thothamon

I think Steve Jobs said the only way to be great at what you do is to do what you love. And I would add the only way to really amp up your income is to be as great as you possibly can be at what you do, and always look to be better.

I had a couple jobs I took mainly for the money. They were soul-deadening. Maybe some people can handle that, but for me it's a recipe for burnout.

The interesting thing is I made, by far, the most money running my own company and doing work I actually enjoyed.

In my career, I've had a handful of occasions where someone mentored me. When they do, you can learn very, very rapidly.

But as good and valuable as that is, I think everyone needs the experience of solving multiple, hard problems mostly using books and the Google machine. You can never be senior until you can solve hard problems without someone holding your hand.

But the specific question is, do you keep a phone in your home? If so, how is that better than having Alexa in your home?

I agree with much of your argument, but what makes you say so confidently that we capture or punish almost all of the people who engage in child exploitation?

d) Constantly changing jobs every time some jerk floats into your circle doesn’t speak well of your character or look good on your resume.

First of all, I would have had no idea that's what "domain join" meant. But second, I love how the option is down there with "terms of use" and other things you're very unlikely to ever read or look at. And third, it's cute how even if you somehow find your way to this option, they have the "but even better, use the online account!" Oh my god.

If this works as described and there are no tricks (such as Google changing your account password from their servers to a known password and then logging in), then that is a great step in the right direction.

A very important next step would be to make this a required feature for all handset developers who wish to use Google services such as the Play Store. As long as it's a niche feature only used on the Pixel, it's more of a good gesture than a substantive benefit for users.

I appreciate the good things Google does for me; they are many. But I don't think protecting my privacy, much less securing my data even from themselves, is their priority.

Apple has done its best to secure customer privacy not only from bad actors and the government, but even from Apple itself, something that is certainly not true of Google. Apple went to the mat to protect its customers from the FBI. That earns ️<3 from me. Do I think Google would look out for me like that? Hahah, no, I do not think so.

Does this mean these vulnerabilities were not real and serious? Not at all. But Apple took them seriously and reacted quickly. Nobody's perfect, but they deserve a lot of credit for their hard work on security.

I have no concerns about having a build pipeline per se. My concern is that it's still way too complex and difficult. I think it could be made to be much simpler for 90 percent of cases, while still maintaining optional complexity for the remaining 10 percent of cases that need it.

I could split hairs and suggest that the browser accept the phony CA and simply use a secondary encryption layer on top of it, but that misses your point. A sufficiently clever evil government will see that you're doing something encryption-like and shoot you.

But, being "sufficiently clever" isn't all that easy. China has done a good job, but they're a very big country with a lot of resources and a lot of very smart people, and let's be honest, even as good as they are, anyone with a will to get that censored information will get it.

It costs a lot to censor people on the Internet. The goal of people like me is not to stop the most determined, intelligent censorship approaches, but rather to make them as expensive as possible to build and maintain.

My ideal is force governments to either accept the Internet without censorship, or almost completely disconnect from the Internet (and simultaneously deny their nations the competitive advantages that come with it). North Korea is a good model. They basically don't have Internet in North Korea. It's sad, but I can live with that; it's better than allowing an oppressive regime to benefit from the Internet while oppressing their citizens.

For my money, to be an acceptable Python, you have to be able to use the Python numeric, scientific and machine learning libraries -- or have other libraries that are just as good or better. That is the number one reason I would use Python in the first place.

So the thing here is Apple would never have announced the product and pumped it the way they have unless someone who at the time was highly respected said with very high confidence that it could be done. Not only that, but a lot of other experienced and respected people would also, almost certainly, have looked at it and also agreed it was doable.

For Apple to say now it can't be done in a timely manner means those people either got a serious black eye, or they're out of the company and the remaining people don't think it's doable.

Ugh, I think you get to pick between "strict purity" and something other than strict purity -- you can't have both. You can't deliberately tolerate something you deem to be devilish without becoming morally soiled by it. You can't perform an act that you call evil, or tolerate and implicitly encourage the act, and then in the next breath condemn it.

