gridmaths

I missed this in the pastebin text, it adds a dimension. My impressions to the OP :

The description of the reason for working the extra weekend, I think reflects well on your motivation. I'm not a games company, but I have hired developers and testers : if I saw this bullet point on a testers CV, that would stand out.

So instead of feeling taken advantage of, which you were at $11 an hour.. put a more positive vibe on this and see it as a path from tester to whatever is next.

Maybe your passion is some aspect of developing games, or developing better automated test tools? Is there some open source thing you can work on, that will give you a lot more leverage when the next gig comes around?

Somehow get your CV to stand out from the mass of guys who will work for 11/hr and into the more professional 50/hr skill-set bracket. Maybe that's not happening right now in games, maybe take those skills and put them to use in another industry that is happy to pay better. Or stay in games but specialize and become killer and own your particular niche.

Wear this experience as a Medal of Honor [pun, ouch] that you worked on Halo4.. how many people get to do that? It is money in the bank when gaining street cred with any young person, even your own kids later.

I would rework this story.. put a more positive slant on it, its a great blog post, shows character, yadda yadda. Squeeze a bit of mileage out of the pain and glory you went thru.

I love reading these war stories and postmortems on Gamasutra, you have an audience.

I tend to agree, and read recently that young people feel its no longer hip but are kind of locked in [ how I felt leaving M$ dev products for open source back when ]

I use FB periodically, and recently quite a few things in the UI dont seem to function [ logical bugs as opposed to say whether I like the feature design ]

I see this as a kind of bitrot setting in, maybe its just hard for large organisations to continue to innovate. Maybe it needs to move more slowly and focus on polish/robustness now. Do people like FB feature changes? I've found them to be annoying with no added value as a user.

"Global Illicit Financial Team" ie. GIFT wow, cool, these must be the good guys.

Thus begins the FUD storm to discredit BitCoin :

Implication : "if your using Bitcoin rather than a 'legitimate' currency, you must have something to hide. you must be an evil pederast/blackmarketeer/hacker/terrorist"

Readability is not subjective ?

So you have a mathematical formula for Readability, excellent.

That would be simpler than adjusting things by 3px until they just look spectacular and zing off the page.

Yes, but Monsanto now own the copyright to your DNA, not you nor your quite lovely and deeply loyal dog.

You are merely the current instance of your DNA.

[ By implication, you do not have the right to clone yourself and Terence, but big M do. To learn more, see section 23.II.XIV.12.3 of the EULA ]

I dont think facebook will last that long.. and then theres linkedin which I think is also a large blip.

So how to do this with some horizon? Maybe it needs to be an open API that many social network sites implement/agree on. [ but one that allows me to share or not share my social graph orthogonally to using a sign-in user handle ]

Exactly.. and agree with the Please f'off sentiment.

Especially when I can just type in a few tags which signal my interests really well and enable sifting for like-minded people.

eg. "Frisbee bike Newark hacking" or "maker bots liberal coffee valley" or "photography walking s&m boston" :]

I wonder what one has to do to engage in a private discussion over the internet [ with some legal recourse to that privacy being protected ]

As you suggest, we rely on 'good taste' from both our employers and our governments.

Is there some way to define good taste, which can be applied in court.. do I have some legal recourse if my government acts in bad taste ?

It seems that the legal system has evolved over the years to be our best attempt to scale and codify the idea of 'good taste'.

why downvote ? I hilite a logical inference :

If readability is a feature, then lack of readability is a lack of that feature, which is a bug [ as measured against the goals of the product ]

if you believe beauty [ or even readability ] is a feature

<satire>

yeah, but over 1.8 billion page views.. thats 3px is a _lot_ of extra bandwidth.

Not to mention all those screen pixels gone to waste.. thats 3 times the screen width every time.. say 50x3x1280 px per page view.. jesus thats enough to power a small village in the third world.

Not to mention the Carbon footprint...

</satire>

yeah, well maybe all manufacturing will be superseded by 3D printing.. in which case you'd want to move into design rather than assembly.

I think eg. Foxcon is going to be a very temporary thing.

I always thought that at some point a robot arm will be cheaper than a human to assemble electronics.. but we may skip that stage altogether. Pretty soon you'll just print your iPhone, bypassing assembly completely.

I zoomed in on google map, was hoping for streetview [ in which I fantasized seeing Jack Reacher walk past for some reason ]

From the OP, I assumed this would be literally 100 miles from the nearest drugstore/711.. but its bang in the urban grid of a small town.

Shouldn't some of the bailout money be towards loans for people to do up cheap homes like this? It would seem a good investment for the future at low cost to enable more people to pick up these low end deals. Are the banks now so stupid they cant get people into homes and paying interest.. instead of this foreclosure fire-sale nonsense ?

Assuming this place can get internet installed, it would make some family a great home which they could gradually renovate, after which they would look after the place and contribute to the town.

Can we compare PHP and node.js without it appearing as bashing ?

Im critical of PHP, my impression is it has no advantages apart from being more established. I've written code in both, to do similar tasks so feel I can compare them fairly.

