$628 is a lot of money. If you don't see it as a lot -- a lot -- of money, then you aren't poor. $628 per family member would certainly solve a few families' long-term problems. And if $206B in payouts were directed specifically to Americans below the poverty line (13.7% of Americans in 2021, says Google), that's $4,584 per person. It's hard to imagine sums that huge not lifting thousands of Americans out of poverty.

So can huge cash transfers to the poor.

Do you have any evidence that keeping all that money in Bezos' hands is more effective at achieving these societal goods than giving lots of money to lots of poor people?

... experimental evidence at this scale doesn't exist. Somebody would need to transform your 1-2-3 stated objectives into measurable scales; save up $206B; give it to hundreds of thousands of poor people; and monitor value delivered to society. Only a government can do this.

Evidently, the U.S. government isn't trying this. But other governments and nonprofits are trying, at smaller scales. In international development, simply-giving-away-money is a hot research topic since maybe 10 years ago. (Shockingly, nobody has tested this until recently.) The research term is "unconditional cash transfers". Google for papers and you'll see that UCTs alleviate short-term extreme poverty (duh) and generally produce a pleasant bundle of long-term bonuses to society at large. For any sensible definition of "good", UCTs produce good value for money. (e.g., read ICAI report in UK, which monitors government spending.) UCTs give better value than clever ideas like, say, building schools or propping up dictators.

Bezos is king of the castle and we're the dirty rascals. He has the high ground now, so we won't have as easy a time building a megacompany as he did.

Twitter's lawyers aren't there to protect you. Those lawyers aren't the defendants' lawyers, and they don't represent the defendants. Terms of Service don't protect users from anything. As far as I can see, they're irrelevant in this court case.

The people who uploaded the photo wronged the copyright holder. So did the defendants. I'm no lawyer, but I find it hard to argue with those facts.

It seems to me the defendants (news websites) must have known they risked being sued when they embedded those tweets.

I'm a journalist. I've freelanced, and I've had my copyright violated. If Vox wants to publish a photo it sees on the New York Times website, it needs to track down the photographer and get a license. That's everyday journalism. It's been that way for my entire lifetime. And I think on the balance, it makes journalism better.

Why should Vox's photo policy be different when it sees a photo on Twitter than when it sees a photo on the New York Times? I don't fault Vox for trying. I also don't fault the judge for saying, "it shouldn't."

The interesting part -- especially for non-journalists -- will be in determining damages. If my photo goes viral, can I honestly claim I'm worse off than if nobody tweeted it? I suspect the publicity of going viral outweighs the lost royalties in many cases. What will the final cash amount be: $1? $200 plus lawyers' fees? $10,000?

I think the plaintiff did the right thing in suing publishers. I hope Twitter users who unwittingly violate copyright don't get sued. And I anticipate finding out the amount in damages: I think that's the really interesting part.

A "vulnerability" implies that there is a problem that makes somebody vulnerable to something. Who is vulnerable to what in this case?

Here's what won't happen: you won't give your login credentials to a third party. That's because your browser won't read any cookies from the original site, and Genius prevents you from typing into web forms.

The author uses technical language without talking about what people do, how people interact, and what people care about. Instead, there's much ado about a variable called "clickjacker" -- eliding the fact that www.theverge.com installs a slew of clickjackers of its own. Is Genius evil because of a variable name?

Let's find out how Genius' CSP changes can affect human beings, THEN write 3,000 words about it.

On cloud services, storing all your files as "objects" is much cheaper than renting a filesystem to store them on. The gist of this article is, "if S3 allowed block-level access, it would be as cheap as S3 and as flexible as a filesystem."

The most powerful sentence in the article is "I can't work out the details." I can't imagine any cloud-services engineer reading this article and thinking, "ooh, I'd never thought of adding block-level access!" I think block-level access is the most-requested feature since S3 was born. The author hasn't described how this will work -- or how S3 works, even.

So is Java. It's unfair to call JavaScript's problems "product killing" ... unless you mean Java's are as well?

