jkkramer

Overblown fear mongering. Given a service such as App Engine, the policies sound reasonable. Google is covering its ass like all service providers do.

If you want total control over your site, then this is obviously not the service for you. You don't need to read the fine print to know that.

The more I use git, the more I like it. It's like a treasure trove of great features but still feels lightweight and close to the metal.

I think he's arguing separate points, one good the other not:

1) Pizza flyers are expected to look a certain way and despite the fact that this look is deemed trashy by snob designers, it's actually appropriate for the product and audience. This is true and valid. See also: http://www.graphpaper.com/2006/09-04_class-and-web-design-pa...

2) "...the logic suggested that if a pizza flyer does its job then, no matter how awful it looks it must, by definition, be 'well designed'." No it doesn't. Just because it does its job doesn't mean it does its job WELL. I keep a copy of local pizza flyers because they're local, not because they're well designed. One flyer could still be designed better than another. But a badly designed flyer costs me a few seconds at most, so I don't really care.

Nice. Some of your games use a Go board -- are you planning to implement Go itself at some point?

I develop a Go web app myself in my spare time: http://eidogo.com/. It's more for studying and bot-playing than multi-player, though.

I decided that since I'd probably never make more than a pittance off it, I'll just give it all away for free and open the source. At least it makes for a good resume item to show off my JavaScript chops.

A native app is nice, but it has fewer features than other available tools like QGit, which feels pretty native already.

It's still pre-1.0, though, so who knows.

You and the article are talking about different things. Looking nice doesn't matter much for getting funded. But it does if you want a balanced life outside of your startup.

What are you going to do when your startup is successful and you're rolling in money? If you want to be out in the world, pursuing varied interests (or women), looking nice helps.

Appearance is continuous with reality. Imbalance in your intellectual life, for better or worse, tends to reflect in the way you appear. Looking nice is an indicator that you value social connection with others.

An interesting counterpoint -- or at least, a tempering perspective -- is the story that made the rounds recently about a consultant who was called in to fix an unstable Linux kernel driver:

The company programmer was slavishly fixing each symptom as it popped up during boot -- that is, each "first problem" he saw. The consultant instead took a look at the code from a holistic perspective, and was able to fix the root cause.

So while sometimes the temporally-first problem is the root cause, sometimes it's just a symptom. Look for the _logically_ first problem which precipitates the symptoms.

I'd start by coming up with a project, a goal. What are your interests? Gaming, sports, cooking, art? Decide to make something web-based that pertains to whatever interests you have. Doesn't matter if you're reinventing the wheel.

Now, start creating. Learn the necessary technologies as you go along, mixing in healthy doses of theory and best practices when you get the feeling there's a better way to do what you're trying.

It's hard to learn technologies in isolation, when they have no meaningful connection to problems you're solving. So give yourself an interesting challenge that can be overcome with the tools you want to learn.

If you're using automated tools along the way (installers, package managers, code scaffolding), consider doing what the tools do for you manually. Unravel things and get closer to the metal until you're satisfied.

Consider sharing the source code of your project with others. Maybe nobody will take notice, but it will give you motivation to make your code beautiful.

As far as specifics, Python strikes a nice balance among power, maturity, and marketability. MySQL is standard. Be sure to "unravel" your DB code into SQL without just relying on framework magic.

"And that select group appears to be getting smaller and more exclusive by the day."

Did I miss something or did he provide no evidence of this? I don't see any data about what the distribution looked like in the past. How do we know diversity is eroding? It's not a trend if you're only looking at one point in time.

I also couldn't tell whether the top 11 tech sources were the _only_ tech sources or whether there was a long tail of one-time-source stories.

"Their health had almost nothing to do with what they were eating" -- It's good to be young, isn't it? As you get older, the effects of what you put into your body become more immediate, even when you exercise.

Still, most diet advice is useless. Here's the only advice you need: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Quoted from a NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t....

Google's mission statement is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

The New York Times, on the other hand, is about _creating_ information. They also maintain a big archive, but that's not their first priority. Doesn't sound like a good fit to me.

"All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo ..." and a multi-million dollar home in Southern California to put them in.

I read about a condition recently that was like the opposite of autism: people with it were extremely socially adept. Sounds like this kid has it.

Can't find a link at the moment; maybe someone else has read about it?

Consciousness is not an experience of something. It's the experience itself. So it doesn't have qualities--it IS qualities. It's not red, it's what it's like to see red. It's the immediate (no intermediary) subjective happenings of your conscious mind. I can't point you to it because my pointing is a view presented to you in consciousness.

It's not mystical or anything. In fact, it requires less faith than anything else -- it's all you've ever known directly. You could be living in the real world or in the Matrix, it doesn't matter. Either way, consciousness doesn't change, just the contents of consciousness.

I would submit that to properly define something, you have to understand it. Since consciousness is not understood, it has no definition. Talk about consciousness isn't hot air; it's an effort to understand.

Science tends to be inductive: we have to leap from particular experiences to abstract principles. With consciousness, we have the experiences but haven't made the leap yet to principles.

A meticulously-crafted post made to look confidently ignorant, written by an intelligent person is no different from a confidently ignorant post written by a confidently ignorant person.

They both spur argumentative (i.e., non-substantive) posts.

One is a troll by any definition; the other most people would also call a troll, even if the author didn't intend for it to be.

Likewise, if someone intends to write a troll and instead writes a devil's advocate post which spurs substantive debate, then it's not really a troll, even if the author intended it to be.