I remember going over some html I had written in person with one of those coworkers. I had forgotten to write alt text for an image, and the filename itself was some ugly hex string or something. When he got to that part of the page the screen reader starting reading off the filename - it sounded like it was speaking tongues! His nose scrunched up and he shook his head disapprovingly: no, no no! After hearing that cacophony myself, I now try to remember to make things as accessible as possible.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Quake Live was cool because it was Quake III running in the browser. Take it out of the browser and it becomes... Quake III again. Which is cross platform. What the hell?
I could care less if the bubble pops. In fact, it would probably be a good thing. Everyone who is in tech for the wrong reasons would have to find something else to do. San Francisco might go back to being a liveable city. And the real hackers, the ones working on real problems (instead of novel ways to share pictures of cats online) would suddenly find themselves back in an environment that closer resembles reality.
Want a really easy and unobtrusive way to use encryption?
OTR for IM. The plugin for pidgin makes it silly easy, just install and forget. Everyone you chat with that also has it installed will result in an encrypted conversation. Anyone else and it works normally. http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/
Isn't it? I came up with a buddy from SF just to ride for a week... and he ended up driving home alone :(
If you see someone coding in the public library, it's probably me.
From my experience there is a correlation between how likely you are to use your phone during a meal with others, and how boring of a person you are.
Have dinner with intelligent people that know how to hold a conversation and you'll forget that you even have a phone.
A <noun> bum is simply someone who has realized they love something in life more than money, and is immune to the FUD of "economic security" - it's not hard to get by with a little intelligence and resourcefulness. These same people (from my experience) tend to be the best parents simply because they can switch from spending their leisure time from <noun> to child.
Bike bum here writing from Whister, B.C. Work 20ish hours a week for Silicon Valley startups remotely and still manage to actually save money simply by not living in the Bay Area. I have a ridiculous amount of leisure time and relocate whenever I feel like it. I know this isn't possible for most people, but I wonder why more of my peers (and those on HN) don't choose a similar lifestyle.
Last I checked, you could not use cluster compute instances within VPC. Nor could you use the Elastic Load Balancer. Just be aware of what is supported and what isn't.
I'd argue its just as easy/easier to "crossgrade the OS" (whatever that means) on an android phone as a PC. Step 1: get a .zip from http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ Step 2: Place it on your SD card. Step 3: Reboot phone, hold down the power button, select "install update". Now you have an android device with the latest software, no bloatware, and a host of other awesome features.