seccess

I have a more recent example of this: I knew a Google software engineering team which writes all open bugs for their product on a whiteboard. If you want to tackle a bug, you put a post-it note with your name next to it and then go fix it. Nobody is every forcibly assigned to fix a bug (with the exception of security bugs). I think they had it where you could only have one post-it on the board at a time.

> Slips through? Mediocre work is the norm, or at least close to being the norm.

In computer science, this is likely because of the ridiculous number of conferences there are and how eager each one is to fill out their roster. I want to hear of the conference that published no papers this year because none were good enough for publication.

> I don't think it's based on luck, it's based on politics. Academic science is a racket.

I've heard (more than once) of people who submit a paper, have it rejected, and then get scooped by a professor who was on the PC of the conference that rejected them. There is a very real possibility of work being accepted or rejected purely because of what the reviewer thinks will be most beneficial to their career.

So, I think your cynicism is well-placed.

I agree completely. In my experience as a PhD student (comp sci), all conferences make reviewers anonymous. As a result, there is very little accountability regarding the reviews you receive for your work. More than once, I have had papers rejected simply because a single reviewer barely read the paper and dismissed it. These kinds of reviews are very frustrating to receive, not only because they failed to understand the basic premises of your paper, but because these reviews contain no useful information on how to make your paper better for future submissions.

Of course, the opposite can happen where mediocre works slips through, and the reviewers that allowed that should be held accountable too. Its painful to me that so much of the acceptance process for research papers (in my field at least) is based on luck.

Moral of the story: reviewer anonymity is good but it comes at the expensive of accountability.

For those of you who aren't familiar, Brady Haran, the creator of numberphile, produces a ton of awesome videos of experts talking about science and math. Besides numberphile, he does Sixty Symbols (physics), Periodic Videos (chem), and computerphile (comp sci) [0].

[0] http://www.bradyharan.com/

I'm really impressed with how powerful HTML has become with respect to video content. Of particular note is the Flow Player [0], which I love to see websites use, primarily because it works without JS enabled! In addition, it is fast and runs smoothly.

I'm simultaneously really (un)impressed how often websites over-engineer their video content. Of particular interest is Youtube, which is neigh-unusable over a slow connection because the player refuses to buffer ahead and constantly tries to be smarter than it is by switching video quality :(

[0] https://flowplayer.org/player/

"The amount of time and effort I spent wasted on package incompatibilities, instabilities, and debugging strange hardware/driver related issues isn't worth it."

Doesn't this assume that this cost for commercial OSes is zero? In my experience, that hasn't been the case (as an OSX user, haven't used Windows for software development in a long time).

"inhabitable - suitable to live in; habitable." [0]

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=inhabitable&oq=inhabitable&a...

This covers many of the reasons I prefer web browsing without JS enabled: speed, less mem usage, safer. Before I started doing so, I thought that disabling JS would make the internet unusable, but a vast majority of pages display their content just fine without it. In addition, it is really easy to add domains to the JS whitelist in Chrome without the need to go into the options menu every time (less so in FF). AND, Chrome uses separate whitelists for normal and private browsing, and will clear the private browsing whitelist when you close the window! There are some periodic annoyances, but I wouldn't think of going back to default-enabled.

Browsing the web in Emacs is a bit too hardcore for me though :P

Reading this, I'm reminded of Kary Mullis, inventor of PCR (polymerase chain reaction). PCR is widely considered to be the most important discovery of modern biology, ushering a new era of scientific research after he invented it in the 1980s. He won a nobel prize for it.

Kary was a bit off though (in this case due to intense drug usage, I think). Afterwards, he went on to deny that HIV is the cause of AIDS, tried to discredit global warming, and began believing in astrology and magic.

In the end, its possible that a little bit of insanity is a good thing; that it can help someone make a profound discovery that no one else could see. Too much is obviously detrimental, however.

My PhD adviser's rule of thumb with pie charts: don't use pie charts.

My favorite reason I've heard of for prescribing medical marijuana: writer's block. A police officer told me that, so I'm inclined to believe its true.

"Scientists are analyzing the data to see whether the organic compounds detected by Philae are simple ones—such as methane and methanol—or a more complex species such as amino acids"

I feel like there is a big difference between finding methane and finding amino acids on the comet. Surely, finding methane isn't all that interesting.

I haven't seen any discussion of the possibility of Philae receiving light to its solar panels as the comet tumbles through space. Is there no chance of the comet turning to a point where the sun can reach the lander?

Bear in mind it left Earth more than 10 years ago, I'd imagine they did send state of the art tech for the time.

I rather like this interpretation, actually. But I'm still going to try disagreeing.

Speaking more broadly, Orwell portrays a world where the freedoms of people are forcibly oppressed, whereas Huxley portrays a world where they are willingly oppressed. The people in Brave New World are more caught up in (what Huxley might call) a shallow culture, disinterested in the real world. This view does not seem so far fetched after all. Looking at the modern world, how easy it is to turn a blind eye to the troubles of far off countries when you are living in relative comfort?

Fahrenheit 451 is interesting novel to consider from this point of view as well, as I think it portrays a middle ground between these two extremes.

I don't personally agree that Obama should have received it, but this article presents an interesting position as to why he did [0]. The author argues that giving the president the prize at the beginning of his presidency may have been motivation for him to make more peaceful decisions while in charge.

[0] http://controversialtruths.com/node/8147

You might find this paper about stealing a botnet interesting [0]. Even though its five years old, the crazy stuff these researchers found is still amazing.

[0] http://www.net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/teaching/ws0910/IS_semina...

In my experience, PHP can have really unexpected runtime performance. This site has some interesting benchmarks highlighting this: http://www.phpbench.com/

I'd like to hear of any other PHP performance gotchas people know of. One of my favorites: passing function arguments by value is faster than passing by reference.

This. SSL/TLS can ensure perfect forward secrecy when the private key is compromised, as long as the session information is ephemeral. With session tickets, compromise of the key used to create the tickets means every session created under that key can be compromised, regardless of whether the private key is lost. See https://www.imperialviolet.org/2013/06/27/botchingpfs.html for a great discussion of this.

Interesting, could you elaborate on this a bit more?

Say I have a header file "foo.h" with an "auto foo();" declaration. Another file (eg, "bar.h") imports foo.h. How can the compiler do type checking when compiling bar.cc without also parsing foo.cc to determine the return type of foo()?

Using 'auto' for return types seems just awful to me. In the context of a collaborative project, I don't want to have to dig through the implementation of someone else's function just to figure out what type it returns. Having an explicit return type is a form of self-documenting code.

Logic gates and T-flip flops can be built in Minecraft. They might not be the same as their silicone counterparts, but understanding how they fit together is an important part of "real" circuit design. I honestly never understood what a T-flip flop did until I got into redstone :)

http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Memory_circuit http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Tutorials/Basic_Logic_Gates

Does anyone know if WebView is similarly susceptible?