assaflavie

SMTP is just a bad protocol and it needs to go away. Unworkable.

Yea, that's exactly what it's for.

Distributed programming is a means to an end, not a goal. If you had a computer with infinite cpu and ram and it could never crash and be geographically close to every customer, you would just use that and build your system on it as a dreaded “monolith”. Much simpler to grok such systems. Much easier to debug and monitor.

That’s what temporal enables.

fwiw, there's a new syntax for this, that is a bit more verbose, but probably worth adopting:

docker container rm $(docker container ls -qa)

docker image rm $(docker image ls -q)

Oops. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Fixing...

Does this solve the state-sharing difficulties of the python solution?

This is so addictive...

No demo video?

Say index funds become illegal, just for the sake of argument. Aren't they replaceable by an algorithm - trading software that balances a portfolio that copies an index per investor? It's less efficient, of course, but it's essentially the same thing. You get millions of tiny, cross-sector owners instead of few big index funds. So in that sense the argument in favor of banning index funds is really pointless. They're just one implementation of a strategy that investors could follow on their own, just less efficiently. Essentially, banning them is just a way of enriching brokers because of the expected rise in transaction fees.

Should be tagged NSFW.

Have you looked at docker as a replacement for creating all those AMIs? You could have one AMI (with Docker) installed, and then use Ansible to pull whichever container (app) you want onto each instance. Using docker also has the added advantage of letting you test your images in the development environment (and it's much faster than vagrant-up for every service you want running locally for dev/test).

I'm sorry but "predictable results in communication" is not the criterion for being meaningful. If you fart in a courtroom, you get very predictable results, too. The phrase isn't 'real' just because some people use it. People use "God" quite a lot, and that doesn't make it a meaningful concept.

(why do I feel I just unleashed an unholy flame war from hell with that last analogy?)

This sounds very Wittgensteinian. In terms of his philosophy of language, what we have here is a "metaphor gone wild". You take "intellectual" and "property", you put them together as a metaphorical phrase that on the face of it seems meaningful and semantically sound, and people start believe that there's actually such a thing; that it's not made up word-lego.

It takes careful awareness to language to be able to point this out, as Stallman does. Just because there's a word for it, doesn't make it meaningful.

I actually find the scroll motion to be very easy to perform using my index finger. However, I do agree there are issues to consider when it comes to usability. You definitely want to prevent unintended gestures and clicks/taps. So for one thing, the back touch doesn't necessarily have to be "on" all the time. It may be a mode that you enter under certain circumstances. And perhaps more advanced gesturing algorithms are needed to filter out intended from undintended gestures - maybe giving more weight to the size of the touch area, so that you palm resting on the back doesn't register as an event.

I don't pretend to have the answers to all these issues, but something tells me that smartphones can do much better than the current state of the art when it comes to game controls, to pointing at precise location, etc. And it goes without saying that this won't work with the existing mobile OSs as-is.

Very true. I got a rough POC of this, implemented using the technique in this answer: http://stackoverflow.com/a/22816419/11208

(just with divs instead of images)

It's very brittle though. It relies on knowing the line-height, calculating the line in which the highlighted word sits, accounting for the existence of vertical scroll-bars... not trivial.

Thank you! Just tried it. I'm in love. :)

About popups/tooltips/hovercards: I considered this approach, but decided to go with this sort of "inline" expansion for the following reasons:

1. A popup obscures the original text. This interferes with context, albeit admittedly to a much lesser degree than full-blown navigation, but still.

2. Multi-level popup hierarchies just don't look good, in my opinion.

3. You must dismiss a popup to continue, whereas with inline expansion you can just as well keep the expansion and continue reading.

4. The hover approach doesn't work as well for touch-devices (i.e. without a mouse).

How to make people like you: 6 science-based sexual reproduction hacks

Why???

What this then? http://www.tyresum.co.uk/images/graph.png :)

This is still susceptible to timing attacks, for example. http://codahale.com/a-lesson-in-timing-attacks/

Yup. But it's a goal to strive to. Nobody's proposing people spend their entire day documenting, but if they remember to document decisions/knowledge by default they mitigate the problem. Besides, who said it's a good thing to have one person with 10 years of very specific, undocumented domain expertise? Sure, in rare cases it's some outlier guru. Sometimes you have PhDs who spent 10 years becoming domain experts and you can hardly expect them to be able to serialize it all into the company wiki. That happens. But I'd bet that in most cases these are just people who positioned themselves into a cozy role, guaranteeing you can never let them go. These are liabilities, not assets.

First, not every employee is a unique and rare snowflake - a one in a million hire. People _are_ mostly replaceable. This is reality, not a wet dream. Using an example to the contrary does not disprove the rule, just highlights an exception.

If you read the post carefully, it describes very clearly what makes employee valuable _besides_ their domain knowledge. It's quite a lot. That's why it's so hard to lose people. As I wrote, we each bring our own capabilities, attitudes and skill sets. But that doesn't mean that it's alright to work under the assumption that _none_ of our contributions to the organization can be documented and shared. In fact, a lot of what we do in our day to day work is pretty mundane stuff. We tackle problems, we learn things, we talk to people and make decisions. So for the most part it's entirely reasonable to ask people to share their knowledge with others through documentation by default. Mind you, documentation can be as easy as discussing things in a mailing-list vs. personal emails (one is searchable after you quit, the other pretty much disappears).

Additionally, the title of the post is clearly not to be taken literally. If you understood it to mean "find your best people, get them to document everything, and then fire them" then you misunderstood. That makes zero sense. It's those team players - the people who volunteer their knowledge - who are the most precious of all employees, and those are the ones you never actually want to let go.

On the other hand, the ones who are sure that their own Peter Norvig level "genius" could never be put into documentation, are the problem.

For what it's worth, this isn't an "empty suit's" dream. This is the way I've seen it done as a developer in a few software companies, and it's something I'm trying to promote ever since. And I stand by the title of the post, even if you find it controversial. Every organization has its local "guru" knowledge hoarder who is essentially a huge pain in the ass to manage because, intentionally or not, he's not playing well with others. He loves being a required participant in every single meeting. And heaven help you if you try to drive a change he disagrees with - no chance of that happening. These people should be prime candidates to get shit canned as early as possible. By adopting an organization-wide "document by default" attitude you gradually see less and less of this problem and reduce the chances of new hoarders sprouting up.

On the contrary. This view assumes that replacing employees is about the hardest thing you have to do. Good people are extremely rare. So to mitigate the problem, and also to promote intellectual cross pollination within the organization, it's a very good idea to make sure everyone remembers to document what they know by default. There's no need to assume this means extra work - it just means you divide your time differently, giving more priority to communicating what you know. As an _employee_ I always strove to do just that - volunteer to document and spread on whatever I brought with me into the organization, and everything I picked up along the way, too. I saw this not as a chore but as a an opportunity to share, influence and also have less of a headache when the time eventually comes to move on to the next adventure.

The whole "for free" thing is a fallacy. You can get all kinds of things back, even when you're not working for a paycheck. You get recognition, gratitude and respect. You get to learn new skills and improve yourself. You get enjoyment (if your work is fun).

I'd suggest getting to one good slide. One slide with a beautiful font, one line of text and a complementary background image/color. This template is already 90% the work of making the presentation aesthetically pleasing. And take it from there.

+1 Idan is a terrific speaker. That, together with gorgeous slides, is just unfair to the rest of us.

GoDaddy.com should really switch to another DNS provider.