Viewing profile — billybob

Glad to see this, and kudos to the team. Ever since I heard that they were taking code cruft seriously ( http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2012-01-09-unused.html ), I've had hi…

Oh! I see. I would never do a `git reset` of any kind if I hadn't committed or stashed. Yikes!

I've been using Git for a couple years now, and I don't think I've ever lost any work. Even if you do `git reset --hard HEAD~5`, "throwing away" your last few commits, they aren't …

I would have liked your comment better if you hadn't given away what kinds of cars you like and made them guess.

> 1) ones that give you what you want > 2) ones that drive demand A big part of Google's success is that #1 is much easier to prove than #2. "People bought our product more because…

Do they also sue people for word-of-mouth referrals?

This may be one of the strongest arguments for stopping this. US companies will certainly not want their business to be compromised by competitors because of this rule.

Cory Doctorow's talk "The coming war on general computation" is a very interesting take on that: http://craphound.com/?p=3817

Our reactions to the thought of armed drones firing on American citizens on American soil should not be very different from our reactions to using these against our enemies. Americ…

I don't know, I think this sounds disturbingly doable in the near future. Both your problems are essentially "opportunities to strike are few." But the point of drones is that they…

What about assassinating rival mob leaders who are cutting in on your drug business? Plenty of money in that.

Dang, I don't give two craps about controversial language--but overtly violent sexual language, expressing contempt in a way that sounds like rape? Poops on that.

I think Facebook will decline for a much simpler reason: whim. Facebook was cool when I was in college and it was only for college students. Now my dentist wants me to "like" him o…

"What I'd really like is a single online notification service..." Everything you say about this sounds exactly like hosted email to me. How is it different? To me, the problem with…

"Github as resume" is about transparency. If everything you've written is useless, showing it off is not going to help you.

Then again, if customers are annoyed enough by them, firms not using them will steal customers from firms that do. So the free market has a counterbalance. In the real world, this …

Why does "talent" have to mean "incredible geniuses"? Lots of companies need programmers who are "pretty good," whatever that means to you.

I've heard him make the same statement and had the same thought. Is there any downside for them to add a BitTorrent option? Maybe it's just that they can't track the number of down…

It depends on what's considered an API, and that would be a question settled by courts. If a judge decides that someone owns RESTful APIs, every Rails app on the planet will infrin…

If I had to explain the issue at stake here, I'd do it this way. Imagine you go into a fast-food restaurant. "I'd like a burger," you say to the cashier. You get a burger. The next…

It's a huge gray area. To expand on your point, if you're a socialist Buddhist and I'm a libertarian Muslim, there's nothing legitimate about that difference that makes me unable t…

Was excited to see this, as some friends and I independently invented this game on paper once. DoodleOrDie is fun, but jerky/stupid players are really the biggest downfall for me. …

'It's not OK to fire someone because of their gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, etc; but firing someone because they are "shy" or "introverted" or "not a people person" s…

CS Lewis said that ""All language about things other than physical objects is necessarily metaphorical." I can't find the examples he gave, but from your sentence: we must "discove…

That's possible, but only if they're stupid. They'd be losing someone who can knows their business and could automate their next manual process. I'd suggest he say this: "hey boss,…