esk

Could please someone give a layman's explanation for this bombshell?

> Assume I hide a ball in a cabinet with a million drawers. How many drawers do you have to open to find the ball? Sometimes you may get lucky and find the ball in the first few drawers but at other times you have to inspect almost all of them. So on average it will take you 500,000 peeks to find the ball. Now a quantum computer can perform such a search looking only into 1000 drawers. This mind boggling feat is known as Grover’s algorithm.

If 999,000 drawers are left unopened, how can the algorithm guarantee that the ball will be found?

Doesn't Google Analytics also phone home? Google's tracking is far more widespread than Facebook's if that's the case.

> "I mean, I literally don't think there's anything to be learned from other people's stuff." That is exactly what happened with Color, which Nguyen never even bothered to test. "I'm not here to practice. I'm here to play," says Nguyen[...]

I don't think there's any other way to read that.

PG, this is only tangentially related, but I've noticed you quite often use phrases like "starting a startup".

Considering you're an excellent writer, I figured you must have a reason for employing redundancy. Is there a reason you don't say "starting a business" or "starting a company"?

For those of us hacking in languages with significant whitespace, I made a simple plugin for treating indent levels as text objects.

It's not nearly as cool as Easymotion or Surround, but here it is if you're interested:

https://github.com/esk/aye-aye

If someone had told me his work had been done by a devoted team of a dozen people, I'd still be tremendously impressed that only twelve people managed to accomplish so much. The fact that it's one man? It's chilling.

Try looking at things another way—he's generously provided us all with an incredible foundation upon which to build our own things. After having read a few of his essays, I certainly feel changed.

> But I think it’s curious that Facebook has reacted so strongly to Google+: for such a small network (relatively) they seem quite afraid of it, going to the point of trying to match all of its innovations.

Why is this curious?

A giant, appallingly successful company (believed by many to be "the internet") launched a beautifully designed, direct competitor to your only product. They promote their competing product on every webpage they own, and they have gone so far as to stake employee compensation on the success of their competing product.

Why on Earth wouldn't Facebook be afraid? Why wouldn't they react strongly?

This post fails to support its titular claim: that Facebook is "stumbling" all over itself. Normal, ad-clicking, non-social-media-expert users love Facebook. They love being connected, and they love broadcasting to world. Facebook is stumbling only once those users leave.

> Steve, your passion for excellence is felt by anyone who has ever touched an Apple product

That's a wonderful way of putting it. Steve Jobs was inspirationally, infectiously passionate about making good things. Rest in peace, Steve.

Ouch! Awesome apps like this are totally humbling. Congratulations, guys.

If you're still following this thread, amasad and max99x, I have a simple question: how many hours did you two put into this?

What's the story behind the name?

Also, do you think the "Built with" blurb at the bottom adds value to the site? I know I think it's cool when I see stuff like that, but I can't imagine a non-developer caring.

I've shied away from Clojure because I have no Java experience. However, I really love Lisp, and I'd love to get some practical experience with it.

Has anyone used Clojure as their introduction to the Java ecosystem? Did you survive?

For those too lazy to click through to the article, the author says that neither pt nor px are relative units, and then drops a bewildering bomb: "I’m saying is when you need an absolute measure you’ll want to define it in pixels." I'm assuming the last sentence must be a typo, because his entire piece (poorly) advocates using pt rather than px.

I turned off Chrome's prediction service once I found myself relying upon it—it was becoming difficult for me to perform searches on DuckDuckGo without it! Google was making my mind dishearteningly lethargic.

For decades, affluent humans have gone out of their way to work physically harder than they need to (weight lifting, running, standing rather than sitting, etc.). Our technology is rapidly approaching a level that'll force people not to use it in order to stay mentally fit!

This is really cool technology, but I really don't want to rely on Google's engineers to tell me which words to write next.

With Windows 8, Microsoft is ushering in native JavaScript apps. It's probably in their best interest to keep developers firmly in the JavaScript camp—the more JavaScript developers their are, the more developers there are for whom native Windows 8 development will be second nature.

