alexjeffrey

in my experience, if you can grab a couple of not-too-underpriced gigs on a freelancing website (my preference is PeoplePerHour as it's less price-war-y) and can get a few regular clients from that, they'll be more happy to pay a reasonable fee for a reliable and familiar developer. Bear in mind that there are a LOT of unreliable and flaky developers on these sites so once you've proven your value to someone they'll be more likely to pay higher rates to retain you.

a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator would be nice, too.

no problem at all - thanks for all the hard work you put into the book!

white privilege? don't you mean anglocentricism? the bias would be equally present if Mark was African-American or Asian-American.

we still are - plenty of startups don't even start making money before they're acquired.

truly the most hipster art project of all time. I'd back it!

... and it's impossible to know for sure that a hash is secure against collisions. For example, MD5 was the standard for hashing for quite some time but is considered broken today due to attacks that have since been discovered. By implementing the hashing using merkle trees, you increase the avalanche effect relative to the data, making it much harder to force a collision.

realistically you would want to use a merkle tree to hash the source, to make it more secure against a chosen plaintext collision, but aside from that this'd be a great addition.

it should also be mentioned that Jerry's commentary is _hilarious_ - he's basically the SeaNanners of chess.

but with all the publicity surrounding their actions, will they become more well known which will in fact counteract their star rating on Yelp? My guess is yes.

you say that, but minecraft is worth actual money because it sells a product that lots of people want to buy and has a lot of potential for further attached products (servers, DLC, etc). A more apt comparison would be whatsapp/instagram/whatever ridiculous social app facebook is buying this week for $X billion, without any revenue or business model to speak of.

that's just PR - PR companies wouldn't do so well if they pushed stories that showed their clients in a negative light.

these figures are deceptive considering the UK's comparatively-socialist tax attitude. The biggest thing I would point out is that we have nationalised free healthcare for everyone, which takes a big bite out of PPP but also means that being poor isn't a health concern. We also have a pretty comprehensive benefits system which, although unpopular, provides a large safety net for the unemployed, disabled and otherwise non-working.

The UK isn't some pauper state where everyone's living on the breadline, we just take a different approach to the USA.

[edit] replaced GDP with PPP for better clarity/relevance.

I think black triangles are only really possible if you're working on software architecture - that bit when you "go into the tunnel" and are working in purely abstract space comes with such a payoff once you reach your project's "black triangle". There's really nothing like it, it's a great feeling!