Viewing profile — semiotagonal

Git uses hashes to identify commits, but does it actually chain them, i.e. include the previous hash as an input to the current hash?

Sure. It's the world Americans already live in, except for certain specifically defined types of lies (e.g. fraud, perjury, libel of non-public figures, etc). Of interest: https://…

In the US it is almost impossible for a public figure, especially a political figure, to win a libel lawsuit. In theory, a deliberate, malicious false statement against a public fi…

If you want a short-and-simple username, you need to do what it takes to defend it, even if that means logging into twitter once in a while. Even registered trademarks require acti…

I don't think a smaller number of dumb startups will have much negative impact, considering the huge numbers of highly paid employees the giant "fang companies" have.

There's nothing about GPS that says it should provide continuous information to others about one's location.

Also if you sit near the Android people, let them know I'm going to be irritated if I find that my parents have been tricked into activating location tracking on their phones again…

Thanks for the response. I'm mostly familiar with Google Docs in the workplace, where it was apparent who was reading what document at a particular moment from a list of users at t…

I wish he'd keep it running, then write on lessons learned turning $200K into something much less, should such a loss be manifest.

I think you're missing my point that even if you willingly impose Google surveillance on yourself, Google Drive is still worse than Google Analytics because your personally identif…

I should have made it clear I was assuming that people were authenticated to their Google account. I think most people who use GMail never log out, and might not check the URL and …

Doesn't Google Drive show the identity of someone reading the document to other people reading it, or at least the owner? That's worse than just collecting analytics internally at …

> The good news is that there is one way to avoid this (the only way AFIK) I managed to recover from a similar level of burnout/pissed-offedness by changing my domain of software d…

If I were the sixth person at a five-person startup I'd be forever worried that I was just on the wrong side of the get-rich-if-it-succeeds line.

That's actually pretty minimal. It only looks cluttered because the desk is small. The shelves are only half-used, and mostly in proper stacks.

Learning on the job in an unforgiving domain can be costly.

I did about 0.1% of the amount of research you did a few years ago and was really struck by the irreversibility of mistakes. Other engineering domains can have irreversible (e.g. f…

Discovering new physics doesn't move us away from a unified theory, it just means we were wrong about how much farther we have to go.

This is why having a social safety net is so important. If society can put a floor under how badly people can lose, they'll feel more free to try low-probability high-payoff endeav…