Hmm.. let's not criticize the situation now because it was much worse in the past. But I'm not shocked you used that argument given your apologist comments on other posts related to the National Sorority Agency on HN.
You might have a point if I was arguing that the NSA spying isn't bad because the FBI used to be worse. But I'm specifically responding to the "boiling frog" reference in lazyjones's post. The whole premise of the "boiling frog" is that things get worse for the frog over time, but slowly enough that it doesn't notice until it's cooked. The boiling frog analogy, and various slippery-slope lines of reasoning, seem quite inconsistent to me with the general trajectory of civil liberties over the last 100 years.
It's a very good argument, because the suggestion that we've abandoned some golden age of individual liberty in the US is not rooted in fact. The individual has far more standing in conflict with the state than used to be the case.
I just never understood the grand benefits of imposing NDA on iOS/OSX pre-release versions. I can't picture this giving Apple a big strategic advantage over its competitors in mobile OS.
I think a big part of the reason is that they don’t want random people posting on the internet about all the bugs they encountered with prerelease software and how much it sucks, because it can taint people’s opinions of the final product.
I kinda figured that part but to me that's a very very archaic way of thinking given that a significant number of people will eventually break the NDA and hint about bugs.
The root of this problem, I think, is that Apple requires the $100 membership fee (and thus provide a developer account) even for testing apps on one's own device. If Apple, instead required this fee (and gave developer accounts) only when somebody has submitted an app for publishing on the App store for the first time, then there would be a legitimate filter against people who like to download betas just for experimenting or are plain nincompoops pretending to be tech bloggers.
As an added benefit, by doing this, Apple would also invite a LOT more developers into its fold who would like to experiment with apps on their own device without committing to publishing any.
If iOS7 serves as an example, this would be a terrible idea. Betas 1/2 were nowhere near acceptable for day-to-day usage, and while the new betas are better, I still get app crashes and even phone restarts every once in a while. Letting everybody use the beta from the very beginning would be the far worse thing they could do: all of a sudden, with no notice, every developer out there would be forced to fix crashes asap to avoid millions of people complaining about it. And it would pretty quickly cause people to hate apple's phones, because they "crash all the time."
The GP wants to limit the betas to what I will refer to as actual developers, measured by those who have submitted an app, so you both want it to be more restricted than it is.
IMHO, typing on iPad is stupid not necessarily because of the typing experience (I'm actually not terrible at it), but because the screen size above the virtual keyboard is too little. I want to write with a sufficient amount of text around the area where I am writing to give me full context. That's how I have been trained and and so have most people. I'm not sure why this would baffle anybody.
Actually advertising and marketing optimization is a very critical problem that hasn't been completely solved yet, especially when privacy concerns are taken into consideration. It is critical towards keeping the Web free and create a more inter-connected economy. While this will obviously have the side-effects of "frivolous" analytics, there is indeed a dearth of enough hybrid practitioners-researchers in data science today. It will probably saturate in 5-10 years but I'm no analyst to predict that.
Should I start putting every substantial R/Python script I write, even if they are based on some tutorials, on the Github/Personal-Website? Is that how I "show"? I missed the Github bus for all my previous projects.
