HN user
http://henry.precheur.org/
That policy is a bit risky. That might diminish the use of other things that reduce significantly the spread of HIV, like condoms. It's still unknown how effective the gel is: maybe 90%, maybe 5%, condoms are 90% effective AFAIK[1].
If you just look at the number of hours, it's "just" a full time job for a year:
8 hours a day * 200 working days = 1600 hours
With 30 people working just a week (5 days), we're already at 1200 hours.
Maybe they got their hours wrong? Or it's not that impressive (I'm a grumpy old man).
Sometime shitwork can be a very good way to find new possibilities. A lot of people do shitwork that's immensely useful, like editors on Wikipedia, moderators on reddit and forums, people who enter all the data into imdb. I don't see how those people could be replaced by algorithms with what we know now.
Sometime shitwork needs to be done because you can't simplify. I'm doubtful that Facebook's auto-group feature would work for me. Maybe me doing shitwork on Google+ is what work for me, because I value my freedom to control my information online.
> Who pays what in taxes is really a diversion.
The "who" is actually pretty important.
Tax the working man more, and you'll discourage working. Tax the rich, and he might move to another country.
There are many ways to raise money for the state, and none is really "fair". There will always somebody who'll be screwed in some way.
I don't know if I like it or not. If you know SQL well and want to switch to a NoSQL database, what's easier learn? The "proprietary" API of the dababase (like Redis, or MongoDB) or the limitations of unSQL?
I can't speak of other NoSQL databases, but unSQL doesn't seem to expose most Redis' features, like lists & sets.
Keep Your Crises Small, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc
It's a lecture from Ed Catmull. I highly recommend it, many gems from a brilliant developer turned brilliant manager.
Husky & HD (another StarCraft caster) both have a healthy revenue stream from their Youtube Channel. There are at least 12 other casters/players in North America/Europe making a living casting StarCraft II games.
Husky wasn't the first to cast. Guys like Day9, Artosis, & Tasteless cast too, and are quite popular. But HD & Husky were the first to focus mostly on "Virtual" tournaments. The other successful casters focused more on "Real life" tournaments. Artosis & Tasteless even went to Korea for a year to comment StarCraft II games on GomTV. Day9 regularly travel to big tournaments.
And yet, none of them make as much money as Husky & HD (supposedly, I don't have hard numbers.)
It shows the power of the web. The old medias are here to stay, but most of the creativity & growth today comes from the web.
I agree that SPDY would be a "quicker" solution. Just modify the browsers and wait a year or two, and 30%+ of the people browsing the web will have it.
SCTP have the nice side effect of improving things like streaming, and games.
As for application-layer changes, I don't think it would be too difficult to do, kind of like ipv6 (I don't have anything to back this up, it's just a hunch).
SCTP deployment will much longer than SPDY, but SCTP seems to be the "right thing to do". Not only for the web, but for other things that use the network. Internet is not only http://.
UPDATE: I just realized that saying that the transition to SCTP will be like IPv6 isn't necessarily a good point for SCTP :-D ... I guess I'm a purist and not a pragmatist.
I don't like SPDY. It's trying to solve a transport problem at the application level. Plus it seems to be quite complex.
I'd love to see Google promote a transport protocol like SCTP[1], and do HTTP over SCTP instead. If Google pushed SCTP a little bit, we might see it pop on Linux and Windows within a few years.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Pro...
Indeed, just to make it clear: There's no more C++ code in the OpenBSD's base, but g++ the C++ compiler is still present.
I don't think that g++ will be removed. Too many things are written in C++. And as long as GCC is present in OpenBSD, there's no reason to remove G++.
The main reasons for replacing groff were:
1. Groff is buggy
2. Groff is slow to compile & execute
3. Groff is not BSD licensed
mandoc has none of these problems. If you want a "generic" roff system, groff is available as a package.
According to http://mdocml.bsd.lv/
> groff amounts to over 5 MB of source code, most of which is C++ and all of which is GPL. It runs slowly, produces uncertain output, and varies in operation from system to system. mdocml strives to fix this (respectively small, C, ISC-licensed, fast and regular).
Yes, the answers' quality seemed very variable: the most critical answers were the most useful. I'd also be willing to pay a premium to get reviews from the "meanest" soldiers ;-)
You should show more respect to what other people do.
You're not the only one guilty of this, everybody tend to overestimate their contribution to the world. How many times did you hear/read about a business guy / manager saying that programmers are a disposable commodity? Saying that "the entire financial industry is ready to be replaced with a lot of very short shell scripts", you are acting exactly the same way.