Either you have to maintain strict purity, or you have to acknowledge on some level that real life is not especially compatible with strict purity, and sometimes compromise is, at a minimum, necessary and to some degree desirable.

There's no logical way around this, and trying to force there to be a logical way around it gives you this kind of wink wink, nod nod, say-no-more sort of idea.

No accounting for taste, but to me those icons are rather unsightly. From a utilitarian point of view, they might be good, but for art (at the time) I would have looked at NeXT icons.

This code reminds me of why ML-like languages with Maybe-style types and case expressions that generate compiler errors for missed alternatives are good. I bet rewriting this in OCaml or Haskell would lead to tighter code and might even unearth a couple possible states that haven't been accounted for.

My sense of the comment was not that he was trying to change your mind, but rather saying it seems unusual to be so fixated on the escape key that nothing else matters.

Having said that, yes, Apple should allow individuals to, for example, always require the touch bar to provide an escape key (or any other key) on the far left (or anywhere else on the touch bar). The user should get to control what the touch bar does through an easy and powerful interface and API (so third parties can extend the capabilities). Can we even make touch bar keys act as new meta keys? That would rule! The benefit of the Apple approach is that even if this has not been done yet, it's all software: it could be done.

As far as Windows, I guess it must come down to which features are important to you, and personal taste. I use Windows a lot, and have owned a Surface Pro, and boy I hated it. The very, very best thing about Windows is the Linux compatibility layer, and even that's not as good as if it were a real Unix-like platform all the way down.

I am indeed glad you're happy with your laptop (seriously; not sarcasm), but I've been there, done that, and hated it.

All the flaws mentioned are valid enough, but most don't resonate with me as strong negatives, with the exception of iTunes, which is a bloated, slow, nasty mess.

That aside, a big deal for me is that Mac laptops max out at 16GB. That's perhaps the biggest single reason I'm not buying one now. Hopefully the refresh will fix this.

Another big deal is the general lack of attention for OS X (or macOS or whatever). The exception is the updated filesystem, and even this was an extremely painful transition for me because (although it may be fixed now) Spotlight doesn't work on external volumes using APFS. Or how about some good process/application sandboxing and quota capabilities? Or, my machine with 128 GB (!) of RAM starts out blazing fast, and then slows down: process switching can take a second or two, which is really annoying. How is this happening on a modern OS in 2018? Simple -- Apple is not trying.

Having said this, I agree with some other posters that macOS is the worst desktop OS out there, except for all the other ones. I frequently have to use Windows and I simply cannot make myself like it. I love Linux for its freedom and for its terminal, but none of the desktops are awesome in comparison to macOS. Not many people would say they "love" Windows or they "love" Gnome, but many would still say they love macOS, despite the flaws.

I guess you're right that Linus was saying that -- after all, he considers the standard to be less important than toilet paper.

Regardless, if standards should be questioned, then surely Linus also should be questioned. I think a better rule would be: Appealing to the standard is sufficient reason for a change, unless a good argument can be made that the standard is BS.

In theory yes, but back in the PPC days a lot of stuff was not available even though theoretically it could have been.

True, but right now I don't have to do it myself. Things like brew just work. If the proposal is to throw away something that works, and add the burden of doing it myself to my to-do list, that doesn't sound at all appealing.

Well. We'll see what they do, but Apple had better be very careful. If a lot of OSS software won't run on Apple's new chip, then it becomes very hard for a software developer like myself to stick with Apple. And it is developer energy that sustains the software ecosystem for Apple....including many developers who are in the Mac ecosystem to develop for iOS.

This is not necessarily the wrong move for Apple, but it is fraught with danger. Here be dragons.

I reluctantly agree that in the context of a classroom discussion, a sexualized (even if SFW) image is not ideal, primarily because it's a distraction from the subject. I also recognize the point that technical disciplines have enough trouble attracting female participants without making the problem worse.

