freerobby

everyone/channel is similar but not the same.

In HipChat, you can be in a room but you won't get notifications if people mention "@here" while you're idle. With Slack, this isn't possible; you would get email notifications for all of the rooms you're in every time "@channel" is mentioned. Furthermore, "@everyone" can only be used in the primary chat room, not others.

I disagree. We tried Slack on our 26-person team and left it after a week. It had a few fans, but most people found the interface to be more complex and noisy than HipChat. Lots of red icons and blue banners that could not be disabled. No ability to see at a glance who is in a room without clicking the list and scrolling through it. The integrations were nice and the search was amazing, but those things were less important to us than the frictionless communication tools, which HipChat has nailed. Additionally, Slack lacks a distinction between @all and @here, which is frustrating when you want to announce something in a room without emailing everyone present.

We pay for HipChat because it makes team communication easy and painless on every device our employees own.

Pretty generous house to provide even wagers:

> 0.01 CHA 1% 99X -0.01 CHA

I appreciate the clarification of Jeff's position and rationale. The only point I was making is that the non-linking struck me as a reference to Jeff not linking to Shanley.

I assumed that was a dig at Jeff Atwood, who initially refused to link to Shanley's piece on the grounds that it was hateful.

Yeah. Whether that happened here or not, I have no idea, but it makes perfect sense if you want to create plausible deniability about what you have the means to accomplish.

My distinction: you're a cofounder if you worked at any point in time for nothing but equity.

Twitter is like AIM away messages for people who aren't AFK.

Sorry, I misread the fine print and thought the $5 fee was on top of that. OP deleted to avoid confusion for others.

Which ones have you tried? Any Jura machine will do the job and produce better, fresher coffee than a pre-ground pod. The upfront cost is substantially more, however; they start at about $800.

If you can afford a Jura, they're just as easy as a Keurig, better tasting, and a much less wasteful. You can use any beans you want, too.

http://www.amazon.com/Jura-13626-Ena-Micro-1/dp/B008RZFQKO/r...

At four cups per day it pays for itself in about two years.

If this is "frivolous" then I sure wish I were a more frivolous coder. Someone has to do the "frivolous" work of keeping up to date on security patches so our apps are locked down. Someone has to make "frivolous" corrections of bad indentation so code is more readable for the rest of us. Someone has to write all those "frivolous" READMEs so people like me can get up and running.

Thank goodness for frivolous work like this.

I hate the implication that busywork is somehow less valuable than other kinds of work. Much of software development isn't intellectually rigorous. Many deficiencies in OSS could be resolved by people willing to do the same kind of gruntwork that you linked to here. I see this and think major props to @sferik for working hard to maintain public code, even when it's not glamorous.

Upvote!

Planes don't really fall out of the sky either, especially modern commercial jets with high L/D ratios. There are some exceptions, e.g. fighter jets, but generally planes can glide down safely upon engine failure provided there is a nearby spot to land.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift-to-drag_ratio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift-to-drag_ratio

Thanks for the reply here and above! Good discussion indeed.

Agreed, but two important notes:

1) Automation doesn't have to be complete automation. I can use Chef tools like knife-ssh to run a single command on every one of our boxes in near-real time. This might not be automated to the extent that the OP is referring but it's 99.8% more efficient than logging into 500 boxes to do it (or 200,000 in Facebook's case). If you can get 99.8% with ease, it may not be worth pre-automating for that final 0.2%.

2) Knowing what is worth automating comes from experience. If I have to do something nasty once, it might be a total waste of time to automate it. There are lots of one-off things I type at a command prompt that are quicker to run than to automate. I think being so dogmatic about automation as to say you should never run things at a command line requires you to spend peple's time non-optimally.

Thanks. I'm a fan of automation but respectfully disagree with this (see my response above for details).

Thanks.

Does anybody else here agree with this mentality? This seems a major mispractice to me. I've worked at companies with as few as two people to as many as 50,000 people. None of them have had production systems that are entirely self-maintaining. Most startups are better off being pragmatic than investing man-years of time handling rare error cases like what to do if you get an S3 upload error while nearly out of disk space. There's a good reason why even highly automated companies like Facebook have dozens of sysadmins working around the clock.

I thought all of his other points were spot-on but this one rings very dissonant to my experience.

Can you (or somebody else) elaborate on disabling ssh access? Is this a dogma of "automation should do everything" or is there a specific security concern you are worried about? What is the downside of letting your ops people ssh into boxes, or for that matter of their needing to do so?

In a hearsay battle between Paypal and a thief, why is the burden on PayPal to prove its innocence?

