zecho

Governments don't regulate technologies, they regulate people. There are a million ways governments (who are also made up of people) can and will regulate bitcoin and the like. The persistent belief among some cryptocurrency proponents that they're invincible to the powers of government is really naive.

Just because there isn't regulation now means jack squat. It's not a feature, it's a side effect of newness and reactionary politics.

If it's not anti-educational, it's an affront to education.

Online education is an actually interesting problem space in the world and Blackboard, Desire 2 Learn and some horseshit software from Oracle is like the best stuff out there. It's terrible.

Oh god. My office ruined an entire afternoon of productivity with this game. Not because we were playing, but because we were one-upping each other on hacking the game. Great fun!

It was Cow Clicker and it was a weird, terrible experiment.

http://www.bogost.com/blog/cow_clicker_1.shtml

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_cowclicker/all/

DDoS has also been used to cause netsplits, which can then be exploited to gain access to private rooms.

Yep. The users with names like that in channels I'm in are actual users.

I got annoyed, but mainly by the volume and persistence of a few bad recruiters. Many recruiters poorly represent their clients. The one that caused me to close my LinkedIn account spelled "projects" as "progects" three times. He worked for Reuters. The problem is gone now, for better or worse. I wish it wasn't something that came off as a humblebrag. Recruiters and head hunters can be legitimately predatory at worst and incredibly thick at best.

Alias sudo

If you measure efficiency as the number of students per lecture, sure. I never found large classrooms to be all that useful while I was at university. I certainly remember more from my smaller classrooms where I was more closely connected to my classmates and profs.

You didn't get it right. From the first sentence in the article: "A Florida woman has filed a $1.5 billion class-action lawsuit against online dating site Match.com..."

Well, nearly every public speech from members of Congress and the executive office and the judicial branch is recorded, with some notable exceptions like national security, but even then, eventually that information enters the public record by law.

The problem is that much of it is difficult to collate. http://thomas.loc.gov/home/thomas.php is a good start for the Congressional record online, but presidential records and judicial records often end up all over the place.

Ideally the LOC would provide a better online toolkit for this stuff, but you know, good enough for government work.

My general rule of thumb with unnamed sources is to completely disregard what they have to say. With named sources, my general rule of thumb is to assume they have ulterior motive for speaking to the press, usually apparent by looking at their job title. My general rule of thumb with all news is to wait for some distant period of time for the real facts to shake out of the mess of people talking.

The front end does, that was built by Development Seed. The problems have seemed to come from other contractors, such as CGI Federal, though I'm loathe to trust anything I've read in the news about this clusterfuck so far. The reporting has been so bad it rivals Healthcare.gov itself in its awfulness.

iTunes Radio has a similar issue with "Never Play this Song" which is found in a dialogue after clicking a star icon, which I assumed means "Play More Like This." On more than one occasion I've found my finger hovering over some element in iOS 7 guessing at what will happen.

EFF is a 501(c) group, as is ACLU, but they both cover these issues aggressively.

I'm talking about the tradeoffs, with space being one example. You can certainly rent a whole house, at what will most likely be more than the owner's mortgage so if you want to compare apples to apples on the final dollar amount, you're going to have to give up a few things.

Sure, if you're looking at the final dollar amount.

Other factors need to come into play when you own a home. My rent was about $1000/month with utilities for about 1000 sq. feet. I now pay a mortgage of $1375/month + about $75 in average monthly utilities. But with that I get a home with 1600 sq. feet living space, not including the finished attic or the unfinished basement and the 7500 sq. foot lot I now have to mow, minus the garage and house space. Per sq. foot of space, you're likely to do really well, if space is what you need.

There are three main reasons I bought: 1) I have a young daughter and I thought she might like a yard. 2) I'm tired of the noise from apartments and 3) the interest rates were about as close to free as I think they'll get for a long time and I plan to stick around here for at least the next decade or so.

In your case, you might not need the space or want the hassle of maintenance.

Personally I think making the rent vs. buy argument into an investment argument is ultimately worthless. There are better investments out there, like your time. Shelter is not an investment, it's a basic human need. Buy/rent exactly what you need and nothing more. It's a lifestyle choice. Put your money to work in real markets.

Living in a geodesic dome will probably ruin your social life, but if you don't need a social life, great!

That's most likely untrue unless you find a rent controlled apartment or you compare apples to oranges in housing. Sure if you compare an $800/month 1-bedroom flat to the mortgage on a quarter million dollar home, there will not be parity, but you need to compare apples to apples. In my area, $800/month is standard for a very modest 1-bedroom apartment with maybe heat paid. $800/month can also pay the mortgage and utilities on a small 3-bedroom rambler.

Rent tends to increase exponentially at around 2-3% per year. The difference is that generally homes are a store of money in relation to inflation and rent is not. On a fixed 30-year mortgage, that $800/month will only fluctuate with the cost of utilities and taxes.

The obvious tradeoff is that it's easier for a renter to become mobile to follow jobs and presumably increased pay, but really it's a lifestyle choice.

Here, the NY Times made this all into a graphic awhile back.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calcula...

We do this at my job. We try to come up with projects that are good fits for the candidate, usually a small version of a problem we've recently dealt with.

