cmurphycode

Absolutely. Hudson is great (I would even say invaluable), and Kohsuke, the founder, is an inspirational programmer.

The page states it is only your first 30 created repos; did you have 30 before Leiningen?

Google did try this. I don't think it ever left the lab, but I used it for a while. I think they may have canned it; I just realized I haven't seen it in a while. It was called searchwiki. I think it was originally just supposed to apply to your own results, but I'm sure they analyzed the tendencies to see if it would've helful to use overall.

Honestly, such a system would be ridiculously easy to game with a botnet, so there needs to be significant work in the area beforehand.

I'm sure the price reflects a compromise in savings between the hotel and the consumer. While this is a simple example, removing inefficiencies like this is a good thing for the company, and a good thing for the consumers.

By the way, much like the new reduced plastic bottles by Poland Spring, this is a great example of company innovations spurred by the environment. So many cost saving ventures would have been out of the question for companies due to image (What? You expect me to get excited about the fact your bottles are more flimsy??), and are now up for grabs. Companies that recognize this opportunity will do well.

Fascinating. I find it particularly interesting that Jobs, since moving back to Apple, has done nothing interesting with the Web, but so much with the desktop and hardware. Sure, iTunes delivers music over the Internet, but it is not a web application. On the other hand, he did create the iPad: "And then there's the typical hardware. It's possible that some people could come out with some very interesting Web terminals and sell some hardware."

This article made me realize that Google's engineering/metrics based approach is more suited to some tasks than others. There are far too many possible views of the map to "design" by hand, but the algorithmic tricks that Google is so good at can handle it no problem. Even if a traditional usability expert could design a map of a given location at a given zoom level better (e.g., http://www.kickmap.com/), they couldn't pull it off at Google Maps scale.

Very good article, and the visual aides helped a lot.

Hey, those are great! I don't know how I haven't come across those- feels like I've explored every git resource on Google. Maybe I should've used DDG :)

Nice! I also had a tough time understanding the manual on this topic, so I made the following diagrams: http://cmurphycode.github.com/Git-Diagrams/ (Source is on GH, so you can send changes!)

I printed out the get/reset diagram and referred to it a lot when I learned git. I still check it every once in a while, for reassurance :)

You can use the visual mode for selecting text, then operate on it with the usual vim business.

There are commands built in for a lot of actions, and if there is a right click option that the extension doesn't provide, you can always write a script to extend it. Vimperator is nicely extensible.

I'm not sure if Vim scrolling with hjkl resolves the issue you saw with the arrow keys- I'm sure that's site dependent, and you'll have to try it yourself.

Good luck!

You can search for text easily with chrome or firefox. With firefox, you can hit the quote key and search the links, pressing enter to navigate to the page. F3 goes to the next result. The same feature is not available in Chrome natively, for some obstinate reason. It kept me from switching to Chrome, but then I tried the type-ahead-find extension. It's a script so it won't be as fast as native, but it's so much better than nothing.

Firefox also has the Vimperator plugin that gives vim-like nav for Firefox. Highly recommended if you like Vim.

What's the difference? We're substituting having superior intellect with having the willpower to work hard. It seems weird to say that at first. But the more I think about it, the more I think there must be a reason why some people do persevere enough to become "genius" level at something, and some people never do.

Personally, I think work ethic, along with intellect and charisma, is something you are partially born with. It's just silly to say that genetics play no factor: do those with severe mental disabilities just not work hard enough? Think about it as your genes defining a range: you can be between the 30th and 75th percentile of human prowess. Where you fall in that range is up to you.

I agree completely! I suspect the solution to the CAPTCHA paradox will be something we haven't even considered. In fact, I don't think we can even solve it directly- we have to approach the problem from a different angle. For example, we can start requiring significant identity authorization on some high quality sites (sacrificing anonymity for responsibility), and rely on advanced filtering for the rest.

Think about it: the actual problem with spammers defeating CAPTCHAs is low quality content. I'd much prefer to expend energy trying to stop low quality content, which is often delivered by non-spammers :)

I wrote a blog post expanding on these ideas: http://cmurphycode.posterous.com/the-problem-with-captcha

This is fascinating. It reminded me of another documentary on conjoined twins who are fused partway down the spine. Almost the complement of these twins!