There is definitely a bit of "rich idiot" syndrome on Everest (a syndrome which is not helped by needing over $50,000 just to get on the mountain), but let me assure you that they are in excellent physical shape. I don't care how many Sherpas you bring, how many ropes are preset for you; trekking to that altitude carrying nothing but your clothes and an ice axe is extremely difficult. And of course there are still expeditions who go to Everest and climb unassisted, without Sherpas, set up their own ropes, etc. Everest, for existential reasons, will always appeal to climbing enthusiasts regardless of its commercialization. But even for the ignorant non-enthusiasts who probably shouldn't be there and are less than self-sufficient in getting up, it is a monumental feat.

As far as the dangers go, keep in mind that many of the lives claimed by Everest were not "rich idiots." Rob Hall was an experienced guide known for excellent judgment until he perished in the 1996 disaster. Experience helps a lot but there are always things left to chance, always decision points with ambiguous outcomes that can only be resolved in hindsight.

I won't weigh in on the morality of leaving stranded climbers on the mountain other than to provide a little bit of context: climbers know going in that rescue above high camp borders on impossibility. Any responsible outfitter sets an expectation that beyond your climbing partners, you are on your own. There are many climbers who will help others at great personal expense (see: 1996 storm where many gave up their summit attempts to do so). But you get one shot at the summit, and most climbers go in with an awareness that unless their rescue seems surprisingly achievable, they will be passed over by other climbers, either heading towards or returning from the summit. Again, not weighing in on the ethics of that; just trying to provide context for it.

Lots of posts here questioning why someone would climb Everest. I've never done it but I have a bit of mountaineering under my belt, and there was a time when I would've loved the opportunity to attempt earth's largest.

It's not just about danger. In addition to the element of challenge and personal achievement that a few have alluded to, mountaineering provides one of the most beautiful and serene experiences imaginable.

Have you ever attempted a physical feat as awe-inspiring as this? http://photos.freerobby.com/Adventures/Denali/i-XCFxjcs/0/X3...

Have you ever appreciated the vastness of nature as much as standing beneath seracs as big as buildings? http://photos.freerobby.com/Adventures/Denali/i-2QddZdv/1/X3...

Have you ever climbed alongside peaks so beautiful that they look surreal? http://photos.freerobby.com/Adventures/Denali/i-ZbZFvzL/0/X3...

Have you ever walked on a receding glacier that has been there for millions of years? http://photos.freerobby.com/Adventures/Denali/i-pStmFNs/0/X3...

Have you ever succeeded at a physical feat that looks less than possible? http://photos.freerobby.com/Adventures/Denali/i-tQ5cg7v/1/X3...

Have you ever woken up in the morning, gone outside your tent, and looked down at the clouds? http://photos.freerobby.com/Adventures/Denali/i-hgC65Lv/1/X3...

I can only imagine how awesome these things would feel, how beautiful these scenes would be, on a mountain the size of Everest, especially when you consider the beauty of the Himalayan ranges around it.

There are as many good reasons to climb mountains as there are bad ones. Most people have vices. Most people take risks. Mine have been extremely rewarding.

After reading this article I have a pretty good hunch about why the man punched him.

Major "thank you" for doing github login without requiring me to hand over my private repositories.

I bought a nice refillable journal on etsy that I absolutely love. This one: http://www.etsy.com/transaction/145265531

I love it for two reasons: 1) It's refillable with 8.5x11" paper cut in half. I print my own lined and music staff paper and hole punch it myself. 2) Because it's a ring binder, I can reorganize the pages at any time. This is nice because I don't have to worry about keeping like content together as you would in a typical journal.

I use a TWSBI Diamond 540 fountain pen. My inner nerd is confirmed by my love of the clear barrel (called a "demo" style pen) that lets me see all of the inner-engineering of it. The current version is the 580, available here: http://www.gouletpens.com/TWSBI_580_Fountain_Pens_s/1120.htm If you only jot down the occasional sentence, a fountain pen is probably not worth the bother of manually refilling or the risk of a leak if you don't know how to use it properly. If you write a lot, I think it's a good investment, as it's much easier on the wrist.

I am a huge advocate of pen and paper journaling. I've written in longer form about how it can be a tool for self-improvement and self-awareness here: http://wistia.com/blog/non-sequitur-fridays-journaling

Nice to see some fountain pen love! I'm partial to the TWSBI Diamond 540, though if I were buying today I'd spring for the Vac700.

If this is true, it's a shame those in charge didn't learn the lesson from J. Edgar Hoover.

He wasn't legally required to lie to them.