Unless Microsoft adopts Dart, I see them fighting hard to improve the JavaScript development experience.

You're right—employers are being lazy.

It's safe for people in HR to mindlessly prefer mediocre Candidate A with a degree over stellar Candidate B without one, so instead of actually examining the values the candidates can bring to the company, they take the easy, defensible path.

Part of the process of employers' recognizing that someone learning online can easily learn more than someone going to a university will be to empower HR departments to honestly examine candidates' value to the company rather than looking at increasingly irrelevant badges on their resume.

In short, employers lazily prefer people with degrees. People want employment. People seek degrees. Universities see tons of demand and little pressure to improve, so they don't. Most graduates skills are irrelevant for today's employers, so they don't get hired. Employers can break this cycle by empowering their HR departments.

Considering the tone of these letters (especially the last one—wow!), it's a bit difficult to summon empathy with their authors.

And I think that's unfortunate, because they have an exceedingly valid point—American universities are making a killing churning out graduates with very few relevant skills for today's economy.

That's not to say these students are completely innocent—many, many American students view college as their "last gasp" of living without any real responsibilities, and they make make the most of that opportunity (rather than making the most of the opportunity to better themselves and prepare for today's economy).

Now and forever, using only the internet, it's possible to learn... well, nearly everything. Once employers accept this, the cost of a degree will plummet, and universities will be forced to offer something well beyond what Wikipedia, web forums, and online instructional videos can provide. That's the only way they'll stay relevant and worth the investment. I think the universities can do it, but they are going to fight tooth and nail to avoid having to change.

All large institutions do.

That's a very attractive site, and I really find the icons attractive, too (though I imagine they'll be unhelpful for people with difficulty discerning colors).

I thought I'd let you know that you have "DEBUG = True in your Django settings file"[1], which reveals your various routes. This might be unintentional.

[1] http://www.parti.cl/icon/your-site/code/users-name

I love and use CoffeeScript because it removes almost all of JavaScript's cruft, making the true purpose of the code much clearer. Ultimately, removing cruft is all CoffeeScript does—it doesn't fundamentally change JavaScript—but man does it do it well.

That being said, CoffeeScript has bugs[1]. I've run into its bugs before, and there are few things more frustrating than dealing with bugs in your language.

[1] https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues?labels=bug...

I definitely understand where you are coming from (and I didn't downvote you), but I have to disagree.

That employee (we'll call her Sarah) isn't being paid to see how a startup is created; she's paying to see how a startup is created.

She's paying heavily. She's losing money in the form of a lower salary compared to equivalent jobs, and she's losing money in the form of losing free-time compared to equivalent jobs.

Sometimes, that payment is very worth it. But it's a payment.

I really love visualized algorithms like this. To less-than-brilliant people like me, it's often the only intuitive way to understand how an algorithm works.

I envy your understanding—I'm struggling to figure out what that line is supposed to do. Is he switching to a different branch, squashing all of its commits into one, and then merging that branch back into master?

In fact, if you're solving "NASA problems", being the first solver even has some potentially crippling disadvantages—nimble competitors can learn from your public mistakes and build off your public successes, all for a lot less time and money than it took you.

Solving a problem can be a lot easier the second time—what had been a tortuously long and painful process for you is often significantly easier for a competitor who had the benefit of watching.

You'll also also have this issue if you're the first to solve an easy problem, but I believe it's less exaggerated.

I haven't a clue why this is being downvoted, unless the point you are making is too obvious. Perhaps the parent was only describing startups that neither give employees equity nor pay them at market rates?

Do many startups try to pull stunts like that?

Thank you for mentioning this—I had no idea it existed! Do you use lazy enumerables in your projects?

I can think of a few fun uses (such using them as creative replacements for looping constructs), but I'm struggling to find a problem that is most easily solvable with these.

Indeed, but that's what the grandparent is saying—you need to bring your own language to the party.