jazzdev

But it's not a choice of doing this or nothing. It's a choice of doing this or something else. That something else may be a better use of your time.

My grandfather did the same thing. Carried a half-empty pack around in his jacket for weeks after he decided to stop. I always thought that was the hard way to do it, but maybe not.

I think a better analog might be: If you're newbie, don't start with a 42-string guitar like Pat Metheny plays sometimes. Start with a 6-string guitar. Part of the challenge of being a newbie illustrator is learning a tool used by professionals. A tool designed for amateurs might be easier for a newbie to get started with.

The optimal solution only picks the best candidate 37% of the time.

>The young, educated army of knowledge workers who have flocked to Seattle since the 1990s have also helped alter Seattle’s political chemistry. [...] there is often “a significant gulf in attitude toward politics, if not ideology, between tech company workers and tech company management.”

Ironic that Amazon wants a business-friendly town for HQ2, but if they are successful, the new employees may change the politics and make that town less business-friendly.

I also wonder how to separate things caused by aging (like grey hair) and things correlated with aging (like getting weaker). Things that only correlate with aging because of social conventions like being less active as we get older are probably worth fighting.

My favorite quote, "For movements to have power, their members have to embrace the thing that is stigmatized, whether it’s being black, loving someone of the same sex, or growing old. That means moving from denying aging to accepting it, and even to embracing it."

Personally, I ping pong between wanting to grow old gracefully and wanting to fight it every step of the way.

    (defun udpate ()
     (ag-if (find-char-pos)
       (move-char it))
     (print (stats))
     (rotate enemies))

Doesn't Hy's anaphoric macros solve this? And one could even argue it's more readable.

This was my first programming assignment (7th grade math class, 1975). It was a great introduction to computers and algorithms. I think I still have that BASIC program on a paper tape in my basement.

Looks like the Derren Brown who wrote the 1964 book is not the same Derren Brown who is the 21st century magician.

My sister gave me my favorite definition of "computer literate": Someone that isn't afraid of the computer.

The worse thing that's every happened to me because of my lack of fear was that I fried the motherboard on a friend's Mac back in the 90's by plugging a parallel printer into a SCSI port. Oops! Fortunately it was under warranty.

But what groups are targeted? The new recipe is scanning everyone's online communication to decide who to target.

Historically the name came first. Engineering would start working on a new version, Foo, and later on Marketing would decide it if was going to be 1.3 or 2.0

At least that's how it worked in commercial software. Now the names have taken on a life of their own.

"The famous paper Estimating the Return to College Selectivity Over the Career Using Administrative Earning Data (2011) by Dale and Krueger raises the possibility that on average, attending a more selective college doesn’t raise earnings at all. They found that as a group, there was no statistically significant difference in income later in life between students who went to more selective colleges and students who went to less selective colleges. Their finding is somewhat robust: it’s based on a large (~10k) sample size, it’s true both of the class of 1976 and the class of 1989, it’s true of the class of 1976 from age 25 through age 50 and it’s true both of men and of women."

http://cognitomentoring.org/blog/how-much-does-where-you-go-...

How do you access enthusiasm?

Reason.com reports that this consensus is cracking [1] And the correction at the end begs a fascinating question about whether the media should present both sides of an issue. If 99% of research says A and 1% says not-A, is the media being misleading by reporting both views? If the media doesn't present not-A, then is it censoring opposing views?

[1] http://reason.com/archives/2014/11/14/video-game-violence-a-...

Fascinating. "The ’90s were a bubble. ... But the ’80s were not a bubble. Not every cycle is a bubble. ... In the ’80s they tried to avoid risk and got nothing."

Some great quotes, including "C is good for two things: being beautiful and creating catastrophic 0days"

I'm not really sure what the author's call to action is. Seems they have one in mind about demanding better software, but it's too vague to be actionable. Still a good read.

There was an interesting article arguing that motorcycle helmets make motor cycling more dangerous. Sure, if you have an accident, a helmet is a win. But risk compensation indicates you might be less likely to have an accident when not wearing a helmet.

When we started this project there was some pushback about using Node.js instead of Python or Rails, but we went with Node.js and it's been a great choice.

Impressive, and a useful exercise, but it doesn't seem practical to give up DRY in favor of RYRYRY just because it compresses better and saves a few bytes.

I get a bit of this "doing it wrong" vibe from friends and family when I'm on vacation. I take time out of the "work day" for personal stuff, but when I take time out of "vacation" for work stuff, I get the fish-eye.

I'm always feeling lucky. I think this will be great. Trying it out for a while to see how I like it.

I got to ride one of these at Disrupt today. Inside, in a crowd, but still impressive tech. Smooth acceleration. I do ride boards, so I'm not a newbie. Loved it. I want one.

Maybe good scoops are more important than good spelling and grammar.

As a hiring manager, I do look at github accounts if a candidate includes one. Even from a small project you can often tell if the person is clueless or not.

zanny, if you are interested in a Python/Django job in San Francisco, email me. My email address is in my profile.

Yes, very awesome. Makes implementation much easier. But having just removed a font from our web app to improve performance (download time and rendering time) I can't help but wonder if sprites aren't lighter weight than using a whole font when you only need a few icons.

There's a lot of great insight in there, but he's talking about senior executives, not technical contributors. From the article:

if you manage a junior employee and they ask you about their career development, you can say what comes naturally and generally get away with it. As we saw above, things change when you deal with highly ambitious, seasoned professionals.

I've worked with Ben and I know that if a highly-valued technical contributor turned in a resignation he would make a counter-offer to keep them.

I got "The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive" for Christmas and it's just fascinating. Interesting history on the Turing test and AI and philosophy and very well written. I highly recommend it.