wanorris

Duh, I should have thought of that. Thank you.

I think the mistake the parent post has made is conflating the kind of ordering you're referring to -- ordering in a tree implementation to allow for O(log n) resolution -- and ordering to preserve the position of each key-value pair as it was in the source structure. These are only the same thing if the source structure already happens to be sorted by some kind of ordering, something that obviously cannot be extended to the general case of preserving positionality.

AFAIK, the only two ways to preserve positionality as part of an associative array are (1) to store as a postional list of key-value pairs and use linear search to find matching keys, or (2) to use an additional data structure as an index, either by storing as a positional list and having a additional map from key value into the positions, or by storing as a map and having an additional list of keys stored in positional ordering.

It's hard to fill technology jobs in the current competitive marketplace. So it's easier to take a mix of market rates and below-market rates and keep an average that is still below market rate than it is to exclude people who want market rate and still fill all the positions with qualified people.

I can't really speak to other fields, though.

Ok, that sounds fair. Two hours is indeed not sustainable except in sprints. Though I've known spooky people who seem to be able to get by with not much more than that on a sustained basis.

Well, sort of. Working all the time isn't sustainable. But the point of starting a startup isn't to do things that are long-term sustainable, it's to build as much as you can in a short period of time to outrace competitors and adapt quickly to whatever comes up.

And I say that as someone who needs work-life balance -- that's why I don't have a startup. I want to spend time with my wife and kids and hobbies and things, so I have a nice job that I can go to every day and then come home again.

Expecting to maintain work-life balance while creating a startup is bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Can you place a piece to put someone in check?

It's been at least a couple of decades since I've played bug house, so my memories are pretty hazy.

They're considered cost centers, because they are cost centers. Unless you generate revenue by selling software or providing operational or security services to others, there is no direct sales upside to spending more money in these areas. There is only downside risk to not spending enough and screwing something up -- that makes them cost centers, not profit centers.

That doesn't mean they're not important, of course. Any cost center that didn't perform an important function would just be cut. But it's just like running payroll -- it would be disastrous if you couldn't do it in a consistent and timely fashion, but as long as everything seems to be working correctly, nobody outside that area is ever going to care that much about it.

I can't imagine that they are just guessing abut this. I'm sure someone tried implementing it and was horrified at the actual results before they gave up on it.

Starbucks is full of people who like the experience, and they pay the bills. I realize that there is an obvious difference between B&N and Starbucks, but most of the B&N stores I've been in have a cafe, so there are at least some ways to monetize people there for the experience.

Perhaps it would make sense to have fewer aisles and make the whole store more cafe-like? It would be different from what they have now, but if the alternative is slowly going out of business due to online competition, it would be a way to do something online simply can't do.

Better yet, at least in the US there's a long history of non-commercial media like PBS (public television) and National Public Radio mentioning sponsors in exactly this sort of way, and no one objects, so the resistance should be pretty low.

Up to a point. Someone interested in monitoring what you do could still capture the display data and the data transmitted from whatever input devices you use. This is especially true if you plug this into a computer of uncertain provenance, but still potentially true for a monitor, TV, etc.

It definitely seems like an improvement in security over just booting or running a VM from a secure flash drive, though.

Given the way people use Tumblr, SOPA could force them to shut down the entire site, or change it so drastically that it's no longer recognizable. A threat of that nature makes it worth stepping on a few toes.

If a site uses a US based hosting company, domain name (e.g. .com), or payment processor, those services may still be cut off, even if the servers are out of the country.

I doubt they would have any legal basis for extraditing a non-US-citizen for a SOPA violation, but there have been attempts to pursue charges against foreign citizens for notable DMCA violations if they enter the US, so that could continue to be the case with SOPA. If a US citizen uses a foreign server, I doubt that would shield them from legal action.

I'm pretty sure they've got the "series of tubes" part down.

Interesting. I've had good luck with ezPDF on my (mid-2010 single core) phone except for the obvious size limitations. It's definitely the go-to PDF reader on Android.

Maybe the ACM papers are just more complicated to display than the PDFs I've been reading? Because I can't imagine how the Fire could be slower than my phone.