I juggle two day jobs, both for responsive, background-processing-heavy websites. One's in Node and one's in Scala (Java on steroids). To me, the Node way Makes More Sense.

Yes, Java can process in multiple threads at once; but then you need to worry about atomicity. Yes, Java it can delegate different jobs to different threads; but then you need to read up on ExecutorServices. Yes, Java is faster; but if you want async file reads, things get complicated pretty quickly. (If you're going to block your thread, you'd better adjust your thread pool....) Yes, Java is type-safe and compiled; but that hinders as often as it helps.

These are two different cultures. Java culture seems to whirl around huge infrastructures -- J2EE, JDBC, Swing, Ant, etc -- that have gargantuan learning curves and ten-year-old flaws. (One that bit me: Java 7's UTF-8 decoder accepts invalid UTF-8 to maintain compatibility with Java 5 -- that is, a ten-year-old version of the standard.)

In contrast, Node culture is about self-organizing chaos. You can deliver results really quickly, but you might need to rewrite your code in a few months to keep up with library changes. And your favourite dependency might not be there tomorrow.

Java and JavaScript (and any other language, really) can kill your product in different ways. Pick your poison.

MSF addresses severe problems (education shortfall, brain drain) that particularly impact the field of medicine. The problem is specific to medecine because it takes a decade of education to train a single doctor.

There is no equivalent problem in the field of technology, so there is no equivalent organization.

There are already people in developing countries who know how to use JavaScript and would love to apply their skills. And they'll (hopefully) be better at it than you, because they understand the local issues better than you ever will.

You can probably do more good, in a utilitarian sense, by getting a job in America and donating everything you can spare to a nonprofit in a developing country. That nonprofit can hire computer people with the money, building up that country's computer-person economy.

Volunteering overseas isn't a bad idea. But it isn't very humanitarian. Acknowledge that you're volunteering for your own reasons, and try not to make too much of an impact.

If I'm writing a paper, I use LaTeX. Yes, the macros are a pain, but I find it takes less time than writing a paper in, say, Word (page breaks, sections, image placement, etc. need only be written once in LaTeX, but in Word they need to be revisited at each draft); and LaTeX's output quality meets my standards (while Word's, say, doesn't).

If I'm writing documentation, I use Markdown. It's simple and it has links. The output quality is far lower, because I expect readers to prefer reading plain HTML anyway -- a PDF would be inconvenient for them, even if it would be prettier.

Generalizing those notions:

1. The best tool for the job is the one that lets you produce and edit content as quickly as possible, while meeting your requirements. In other words: if monospace, left-justified text files are satisfactory, you should probably be using plaintext. When starting a document, first pick a set of features, then choose the tool that has those features and gives you the fastest workflow.

2. Distributing in multiple formats shouldn't be a concern: you can convert pretty much any open format to any other. Your _master_ copy needs to encode all the features you use.

A CS degree may seem mundane, but the skills are in such demand you can do just about anything.

After graduating, I got sent overseas for six months to work for an AIDS-related organization in sub-Saharan Africa. The challenges were enormous and often unforeseeable; and while the job description suggested I would be doing nothing but programming, most of my job involved interacting with people.

For any white person volunteering overseas, the experience is extremely stressful and not at all glamourous--you won't save any lives, you won't earn bucketloads of cash, and congratulations will be few and far between. But overseas volunteers experience and learn things nobody else can possibly understand: your life would be changed forever.

Starting your search? In Canada, begin by looking for the CIDA internships page (the place to look); in the States, maybe investigate Peace Corps; in both, flip through CUSO-VSO and the myriad search websites Google will find for you. Organizations that pay you a stipend or salary are likely to provide both you and the recipient country with a much more useful placement (not to mention, they won't break the bank); unfortunately, though logically, those organizations are stricter about whom they interview and hire.

Watch the ground for snakes, and don't drink the water; why don't they teach this stuff in Computer Programming 101?