I'd phrase it more like, Thiel paid for people to sue them for their repeated wrong-doings, until one day Gawker finally said "WHAT, YOU THINK YOU CAN HURT US? YOU CAN'T HURT US IF WE KILL OURSELVES FIRST" and then they proceeded to publicly antagonize the judge, violate court orders, knowingly misrepresent their finances to the court and testify under oath that they'd publish child porn. And that's just the highlight reel.

It's all well and good to make another site, but let's be honest: reddit does about as good a job as anyone is going to do with a centralized discussion service. The only possible way to improve it is to create a decentralized alternative.

EFF has a pretty good open letter explaining their reasoning. In short: DRM is a fool's errand. It doesn't work. Everything on Netflix, Spotify, Amazon or anywhere else can be pirated despite the DRM. At no point as any DRM ever resolved any of these copyright infringement issues, and it never will, because the person you're trying to guard the secret from is the person who you're trying to reveal the secret to. It's a mathematical non-starter. Meanwhile, it does succeed in closing off devices, and criminalizing tinkerers who wish to repurpose the devices they've purchased for reasons which have nothing at all to do with piracy.

Prior to this, the status code registry officially listed for 418 has been "unassigned." This meant that there was objectively a gap between what IETF considered to be standard, and what actual widely-deployed software considered to be standard. Something needed to change. I guess this guy just wanted to make it consistent, and for one reason or another decided to start by putting the objective technical needs above our own human desire for fun.

I think a lot of us have wondered, how will the next generation of innovators possibly upset titans like Google? They have unthinkable amounts of money and resources, along with an impressive portfolio of talent, patents and subsidiaries. The answer is that they will voluntarily commit suicide by eroding all trust in their brand, and driving off their most productive people in favor of shit-stirrers, and stifling the creativity and independence of employees who might be able to invent the next big thing -- or avoid the next big disaster.

Good work, Google. Thanks for clearing the way for the next batch.

As I understand it, his track record with the domesticated ones is pretty bad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I remember when everyone hated him for not actually knowing anything and writing heavily-slanted pieces on whatever bullshit stories people told him that flattered his politics. Little did we know then that the future of blogging was a world of Jon Katzes.

The true test of any language is whether it can be self-descriptive, so obviously it should have been written in itself. Also, it doesn't make use of any of the modern breakthroughs in semantic design theory, like functional re-isms, kwanzaa clauses or multilevel reflexisms. You know what? I'll just implement my own and show everyone how it ought to work.

He was the only beta test user, but the product is successfully continuing to answer e-mails for him.

Huh? I think if you read that program and don't know that `C++ > C` == false, you don't know how the post-increment operator works and you're not much of a C programmer.

"This time will be different."
"A rewrite will fix everything."
"This will make it future-proof."
"I'll go to bed after I write this last part."

Well, I'm a bit confused by that. I hear people say that, and then I see stuff like this: https://www.informationliberat...

In this case, a user tested Twitter's consistency by reporting two posts from two different accounts. The first said, "I fucking hate white people and their inconsiderate asses for voting for Trump. Fuck you." The second post changed two words: "I fucking hate black people and their inconsiderate asses for voting for Clinton. Fuck you."

Twitter "carefully reviewed" the anti-white post, and determined that it did not violate their rules. The anti-black was found to be a rule violation, and the account was suspended. Why should I not take that to be a clear example of bias?

Twitter wants to have it both ways: it wants to have a big room where they can put in all the liberals and conservatives, all the Islamists and Zionists, and have them talk about whatever is happening in their world... and then it wants them all to get along. It doesn't work that way.

To put it more technically, Twitter's problem is that, as a social network, it reflects a connected graph of hundreds of millions of people. A lot of those people aren't going to like each other very much. Now they're making themselves responsible for the safety of their users, and that does two really bad things:

1) It announces that Twitter is presently an unsafe platform, and
2) It puts them in the middle of whatever fight any two people might have, equipped with no tools to resolve the underlying conflicts that drive those fights, and only their own subjective morals (with all the attendant biases those bring) to resolve them.

Twitter is at war with itself here.

I don't believe that's true at all. The Y2K bug was an example of a problem that was foreseeable in the requirements of the program. Scientists in 1980 actually predicted that the year 2000 might happen in as little as 20 years.

But if I have a problem where the upper bound on the number of calls to my recursive function that is much lower than the very large number of calls it would take to actually run out the stack, then there's no point in worrying about a stack overflow that is simply never going to happen. I'm not gonna buy 50 pounds of steak for a dinner party where I only invited 8 people.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say "you run out of stack pretty quickly." You run out of space in an 8-bit int "pretty quickly," but I still use those when the situation calls for it and I know I'm never going to need that much range. I don't get to use recursion often, but when I do, it improves readability and elegance. In most cases, I value those more than execution time or a restriction on domain that I was never going to exceed in the first place.