's a hell of a lot better than the installed app version. I laugh every time I go to the website and it suggests I install their app on the login page.

The Android app manages to get stuck buffering a song nearly every time I use it, even on a wifi connection. The widget on my homescreen still has a spinning circle instead of a play button even though I killed the app after it got stuck days ago.

> I’ve found men to be more laid back, friendlier, and easier to talk to than women.

I had to stop reading there. Is this article supposed to be an example of what real sexism looks like?

He mentions why it does that, but he doesn't say why he opts not to preserve the two spaces: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/text.html#white-space-prop

I just thought the exaggeration of steps was ridiculous and unnecessary. I can already do something similar at local bars, but you still have to include the steps of knowing the bartender, having a running tab, getting your credit card information on file with them in the first place, etc. He conveniently leaves out all of these steps yet includes things like "find the machine".

The Google Wallet example is entirely disingenuous. Compare these two:

1. Get (real) wallet.

2. Find the right card.

3. Swipe the card.

4. Press 'Debit' on the machine.

5. Press 'No' to the cash back prompt.

6. Enter my PIN.

Versus:

1. Get out phone.

2. Wake the screen.

3. Touch the phone to the machine.

4. Enter my PIN on the Google Wallet prompt that appears.

5. Confirm the payment.

If they were to list the steps for paying with a normal credit card would their list include "find the teller's hand so you can give them the card"?

Edit: How do I <ol>?

Familiar metaphors like an egg hatching into the prey of its parents?

Not many kids grew up sailing. Most kids these days have a fair bit of experience with video games, first person shooters especially. They might not get the subtleties of some of the 'pro' level FPS games, but I think they would be able to spectate. Games like Starcraft and DotA pretty much require that you play the game regularly to appreciate them though.

Then again, the rules to football are fairly complex depending on how deeply you're concerned about player formations and stats, yet it's wildly popular. Starcraft can be simplified to 'blow up all their stuff' just like football can be simplified to 'get the ball in the endzone'.

It would make the most sense to store nothing. As far as I can tell, it doesn't return a link to the filtered image or anything, just the binary. RAM would be the limiting factor here I think. The images would need to be decompressed to filter them (unless they're doing something very fancy).

Edit: welp, I totally didn't read the OP of this thread. Still, I think the storage costs outweigh the cost of just applying the filter each time. Also, people like to filter their own images. Nobody I know of shoves existing pictures into Instagram.

I want to see a blog post about someone who decides to stop reading blog posts about people who stop reading their email/twitter/facebook.

You definitely seem like what I would consider a light user then. My wife has 1000+ Facebook friends, and posts 15-20 times a day. If I round to 1GB/mo in your case, then she would probably use around 20GB/mo... which is actually not bad.

Thank you for the numbers!

I don't think so, considering that not all of my followers are going to be using the service all of the time. If the server just blindly downloaded everything always, then yes, it would be more bandwidth. But with proper caching strategies and servers only requesting new posts when clients are active, I think you could save a lot of bandwidth by not pushing everything.

What arguments do you have against a 'pull' style for notifications? Something like a GET to /latest that passes in the last time the client checked for updates and only gets back the URI of the last 10 or so posts since then. An HD video post could contain simply a URI that points to the video, so the video isn't even downloaded until the 'app' within tent asks for it.

This way you could have a path with all the videos on it that you could proxy off to a server with more bandwidth. It would get the user a lot more control over how their content is accessed.

Edit: And what if my server is down when one of my friends makes a post? Will I never see it?

It seems like this will use up a crapton of bandwidth with its 'push' style notifications. If someone with a million Facebook followers makes a new post, one entry is made in the database and then users pull it down as they visit their own pages.

If a million people decide to 'camp in my tent' (?), my server is suddenly pushing out gigs of data every time I make a post.

They describe it as a 'protocol' on top of HTTP; I don't think that assumes much about the 'client of choice'. Most apps I've worked with already use HTTP and JSON anyway.

This seems like something you could throw a Kinect at. Get a few images at the right angles, build a crude 3D model, and measure that in software instead of wasting resources shipping shirts around. It wouldn't account for preference, but surely it's as accurate as someone guessing at their own adjustments.

I still feel like I have to do math (albeit simple math) with relative line numbering. If I want to yank a block of code that's X lines long, I have to look at line X, and add one to the number next to it. E.g., when I want to grab 8 lines, the last line I want to grab has a 7 next to it.

I guess I think it'd be more helpful if the numbers were inclusive, and 1-indexed. I'm not sure how to configure that though.

I just tried googling for the cached version, hoping that they were able to grab it, but interestingly they have only a screenshot of the article. It's even clear enough to read all the text, but there's no cached version. Surely the page itself would have been easier to store than an image?

If I'm not allowed to assume names fit into the set of Unicode symbols, what do I use for a name field in my database? An image field? What if a dragon whose name cannot be printed attempts to sign up for my service?

Someone who decides to identify themselves with Klingon (whether their parents gave them that name or not) should expect to have an alias ready...

It's definitely a signal, though I don't take to mean quite what you do...

It's only 'likely that they sweated the other details' if you assume infinite manpower and resources. In reality, all of the very finite resources that went into picking the right shade of beige for the background could have instead gone into improving the actual tools.

I don't think it's possible for an engineer to underestimate the importance of design and marketing for an engineering tool.

Have you seen nginx.org?

Isn't that what Google Buzz was doing? That didn't turn out too well...

That's the conclusion I came to, but it wasn't very definitive. At the very least I expected to come across links to people talking about their lack of patents. Maybe I should have searched for 'instagram no patents'.

I tried searching around to see if Instagram had any patents that were discussed on the web after their sale. I could find absolutely nothing useful. The search algorithm decided that news about Facebook's acquisition and their AOL patents was so 'hot' that it would show me only day old links.

It's a useful feature at first glance, but more and more often I find myself wishing that Google would just work like I expect it to (like it used to).

That's not that great of an example:

    password:	This is easy to guess
    entropy:	52.13
    crack time (seconds):	246474312966
    crack time (display):	centuries
    score from 0 to 4:	4

Is it that you can't suffer the same issue, or that you can't 'really' suffer the same issue?

Even if there's a smaller chance of it happening, any language that has ANY chance of killing your system when running as expected is a language I'll never bother to learn.

Is there any sort of analysis tool they might be able to put into the compiler to tell you if a data structure you created has a high chance of looking like a pointer?

That may be the case, but I don't think the data is actually used to route you. I missed an exit once and had my estimated transit time drop by 20 minutes, as it was going to put me on a heavily clogged highway. It knew how the traffic was too, since my traffic light changed as well, from red to green.