ajdecon

cries

(Yes, it's a workstation. Yes, I have worked with engineers who did this. Don't make life any harder for your users than you have to.)

But to be honest, I don't bear any ill will toward Google on this. Based on their behavior in the past, I'm willing to believe that if this program existed, they pushed back to the extent they felt they could... but if they eventually complied, it's difficult to blame them, given the threats the government is capable of making.

Unfortunately, the only place to resolve this is at the government level, if it can be resolved at all.

Because the only thing anyone ever needs to do in the modern world is develop software projects, of course.

A lot of the time, these requirements are more about auditing and liability than about technical security measures.

[0] http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/

"Failed" might be too strong, but I'd definitely say it's not yet ready for deployment.

My impression is that the Boston marathon was extremely well-photographed from a variety of angles, by everything from nearby security cameras to folks in the crowd. This seems like the best kind of data set you'd reasonably expect outside a controlled environment (i.e., a lab or security checkpoint). If it's not yet good enough to at least flag possible matches based on this data, I'm not sure I believe it's ready for widespread use.

But it is not:

* neutral: there are some pretty obvious biases, though they aren't consistent

* need-to-know: there's nothing I've learned on HN which has been strictly necessary to me, though there's a lot which was interesting

* concise: the net information density is relatively low, than higher on many other discussion sites. (Low bar, I know...)

* The pitch shapes encoded in the notation are fun and probably help learning, but I think they'd be distracting past a certain point. They don't convey any extra information that the staff doesn't, and if they didn't match it's one more thing to trip up on.

* The sharp and flat signs are way too subtle, compared to the traditional accidentals. I'm not going to see those when I'm sight-reading.

* This is also true for the eighth notes and shorter. Those flags are tiny!

* No key signatures?!!

I love that someone's playing with ideas for notation, but this notation is worse for experienced musicians because it makes important information harder to see at a glance. (Yes, sure, I'd get used to new shapes, but the distinguishing marks on the page are smaller?!!)

I can't comment on whether it'd be easier to learn, but this is notation you're going to be using much longer than you're going to be learning it. Optimize for long-term usefulness.

Veronica Mars doesn't fit strictly into those categories, but the fanbase seems to have substantial overlap with genre fandom. It's jargon, but not particularly uncommon in its area of relevance.

In the long term, this all balances out with new workers and education. In the short term, if this is a large enough disruption, it's probable that the actual people who are unemployed will either need long-term support of some time, or subsidized retraining (if even possible).

While it's often neglected in these discussions, the short term disruption does matter for both moral reasons (we don't like to let people starve, or let them sit around doing nothing when we could retrain them); and for practical reasons (large numbers of unhappy and needy people can cause major social disruptions).

I think it's less about defense against "bad admins" than it is about protecting against accidental bone-headedness. :-) I typically set up a restrictive firewall policy even when I have a clear list of the services I'm running and/or I am the only admin. This comes in handy every once in a while, in cases where...

* A service is expecting more ports to be open than are documented. (Happens not-infrequently with license servers.)

* I'm re-using an old image and there are undocumented services enabled by default.

* A user decides to run a network service in their own account without informing the admins.

In all those cases, am I likely to change the firewall to "make it work"? Sure. But having to actually make that change helps keep an audit trail, and helps keep the admins explicitly aware of the attack surface. It's similar to why it's a good idea to periodically run nmap against your own servers.

If you could make all the ads I saw on TV perfectly relevant, I would still fast forward. Because I would like to get back to the show, OK?

As an example: no work in the bedroom, ever. This includes reading work email, doing web research, taking work calls, logging into a server, etc. If you have to do something work-related, take it outside. This helps you (and your partner, if you have one) keep good sleep hygiene, and also provides a good barrier to obsessing with work. ("I could check my email, but do I really want to get out of bed?")

This also applies to side-projects. Take it outside.

My wife and I have periodically enforced a "no screens in the bedroom" rule (with exceptions for e-Ink), but this breaks down sometimes when we need to have a phone in the room for emergencies, and when one or the other of us gets obsessed with a new tablet game. ;-) But it's usually possible to at least keep objects with physical keyboards out, which provides an additional protection for me against cheating on the "no work" rule.

(warning: rant)

Look: if you really want to get into these fields, it's really not that fucking hard. The people working in science are usually not stupid, and there are some geniuses, but they are mostly not ridiculously smart. They're pretty dedicated to their research, but no more than any programmer who enjoys their work enough to stay late on a regular basis. They put in a lot of time and work, but having done both, working in any startup is probably just as much work.

Research can be ridiculous amounts of fun, and it can be extremely satisfying. The progress is a lot slower, more incremental, and less visible than releasing a webapp, but if you're working on something you think is important, it still feels great. But the pay isn't great, the work isn't easy, you need to spend a lot of time in school, and academic politics is a pain. And you have to be ok with the fact that your personal impact will probably be small. (The last is the part that puts a lot of people off.)

If you don't want to do research directly, there are plenty of places to go where you can help indirectly. I work for a company that builds HPC hardware, and some of our customers are labs big and small. There are lots of companies that write research software, or you can contribute to the many open source projects that support scientists. (Witness the huge scientific Python community.)

You did not make bad life choices just because you aren't contributing to "big problems". The world is bigger than science and research, and that's ok. Working on social webapps, because they are more fun and pay more, is ok. But if you're not working on these things, and you're working in startups and tech, it's because you probably don't want to.

Ben Rockwood from Joyent has a good conceptual talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5E--QSBVBY , "DevOps Demysitified".

This order of events is incorrect from the OP.

> Recently, I found out that one of my employees has been having an affair with my wife. ... My wife has since left me.

I don't think you're disagreeing with the article. He shows a real-time dashboard of ops stats, and then says:

> It's important to divorce the concepts of operational metrics and product analytics.

Real-time ops statistics help solve ops crises, but product analytics can afford a little more consideration.

Out of curiosity, will there be options in the client to either (a) keep private keys un-synced (but still be part of the public key network), or (b) import an existing keyring? Or other mechanisms for someone who is already using PGP, but unsatisfied with the experience, to join without needing to generate new keys.

In terms of whether online dating needs "fixed", I'd be interested in knowing how the success rates for online dating are better or worse than current offline methods (going clubbing, dating co-workers, whatever). My own worthless anecdotal experience shows a much higher rate of success in online dating than trying to meet people IRL. ("Worthless" because I met my wife online, and we naturally hang out with people who tend to spend lots of time on computers.)

Also, from the OP: I had average success on this service, but the reason it probably wasn’t better had to do with the fact that the Q&A section tended to expose character flaws that turned me off.

I think it's interesting that the OP was getting too much information about his potential partners... or at least, too much too early. Most people have flaws, and one advantage of traditional dating is that you learn about their flaws more slowly and have time to learn good things that mitigate them before getting scared off.

However, I think it's more likely that people are going to have to adjust to knowing more, rather than using services that expose less: more and more we live our lives online, and it's very easy to learn "too much" about someone just by using Google. We're either going to have to accept that people are flawed, or it's going to get even harder to find partners...

Don't exclude Perl! :-) In certain scientific subdomains, Perl is still widely used, also for historical reasons...

The classic example is keeping multiple MPI implementations around; but I know scientists who keep multiple versions of several libraries in their home directories depending on which apps they want to use, and just select the right module groups.

That said, I've never tried this with anything as fundamental as libc...

[0] http://modules.sourceforge.net/