bluetshirt's comments

bluetshirt | 11 years ago | on: Rides of Glory – Uber Blog (2012)

The trouble is that it all adds up to paint a picture of a corporate culture that's a little too comfortable being icky.

bluetshirt | 11 years ago | on: Rides of Glory – Uber Blog (2012)

It's not about who has what data. It's about what's being done with it.

bluetshirt | 11 years ago | on: Announcing Soylent 1.2

... 21 meals IS a week's supply.

bluetshirt | 11 years ago | on: A hilariously sad tale of gender bias

No, but we have an opportunity to be a leader and not a follower. To be on the right side of history, so to speak.

bluetshirt | 11 years ago | on: Bizarro World: World Record Tetris (2007)

It's a pretty icky thing to say, to be sure. This person set a new world record and she's receiving comments about her appearance? This woman performed an incredible feat of skill and she's being reduced to her looks. Doesn't sound like much of a compliment when you frame it like that, does it? Sounds like sexism to me.

bluetshirt | 12 years ago | on: Ludum Dare is about to start

References to "source code" apply only to video games.

bluetshirt | 12 years ago | on: Ludum Dare is about to start

So when they say "game", do they really mean "video game"?

This is a semantic shift that leaves me uncomfortable.

bluetshirt | 12 years ago | on: Brendan Eich becomes Mozilla CEO

I don't remember when Barack Obama donated money to suppress gay rights.

bluetshirt | 12 years ago | on: Show HN: Minecraft clone in 2500 lines of C - even supports multiplayer online

Because it needs to be bigger.

bluetshirt | 12 years ago | on: HTML5 game written in 0 lines of JS

"Most blues are subtitled either no sense of wonder or no sense of scale." - Gastr Del Sol

bluetshirt | 12 years ago | on: LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS

> They are purposefully inserting themselves into a stream of information

to implement a feature that's impossible to do any other way. They have a justification for doing this.

bluetshirt | 12 years ago | on: Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments

Web development in the 90s and early 00s was not a practical substitute for learning how to program. Now, it is.

You make a claim that the low-level nature of the calculator programming was an enticement to you. That may be, but I would hestitate to generalize based on your own experiences. I would suspect that the ability to come up with something that actually does something conventionally interesting trumps the benefits of working close to the metal, ESPECIALLY with young, novice programmers. A few hours of hacking in assembler and you may get to hello world, whereas the same amount of effort in javascript might net you the ability to drag and drop objects around a UI. Which is more impressive to a kid?

bluetshirt | 12 years ago | on: Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments

Oh, it completely does. My niece this year is required to have a laptop for school. She has to have a PC with her. Now, she has no interest or aptitude for programming, but if any of her classmates do, they can easily fire up a web browser and get to hacking, even without an Internet connection.

bluetshirt | 12 years ago | on: Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments

Is a graphing calculator really the most obvious way that a young and impressionable mind will find an inroads to programming in this day and age? I find that idea laughable. Tinkering on the web is the obvious modern-day equivalent that is completely neglected when talking about how hostile the modern environment is towards the young creative spirit.

bluetshirt | 12 years ago | on: Humble Bundle releases EA/Origin bundle

Do any of these games offer DLC? Who profits from that?

bluetshirt | 12 years ago | on: The Get-Rid-Of-Crap-Every-Month Club

If only it was as simple to make a business out of a cockamamie idea as it is to come up with the cockamamie idea in the first place.

bluetshirt | 12 years ago | on: Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me (2008)

They are decided by single votes.

Usually, there are several millions of single votes working together to make it happen. But it's not like anyone's voting in aggregate.

bluetshirt | 13 years ago | on: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

People are going to die. If it's not cancer, it'll be heart failure.

I'm not convinced that what this world needs is research into keeping sick people alive longer. We have lots of people as it is.

bluetshirt | 13 years ago | on: I quit Twitter for a month and it changed my thinking about mostly everything.

Everyone I know who's left facebook - EVERYONE I know who's left facebook - has come crawling back. In most cases it's because they're tired of being left in the dark about events. So as to whether or not it leaves "holes in your life", I guess that depends how you feel about sitting alone at home while your friends are out skiing, watching movies, or catching a show.

bluetshirt | 13 years ago | on: No, I still don't want to work for Google

"being more familiar with Scala than Java" is a few miles east from "cannot/will not write pseudocode comprehensible to people who don't grok functional languages".