Yostivanich

“Look, you can apply what­ever weird laws you want to your­self. Per­son­ally, I have a law that states that I’m only allowed to take an even num­ber of steps each day, and that I must eat a bag of nuts each evening[2]. But I’m not going to come to your house and tell you how to walk and how many nuts to eat! Not every­one sub­scribes to your god, so you have no right to impose your own reli­gious laws on other peo­ple, just like you don’t want other reli­gious peo­ple to impose their laws on you.”

“If there is a prac­ti­cal limit to the amount of tele­vi­sion a child can watch, we have not yet dis­cov­ered it. Nielsen reported last week that chil­dren ages 2 to 5 spent nearly 25 hours a week watch­ing tele­vi­sion, the high­est fig­ure on record. They spent an addi­tional seven weekly hours watch­ing DVDs, play­ing video games, and watch­ing TiVo-style time-shifted television.”

“Remem­ber the evil maid attack: if an attacker gets hold of your com­puter tem­porar­ily, he can bypass your encryp­tion software.”

“To be clear, this will not be a fully open source sys­tem, because it won’t give users the right to mod­ify and redis­trib­ute the soft­ware. But it will be open in a very impor­tant sense, because every­one will be free to inspect, ana­lyze, and dis­cuss the code.” That’s a great decision.

“If you are demand­ing reg­is­tra­tion before check­out, you need to cease this prac­tice imme­di­ately. It is cost­ing you a for­tune. If your site is han­dled by a web-design or ecommerce-engine com­pany that is demand­ing your users reg­is­ter before pur­chase, I would strongly con­sider switch­ing ven­dors. Any pro­fes­sional devel­oper car­ry­ing out this prac­tice this late in the Inter­net game is prob­a­bly doing other hor­ri­ble things as well.”

“Here is the prob­lem with using the results from New Jer­sey or Vir­ginia tonight to judge the sta­tus of the national polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment. It’s not so much that the races are “mean­ing­less” in the abstract, but that ticket-splitting is so com­mon in guber­na­to­r­ial races that the noise swamps the signal.”

“To me, it all boils down to just 3 things. If any phone man­u­fac­turer gets these 3 things right, they’ll beat the iPhone at its own game:” Pretty much.

“After all, there was no fed­eral act dri­ving banks to lend money for office parks and shop­ping malls; Fan­nie and Fred­die weren’t in the CRE loan busi­ness; yet 55 per­cent — 55 per­cent! — of com­mer­cial mort­gages that will come due before 2014 are underwater.”

A web series about dress­ing like a grown up, equal parts inter­est­ing and awesome.

“And this has a truly weird effect in the Amer­i­can con­text: the best quarter-century of growth Amer­ica has ever expe­ri­enced, the post­war gen­er­a­tion — which hap­pens to be the era dur­ing which many of the founders of neo­con­ser­vatism came of age! — has gone down the mem­ory hole. After all, it’s impos­si­ble that liv­ing stan­dards would dou­ble under a regime of high mar­ginal tax rates, gen­er­ous min­i­mum wages, and strong unions. So it just didn’t happen.”

“Too often in “main­stream” polit­i­cal analy­sis, once it is pointed out that inde­pen­dents have swung in one or another direc­tion, the analy­sis stops. The pun­dit inserts his own opin­ion about what caused the inde­pen­dent vote to shift (“Obama’s far-reaching pro­pos­als and mount­ing spend­ing”, says the Wash­ing­ton Post), with­out cit­ing any evi­dence. It’s a neat trick, and some­one who isn’t pay­ing atten­tion is liable to con­clude that the pun­dit has actu­ally said some­thing interesting.”

“Com­pa­nies in non-network-effects busi­nesses don’t become extinct because they only have 50% y/y growth. They become extinct because they fuck up a good thing and become their own worst enemy. They take a suc­cess­ful prod­uct and ruin it try­ing to reach for the moon. Joel, please don’t do that.”

“The results of an update to the com­Score highly pub­li­cized “Nat­ural Born Click­ers” research, con­ducted two years ago with Star­com USA and Tacoda, indi­cate that the num­ber of peo­ple who click on dis­play ads in a month has fallen from 32% of Inter­net users in July 2007 to only 16% in March 2009, with an even smaller core of peo­ple (rep­re­sent­ing 8% of the Inter­net user base) account­ing for 85% of all clicks.”

“I know the Bible can be a lit­tle hard to under­stand, so let me spell it out for you: God hates shell­fish. You know what’s a shell­fish? Lob­ster. Because of this, I fully expect a ban on Maine’s lob­ster indus­try ASAP. I know that’s a major facet of your econ­omy and all, but you’ve illus­trated that God’s word is more impor­tant than the well being of your cit­i­zens. I’m sure they’ll under­stand the dip in the econ­omy, since get­ting into heaven later is more impor­tant than this life.”

“At least seven peo­ple are dead and between 12 and 15 wounded in shoot­ings at Fort Hood in Texas on Thurs­day, senior Pen­ta­gon offi­cial told CNN.”

“Web devel­op­ers have waited for what seems like ages for this month to come along. Inter­net Explorer remains ahead of the rest of the com­pe­ti­tion, but since month after month it con­tin­ues to lose ground to all other browsers, Fire­fox has now finally sur­passed IE6, which is eas­ily the most hated ver­sion of Microsoft’s browser. Firefox’s steady gain con­tin­ues, Safari remains in a non­threat­en­ing third place, Chrome is hap­pily carv­ing out a small niche for itself, and poor Opera can’t seem to budge from fifth place. In Octo­ber, all browsers except for IE and Opera showed pos­i­tive growth.” Really good news.

“NEC said it planned a ver­sion that used real-time trans­la­tion to pro­vide sub­ti­tles for a con­ver­sa­tion between peo­ple lack­ing a com­mon lan­guage.” Wow that would be cool.

“That’s unac­cept­able. I’ve been say­ing for ten years that the top devel­op­ers have a choice of where to work, and the top employ­ers need to work harder to attract them, because the top devel­op­ers get ten times as much work done as the aver­age devel­op­ers. And yet, I still keep meet­ing ridicu­lously pro­duc­tive devel­op­ers work­ing in shit­holes. We’re going to com­pletely turn the job mar­ket upside down, for the best soft­ware devel­op­ers and the best com­pa­nies. This is a tal­ent mar­ket. Devel­op­ers are not even remotely inter­change­able. There­fore, recruit­ing should work like Hol­ly­wood, not like union hir­ing halls of the last century.”

The mod­ern lib­eral arts col­lege lifestyle.