The wiki page for the other girls has information and links: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Abigail_and_B...

Using rebase this way is not harmful, but the author didn't explain the situation when it is!

As usual, the Pro Git book does a great job explaining: http://progit.org/book/ch3-6.html

In short, if your team develops with an old-school, SVN type model, where there is one reference repo (the remote) that all developers pull from and push to, rebase to your hearts content. But if your team pulls from each other, you really want to be careful with rebasing. I believe this is how the Linux kernel is developed, which explains all of the warnings about git rebasing. After all, it's logical to assume that you should do exactly as the Linux kernel developers, for whom git was created, do!

The historical question is very interesting, and I'm going to have to look into that more. But I suspect that artisans (a class that has changed a lot, if not died out completely) were very passionate about their work.

With the huge amount of hours that a knowledge worker spends at his day job, I personally feel that it's almost never worth it to have a job you don't enjoy. There just aren't enough hours in the day to do enough exciting things, once you subtract a healthy amount of sleep, maintenance tasks, and the day job. It certainly isn't worth it at the typically small compensation differences between jobs.

There's an old quote I've heard attributed to the military, but I'm sure that's not the origin.

"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast"

Practicing fundamentals slowly is the traditional advice in everything from piano to karate.

I like the !:-, even though it's super ugly. It's the perfect complement to alt+. !! is a classic, but the article mentions it.

Here are some of my other favorites:

^foo^bar replaces the foo in the last command with bar

example: less setup.conf, ^less^vim

alt+. recalls the last argument of the last command (in emacs mode, anyway)

example: less setup.conf, vim alt+.

As mentioned, Ctrl+R is great for history searching. Repeatedly pressing Ctrl+R goes to the next result, and you can use the arrow keys to edit.

cd - goes to the last directory. It handles most of the use cases for pushd and popd.

Would you accept an approximation for results as you type, with the true, exact search happening when you stop typing? I think this would be very useful, especially since I don't need to search the absolute real-time index of my emails 99% of the time. It would probably confuse users, though- having a new result pop in .5 seconds later.

There's always a chicken-before-the-egg argument with companies like Apple. Do people love using their products because of their marketing, or is their marketing effective because people love using their products?

I think it's naive to say the former. Apple posted 3 billion dollars in profit last quarter. If all Nokia had to do to post those numbers was grossly overstate every feature in their phones (which should be easy, there are so many), they'd probably be doing it.

The thing that really bugs me about this is that personally, as a DIY techie, I actually like the power-user oriented nature of the Nokia phones a lot more than the iPhone (at least, at first, when the iPhone was hopelessly feature-barren). I probably would've really liked your real time search! But I'm not arguing about what I want from a product. I'm arguing about what the majority of people want.

This is a classic engineer response. It's not about who does it first, it's about who does it right. We didn't have the technology to implement this properly 5 years ago. I've never seen the Ovi Maps tool you mention, but I'm willing to bet that it wasn't polished enough to make it natural for users.

Now, I'm not entirely convinced that Google Instant is polished enough either- anecdotally, I've already seen some confusion. But saying "it's all marketing" willfully ignores the lesson we've all been taught by Apple: a revolutionary feature that isn't intuitively usable is no revolutionary feature at all.

I find careful measurement of activities is extremely helpful as a starting point for life change. After a certain point, you can leave the measurement behind, or at least back off the intensity. This is fortunate, since keeping such careful track of your life can be frustrating.

For example, when I wanted to get in better shape, I started calorie counting (in addition to exercising more, etc). I entered everything I ate into a website. This helped me become aware of what I was consuming- which can be quite deceiving.

Once I got a better handle on what foods were "dangerous" (not just bad for me, but which I ate in large quantities), I stopped calorie counting, but I'm maintaining my shape. I may go back to calorie counting every once in a while to see if anything's changed, but just that initial investment of time paid off quite well.

I don't think it's as simple as keeping moving. I lost that flexibility fairly early on, certainly in the middle of playing multiple sports through high school, and I'm still very active today.

