This is correct. You will see more posts from subreddits you recently commented in. That's something new I've noticed in the last six months or so. It used to be just subscriptions, but now includes "engagement" as a factor for calculating the home page.

Hacker News bogged down a bit at the same time Reddit went belly up yesterday.

I came back here to read up Reddit as well. It's been a bit.

Microsoft has made careful and deliberate strategic decisions about Windows 10.

"Look at Google, and Facebook... They're making a killing on all of that personal data and ad targeting info. We need to get in on that. Hmm... We control most of the home PCs, what if we just funnel that info back to our data centers. We make Windows an OS-as-a-Service, then no one can complain about all the telemetry we collect. We get the audio, the webcam, and every keystroke. That's even better than Facebook or Google can do."

"Man! What a jackpot! Let's do it! We have to make sure as many people as possible are running this new version. We can call it a free upgrade, people will sign up for anything if it's free. How can we get it on everyone's machine?..."

* All eyes turn toward Windows Update *

"Right."

----

This isn't an "oops, that was a bug", this is "you're going to take this 'upgrade' and like it you filthy little revenue stream."

Meh. I don't auto-install any updates on Windows. I require prompts.

Granted it is a major pain in the tuckus to find information about every single patch from non-Microsoft sources to be sure they're actually patches and not landing craft in camoflage. I also run GWX Control Panel, which has been a godsend for keeping Win10 off the machine (I was actually at the point where Win10 was trying to install itself and I hard-booted and did a system restore).

I'd have switched to Linux already if I weren't a Windows gamer.

I was under the impression that we're living amid a second generation of stars. Early-universe stars were very large, very bright, and have all died already, giving birth to the current generation of cooler, longer living stars we see in our night sky. Granted, I'm basing that off of reading the Xeelee sequence, so who knows.

Which makes this approach seem similar to that heavy breathing about black holes not existing due to quantum corrections. It's headline hyperbole. So mathematical singularities may not exist, and there is very likely a minimum length in the universe.

This paper seems to exchange one infinity (density) for another (time in the past). If there was no initial bang and no crunch to come what was the universe doing for that infinity in the past before it expanded?

The *potential* harm is that you buy Acme ThingMaker 5.0 and make great works of meaningful art, and Acme requires you to pay them more money for ThingMaker 6.0 to access the works you've created with tools you bought that have "expired". Intentional software obsolescence was a real problem 10 years ago. RMS is part of the reason it is less of a problem now.

I still think he's wrong about interop with LLVM for EMACS, but he wasn't wrong about the dangers of proprietary software and the need for someone to keep vendors honest.

And herein lies the rub. Richard is arguing in favor of restricting the functionality of GNU software in hopes of ensuring others don't get some unintended use out of it.

On principle, that flies in the face of everything he has built.

What point is there in pouring resources, be they money or sweat equity, into software that is less useful by design? (Again reminiscent of FSF's "Broken by Design" campaign.)

The trouble is you've forgotten who's sitting between you and the developers. The developers themselves often don't make the call between fixing a bug or adding a feature. Unhealthy Scrum practices often lead to "stakeholders" usually Product Management or Marketing prioritizing features over defects and technical debt.

I've seen the organizational vertical slice approach work very well in the past, but you have to have management team that enjoys responsibility. Once the company goes down the Matrix-Management path, it's more about spreading blame around and abrogating accountability.

That would make some sense if the projects themselves were intended for highly concurrent operation, thus the choice of language, thus the defects in that category because that's what the code is for.

I will say that the all of those languages have very particular models for concurrency, such that misunderstanding the models can lead to design errors in the code. Harder problems plus clever code often yields brutal bugs.

Aye: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.c...

So which connector do I need to flush to get Google fiber?

Step one: corner the maple syrup market.

The mathematics of the problem of Ebola propagation are clear. So are reasonable responses to limit propagation chances. But we let politics decide against science. Who are the science-deniers now?

http://pjmedia.com/richardfern...

Needs a banana for scale.