How are you going to figure out an exciting new ways to integrate FB, Twitter, or Instagram if you don't even use it? Maybe some 18 y/o programmer will have the next great idea for his generation. What exciting new thing can you think of that the young generations will also think is fun and exciting? They don't just want programmers, they want people with ideas and inspiration. They want people who can get into the heads of the people they're targeting.

What they're getting after is can you relate to the demographic you're targeting. Anyone can develop a system, but it takes intuition to make a good system. In their case, a system that caters to the needs to "social internet" users.

Without hardware knowledge, you cannot have an expectation of how much performance you should get out of certain specs. This is why you get people who thinking throwing more servers at a problem is a perfectly good bandaid.

Supporting unencrypted is in itself a threat. It may not matter in all cases, but it matter enough that it's an overall win.

The main PFSense guy trusts one of the main new OpenSSL people, so PFSense is sticking with OpenSSL.

My company recently got into this agile thing. My department wasn't hit because we're so special that it does not really apply to us, but we do need to interact with other departments. with my limited interactions, it overall seems like an improvement has been made. I have no idea if they're really doing agile or just certain aspects of it, but a win is a win.

To me it seems more like our company has applied agile to User Interface, which is a great fit, but I still question other department's ability to create infrastructure.

I am a firm believer than 80% of programmers should not be programmers. Why is it so difficult? Programming is hard. It's even harder when you're stupid.

This is the answer to why Agile is so hard.

I've never been handed a spec, it's always been my job to figure it out. The other part of my job is the predict what will be needed by understanding the problem domain. There's a reason I get put on all of the big projects and why people tend to come to me first before asking others. I'm also that guy who makes changes in prod because it's pretty much a requirement. I'm the only one who fixes problems in minutes instead of hours or days.

About 80% of the design is known at the time they started building. The designed and built a framework upon which the remaining 20% should work just fine.

When I read about Agile from well respected people, they explicitly stated that Agile does not replace design. 80/20 rule, you need about 80% of your design ready to go before you start doing Agile. Agile will help with those remaining 20% of cases that are hard to pin down until you get more feedback. The problem is when people skip design and jump strait into dev and assume a sky scrapper can be built with no real planning.

It was my understanding that all events need to be reversible. If information falling into a blackhole disappears or is otherwise not accessible anymore, then the act of falling into a blackhole is non-reversible. The reason everything needs to be reversible is because time is just a dimension. You can go forward or backwards, but if information is lost, then you can no longer go backwards. This has a lot of ramifications.

Dark energy is an observable effect.

Budgeted military spending is a small subset of the entire military spending. If the military needs more money, they just have more printed or someone changes a number on an account.

Paper work is about 50% of the entire cost of health care in the USA. Too many types of insurances and time wasted fighting them.

There a /. article from the DoE that said Green energy requires a different sort of infrastructure, but it does not cost more than regular power. Adding N units of power costs about the same either way.