antonovka2
Re:Why climatologists used the tree-ring data ‘trick’
on Saturday December 19, 2009 @04:41PM (#1005247)
There's an over-abundance of information. All that's left for HN is angry, emotional quibbling by those who lack the basic qualifications to evaluate the data and science, even if they were interested in actually doing so.
Re:How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus
on Friday December 18, 2009 @03:52PM (#1003912)
("Hacker News"? This particular little niche website is fast becoming Wall Street Blog West. People who came for the tech are leaving because of the increasing emphasis on how to make a few fast buck any old way.)
I agree. I found it depressing that your comment was down-voted to the negatives.
Re:Web 2.0 Suicide Machine - Meet your Real Neighbours again - Sign ou...
on Friday December 18, 2009 @12:09PM (#1003450)
As a long-time San Francisco resident I found it irksome that Alex was so quick to bemoan the lack of culture to consume without showing any possible interest in creating any.
In my opinion, San Francisco is a beautiful place for creators.
Re:The decline of the MBA will cut off the supply of bullshit
on Friday December 18, 2009 @12:32AM (#1002599)
Where did I claim otherwise? I only noted that his suggested approach -- which is clearly reflected by 37signals -- has led to me maintain a lower estimation of their decorum and the value of their positions.
Re:The decline of the MBA will cut off the supply of bullshit
on Thursday December 17, 2009 @09:54PM (#1002466)
37signals would be significantly raised in my estimation if you tempered your invectives with less emotional arguments.
Of course, tempered rational arguments rarely drive significant traffic, and lackluster traffic doesn't drive sales.
Re:The decline of the MBA will cut off the supply of bullshit
on Thursday December 17, 2009 @08:33PM (#1002370)
First, Please avoid editorializing story titles.
The submission title is a direct quote from the article: The decline of the MBA will cut off the supply of bullshit at source
Second, this article has the facts wrong. MBAs from top schools aren't having trouble finding jobs, nor have those jobs started paying way less.
I don't have the statistics to support or refute this claim, but the article discussed a massive glut of graduating MBAs, not just the top of the class from "top schools". I'm not sure if you actually read the article, or simply penned a knee-jerk defensive response to the harsh wording.
Re:Greybeard Stories: The Jamming Gyro
on Thursday December 17, 2009 @02:23PM (#1001677)
Unit tests are narrow and focused, and aimed at verifying features. What you're talking about is something I'd call white box QA. Which is valuable, though it's essentially just an extension of design, and has the same limits.
It seems like most negative arguments regarding "unit tests" start by defining them as a small subset of what can be usefully tested, and then arguing against the value of testing such an incomplete subset.
I don't see the point of drawing such an arbitrary line. I leverage "unit" tests to automatically test units of code as completely as possible (not just 'verify features'), and I expect the same of tests that others write.
Re:Greybeard Stories: The Jamming Gyro
on Thursday December 17, 2009 @01:23PM (#1001550)
No amount of testing the former will lead you to realize the latter. Sure, you might happen to come to the realization while writing the test, but you might do so over breakfast too.
You're a bit more likely to do it during a time you've set aside to fully consider potential failure scenarios.
Re:Greybeard Stories: The Jamming Gyro
on Thursday December 17, 2009 @12:58PM (#1001493)
Testing can verify that your software works within the space of behavior that you already know about. It can't make up for your failure to understand the problem fully.
Thinking about correctly testing software is generally one of the best ways to improve your understanding of the problem.
I quite often find bugs during unit testing simply because I'm forced to think about how the software will break, rather than thinking about how it will (or should) work.
I think of it as being quite similar to waiting overnight to proof-read your own paper. You need to be in the context of the reader, not the writer, or your brain will skim over most mistakes.
Re:Apple Gestapo: How Apple Hunts Down Leaks
on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @01:28AM (#998237)
They have a restriction on taking pictures of things you shouldn't (which includes most of the campus), but they don't have restrictions on cameras.
In addition to there being no written rule against it, I've openly and regularly hauled digital video and still cameras across campus without ever hearing any complaint from the omnipresent security guards.
How do you think people work on iPhoto/iMovie/FCP? Check out cameras from a locked facility?
Re:Apple Gestapo: How Apple Hunts Down Leaks
on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @01:23AM (#998231)
This is Apple, not the Government. If you don't like the legal terms of employment, California is an at-will state. Quit.
That said, this article is total ridiculous bunk. Gizmodo has been trolled.
Re:Apple Gestapo: How Apple Hunts Down Leaks
on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @01:22AM (#998229)
I can also confirm that Apple does not have a "no camera" policy on campus.
Or a "gestapo". The security is very well run, however.