It's not a first line, though. We tend to start by actively recruiting/headhunting. We cherish recommendations from current or past employees, but we'll also open the position to all on the off chance we get a good application through traditional routes. HR only becomes involved with the process after an offer has been accepted or if the hiring manager has questions/concerns.

After an informal lunch with the hiring manager, you'll be invited to meet with some senior developers for about an hour. These meetings are mostly to figure out what the candidate thinks their strengths and weaknesses are and gives us a chance to talk about the stuff we plan to work on in the near and not-so-near future.

Once we have a fairly basic understanding of each other, we'll come up with a project. Think your strength is on the front end? Here's an API we wrote. Build a widget with the data. Think you're strongest at databases? Great, here's a database project.

We don't care if you have a lot of questions or if you fill in the blanks. We give as little direction as possible at first on purpose. Write it in whatever language you want to write it in. We want to see how the candidate works. If they ask questions, great. If they don't, great. Do they ship something?

We make sure to stress there's no wrong answers. At all. The projects are designed around your perceived strengths because we'll figure out your weaknesses and will compensate for those during the 90-day trial period all new hires have to go through anyway.

The point is to see something we can discuss in a later, final round. Even failure to complete is acceptable, so long as you can articulate why.

None of this is hard and fast. We have had candidates who, for whatever reason, can't or won't write code outside of their current position. We'll adjust. Our process isn't rigid at all. We try our best to take a holistic approach. It's only bit us in the ass twice, mostly due to culture issues because the hiring manager made his decisions unilaterally. Since then, all senior devs and a few others on the team meet all candidates before hire and can give management input.

I hear this quite often about Github and it's a bit disturbing to me. If I heard an editor judge an author's work based on what that author posts to twitter, I'd be horrified.

I can't be the only person on Github that uses it primarily as a junk drawer full of bad implementations and abandoned "projects" that were more quick and dirty personal itches. Sometimes I'll contribute to random OSS, but the vast majority of GH for me is just a place to store random ideas, many of which were just toying around with some new tool or whatever and would never see the light of day in production without given much more thought.

Honestly, if you want to see code samples, you're probably better off watching the person work through a problem. Give prospective hires a project. Whether its as simple as fizzbuzz or as difficult as a trial week is up to you, I suppose.

I'm not really talking about on the spot knowledge, though. After awhile, you should just know things. If every time you sat down to write a program, you had to look up the definition of a variable, you'd be in for quite a difficult time.

Some knowledge, like history or literature or even science outside of your field, doesn't really have an apparent application. I'm not really arguing against applied knowledge, but I'm saying that personal edification is a very good thing. Connections pop up in the strangest ways. In fact, I'd argue that without a degree of memorization, research skills will be lacking in most people, as they wouldn't have a clue where to begin.

Oops. My bad. I fixed it. Thanks.

I believe that's the idea, yes. Small communities tend to be underserved for news content and local businesses don't want/need to advertise in their region's metro news sites, but may be interested in something more local.

Imagine a disease in the modern world today that primarily affects young children and causes parents to bleach the streets and sidewalks. Local officials quarantine blocks of neighborhoods when someone is found with the disease, because they don't know what else to do. Now imagine someone was selling a cure at the time. There would be riots, the seller would be strung up, and his drugs/methods would be copied.

I think we have great difficulty today understanding what life was like in parts of America with epidemic breaks before there was a vaccine for polio. There were children in iron lungs for weeks.

I can't imagine anyone developing a vaccine or a cure for something like that and not simply giving it away. The breakthrough with polio doesn't compare to anything else in patentable medicine. Salk's work stands alone.

Facts are the building blocks of argument. One shouldn't expect an 8th grader in 1912 or 2013 to have particularly well-developed arguments until they understand basic facts. You might think "rote memorization" has little value, but I have to disagree with that here. We're not talking memorization of mathematical theorem without proving them. We're talking about having a rather basic understanding of the world in a handful of subjects.

Yes it's easy to look at a map if you're unsure which countries border Turkey. It's much easier to remember which countries border Turkey if you've studied geography, which allows you to move on from looking up the basics every time so that you can have a deeper understanding of the subject.

I agree, but a very damning statistic is buried at the end of the article. The vast majority of these 1-star reviewers don't have other reviews on Amazon, which seems very odd, considering the book's subject matter is wonkish.

I agree with this, but data for data's sake is worthless, which is where many life hackers get lost in the weeds.

Knowing your calorie count helps you understand where you may be overestimating your exercise and underestimating your intake, which is a common problem when people try to lose weight. As you gain more experience, the data itself becomes less and less useful.

I'm not convinced that ever-more-granular access to data (such as precise micronutrients) makes people any healthier than those who don't pay attention to them.

All things in moderation. Including moderation.

I don't know. Often I'm not sure if I want the job or not whem I apply, so I see interviews as an opportunity to learn more about the company. Many companies are very different in what they ask for in a listing and what they're actually like. It goes both ways.

Where I think bicycles.se tends to excel is less on the mechanical aspects of cycling and more on the technical aspects of riding. There have also been interesting discussions that are more esoteric, too, like how to get your bike on an airplane while avoiding fees.

His wife and friends continue to maintain the site, as does his bike shop.