zyphlar's comments

Do you want your bank vault to be locked with a Masterlock padlock, or a 1-ton safe door with glass inserts and an armed guard? That's the difference between unsalted MD5 and salted SHA.

The horrors of Java! It's a single app, and it's cross-platform... oooooh.

Now sit down and let me tell you a tale of Intuit.

Why a $57,000 limit?

1. What deductions? I fill out a ton of them every year and they're never more than my standard deduction. Maybe things change as I get older, but in the meantime it seems like a safe default. "Do you want to try and get your taxes lower than $X by filling in a bunch of info? (Y/N)"

2. What am I going to deprecate, my Civic?

3. Despite being in a healthy tax bracket I don't know what this is.

4. See #3

5. Snoozefest

6. Diverse activity?

7. Yeah I think most of your objections apply to the minority of people who actually hire a CPA to do their taxes.

The bottom line is, for the vast majority of people (even people with interesting W2/1099 incomes like me) you could do your taxes on a napkin if you enjoyed a bit of paperwork/math pain. Again: the IRS already has basically all of this info. What gives?

Also, as an entrepreneur you've officially graduated beyond the resume/interview/application process. The only people who fully appreciate those entrepreneurial skills are other business owners and executives; if you come in and ask me for a job coding awesome stuff, I'm mostly going to care about your code skill because someone else is handling the promotion, design, and management.

Of course you could work in a small business where having lots of diverse skills is valued, but you'll probably be vastly underpaid and overworked.

Sounds like you want to be appreciated though. Offer to work for free! If you don't need the money, help someone you identify with. Give back, pay it forward, whatever. You'll have a great time, learn a lot, and make new friends for whatever happens next.

Great but is this hacker news or just mini-reddit?

That they let you accrue thousands or even millions in charges and then lock your account unexpectedly with poor customer service is the rub. There's no warning, just a surprise logistical nightmare that they benefit enormously from.

Absolutely. Have you seen some of the "off the cuff" town hall style meetings he's had? The one before the release of OSX was telling, he repeatedly said that if he were making the decisions, he'd do X, but he's not. It was very eye opening that sometimes it isn't all Steve's fault (of course it isn't.)

Likewise, it's amazing to see that it isn't all Bill's fault. Here he is advocating passionately for a huge change in usability and getting nowhere. Lots of these problems still haven't been solved as of Windows XP (Vista/7 have fixed a lot of update quirks by virtue of being a native app.)

Generally it's pretty easy to get root on a system. Then you're generally 100% owned. The only away this will survive is on the good graces of malicious hackers everywhere.

Why would anyone buy $12000 in bitcoins, at this stage? That's just dumb no matter which way you slice it and asking for handouts via bitcoin after having your bitcoins hacked is the perfect scam.

Sucks to be you, man.

Microsoft has tried time and time again (with their various .Net initiatives explicitly!) to lock the web into their platforms, because they saw back then (and are blinded by the fact now) that the web is the new platform and pretty soon nobody is going to need Windows anymore.

Just look at Silverlight. Who wants to install that on their Apple or Google device? Flash is bad enough. And yet it's what Microsoft wants you to use to make your ASP.Net app have fancy graphs. L-L-L-lock-in.

Even iOS and Android wouldn't be as powerful as they are had fully-interoperable webservices not come first (killer apps like Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and Dropbox are webservices first, apps second. You can't compete with them by making an app first, they're platform agnostic.)

So yeah, given the chance Microsoft will try and make Windows 7 running IE accessing a Windows 2008 Server running a .Net app on IIS with a MS-SQL Enterprise backend the only option. It's a testament to the fierceness of the FOSS and LAMP communities that Microsoft is losing this battle (and the world is better off because of it.)

I'd buy your argument if Ruby on Rails only worked on Amazon servers, or if by using Ruby you could only use nginx and not Apache.

The fact is when writing a .Net web app, if you don't like the way IIS or Windows Server or their providers are handling things, you're out of options. Oh and if you want those nice features that make the ecosystem usable, you get to upgrade everybody to the Pro version (not just the people who need the features.) Remember to buy the next version, too, so you don't fall behind on updates and enhancements. And the next version.

No, because terrorism is decentralized and the millions of people who (rightfully) hate us now will be even angrier. Which will justify further control of the populace for safety.

You must read a lot of websites that are all forums, plain text. Web services and online stores on the other hand need techniques like this to lay out things in a way that makes sense. Imagine if Wal Mart had its cash registers in the back and only niche expensive items at the front. Sales would drop. In fact I think I just realized why malls suck so bad.

Those sites are designed oppositely. This principle applies to movies and in fact anything with a frame around it, there are certain emotions and intents communicated with framing. Think of this as website framing.

"Most people have seen a gyroscope in action, so the stability of a rapidly rotating wheel should be fairly intuitive, making this a focus from the start. People have built bicycles with counter-rotating wheels and found that they still remain upright, so that can't be all of the story."

Um, counter-rotating wheels are still gyroscopes. In fact they're extremely stable gyroscopes in that they won't impart rotational velocity on the frame. So by having the wheels on a bike rotate oppositely, you're actually making the gyroscopic effect even stronger.

I think Ars is pulling from this article, which isn't about staying upright but is about the self-correcting steering of a bike wheel (i.e. the fact that you can ride hands-free.) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6027/339.abstract -- in which case the conclusion is correct and likely due to the geometry of the wheel. For example tractors have convex pulley systems that allow leather belts to self-center despite not being perfectly aligned. It's counterintuitive but it works.

Those are calendar clients. Now ask Mozilla to write a calendaring server that syncs with every mobile device on the market across 150 calendars some of which have many thousands of appointments each (with years of exceptions to recurrence) -- no mistakes allowed. Also meeting invitations.

This one issue might be what keeps Microsoft in the game.

There is 6-to-4 translation available. So we need to move clients to 6 in order that servers can move to 6.

Apple has a superior update model? Sure in theory, but I'm not aware of many significant updates to an iDevice that would be comparable to the Android update history. It seems like each phone gets one significant upgade before being phased out 18 months later, same with Android except with Android you have the flexibility of complete customization (and the customization is what causes update delays.)

Consider how much data you're putting on it. No phone is going to be fast when you ask it to pull down 5gb of email as some of my users do. The iPhone isn't that magical.