_broody's comments

Agreed. And then deal with it the same way you do with tobacco and alcohol, with social campaigns to raise awareness of the issues of addiction. We have a working model here for legal drugs that are just as bad or worse.

> Snapchat had the right product with the right marketing that lead them to gaining a large user base with high engagement.

You can say this of any fad. The ice bucket challenge certainly engaged millions of people, but that doesn't mean it's a brand worth investing billions.

The problem is you're feeding the other candidates (and the audience) the illusion that they have a fighting chance against the insider. This deceit won't be taken kindly after they realize how they were beat out.

This is the equivalent of insider trading among government legislators. It's a very real problem, and there is no realistic solution since it is a systemic flaw of the startup/VC model.

It's quite possible startup culture can't continue working forever, and if this is a growing trend, that eventually too much encroachment by VCs will smother and scare away everyone who isn't an insider.

Indeed. Compromising cybersecurity as a means of defense is fighting with a gripless sword. It makes no sense that planting backdoors in all of your systems is somehow supposed to help security.

For one, there has been little appreciable gain from this practice, but it's also way too easy for an adversary to subvert a backdoor planted for purposes of peeping around, and use it to do very serious damage. The more entrenched surveillance via cyberespionage becomes, the more it expands the attack surface for a foreign actor to exploit it.

Second, there is no guarantee at all that the NSA is impervious to the same sort of infiltration methods. If they become compromised themselves by a foreign hacking entity, then that's it for everyone they're "surveying".

There's a number of professions where the crunch time is insane. There's a lot of differences between that and service work, though.

- Those people such as doctors, lawyers, programmers, etc. are paid an order of magnitude more for their time. Without counting the benefits which service workers don't get.

- They're not just working to earn a living wage. Their work propels career advancement.

- Their work is usually much more pleasant/interesting and they like it, which helps bear with crunch time.

Usually in a highly demanding, high-paying career you'll be able to advance relatively quickly and find yourself in a managing position which gives you a lot more slack. You'll also be able to retire rather soon. In light of all of this, the effort is more than worth it. But low-wage jobs... The only place service work leads you is to waste away.

What competition? Microsoft may be shunned by startups/hackers (that could change quickly if they keep turning the ship the way they've been), but in your average boring old cube farm they are absolutely ahead of other sellers in both product quality and revenue.

That's a moot point if there's another viable way to generate the same amount of power without trading lives in the process.

Slave labor also improved your life quite a bit, provided you were a slave owner. Thankfully we found an alternative.

One might argue that the SOLID principles applied in Symphony and inherited by Laravel are in fact anti-patterns which only serve to add massive cognitive overhead. They've wrecked countless Java projects over the years and are now going to do PHP the same favor.

There's even less reason for a scripting language with a GIL to be saddled with this level of complexity, than there is for Java.

You know, even though I think there are pretty decent Linux DEs today (I'll gladly take Gnome 3 over the OSX or Windows GUIs), you are completely right about the community having an awful attitude towards their designers. See all the hate thrown at Gnome 3, Unity and Pantheon... Those projects are the only ones keeping Linux from looking like it's 10-20 years behind its competitors in UI design.

The settlement offer is off by an order of magnitude or more from where it should be, that's what the OP means. The tech companies screwed their employees out of a lot more money than this, and this being a class-action lawsuit $100m means a pitiful amount of money being distributed among the plaintiffs.

Oh, and have you seen Apple's and Google's quartely revenue reports? This definitely is chump change to them.

The endless attention-whoring and KIRF posturing invading my newsfeed constantly is why I gave up on social media. I'm much more at ease without it.

Most of these WTF examples basically boil down to JS doing type coercion willy-nilly. This 'feature' makes writing conditionals slightly shorter, in exchange for introducing the possibility of massive bugs everywhere in your code at any moment. Seriously, f* JS type coercion.

The other misfeature I hate is that accessing undefined properties doesn't raise an error (then, but you can be sure it will make your program blow up a bit later).

Typescript helps to solve both.

Yes, that was an absolute fiasco, but it's more of a problem with Head-Fi banning anyone who criticizes their sponsors because they make their money off of nurturing massive audiophile cargo cults.

Schiit products are battle-tested, high quality and high-value. You can tell the company is run by people who care about what they do.

I definitely like Ubuntu's font rendering engine better than either Windows or OSX's. The one used by other Distros though (FreeType) is like a way inferior version of MS ClearType.

One thing that definitely kills the Linux experience for most people is that they buy a new laptop model and then complain about Linux not supporting their hardware. In fact, the latest Linux kernel image will generally be pretty awesome about hardware support, but most Linux distros ship with an older kernel version.

Your argument is basically "It's not exactly like California". In general, in Latin America, internet access is slower but like all sevices, a lot cheaper than the US, and phone carriers still can afford to offer unlimited 3G plans so people use that instead of wifi. Spanish as a native language isn't a disadvantage -basically every single developer or indeed any techie in the world knows english anyways.

Wow. I just read that article yesterday while browsing for some critiques of The Hobbit Part 3: Alfrid's Quest[sic], and I was nodding furiously all the way through. Brilliant, brilliant framing of the state of Hollywood.

I was ensnared by franchise hype for the last couple of years, and seeing this film was the turning point for me to stop and reflect that not one of the dozen+ franchise movies I saw at the theater in this time managed to remotely live up to my expectations.

I believe all is not lost, though. Other industries have shown the public eventually fatigues from such exhaustive, quality-less milking. Personally I've had my fill of being duped with franchise marketing, and next time I start thinking of wasting my money on one more of these ridiculous plot-less, CGI-bloated rehashes, I'll look for a decent original movie to wash the temptation off.

I agree. Social campaigning will be much more effective than prohibition, that's what we do for legal drugs which also are devastating for addicts.

Prohibition does absolutely nothing to control drug demand. It makes the supply swell until it overruns law enforcement's efforts to stem it. It makes hard drugs with stronger effects for a small dose more profitable for smugglers, because they're easier to ship. And as American alcohol Prohibitionism showed in the 20s, it makes drugs more popular among the underaged.

Oil is only going to fall long enough for Saudi Arabia and the US to bankrupt Russia, though (and they're pretty far along into it already).

I don't know the details myself, but it is a position shared by U.S. officials that Saudis are Al Qaeda's prime backers, though not stated officially (it was exposed by Bradley Manning's embassy cable leaks):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabia%E2%80%93United_Sta...

Similarly, it is known that Saudis are the prime backers behind Hamas. Most of their money comes from religious "charities":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas#Funding

Radical Islam will always go on doing its thing, as long as it has gas to burn. Curiously, the entire West is unwilling to go after the people pulling the strings of radical movements - those who give them money, holed up in so-called 'allies' of the West - Saudi Arabia, Qatar and more.

We will go on for decades killing grunts of Radical Islam, all while they take the lives of countless innocents, and not be one inch closer to ending with it. If we had put the sheiks and Imams funding Al Qaeda/ISIS/Hamas/Boko Haram/etc. in prison and frozen their assets, those movements would have died off years ago.