thothamon

Phone spam as in text messages? Your email is a whole other thing

I have Ubuntu running in Parallels on an iMac, retina display, and the Ubuntu fonts seem noticeably less "nice" to look at than the Mac. Now, I didn't take the Pepsi Challenge here, i.e. a blind test, so it might just be internal bias -- but to me, the Mac fonts are noticeably better.

C is unsafe by default. You should have to do something explicit to use unsafe features.

I don't know much about the physics, but it seems like you'd want square miles of solar panels, even in space, and then there's the problem of getting that energy back to earth. On the other hand, in space you'd get a lot of light frequencies that are rarer on Earth. It's not clear to me if those could be harnessed somehow. Regardless, it's a creative idea.

Plate tectonics has everything moving, so although I am an amateur, it seems the fact that the British Isles are moving away from Europe doesn't prove much.

I think the author is trying to say that _from a teaching point of view_, thinking of multiplication as a kind of addition is suboptimal.

Because you can indeed multiply through repeated addition (which she acknowledges), repeated addition is one valid way to look at multiplication. But it might not be the maximally helpful framework for students.

It's difficult to account for every possible case while still remaining brief.

Seeking expert knowledge is good advice in most situations. If you have the time, and the issue is potentially costly or valuable to you, then you should almost always gather the best information before deciding.

It does have a monopoly on third-party software running on Apple devices.

Agreed. Unless the long-term need for software begins to decline, if you are skilled, hard-working, and able to communicate and work well with others, a lot of people will hire you.

And then you would be committing the classic blunder. Putting more engineers on a late project makes it later.

To the extent he is speaking only for himself and not making any kind of larger point, I'm not sure why it's on the front page of Hacker News.

To the extent he's making a point such as "I gained nothing from this experience" or that he's asking for advice or thoughts, I think some of the thoughts -- such as working toward your strengths rather than through your weaknesses -- are interesting.

When faced with an oppressive law, people are entitled to do everything within their power to deal with it. Changing the law itself is certainly a great solution when practical, but it is not always practical.

Is this report simply saying it is possible to overdose on Vitamin-D? Isn't that possible with virtually anything?

$50K is kind of cheap actually. I've seen people pay $200K and more for basic CRUD websites with a little extra this or that.

In fairness, if your web app does more than CRUD, or if you expect it will in the future, then PHP and jQuery wouldn't be my first choice. I'm very familiar with how much of a mess an app can become when pursued that way -- a nasty soup of callbacks and conflicting states. As tooling around React improves -- and it's already quite good -- it will be easier to cost-effectively write a React CRUD site.

If you just want a CRUD site that works, and you want it fast, a Rails site with scaffolding will probably give that to you in an hour or two -- with almost the whole hour being spent thinking about your data model.

I started programming on an amateur basis in 1984, professionally in 1997. I'm 52 now. My experience is that coding has become more and more interesting and pleasant. In the early days, I had to deal with under-powered languages that either couldn't do certain things or that made them very difficult. Then I encountered languages that were much more pleasant to use, but had other problems such as not scaling well to team-level development -- sometimes even I couldn't figure out what I had been doing. Languages are clearer now, they make thinking about problems easier, and while this issue has not disappeared, it's less bad for me than it used to be.

For me, tools, including languages, do matter. I can well imagine that programming in Java would be soul-deadening (although Java is still better than some languages of the past).

Incidentally, I am not dunking on languages of the past. Lisp has been around for a long time, as has Smalltalk or Haskell or ML. Many of those languages were not accessible to anyone without a mainframe or expensive workstation. This situation has improved greatly in the past decades, which to me is another reason to prefer coding today versus the past.

Obviously, most of us are not able to cherry-pick our toolset for work. We use whatever our employer says to use, or whatever the demands of our project require. This may be part of why many people find coding to be an uninspiring experience. Also, the problems that people work on might be dull, it's hard to get motivated about a basically tedious problem.

Last, it's worth acknowledging that some people just don't love coding all that much. It's hard to imagine doing really well at something you don't deeply enjoy day in and day out. And your passion can change over time: you might really enjoy something in one part of your life, and not derive much joy from it at another part.