Re:The S stands for Simple
on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @09:17PM (#997952)
They're not "blobs" if they are also protobuf/thrift messages themselves.
Re:The S stands for Simple
on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @12:45PM (#996958)
Heterogeneous collections, discriminated unions, and GADTs can be implemented easily in either thrift or protobuf by leveraging inclusion of custom type-tagged messages/data.
However, while the encodings are absolutely sufficient to represent these data structures -- if you so choose -- my experience dictates that keeping serialized messages typed and as simple as possible is advantageous from the perspective of long-term maintenance and interoperability.
Re:The S stands for Simple
on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @01:42AM (#996067)
I hope not. Between Protobuf and Thrift, I don't see the point of adopting a less efficient, even more niche NIH serialization format and RPC protocol.
Re:Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?
on Sunday December 13, 2009 @08:24PM (#993381)
> As an analogy, you can take the routers that were stupidly configured to use stratum 1 NTP servers. These misbehaving devices placed too much strain on the NTP "network" because they used it inappropriately. But it was only the NTP servers that a lot of these routers were configured for that were having problems. Yet no one would claim that it's the NTP network's fault for the issues.
A poor analogy:
- AT&T sells the iPhone.
- AT&T sells the service.
ergo,
- AT&T is responsible for providing quality service to the iPhone.
Re:The real identity crisis of the web
on Saturday December 12, 2009 @03:09PM (#991885)
All of this is going to lead to massive disillusionment with an open online lifestyle. Privacy is going to make a major comeback in the decade to come.
Or, alternatively, it's going to lead to an entire generation's total acceptance of human foibles as it becomes clear just how universally human our failings truly are.
Re:Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"
on Friday December 11, 2009 @09:10PM (#991002)
To put it another way: the only reason to maintain your own backups of your site data -- aside from healthy paranoia -- is because you expect your service provider to fail at doing their job. And if that's the case, shouldn't you be finding a service provider that does it better?
If you don't expect your service provider to fail, you don't know anything about service providers.
Everybody fails.
Our colocation facility has redundant generator systems. They're tested regularly, and have handled failures previously. Yet, when the power went out, three of the backup generators failed, and our site (as well as Craigslist, Yelp, and others) was out for 45 minutes.
The cause? A bug in the backup generator's software: http://365main.com/status_update.html
Shit happens. Sometimes it's not your fault. You still need to prepare for it.
Re:Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"
on Friday December 11, 2009 @09:02PM (#990994)
Reason 1: I pay for my bank account one way or another. It's bank's responsibility to keep the system running and secure, not mine. Sometimes we just can't do everything ourselves and have to rely on others.
You are responsible for reading your statement and ensuring that all activity is valid, much in the same way that you are responsible for ensuring the viability of your recovery strategy.
Reason 2: Many of us host something somewhere. How many do backups?
Anyone who wants to keep their data badly enough to pay (time, money) to do so. Coding Horror is a popular technology blog, and there's a significant cost in traffic and credibility when it fails.
Jeff Atwood lacked cognizance of the risks and made an incredibly poor technical and business decision in failing to validate correctness of his backups and implement a suitable recovery strategy.
Re:All Tarsnap profits for Dec '09 will be donated to the FreeBSD Foun...
on Wednesday December 09, 2009 @01:40AM (#985472)
Colin's statement was in the context of the question of BSD vs. GPL licensing.
RedHat's model it's clearly more effective than simple charity, but I don't see a difference between RedHat and any other OSS-reliant contributing vendor. As an example, Juniper funds FreeBSD development based on sales/support of their high-end networking products, and contributed the MIPS port included in FreeBSD 8:
http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/news/article.php/3...
Blue Coat contributed the new L2/L3 SMP-improved rewrite:
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3835746
The main difference is that these companies make their money by incorporating FreeBSD into their products, are not required to provide all the source to their products, and thus can contribute back improvements as they see fit.
Re:All Tarsnap profits for Dec '09 will be donated to the FreeBSD Foun...
on Tuesday December 08, 2009 @08:50PM (#985096)
This is an unfortunate misconception. Some of Apple's significant BSD/MIT/Apache contributions, off the top of my head:
* LLVM and clang (MIT) - http://llvm.org/
* libdispatch, aka GCD (Apache) - http://libdispatch.macosforge.org/
* launchd (Apache) - http://launchd.macosforge.org/
* OpenBSM (BSD) - http://www.trustedbsd.org/openbsm.html
* mDNSResponder (Apache/BSD) - http://developer.apple.com/opensource/internet/bonjour.html
Nearly all the code to the base system is available under the non-BSD APSL, but the fact is that most of it just isn't useful to the BSDs, and if it were, Apple would likely be open to contributing the code under an alternative license (eg, they re-licensed launchd under the Apache license):