biesnecker

Great results, but

> "While it makes the eventual git merge a nightmare when the branches diverge, a day of wrestling with merge conflicts is a small price to pay for unfettered experimentation."

terrifies me. It sounds like the sort of thing that makes a lot of sense until one day it doesn't and you're left with a massive bill of work to reconcile two very different codebases, all for the sake of UI experimentation.

Removing routes from ISP DNS servers nationwide is often the first step in blocking content. It's easily bypassed if you know what you're doing, but most people don't and are stuck. China did this circa 2004, and AFAIK a lot of blocks in Vietnam are still done like this. I doubt Turkey has the infrastructure that more advanced censorship regimes like China and Iran use, so it's something of a poor man's solution (especially in a world of apps on mobile where the end user has no control over how data is fetched over the network).

Google DNS being just two IP addresses makes it a lot easier to shut down without collateral damage.

It's cute to watch an sliding-into-autocracy government trying to implement internet censorship without the infrastructure. Mr. Erdogan, call Cisco, see if you can get a discount on the China Package.

Would be interested in hearing what data they've collected that pushed them to make that declaration. Everything I've heard so far this morning is that there is mounting evidence, but nothing concrete.

Given the length of time the families (and the rest of the world) have been left hanging, I certainly hope there is slam-dunk evidence that this is the case, and that amendments and alterations won't be forthcoming.

I think it's even worse than a coin flip. At least with a coin there's a reasonable assumption that the odds are 50% both ways. Flipping the Duke/Mercer coin, though, you have have a maybe 95% of landing on Duke, which causes significantly more than 95% of people to put their money down on that, whereas with a normal unweighted coin you'd expect ~50% of people to bet on each side.

I want to, with all my soul, leave a snarky comment about Boston bravely entering the early 2000s, but more than anything I'm saddened that decision makers whose choices impact the lives of millions don't have easy access to the sort of data visualizations that a soon-to-fail social media startup has up on monitors on Day 3.

You know what else will wipe out polio? An extinction-level asteroid strike that wipes out all of mankind if we don't manage to colonize another planet before then.

It's basically fear of this that finally drove me to management, and improving the skills that being a good manager requires. They're actually many of the same skills as being a good programmer -- communication and organization being two that immediately come to mind -- but they're applied differently, and there are other things around leadership and change management that I've had to learn from scratch, more or less. Not that management is the panacea and everything will be all right from here on out -- I'll still have to hustle my ass off -- but I think I have a longer runway than I would otherwise.

Absolutely. My (2) kids definitely require my attention and devotion, but in terms of "getting me focused on the important stuff," they are miracle workers.

Having a supportive spouse is an amazing boon, too, and one that should not be overlooked in this discussion.

Nice, I didn't realize that. I knew that whole album was full of Bill Hicks references, but I didn't know that that was one of them.

Seriously. I thought I was fine until I was reading HN on my phone and thought to myself "hmmm... I wonder if the game works well on a mobile browser."

It does. #fml

From the lips of the great prophet Maynard James Keenan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCEeAn6_QJo

"See you down in Arizona Bay."

> The worst thing in world today is to become the rope on which the imperial forces tug to prove their strength.

Not just today -- it's been a shitty position to find oneself in since the beginning of time. The only difference today is that we think of ourselves as above such things. But clearly we're not.

"You think you know what teachers do. Right? Wrong."

So I'm wrong that I think that I know what teachers do?

Do teachers teach you how to write intelligible headlines?

Google cache: http://bit.ly/1buD4wq since it's not up to handling (any?) concurrent users?

Didn't Dropbox's share links more or less solve this problem? Maybe not for 100% of the population, but I've managed to walk my mom through the process, and isn't that generally the success metric for things like this?

Nah, the last job I had there would have paid for schooling. It wouldn't pay for a hermetically sealed bubble of fresh air and water (and clean food), though.

Sad. I love -- _love_ -- that city, but I could never live there again, not breathing that.

Quite a high percentage of the people in the world with internet access live under governments with poor human rights records, too.

Isn't this how the AI in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress gets started?

It's the entire Western sense of superiority (I'm American). Gitmo is America saying that the rules we hold ourselves to don't apply to "others." It's hypocritical bullshit, and we deserve what we get because of it.

But it's not just the US (or just Gitmo) -- read about the treatment of refugees in Australia (tl;dr: it's better than Gitmo, but not good by a long shot -- http://mitahungerstrike.wordpress.com). And I don't mean to pick on Australia, because the Australian government is no more (or less) guilty than the governments of much of the developed world, I just want to make a point that we all are having terrible things done to other human beings in our names.

It's a damn sad state of affairs.

"... and a new job at Yahoo."

Poor kid.

Maybe I misinterpreted your question. My answer was to a question more along the lines of "why do parents talk about parenting all the time?" If the person offering advice is being a dick about it (be it about parenting or anything else), then sure, it's inappropriate. But at the same time I remember when my first was born, I was pretty darn receptive to advice because _I had no idea what I was doing_. I'm less receptive now because half a decade in I think I have a decent handle on things, but I'm still not hostile about it -- I generally smile and nod and ignore (which, come to think of it, is what I do whenever anyone offers me advice I don't need).

Because being a father is the only thing I've ever done that is pretty close to being mystical, and I'm proud of it?

Agreed, weixin is awesome, but how likely are they to gain real international traction so long as messages from anywhere are subject to the same censorship regime?

One, I still think telling someone that something they have done sucks is harder to do in person than online. But two, the point is that the incident in question was pretty much "you suck because your code sucks."

It least it takes a pair to look someone in the eyes and tell them they suck.

Github being blocked for a few days was annoying, but the real story here is that for a person / company in China, there are no "safe" web services upon which to build things, no matter how apolitical those services might be. Anything you build on technology that you need to access over the network is immediately at risk of suffering a massive, totally opaque, and totally unfixable (by you, at least) failure. Domestic services are a little bit better, but (and I say this out of sad experience) not immune. Non-China based services are just a crapshoot, especially these days.

It's sad and it's frustrating and it really makes you wonder how China is ever going to really transition away from a heavy industry / copycat technology economy.

Not always. Don't underestimate the strength of pride (though in this case, over a tweet, you're probably right).

Regarding karma, this is one place where I think HN's implementation gets it right (or at least more right than others). You can see your own karma, and the votes of things that you've submitted (I'm talking about comments not stories here), but you have to go look to see anyone else's, and you can't see the karma they've gotten from their comments (except as a relative number versus your own comment at the same level within a thread).

There are surely still karma whores (I'll admit to liking seeing the little number next to my name go up) but it's not quite as in-your-face as somewhere like Reddit.