Possible credulous users cannot be the one-size-fits-all excuse for blocking the freedoms of everyone. There are many ways to mitigate any conceivable concern without abrogating the freedom of a phone owner to run the software they wish on their own device.

I don't see that at all. The value Apple supposedly provides is safety. If consumers want the safety that Apple offers, they can continue to limit themselves to Apple's App Store offerings, while those who don't value safety as highly can use a different app store. Just because you value something in a certain way does not mean everyone else should be forced to adhere to those same values.

The arguments are well-repeated by now, but your comment is analogous to saying if I buy a Ford, I can only fill it with Ford gas. It's OK to have laws that prevent and forbid that because it's not good for the people.

Or even better, allowing users to opt to install apps from other app stores.

This isn't really an option if you actually want iOS apps. It's an all-or-nothing play by Apple: accept all our rules, including the ones that greatly limit you, or get none of the benefits of iOS, including the large collection of high-quality apps. And the option of jailbreaking really isn't an option either. Apple does its best to prevent jailbreaking: they'd stop it outright if they could. This is their way of keeping that market unpleasant, small, and marginal.

The argument is that that approach is anti-competitive and unfair, especially since Apple itself gets a large cut of app sales.

I'm not coming down hard on either side, just yet. But I don't like the feel of this sort of lock-in, and almost no one would question the use of a term like "lock-in." Some lock-in is surely legal, even if almost always unpleasant. But it's only a hop, skip and a jump to full-fledged antitrust.

My questions on this are very simple:

1. Did they legally acquire the books they scanned?

2. Are they only allowing one subscriber at a time to check out/read the book?

If so, then they are doing exactly what libraries do. To argue that there's some fundamental difference between a physical book and an electronic book is exactly why people hate the music industry, and if the publishing industry tries to go in the same direction, they'll get the same results.

Sure, maybe everyone is an ungrateful SOB who doesn't appreciate you. Or, maybe you personally are a very unpleasant person to have in any position of power, and that's why moderation was so very unpleasant for you that you quit. I don't need to know much about you to know which alternative is more likely.

I'm a very loyal Apple customer, but if they turned off all third-party apps, I'd switch to Android right away. Just flat-out.

Valid points. My worry is if this is being exercised inconsistently. Is the same rule applied in the same way to everyone? Even Apple granting itself exceptions isn't great -- and I know it does grant this exception to itself -- but if it grants exceptions to some third parties but not others, or does not faithfully and consistently enforce the rule for everyone, that would be extremely troubling.

I feel like they're being very honest. If you (or anyone else) feels strongly, you can always fork the code now and develop it. You and I have no right to the _future code_ that Sentry might write and license under different terms.

I feel Apple is moving into somewhat dangerous territory. If the intent, as documented by internal messages and emails, is purely to protect the consumer by forcing people to use only public APIs, that's one thing.

But, if Apple is trying to apply anticompetitive behavior against certain technologies, if this rule is selectively enforced, if there is any bad smell or anything dirty about this process, then Apple is inviting antitrust scrutiny or new laws.

Apple had better make sure it is squeaky clean on this.

While it's true that your VPN provider _may_ be lying about their "no logging" policy, at a minimum, you get additional layers of protection. Your source IP is masked. A subpoena would be required to reveal your source IP, and perhaps your VPN provider is telling the truth about not keeping logs. If your VPN endpoint is in a different country than your network endpoint, then the legal obstacles get even higher.

Surely you shouldn't depend on that alone. Tor would be a wise additional layer of protection, if applicable. But to suggest that you get no privacy benefit at all from a VPN is like saying your host may be compromised, so you might as well use regular telnet rather than SSH.

I'm not offended. Steve Jobs was unquestionably a flawed person, but also a genius. I personally try to learn from everyone, even people who may have had grave flaws.

I don't know many really skillful, hard-working people who make squat. But, there are definitely other factors. Industry friends is a big one, people who can introduce you to opportunities. Good negotiation skills also matter. Being well-spoken helps a lot.

But the most important thing is impressing people once you get an opportunity. When you get on the stage, you gotta be able to sing. That opens doors more than any other one factor in my experience.

Couldn't agree more with this perspective on mentorship. You nailed it.