My impression is PHP is more messy, with no real advantages to balance out what I would call 'legacy syntax cruft'. I really see node.js as a natural evolution from PHP.

To be fair, its well known that Javascript has some bad parts, some of its own legacy syntax crud, but you can write in a modern style that avoids most of that - so I think its an order of magnitude less cruft in practice than PHP, and small code size reflects this assertion.

I know modern PHP in OO style can be more readable, more amenable to programming in the large than old-skool top-to-bottom PHP... but I think the lispy functional features of Javascript lead to more readable 'code as thought' : map/reduce, passing functions in variables in practice is more useful to me than OO is, it leads to simpler code.

A lot of people feel emotional attachment to PHP, if you love it use it. But all the things I do love about PHP, I love more about the node.js/javascript combination. You might like it too.

This is probably the most common hiccup in getting started with node.

I think this is the reason node.js is either loved or hated : if you get over this activation energy hump, you love it, if not you hate node.. to a first order approximation.

Basically, to get over this hump, you need a small piece of code which can handle a sequence of tasks in order : I wrote serialq npm to a minimal implementation of this, and there are much better ones for production use.

So, once you have a sequential task Queue, you can use it to program in a more procedural way to get started with your early apps.. then you will use it only for a few edge cases like startup initialization, and you will be comfortable with callback-heaven :]

Callback-heaven is not a new idea.. you may not have heard of CICS COBOL system.. its an ancient mainframe terminal client-server app framework system with some of the same ideas.

As a side note, be aware you don't need to have many levels of indentation in your code.. its a bad symptom in node javascript or in any other language. Just as novice programmers can make deeply indented code in Pascal or C.. you can do it in your node.js program. Just realize its bad style and think of nicer ways to structure it. Async does not imply deep indenting.

This is debunked, in my personal experience. If I want to do internet data piping, data conversion or a database backend, its faster and simpler to do it in node.

I also use node as replacement for scripting in bash, PHP and perl. I also use javascript for frontend work, so this means I need to keep only one programming language syntax in my muscle memory.

I've actually used node for quite a few commercial data back-ends : both nosql ( mongo, redis ) and relational ( postgres, mysql ). Ive written similar things in PHP, so I can compare them fairly : basically there is just more ugly syntax with PHP.

I use a node proxy to handle multiple small sites on one host, and have a small node program for hosting static content [which does gzipping, sets cacheing for images to help page load performance]. It might be slightly better to use nginx.. but for a small to medium traffic site, this is fine - I don't want to know the nginx or apache incantations to do this, its just faster to write code in node.

The main npm modules are pretty stable and cover nearly everything. The language is _better_ [ smaller simpler more readable code, less syntax, less ugly syntax, functional idioms, procedural idioms, readable map/reduce, readable 'functions as variables', better names, less UPPERCASE ugliness, less work ]

Yes, node is newer, yes there is a mindset change needed to handle the async-callback-centric approach. But basically node is a better PERL than PERL, a better bash than bash, and a better backend web language than PHP.

You'll write smaller nicer code.. its probably just as fast or faster these days at runtime [ although that is not my main reason for choosing it : my reason for choosing node is less PAIN.. and more enjoyment ]

I think part of the problem is we don't teach Math in a way that is visual/obvious enough, which means early math is experienced as 'mechanics' not 'understanding'.

For example, we should explain commutative rule [ a(b+c)=ab+ac ] by drawing the rectangles.

My efforts to help this in some way : GridMaths.com [ sample pics + blurb : quantblog.wordpress.com ]

javascript. Then lisp if you get hooked and want to go deeper, then back to javascript

One thing that struck me about this article is the anti-pattern : Describe the distribution in words, then don't show the chart / graph.

I refer to "Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25; and twice as many, over 60 as under 20. ... ". That takes a bit of parsing and visualizing to actually make sense of, and is pretty central to the topic of the article.

That sentence describes some sort of log-normal bump distribution. But you'd want to compare it to the some-sort-of-lognormal distribution of population per age to draw a conclusion.

The assumption may be "our readers are too math-dumb to read a chart". If true, why is that? Most people can read a map, so I wonder what percentage of people can read a population distribution and make some sense of it. How can it be improved?

[ I created GridMaths.com [ early demo stage], so I'm actually interested in how to get Math concepts across to young people. ]

The rent in Melbourne and Sydney is pretty insane also... we have the very same problem. This is why a few people bootstrap from SouthEastAsia : low_rent == longer_runway :]

The PWC report they mention can be found here : http://www.startupaus.org/research---startup-economy

[ PDF here : http://www.digitalpulse.pwc.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/0... ]

If you could have invented Parse.. you would have invented Parse

Could the real problem be : "we dont trust facebook"

so this is jqMobi [ rebranded + extended ? ]

github : https://github.com/01org/appframework/

They did a nice job of this along the Melbourne waterfront boardwalk, here : http://lokenote.com/lokenote/OBWw7zwX

I think the scale is 1 to 1 billion

pics :] https://plus.google.com/photos/106795164119213709932/albums/...

Do kids in the Barrios these days have access to Android phones?

It would be good if at least some of them can get to information and bootstrap some education / skillset from there.