Jebdm

Cool, I guess, but I'm not really sure what the market for this is.

It'd be cool, but there are a few things to worry about:

- Bugs in the system are dangerous; for instance, if I did my quiz in an hour but it got submitted as two, my job opportunity could be lost

- People will get around your anti-cheating methods

- People will practice or memorize solutions to your quiz (while there's no problem with practicing, this allows people who are good at solving your quiz but bad at programming in general to get through)

- Code comparison may not be useful, especially since a lot of tasks will lend themselves to being expressed in just a few ways which most code will use

- Defining a useful metric for "how good your code is" is tricky, possibly impossible

It'd be especially good if your quizzes asked for things that needed to be implemented anyways. It'd be a nice, cheap way to build up an open-source code repository.

Honestly, I'd probably do the quizzes just for fun. Now that I think about it, something similar already exists which I do play for fun: http://projecteuler.net/

Altogether, it sounds like a good idea if you can get the details right.

"Somewhat", as in it has some mild nudity and sexually suggestive poses, rather than showing any genitalia or actual sexual acts. There's hardcore porn, and there's softcore porn, and then there's this.

Ah, that's what you meant. You just have to click on the original page to shift it back. It was intuitive to me, but I can definitely see people not realizing it. You're right, they should definitely indicate how to get back in some way.

I'd say that some of the ads are somewhat pornographic, yeah. That said, I think it's fairly standard practice for anyone producing pornographic material, and more importantly anything which could be construed as pornographic, to get a release, just to be safe. In fact, people almost always try to cover their asses legally; companies doing "iffy" stuff often check to make sure it's legal first, etc. Thus, it's not clear that they know they are making pornographic ads OR that they think their models look underage, just from that evidence, even if those are both true.

As for the photos: like I said before, they don't look underage to me. I've additionally checked this with a few people in other age ranges of both genders, just to be sure I wasn't crazy, and the consensus was that they all looked like adults.

P.S. The "If you don't agree with me, you're <insert x here>" approach is a bit silly. I do like to consider myself pretty open-minded, though :)

I like the design (though perhaps a bit gradient-heavy, I prefer flat) but you should definitely add some sort of tagline, or at least put the "what is zipalong" link in a different color or something; I didn't even see it the first time I opened the site. Just seeing a login form, I immediately closed the tab. Good thing I read the comments, because this looks really cool.

One small usability tip: you could pretty easily combine the login and registration forms. Just put an extra "register" button, do a username check, then add a second password box and the name fields. Also, it'd be a little nicer (though I see what you're doing with the in-one-line thing) if you stacked the password confirmation box under the other; I usually visually compare the lengths before hitting "enter".

Also, I noticed that the look and feel is in many ways similar to Flickr, especially the colors. I don't know if that's a positive or a negative; on the one hand, it will immediately associate your site with photography for anyone who's used Flickr before, while on the other hand it may make it harder to establish a unique brand.

I haven't explored the inside of the site much, but from what I can tell, you've done a pretty good job. Keep up the good work, and good luck.

I'd be willing to bet that most people don't encounter horizontal scrolling on a regular basis. At least I sure hope not; it's hella annoying. The only cases where I can think of it coming up (for a full page, at least) is when there is an over-sized image or on the occasional artsy site where it's designed that way intentionally. Perhaps horizontal scrolling comes up more often for people using small screens--on a netbook or phone or something--but even then I imagine it's fairly rare.

The use case? Inline comments, feedback boxes, contact info, control panels, really anything you want to have immediately available but out of the way most of the time. Is this the best way to implement those? Not always, of course, but probably enough to warrant its existence.

I'm not necessarily saying that AA doesn't "make and promote what is essentially child porn", or that I'm siding with them in any way, but "child porn" is a pretty heavy accusation and you should back it up.

The link you provided doesn't count. First of all, it's on a humor site, and the article definitely seems to belong there. But more importantly, it provides no evidence that the models are underage, the photos it shows don't appear to be me to be of underage girls, the photos aren't quite pornographic anyways (though admittedly fairly close), and it doesn't even provide any evidence that AA attempted to represent them as underage.

I'm completely willing to hear that AA is making child porn--I have no affiliation with them or anything like that--but you haven't provided any evidence and therefore you shouldn't make the claim.

Huh. I suppose that just shows the subjectivity of such things; I found the site to be quite easy to use and well-designed, other than the letter-spacing.

"When I became a junior and was allowed"

This bit isn't E-prime.

You can do a lot of stuff without ever touching the shell, and there's a good chance he's even used the shell before, just not in a Unix environment (probably Windows, which is significantly different, though the transition isn't too hard). Besides, nobody said he was "experienced", just that he wasn't a novice.

Really? I didn't really look at the main site, but the blog portion seemed like... well, a blog. Nothing nonstandard, as far as I could tell. And the font was just blown-up Helvetica, though the letter-spacing did seem a little wide.

