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> The problem is that it's hard to be an informed dollar-voter in this environment of deliberate obfuscation. Spending hours wading through reviews, product descriptions, and so on…

To quote the book by Google software engineers, “Software engineering is programming integrated over time”. Programming is writing code at one snapshot in time. Software engineerin…

Check out "Uber is a bezzle" by Cory Doctorow. His allegation is this scheme: 1. Early VC funds are used to subsidize Uber rides at a loss to Uber. 2. The deep discounts made Uber …

Dropbox storage is the lead example in TFA ;-)

A helpful little heuristic that always stuck with me from a Stanford lecture by Andrew Ng was, "log N is less than 30 for all N".

I feel your pain. Two workarounds when Google gets it wrong are to put the term in quotation marks, or to enable Verbatim mode in the toolbelt. (I know various people have come up …

Yes, I think you'd call it a Red Queen Problem: “Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.” -Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass

I'm no political philosopher, but I'd say, for example, the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution says the government's purpose is to “promote the general welfare." Phenomena like bank…

This is correct. In this query, the '*' is being disregarded. Then, I assume, more people on the internet discuss 48 and 6 in the context of long division than in the context of mu…

I see what you're saying -- money isn't useful until it's spent. But I think the argument is that a wealthy person doesn't put that extra 98% of their money under a mattress, they …

"If they can only work five hours a day" I appreciate the sentiment, but five hours?! That's your example of an acceptable low level of performance for someone working from home wi…

I'm surprised that you're surprised. Even ignoring Blizzard game players who don't follow the news, and ignoring (presumably Chinese) players that actually support the Chinese gove…

There are key differences between building more highways and building more dense housing. I suspect induced demand is more of an effect with highways than housing. People can chang…

For what it's worth, when I do coding interviews, I really don't care if the candidate calls the function at() or get() or find(), whatever that particular library in that particul…

Yes, I'm eager to risk my life on self-driving car failures; it would be a tremendous step up from risking my life on human drivers (including myself!) as I do on a daily basis. I'…

From the article: UPDATE (2/7/2016, 4:33 p.m.): Google tells us that the website was flagged by another user as spam. After Google manually reviewed the site and found this was not…

Google doesn't penalize competitors in search rankings!

I thought they chose the name to fit their inclusive, inviting target with the console. "Wii Play Sports" -- yes we do!

const is type-incompatible like this: Suppose you want to write a function that returns all the nodes in a tree that satisfy some property. In C++ you have to define two different …

It's the ever-reliable Lewis's Law: "Comments on any article about feminism justify feminism."

The keyboard shortcut that I found is Control-Shift-M to open a box around the profile, down-enter to select "Switch person", then Tab-(Tab-)enter to select the other account. Anyo…

Sam is right about "the wildly-out-of-control housing costs, which is probably the biggest weakness here right now". FYI, some Mountain View tech workers volunteer for an organizat…

Maybe most people who were vocal about the change were mad, while the rest of us happily used it. I do remember how jarring the change felt, but it quickly become obvious what a ne…