One of the most annoying things about translation is that the length of the string may change which can mess up designs and layouts. For example German strings tend to be longer than their English equivalents. Or dealing with languages which orientation is right to left (eg. Hebrew).
What type of database did they use? What type of caching would be desirable? Most modern RDBSes, like Postgre, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL server, have internal LRU caching already implemented. InnoDB tries to store everything in memory.
I wonder if they meant that the default caching was turned off, or that all the queries had "no cache" clauses, or that an additional caching layer (Redis, Memcached) was not implemented?
The back end is swappable. I think right now you can use Mongo or MySQL. If you want to use something else you have to write your own DDL. They hope that more people will do that in the future. Or presumably, they will do it themselves, once they think it's a priority.
I assume it meant zoning that limits the number of hotels that can be built in a particular municipality. I also assume he meant to suggest that established players attempt to limit the growth of competition by being in favor of regulation (permits, zoning restrictions, business licenses) that makes it difficult to enter their market.
If more programmers did volunteer (or their employers encouraged volunteering), even for a little bit, by being exposed to the problem and having an opportunity to interact with the homeless, some new solutions might arise.
I work in the Downtown Crossing section of Boston, which has the one of the highest visible homeless populations in the Boston area. I was also consistently troubled by the number of homeless people I encountered to and from work.
It really helped to volunteer at a nearby homeless shelter (Pine Street Inn). I was comforted to see some of worst cases (including people I encountered daily) have access to meals, a clinic, a shelter, and treated with courtesy.
I was also struck by how many people seemed normal - not someone who was mentally ill or spent time on the street.
In general America fulfills a lot of need with private charity - which can occasionally be really impressive. When I worked at a large financial institution there were lots of opportunities for matched giving and volunteering opportunities. I wish tech companies would do this more.
This is a false equivalency. Musicians can opt out of having their music played on the radio. If they do choose to have their music played on the radio, there is a genuine attempt made by radio stations to track how often their music is played and make a commensurate royalty payment to the artist. (source I worked on college radio).
Businesses take cash to local bank branches, which then take the cash to closest Federal Reserve branch. Most large cities have Federal Reserve branches even if they are not heads of the regions.
I could see myself adapting this strategy, except that my employer requires me to use a VPN client that runs only on Windows and OS X.
As of right now this solution makes economic sense if you already use cloud storage.
Assuming storage costs will continue to decrease and the network accessibility will continue to increase, then I can definitely see myself using it for personal projects.
Both. If hacker who discovered bug in a system should have reported it, instead of exploiting it.
However, the analogy is flawed because if you find a loophole in the law and it is discovered you are usually not liable. If, however, you find a "bug" in an inadequately secured system you are still likely to be liable for exploiting it. Similarly, if you find physical security exploit in a building (a broken window, unlocked) you can still liable for taking advantage of it (trespassing, etc).
However, you point was about "admiration" vs. "contempt." This is obviously a matter of opinion, but I don't share admiration for hackers who take advantage "exploits" without at least attempting to report or taking some other "good faith" action. Neither writing software nor governing a society is easy. Finding and reporting "bugs" is a helpful and productive activity, exploiting "bugs" is not.
I don't think anyone (with the possible exception of the Spotify marketing department) thinks that Spotify will be the savior of the music industry. Most popular artists know this. Popular artists like Radiohead, Taylor Swift, or Arcade Fire either distribute only a portion of their work on Spotify, or distribute it with a delay.
And Spotify is better than piracy for record labels. (i) Spotify provides useful data for labels (at least those that have an ownership stake in Spotify), (ii) the revenue, in aggregate, is not insignificant and certainly better than revenue from piracy (again this benefits the labels with ownership stakes), and (iii) gives them a measure of messaging control.
Essentially, Spotify is marketing channel for major labels.
Just because something is easy to do does not mean it should be legal. A person could walk into a business and find documents with private information that have been carelessly left in the open. That does not make it ok to take and publish them.
There are plenty of physical crimes that are easy to commit. For example, opening up someone's unlocked mailbox is technically a federal crime in the US (even if you don't take any thing and just put a leaflet there). Pointing out that a 'bad guy' could easily steal someone's mail by opening their mail box does not constitute security research.