I feel reluctant to admit this because there always lots of people more than ready to be offended by anything, and giving in to their demands encourages them to demand the next thing. The author acknowledges this can go too far, and it is a slippery slope. So I only agree with reluctance, in this one case, that the best thing is to drop the Lena image.

But to me, the author goes too far. Avoiding any "needless" offense would have many people walking on eggshells all the time in an unnecessary effort to appeal to the unreasonable. Life is rough. Unless we are completely boring, sterile people with not a single original or interesting thought, we're bound to offend and be offended. Instead of trying so hard to have everyone like us, I think it would be preferable to expose people to many, sometimes offensive, perspectives, and to have vigorous debates about them.

Giving offense is not a virtue in itself, but stifling ingenious or even interesting thoughts merely to avoid giving offense is a vice. The people among us worth emulating are not those who will go to great lengths to avoid giving offense, but those with a passionate and unique perspective -- people who are willing to offend, if need be, to communicate those thoughts.

In practice, if something was truly open-source, there'd be nothing to prevent someone who didn't like you from building your app with each new release and putting on a web site for anyone to download for free. You might be the kind of guy who would pay $40 for good software, but a lot of people would get the free version and not pay. This is the eternal conundrum of open source.

Here's a modified idea, perhaps still not good enough but hopefully a step down the path. When you purchase the product, you receive access to the source code for the version that was then-current one year ago. Granted, you are not sure the current code doesn't have malware. But you can be confident, based on the history of the product, that it did not have malware for a long time. (And were you really going to scan the diffs for each release for malware anyway?) You could also allow trusted third-parties under NDA to review all diffs for the current code base and certify that they didn't see anything malicious.

This also ensures that should your company disappear, at the very worst, the user community will have a not-too-old version of the software to fall back on.

In the US, we are loose about the term "city." The "city" I live in has a population of I 76,000. The neighboring town, Fort Collins, has a population of 164,000. But in 1990, my town, Loveland, only had 40,000 residents and I still would have called it a city.

The term "big city" is more specific. That's a major city, probably with skyscrapers. Population is probably close to a million or more.

The term "metropolis" is even more specific. That's a really big city, one of the top 20 in the US, to give a rough sense. Chicago, New York, Los Angeles are metropolises. Denver? It's a big city, but I don't know about metropolis.

Keyboard Maestro is one of the most underrated apps for power users. I had it for a long time and finally began to realize what amazing power you get with this tool. Others also mentioned BetterTouchTool. With that and Keyboard Maestro, if you have that little thing you wish an app would allow you to do, most of the time you can do it by using these two tools.

As Ferris Beuller said, if you have the means (and almost all of you do), I highly recommend it.

Here's one that I think is the most important key. Pick a very small sub-piece of the habit you want to build, and EASY sub-piece. If you want to work out, then this might mean getting your workout clothes on. This is the minimum thing you do every day. If, after getting your workout clothes on, you decide you don't want to work out, then don't. You still get 100% credit for doing the task that day.

Even if you go two weeks and never get to the gym, you have at least built a habit of getting started with working out! You're much better off than if you had done nothing. Every day, at least you get started. And getting started is usually the hardest part. If you get started, most of the time you'll actually do the thing you had in mind!

It's critical to make the minimum requirement easy and then DO IT EVERY DAY. If it's hard and painful, you'll simply quit the whole thing after a while.

No one is talking about legal punishments for Trump (even though he threatened to jail Hillary if he won). We're talking about Y Combinator doing business with someone who is substantially and actively supporting a racist.

There are many historical examples of countries with legitimate governments that were taken over by a demagogue or tyrant. You can't imagine a sane person could fear the same outcome in the United States?

Democracy has to be re-earned in each generation. If you just depend on past victories, you can absolutely lose it.

Exactly. There is no First Amendment protection against _social consequences_ for abhorrent speech. Companies that choose to protect people who threaten the values of democracy are _choosing to do so because they want to_, not because of some higher calling or noble purpose.