A few months ago I anonymously answered a question on Quora, and it turned out to be my most popular answer ever, by several orders of magnitude. I’ve reposted it here, in order to expand on it a little bit. Question (paraphrased): Why is Office more than 800MB in size, when LibreOffice can come preloaded […]
tl;dr: because that’s what the market wants. The commodity PC business is very competitive. The margin on a typical consumer desktop or laptop computer is at break-even or less. Mostly, profits come from selling support or extended warranties and the like. Imagine you are a PC manufacturer. Due to intense pricing pressure, you are basically […]
SurveyMonkey last month released some surprising insight from a study they recently did comparing users’ search preferences. The result? It turns out people prefer Bing over Google, but only if you label them Google results. Actually, if you correct for the Google brand, people outright prefer Bing. Why does this matter? Because it means Google’s […]
There’s this toxic idea in tech circles right now that’s starting to get really tiring. And it pains me to have to point this out because I could just blissfully go along with it, and give myself that self-congratulatory pat on the back that most of the tech world is doing on a nearly daily […]
Some people have taken Google’s idea of offering security bug bounties, and taken them to their logical conclusion: why stop at security bugs? Why not incentivize reporting of ALL software bugs with bounties? Aren’t other companies cheap for not offering bug bounties? Questions along these lines misunderstand how software development works. Engineers don’t sit on […]
It’s a pretty sad fact that OAuth has come to be a de-facto industry standard for API authentication, because OAuth is so broken. Before OAuth, creating and consuming APIs across services was hell. We mostly just did stupid stuff like asked users for their passwords, so we could log in on their behalf and maybe […]
I’m often asked a question along the lines of “how do I get into software if I studied x instead of Computer Science?” Often x is a closely related field, such as electrical engineering, but I sometimes get this question from, say, English majors as well. So my answers will depend on how much catch-up […]
“You have to pay it all back eventually,” he admonished me. There was a long silence; I hesitated to openly disagree. This stranger, after all, was many decades my elder, and the commander of the vehicle I rode in, at that. It was a chilly October, and the discussion had turned to the fiscal stimulus. […]