biesnecker

Well done. Saying sorry is the (easi|hard)est thing to do in situations like this, and you should be commended for doing it out loud.

It's unfortunate that there's permanently indexed copies of all of this attached to everyone's name, but hopefully this will come up in context with the rest.

> FWIW

FWIW, I personally think it's worth a lot. It's easy to be nasty on the internet and a lot harder to be nice.

At some point during my teenage years, my dad gave me the one of the most useful pieces of advice I've ever gotten: "the world is full of assholes, don't let 'em get you down, but don't put up with 'em, either."

Or, in this case, don't work with them, or recommend that anyone you know work with them, because while the world is indeed full of assholes, it's also full of enough awesome people that you should never have to put up with the assholes.

Blocks and restorations don't propagate immediately -- if the block is really gone, you should get it back as soon as the name resolver cache expires.

That's awesome! I assume 27.3 (C?) is the temperature of your house right now, or else you run a mighty cold oven. :)

Well, that's that it seems. Could it be that he's running a single dyno app (with a bunch of add-ons) and that's what explains the behavior he's seeing?

This really sucks because Github doesn't seem to like my favorite OpenVPN providers -- I can access the site, but actual git operations don't work. Previously I'd just disconnect, clone/push/etc., and reconnect, but now that might not work at all.

Pain in the ass, more so by the day it seems.

Seriously? (I say this as someone living in Shanghai now, who has lived here for the last 10 years). Github was your bottom line?

That is so goddamn sad. Rest in peace, Aaron.

Reasons to be excited about Java in 2013: scala, clojure, jruby, groovy, ...

Lobbying doesn't necessarily equate with doing evil, but it almost always equates with a person or group of people using their disproportionate power to push an agenda that individuals have little hope of pushing back on.

Obviously the nature of the agenda itself is what makes it good or evil, and there are plenty of lobbyists that do work that I personally agree with, but at the same time I can step back and say that because of the way the system is set up that lobbying disempowers individuals with whom I disagree but who do not have access to similar resources, and that makes me uneasy.

This is a fantastic collection. Though it's more or less been rectified now, one of the problems I had starting with Clojure (which was also my first Lisp) was the lack of good documentation, and my inability to convert documentation that was for another flavor of Lisp into meaning Clojure code.

Kid's these days have it so good ;-)

Wouldn't this imply that people who would otherwise not steal are stealing Apple products? If it were otherwise, the Apple thefts would simply be spread out among other targets.

Interesting. When I was doing more client work I wanted to do something like that, but was never able to suss out exactly how to find such a middleman. I was a lot younger and (I'd like to think) less savvy then, though.

Which in turn reminds me that project managers working with freelancers are often far, far better at negotiation than are the freelancers.

I'll second the value of working all the way through SICP. I started and stopped with it several times before finishing it several years ago, and I learned _so_ much.

I think term limits only make sense if you believe that you don't get better at being a legislator with experience. If you don't, then yes, absolutely, term limits will make buying votes far more expensive, but if you do, then you're constantly running the country with a team of redshirt freshmen, which may well be worse than corporate interests being able to influence policy decisions.

Agreed, Moneyball works because of the vast amount of data that is collectable in baseball. Even more fluid sports like basketball and football have a hard time applying algorithms to player ratings (though it's beginning to happen).

While I do think there are probably some useful objective ways to measure entrepreneurs, unless someone has enough data points under his or her belt the "Moneyball" approach is never going to give reliable results.

Segments the market into people who know about their browser's incognito/porno mode, and those that don't.

What an awesome concept! Thanks for the link, I think I'll be adding this to my reading list.

But you're still not likely to tell stories of the battlefield tactics and grand strategy that led to the burning of your barn, but rather than deprivation and hardship that not having that barn caused.

That "we were still subsidizing those same terrorists" bit causes me to reflexively facepalm every time I think about it.

No, if your MVP is a total throwaway that you're using solely to validate a hypothesis, and once/if it's validated you'll be redoing everything.

Yes otherwise.

My experience with TDD is that the cost/benefit curve doesn't really pay off until you need to refactor or significantly expand a project, at which point having good test coverage saves you an enormous amount of time/pain.

Fantastically important.

Fundamentally, math == logic, and logic is the basis of all of mankind's post-Enlightenment gains in productivity, standard of living, etc.

> Most people never again get the chance to learn so much from educated people.

This. I didn't realize it either, and I wish I had. I have a decent number of interactions with educated, intelligent people now, but not with the sort of frequency and intensity with which I had them at university.

I don't know that I ever want to be a proper student again, but I do miss that.

It's because once a company gets to be over a certain size, everything is part of a process, and processes tend not to care all that much about their participants. When you get really good service from a company, it's generally the individual service rep going above and beyond what the process calls for, rather than the process being one that delivers good service.

"Going to college is not the same straightforward decision it used to be."

Honestly, (and you've basically said this), taking out significant loans to go to college is not the same straightforward decision it used to be.

I understand that for some people it's simply not possible to go to college without taking on debt. I don't think this is the case for the vast majority of people. If someone would have made 18 year old me more aware of the burden that not going to a state school and working a job or two during my four years was going to be, I would have been a lot less likely to do it. Sure, I had fun, and I ended up without a lot of debt anyway, but it wasn't worth paying interest on for the better part of a decade.

Thanks much for the feedback. I clearly didn't understand them as well as I thought I did, though after reading http://stackoverflow.com/a/3085516/337184 I think I understand a bit more.

I'll update the post with a correction, and eventually write a "how I learned to stop worrying and love the difference between foldl and foldr" post. :-)

Point taken. I might redo this with Ruby at some point in the future -- the functions are all available and it might be interesting to see the differences between the two.

I ignored the existence of foldl1 and foldr1 because though they're available in Haskell and make a lot of things easier, they're not available in every language and not fundamental to understanding the concepts themselves.