I know I don't do enough stretching, though. It's just frustrating because my hamstrings never seem to improve, and as soon as I stop stretching, I go back to base (about 12" from touching my toes while standing).

This is the stereotypical Asian squat. Interestingly, young children do it by default. I think we lose flexibility as we age. I can't squat back on my heels without straining my shin muscles to keep from falling backwards, but the more I do it, the easier it becomes.

It is certainly a lot healthier for your knees than squatting on the balls of your feet, if only because your knees stay roughly on the same vertical as your toes. This is old powerlifter wisdom, and anyone with a knee injury can tell you first-hand. I can't squat on the balls of my feet without my right knee squealing in pain. Squatting on my heels is, at least, tolerable.

We used to think that the performance gap between people was completely accounted for by their innate intelligence. Now, we know that working hard is often even more important. Do you think there's an innate ability to process information that some people are superior at?

It would make sense that if some people could practice their craft more (without hitting the wall of diminishing returns) they would be better at what they do.

Great idea. I'm convinced that we can find a way to tap into all of the wonderful data on the Internet. Right now, it's just too hard, which is one of the delights of reading a well-researched article.

Most of the recent criticisms of TV that I've seen don't spend much time recognizing that the human brain needs downtime. As a way to veg out after 12 hours of programming, TV isn't any worse than reading a trashy novel or whatnot. I think the real question is, is there something about bad TV that changes our brain?

That is, is it not just a break from work? Are we actively making our brains more demanding of a break? In my limited experience, TV does seem to "rot" my brain. The more I watch, the fewer hours I can spend each day doing productive tasks.

Thus, my goal is to find an activity that allows me to veg out as effectively as TV while improving, or at least not inhibiting, my mental acuity. One obvious example is exercise. Of course, as any regular weightlifter or long distance runner can tell you, exercise can be rather addicting itself!

You're right about Twitter hitting the missing square in the periodic table. I think you glaze over the importance of the short nature of Twitter, though.

Yes, you can write arbitrarily short blog posts. But you don't, because you feel like you have an obligation to make your official blog be a well written, safe-for-future-eyes snapshot of your personality. Most of us have started a blog with grand intentions and given up after the effort of crafting essays carefully became too much.

Twitter requires no more commitment than a minute of your time. The simplicity of the medium (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdorsey/182613360/) is its greatest strength, and it is also why nobody else was able to make it. It takes a special sort of daring to provide a product that does so little. I'm sure users are constantly clamoring for the 140 character limit to be lifted, for new features to be added, and for more in general. But if Twitter had been created with no emphasis on short, simple messages, it would've been just like all the other blog ecosystems.

The impact of the small commitment goes beyond the importance to the average user. I think that one of the huge factors in Twitter's success was all of the hype generated by celebrities. What better way for celebrities to connect with their fans? They can do it in the privacy of their home, it takes nearly zero effort, they get extra points for being tech-savvy, and they cut out the middleman of the media. For the star basketball player who think he's misunderstood (e.g., @TheRealShaq), this is perfect. No more media twisting his words, just one-on-one conversation. Except it's better than one-on-one, because the whole world gets to see how you treat your fans.

In short, I think Twitter took off because even though they didn't know it yet, people yearned for a low effort medium of communication.

I don't understand this paper. How does the merchant credit card fee change the price that users pay? I understand that they implicitly markup to make up for their loss, but everyone pays that markup, whether they pay with cash or card. This paper makes it seem like those who purchase with credit cards are paying slightly less than those who purchase with cash, and that's how it's being interpreted in the blogosphere: (links listed by closest-to-the-real-paper)

http://modeledbehavior.com/2010/07/27/are-credit-cards-regre...

http://motherjones.com/transition/inter.php?dest=http://moth...

http://kottke.org/10/08/cash-is-expensive

I understand how credit card users make some money due to the rewards programs, and that those reward programs are funded by the merchant fee and thus the markup that everyone (including those who pay with cash) pay. But the paper explicitly mentions the rewards programs, and seems to point to the merchant fee as an additional, separate factor. Anyone understand this?

Thank you; that is what I meant to explain, but you were much more clear. I guessed that wil was asking about the safety of his own application once replicated by others, because I don't see the concern of having users replicate their own copy, as long as the damage is contained.