But the bill would give software companies the same tools to go after warez sites too. Why wouldn't Adobe want to be able to crack down on sites that distribute cracked copies of Photoshop? Or Microsoft with illegal copies of Windows or Office?

That's not to say this is a good bill. It's not. But if it's in the interests of companies with significant IP to protect to support it, companies with significant IP to protect like Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple can be expected to support it.

Their support is really that simple.

If your job is to shepherd, say, Proctor and Gamble forward, then the upside of boldness is radically less than if you're Amazon. And the downside of boldness, profligate spending, is likely to come out of your margins without ever being made up in the long term.

In a relatively mature segment, operational discipline is more important than big ideas and plans. Since the reward system is different, it attracts different people, and a more suitable mentality.

This is heavily related to why it's so often that the best people from a growth company leave as the business matures -- the skills that make you great at growing a company will not make you equally successful at managing an existing business, even aside from the fact that growth-company people usually don't like doing the more mundane tasks of a later-stage business.

While this could change the game for electric cars (Edit: as others have already been discussing), it would also be an amazing advance for cell phones and computers. Imagine a cell phone that had a lighter battery but still lasted through a week of use between charges. Or an incredibly thin and light battery (and a correspondingly thin and light phone) that still lasted a couple of days.

Or a notebook that didn't need all the power management to dial down the CPU and GPU when unplugged, and could barrel away full speed and still last for a day or two. You'd still have to worry about heat dissipation, but there are plenty of fast notebooks that handle that fine when plugged in.

Or an iPad with the battery life of a Kindle. Or a Kindle that you charged once a year.

Actually rather than being unlucky, I think it would be more correct to say that they failed to get lucky somehow. In the absence of doing something right (promotion, naming, hitting a niche at the right time, having other successful apps by the same developer) or getting lucky (being featured by Apple or a blog, etc.), I expect the natural state of an app is to have sales that round to zero.

With hundreds of thousands of apps in the App Store, it's not much different from building a random website and expecting people to somehow just show up.

I'm comfortable in Javascript, but not a ninja with it or anything. How do you effectively use this to keep what would be client side code on the server side?

You can already write code in server side frameworks and only ship as much code to the client side as actually needs to be there, but surely this isn't what you're talking about.

What am I missing?

TBD. Incorporating user feedback and giving users options are pretty fundamental to Microsoft's standard operating procedure, so my guess is that the next public preview or beta of Win 8 will force a lot fewer changes on the user.

Really, the desktop mode of Windows 8 doesn't change all that much for power users, it just replaces the utterly broken Start Menu with a fullscreen start screen. It also makes this start screen the default environment for unsophisticated users, which is probably a reasonable move.

Aside from (IIRC) not letting you set a preference to default into the desktop mode on launch, the biggest problem with the start screen for power users was the low information density. This should be a setting, just like the default for Explorer is these giant icons and tiles for files, but you can easily switch it to use "Details" if you like to get real work done.

I think the end result for power users on traditional systems is likely to be that they deliver a desktop mode with only modest differences and a start screen that serves as a much more usable replacement for the start menu (and possibly the option to turn it back off). The start screen also provides a better replacement for some other ambient things like the desktop widgets that nobody ever sees because their apps are on top.

Meanwhile, that start screen, set to a lower information density (as was previewed), should be a pretty nifty base interface for tablet users and basic/new desktop users.

I'm sure there will still be some people up in arms, and possibly rightly so if there are some things they don't fix between now and the final release. But Win 8 has the potential to be a significant step forward without being too coercive on people who already have a good workflow in Win 7.

They always allowed it on the old WinMo -- and they never tried to shut down the OS hackers making custom versions. Even Google tried to shut down Cyanogen, before finding a compromise and backing off.

And Microsoft has always allowed you to load whatever you want on Windows, even if they've worked really, really hard to make sure that what most people want installed is their own software, often by bundling and such. (The Windows 8 Marketplace will be a departure from this, but there are already loopholes and there will likely be more.)

They even let you load your own stuff on XBox -- and on the Zune HD -- using their free dev tools. Now that Sony has backed off their Linux for PS3 support, Microsoft is the only console maker to support this.

