azza-bazoo's comments

I love services for app notifications but despair that there are so many -- having a management layer on top of all of them sounds awesome!

This is such an awesome, anachronistic mix of the shiny new and the internet of yore.

It's a shame MUDs expect you to be constantly interacting, I keep being slow and having them time out on me (then having to ;;reset to revive the session ...)

I hope they publish a post-mortem when all is resolved, it'd be an interesting read. I remember hearing that they had a fairly complex mix of MySQL, Riak, and Varnish caching, in what sounded like a reasonably well-thought-out design.

Also, there's probably a fail-whale joke in here somewhere :-)

> You still have the same email client you paid for, you weren't paying for future features.

Although I agree, if you look through the other Sparrow threads there's a strong theme of "I paid with the expectation of future improvements". And that doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, given how quickly they'd shipped improvements before.

It feels like there's some larger argument here around what exactly you're buying when you pay for software. After all, many small vendors say things like "pay us so we can continue our work", which certainly suggests you'll be getting more in future.

I wonder what the false-negative rate of this algorithm is. 99% (which I assume is the true-positive rate) is certainly impressive for such a simple test, though.

It would be all kinds of awesome if this turns into something that can be done reliably and routinely!

Edit: seems like 99% is only for later stages of Parkinson's, and the accuracy number is just off a 50-person sample. Less impressive, but still cool. http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/07/03/new-softw...

... which still doesn't excuse them not running with the idea and continuing to improve. Sparrow did; maybe I should have said "shifting further".

(And yes, Gmail popularized conversation view, but it was talked about at IBM Research and Microsoft Research years earlier. Of course, those guys are even worse at delivering innovative interfaces.)

> Gmail is pretty much perfect

There isn't any room for improvement in Gmail? Really? It's still using the same basic design of every email client since forever (labels/mailboxes at the left, inbox shows a time-sorted list of messages, click through a message to read).

Meanwhile Sparrow showed what was possible if you sit down and at least tried to rethink the email interface -- with things like gestures, or by shifting towards streams rather than lists.

Wow. Hopefully this will give Gmail the kick in the pants it needs ... the interface really hasn't changed that much since the early days.

(Well, of course it's been prettified a bit, but besides a few things like Priority Inbox there have been scant few changes to the interaction. And I always liked that using Sparrow felt different to using the Gmail web interface.)

I was hoping for less "here's how your commit message should be formatted", and more "here's what your message should say". Though at least the blog it links to[1] discusses the latter.

No guidance on how many changes should make up one good commit (versus several)? No rules on referencing the issue tracker, or changes made by other contributors? No suggestions for when to put useful information (like "always do x when calling y()") in the commit or in a wiki or something?

[1] http://who-t.blogspot.com.au/2009/12/on-commit-messages.html

I don't think it's a symptom of hype in the Valley. (The high rents in general, sure. But not the hacker hostels.) As others mentioned, the whole point of being in the Valley in the first place is to be around other people doing similar things, because it's more fun that way.

But if you just step off a plane at SFO and walk around, you're not guaranteed to find people doing startups, especially if you don't know which coffee shops they frequent. Speaking from experience, staying at somewhere like Chez JJ means an instant connection to a community of smart and similarly-inclined people. It really is great for folks new to the Valley ("on the bottom rung"), and I think the article got at least that point correct.

"a program is without value before it is used by an end user for something valuable"

Nice snippet of advice there. Also the rest of Trygve's original post is an excellent reminder (and in simple terms) of MVC as an idea, rather than MVC as a label to slap on the next bit of JS code you publish on github ... which is basically all the intro paragraph says.

I agree with the last paragraph in the article -- it's pretty crazy to see Google anointing this software update as special and rushing it out so much faster than normal Android updates.

I mean, I get it, this is a headline-grabbing issue and they need to act to keep a flagship phone on the market, and it's Google writing this patch rather than the phone manufacturer. But if it's okay to fast-track and skip some of the process for this patch, why not others?

The title is a bit silly, of course science has advanced since the 1500s and you need to focus on one sub-field to make a contribution. But I think the point towards the end is a good one -- that advancements in science will increasingly require effort put to organising teams, and improving institutions to support research.

He mentions patents, which we all know are broken, and financial firms poaching scientists ... and funding, which everyone I know in grad school complains about one way or another (i.e. "we could do better work if it weren't for all the grant applications"). But I doubt that worthwhile change will happen to any of these in a hurry.

It seems to ... generate different robot images, based on the names you type in, I guess?

Maybe this person hadn't had much chance to network beyond their coworkers or people otherwise connected to the company? Depending on how they got fired, I could see how that might create a sense of being excluded from the bit of the community they could see.

In other words, maybe they hadn't yet come to appreciate that there are multiple tech communities with all kinds of diverse characters.

Sure, 'twas obvious sarcasm, my bad. But there are good reasons for China's economy to grow sustainably for some time yet (emerging middle class, manufacturing going more high-tech, etc). They have major structural problems too, but it's not all doom-and-gloom like Japan is/was.

Sad but true. I love PHP, but it's like the Internet Explorer of (web-)server side languages. First there was the ordeal of dragging folks off 3 and onto 4, then 4 to 5, now 5.2 to 5.3 ... I look forward to writing PHP 6 code in my hovercar ;-)

I think you might be missing the point, though. The argument is that we're collecting exponentially more data about the brain, but that data doesn't translate directly to understanding.

You mentioned Phineas Gage. That case led to the idea of regions of the brain controlling different things, which led to lobotomy as a psychiatric treatment, which was used up until the 1960s or so. Then chemical methods improved, and people came to understand that neurotransmitters played a role too, which led to antidepressants and other drugs. Those drugs have improved, but their design hasn't changed that much in the last few decades. Obviously this is over-simplified -- but it doesn't sound like an exponential growth of understanding to me.

Um, no. Japan's economy has been stagnant for close to twenty years now. China's economy has plenty of growth left in it.

Although you're right that much of the scared-of-China crowd are just people who've transplanted their fears away from Japan.

Agreed. These are the same Chinese authorities that refuse to publish key economic statistics, or blatantly make them up. They also have trouble keeping track of government debt -- just this week there were reports about regional government loans that have been kept hidden. And then there's the housing bubble developing in the major cities because it's been so easy to get private loans the last two years.

Chinese officials can do many things, but they aren't magicians, and won't be fixing anything overnight.