Did you forgot about the dot-com bubble when the tech industry was the one guilty of being over-rewarded for what was often was no value (pet.com)?
We still need to wait for WSGI based frameworks and wrappers like Django, werkzeug, WebOb, etc. to be ported.
It shouldn't be too long though. I'd bet that in 6 months 1 or 2 projects will already be functional.
> I'd be interested to know what the "core developers" disliked about Git too.
I spoke to Brett Cannon --basically the guy who chose Mercurial-- not long after the choice was made. Apparently the most important factor was that Mercurial was the favorite choice in the Python community. That's probably because Mercurial is written in Python, and was used by a lot of Python projects.
Also Git didn't work very well under Windows at the time if I remember correctly.
Companies can always build their own "last mile connection". I have a fiber optic connection here in Vancouver (20/20mbps), it cost $45/mo, which is reasonable.
The thing is that the ISP (Novus) had to lay cables to all the suites in the tower. This cost money, and might only viable in high density areas.
Yes. I didn't want to criticize MongoDB or SQL based databases. Just point out that Redis' protocol is small and easy to implement.
I've been using Redis for 2 months now. It's a real pleasure to use.
I especially like the simple protocol. It's possible to write a simple client without any external libraries within days --maybe hours if you're really good ;). Try to do that with SQL or MongoDB (Javascript parser anyone?).
Which is one of the most tested, most utilized, most known pieces of code used among modern software.
Sounds like Microsoft Windows to me :)
I think that SQLite is a really nice database. But just because SQLite would work in the browser, doesn't mean W3C shouldn't try to do something better.
SQL is certainly a well-known _language_, but I don't think it's very well understood by most.
Also if IndexedDB has a "lifeless" spec, it might be because there's not much to discuss. Something simple and straightforward tends to requires much less discussion and debate, than something complex.
I think that's a great news. HTML5 adds lots of complexity in the browser, and yet don't address most of the fundamental problems of HTML: security, complexity. Web SQL was another step in the wrong direction.
Local storage wont go away. I hope Web SQL will be replaced by something "better" and more straightforward, A simple key-value database would be great.
I would love to see X die. Over the years it has become a very complex beast. But I don't think X will die anytime soon: Replacing it with something better is a daunting task, but it's kind of trivial compared to rewriting all the applications that use X.
Of course we can run X on top of something like Wayland, but we'll just have added another layer, and X will still sit on top for another 10 years.
I agree that the Fed is probably doing too much. I'm glad to live in Canada where central bankers act like robots and not like cowboys :)
We'll probably never know for sure if QE2 was worth it or not. It's a trade-off, let's hope that the upsides justify the downsides.
Maybe macro-economists don't really get macro-economics, but who else do we have?
There's nothing fishy about it. They buy treasury bonds from primary dealers, which include Goldman Sachs.
1M people viewed this cartoon ... This is scary.
The guys who did this clearly don't understand macro-economics. And yet many people will be convinced that QE2 "is bad" because "deflation is good, I can buy more stuff for less money" or "Bernanke didn't see the subprime crisis coming, therefor is incompetent".
QE2 might not be the right thing to do. But this movie doesn't educate people or make them understand why QE2 might be a bad idea (hyper-inflation is the main risk). It just make people angry and suspicious, while keeping them ignorant.
The great depression has NOTHING to do with the Greek crisis. The crash of 1929 was caused by the financial sector, not by a crushing national debt. In 1929 the US federal debt was less than 20% of GDP [1].
It's not because a looser monetary policy could have helped during the great depression that it will help in every situation.
Being unable to devalue the currency (print money to pay debt), is --I think-- a good thing. It is harder for politicians to postpone the pain, they have to cut spending and do what's needed for the country/state/province to recover fiscally.
If somebody weights 200kg: The right solution is to lose weight and eat your vegetables; not to "devalue" the Kilogram.
I think this includes your salary/compensation. That's probably why they asked you to sign those stock options, so they could say "Hey look, we paid this guy $X for R&D. That's a tax credit of $Y."
The per-capita numbers wouldn't be as dramatic. Canada's population grew by 10% between 99 and 09.
Also saying that "Canada is fiscally prudent" is true if we consider only the Public debt (which excludes household debt). France has the opposite problem, the state is a big spender and households are financially prudent. A country's finance doesn't necessarily reflect its citizens financial habits.
This is still a worrying picture for Canada...
Secure & correct programs don't always have a nice code.
For example qmail is probably the most secure smtp server around. But the code is not easy to read.
Pretty much all the stuff Dan Bernstein writes is secure and correct. But his coding style is just too weird for me and many others.