Microsoft knows that power users and early adopters are a crucial market for them if they're going to grow their tiny phone share at all. Power users and early adopters often like to do things that are outside the box. So if they can offer enough of the openness of Android (not nearly all of course, but enough), maybe more people will come on board for a sort of best-of-both-worlds thing: a locked down platform for the overwhelming majority that cares more about security, and an override for the enthusiasts who want to homebrew apps.

The "startups are like bands" analogy actually implies a different, more interesting model: what about a startup incubator for bands?

Pick the most promising unsigned bands out of a set of applicants, and give them access to smart folks who have experience with being successful in the music industry along with other promising bands?

Bands don't IPO or get bought out, but a deal for percentage of revenue might still be viable, sort of like a manager/agent contract. I have no idea what the potential upside of a successful band is, so I don't have a clue whether the numbers add up to make the financial aspects of this work the way an incubator does, but it seems like it's worth exploring.

The band would still be in charge of their destiny, unlike with a major label or some more onerous types of management contracts. They would just have a access to a lot of insight and help toward achieving that destiny.

I don't know that this is a correct analysis but the premise of the argument presented is that Amazon is taking a small loss up front, but in return they are effectively shipping you a cash register into which you keep depositing money for Amazon digital and physical goods.

If this proves to be correct, then the Fire would be increasing Amazon's sales on other high-margin goods, and the money lost on the device could simply be considered a form of customer acquisition cost.

Personally, I think the most tempting 7" is still the HTC Flyer, which is now marked down to $299. It has a digitizer and a $40 stylus is available, which makes it much more useful for notetaking than any of the other alternatives, including the iPad (in my opinion anyway).

Combine that with the basic 7" premise of a small, light reading device and it seems like an all-around win for users with that particular set of needs.

I don't think it's an indifference to microeconomics in particular so much as an indifference to anything that doesn't seem like it's especially relevant to one's life at the moment. People are indifferent to structuralist anthropology too, just to pick a random example. I agree that people are probably misinformed as to how useful microeconomics might be to their life though. It's a fantastically useful subject.

The reason macroeconomics is on the Khan Academy and has more general interest these days comes from the fact that people feel like their lives are in turmoil due to the economy, the real estate collapse, and Wall Street, and they don't understand how any of it works. Macroeconomics may be incomplete and perhaps even problematic, but it's the subject that can most shed a light on complex interconnected problems as opposed to local specific ones.

Actually, setting up software firms where the best developers can "make partner" would be quite an interesting approach.

I'm not sure it would work, but if it did, it could be a perfect solution for keeping a great team together for the long haul.

No, I think it's still in the creative sense. Consider this question from the Y Combinator application:

> Please tell us about the time you, {name}, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

Other than the allegations of misleading clients regarding CDOs -- which, if true, are criminal and utterly reprehensible -- pretty much everything else on that list fits this criterion. Amoral and mercenary, but about hacking the system to their advantage.

It's regulators' jobs to close loopholes, but we should hardly be surprised when capitalist enterprises exploit them until they're closed.

Fair point. Perhaps I picked a bad example.

At the same time, if you were writing a bunch of random awk-like one-offs as part of your normal lisp workflow, you wouldn't write 4 lines of code every time, right? You sit down and write some functions or macros that condensed it into something simple that allowed you to easily specify things like a split token, one or more filter-on fields and values (or better, a filter lambda), and one or more output fields, I bet. Because it's silly to write several lines for something you do a lot.

And while you might call it process-file-and-return-matching-results or something, the interface to the result might not be so different from the line of awk in the original post.

It is both strictly correct and irrelevant to the topic at hand that the Lisp is easier to read. Because that's like saying "Lisp sucks because WTF does 'cddadr' mean anyway?"

AWK is a purpose-built language for splitting lines into fields and doing stuff with the result, so of course there's not a lot of boilerplate for splitting lines into fields and doing stuff with the results.

Lisp for doing a lot of fancy work with s-expressions is going to be high density code that's a lot harder for newcomers to read than verbose, plodding Java code that is working with a simple LinkedList class or something.

Readability (Edit: to newcomers) just isn't the relevant benchmark here.