Well, obviously we're progressing in terms of the ratio of human work to computer work, but I was thinking of a program that, rather than taking actual algorithms, takes specifications, and not exact ones like Prolog and the like require--some sort of natural language processing/artificial intelligence kind of thing that understands something like "I want a Firefox extension that will automatically do...". Of course, it would have to have knowledge about different protocols/methods/algorithms/etc., and we'd have to give it that knowledge manually at first, and sometimes you'd probably have to work with it, especially in the development of new algorithms. There would probably still require some significant work to put a non-trivial program together, but it would mean a lot less learning UI libraries, putting together basic systems (I'm thinking of games especially here), etc.

This isn't to say you couldn't put together programs manually still, of course--it'll always be fun. But you could get rid of most of the tedious bits. Also, Lisp (or something Lisp-y) seems like the most likely candidate for putting code together this way.

Don't get me wrong--I'm paying for food and rent--just for many (most?) it's covered in their loans/scholarship/whatever. I guess I wasn't thinking about people who work at the same time, though. (My school requires everyone to be on a meal plan and to live on campus or prove that they can live off campus, so I forget that people at other schools have to worry about it.)

"John Munson, a software engineer and professor of computer science at the University of Idaho, is not quite so generous. 'Cave art,' he says. 'It's primitive. We supposedly teach computer science. There's no science here at all.'"

I'll give him his clever phrase, despite being technically false. What we create with our knowledge of computer science (our programming) is not the same thing as computer science itself.

This is an interesting way to think about programming, though. Compare it, for instance, to metalworking. The craft itself, clearly, is distinct from the science of metallurgy, but at the same time they have evolved alongside each other. I wonder if programming and computer science will go through a similar progression. As metalworkers just were learning to manipulate metal, we bit-twiddled and hand-assembled; as metalworkers evolved their tools and meticulously forged their creations, we created compilers but still hand-coded our programs. The next big step in metalworking was the automation of their craft via factories; is this way code will go as well? Will we simply guide computers as they produce their own code? And what advances in computer science would be necessary for this to happen?

Edit: Please forgive me if my history of metalworking is slightly incorrect, I just realized I mostly pulled it out of my ass.

A better link perhaps would be to the original site: http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/daily_routines/

I'm still not solid on what I think about private companies having the responsibility to provide your data for you if they're closing down, but his bit at the end about the archive team seems... well, brilliant. Hell, it could even be a paid service. Monitor the web for companies shutting down and download away. Of course, that's assuming that the data's not protected behind some sort of wall (if Facebook was closing, or something like that); in that case, contact the company and try and make a deal. You could get them to simply give you all the data, or (in case of privacy concerns, etc.) offer the closing company a solution where they commit to letting users get at their data for 90 days (or some similar number) and after that, you put up a page where people can pay to access the original site, or at least some sort of download page.

Of course, people could just back up, but some stuff is just hard to do that with, especially on the web.

Well, that's probably the leftover liberal arts philosophy that seems to be so common among college administrators.

Chances are, whatever they're building doesn't need to be put in private repositories. If it really does (as in, they're working on commercial stuff), $7 a month (even $12) shouldn't be hard to scrounge up, and I'm an in-the-red student myself. After all, we all need to learn about business expenses sometime--and they're not having to worry about paying for food or rent. If a private repo is that important to them, most schools offer private server space. I say no.

"'Big-ticket enterprise ideas that take $50 million to $100 million to get to market are going to be few and far between,' said Dana Stalder, a general partner at Matrix Partners."

Is it just me, or did they mislabel the section "Enterprise is Back"?

I didn't know that Crays could split timber!

Or at least suicidal (adventurous?) men from the others.

I wonder what the root cause of these findings is. It seems to be a combination of attention diversion and something else-- after all, trees and buildings (presuming no extra stuff like birds, shouting neighbors, etc.) seem about equally distracting. One thing that occurs to me would be to do studies with subjects who are blind, deaf, both, and neither, as well as possibly autistic vs. not, etc. Also, comparisons between different cities, especially if you include small cities (still fairly urban feeling, but not a million people either) would be interesting to see.

Not that I know of from your profile, but you can always bookmark the page, email yourself a link, or use something like Read It Later (http://www.ideashower.com/ideas/launched/read-it-later/), which saves you from cluttering up the comments.

Compare to C++ templates, Java generics, etc. vs duck typing.

Really, this looks like a rather silly way to put this function together. It doesn't even run in constant time! It might be a little complicated, due to the leap year rules, but it would probably not be too difficult to do this calculation without any loops.

You're right, but he shouldn't have titled it "Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp".

"...NEVER accept an invitation (even if I actually end-up attending the event)"

Strange, considering that the events feature is one of the most useful on Facebook, and because he has obviously used it (albeit inefficiently) since he's noticed events this way. Really, Facebook events are great for parties and things when you can't get everyone together at once to plan/discuss/whatever, (or when you're antisocial like me and you don't want to). A lot less phone calls and such to mess with, and a built-in discussion board and RSVP system to boot.

"Lots of people can talk about what they'd like to be, very few can confidentially tell you what they're doing about it now."

This is a really, really good point. I can't think of very many people who I'd expect to be able to answer. I can't, not really--I can tell you what I'm studying, but I don't think studying quite counts, at least not with something else accompanying it.

Yeah, I created an account and self-posted, but Zed seems to like you (http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2008-12-25.html) and I wanted to share.