Space Monkey's wording maybe could have been better, but I understood it as they intended and they appear to be dealing with a customer issue in a very reasonable manner.

It's a little discouraging that public "exposés" of startups seems to be the cool new thing on HN and that this is so high up on the front page.

All his short stories are worth reading. My favourites are this one, Story of Your Life, and Tower of Babylon.

I couldn't stand Story of Your Life. I felt it made no sense from a physics point of view, and if you're not going to do that then why write science fiction at all? (Whereas I very much enjoyed Lifecycles of Software Objects)

I can't imagine anyone stepping onto an autonomous passenger aircraft for a long time, not until long after cars and smaller commercial aircraft are regularly driven using computers only. And even that seems like a stretch. I don't see how pilots use or non-use of some automated systems is going to influence popular opinion on that one way or another. But maybe there's a perception among pilots that it will.

The fact of the matter is that most commercial jetliners today are fully automated. It is only takeoff and landing that are still done by hand. No one ever hand-flies a jetliner during cruise except in dire emergencies. In fact, at high altitudes, where the plane is flying in the "coffin corner" of the flight envelope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_corner_(aviation)) hand flying can be extremely dangerous.

Isn't this a lot closer to dwarf fortress?

Since the exploit lets you easily root the install, couldn't zamfoo just patch all his users machines themselves?

That would make about as much sense as everything else they've done....

I have a lot of problems with this article.

> What there is is a shortage of ultra-elite American-born talent, and Silicon Valley wants to hire the very best in the world. The view from Silicon Valley is that a lot of the US talent, while bountiful in number, just doesn't stack up.

So you're saying that the US has a shortage of the world's best talent? And that Silicon Valley wants to be able to hire the world's best? Those 2 suppositions seem too obvious to bear mentioning. Are we supposed to expect the majority of the ultra-elite of anything to come out of the US?

Then the article looks at average salaries for STEM workers over time to "prove" that there's no shortage based on "the fundamental laws of supply and demand." OK, but average price would only rise if the supply-to-demand ratio was also shrinking, not if it was relatively constant. I don't see this brought up in the article.

I have a huge issue with what the article says because we constantly also hear about how foreign scientists and engineers aren't as creative, innovative, or competitive and how countries like Japan, China and India have issues fostering creativity, independence, innovation, individualism, etc., which are supposedly exactly what we need in developers.

Likewise the most talented scientists, engineers, and developers I know are always the ones who have a harder time finding work. Why? Because they can intimidate potential bosses and co-workers without meaning to. Because they're indifferent a lot of marketing schlock or the jargon flavor of the month. And because really smart people constantly undersell themselves. In fact, smart people who don't are most likely narcissistic. (Yes, this means most 'rockstar' 'talent' is neither.)

The average person, regardless of what hip SV types spouting the kool-aid say, is unlikely to feel comfortable hiring someone who makes them feel threatened, confused, or inferior. Even with the best intent to hire people 'more talented' than the manager or existing developers, there're many other divides that preclude there being more than a small difference in skill.

Richard Feynman's account of his experience teaching in Brazil speaks to your first point. Focusing purely on test scores, fact regurgitation, and formulaic problem solving misses far more important abilities such as grasping underlying fundamental concepts and applying them to novel situations.

Agreed. Surprised "Symbian Down By 80%!" didn't make it into the headline.

Agree with both points from the author. The other 2 big ones that I can't get Chrome to do as well as Firefox are Type-Ahead Find, and the default behaviour of the location bar to match on any URL in your history. The Chrome version tries to be too clever. I just want straight text-to-URL matching.

This is the same behaviour as Safari has had by default for years. App developers that depend on 3rd-party cookies should in general already have the work-arounds in place to support Firefox 22 assuming they already support Safari.

Common in Lua, Ruby, Python. In fact, ruby gives _ a minor amount of special meaning to make it more convenient as a throw-away variable, e.g. it can be specified multiple times in an argument list without an error and generates no warning if left unused.