mcantor

You seem to be suggesting that the world would be better off if this article didn't exist. I'm interested to know why, because I found it mostly funny and a little thought-provoking. I didn't get the impression that the author claims his work has been subjected to any degree of scientific rigor, nor that he thinks people ought to be idolizing or congratulating him for sharing it. It's just kind of out there, for each reader to make whatever they want of it.

Also, what exactly do you mean by "parody"? I thought he was clearly poking fun at the world at large, but didn't get the sense that there was any particular other work which he was lampooning.

Well-said. Lately one of my mantras has been "Do What Works For You". We tend to broadcast our opinions as if they were the only possible approach for all people, because our insecurities make us fear being wrong every time we see someone with a different solution. Or, worse; we choose to take the "easy way" of following someone else's belief system to avoid the uncertainty of nurturing our own, even if it obviously doesn't work for us. Each individual person experimenting and drawing their own conclusions seems like the most reliable way for everyone to actually see results.

If only everyone would just be quiet and follow my opinions about that...

There happens to be an entire nutritional philosophy based on exactly that approach:

http://thepaleodiet.com/

It was my understanding that the derogatory use of "sophistry" implies an intent to deceive, which is not professed by the author of the article.

I started a new job recently; at my previous location, I ate with the other developers (some of whom I worked closely with, or had done so in the past). I've been at the new place for less than two weeks; it's a much smaller company, and I find myself inspired to go eat with everyone but the other developers, just to see what happens. However I have been surprised by my own hesitation to broach the perceived social barrier--the other devs invited me to lunch of their own accord, so it seemed natural; on the other hand, approaching someone else feels like a different situation altogether!

It knocked the wind out of me... just reading it again begins to elicit tears. What a remarkably candid message.

I agree, the "Build it and they will come" idea drives me insane. For the 0.1% of people that the approach works for, they treat it like gospel, and it just ends up giving the other 99.9% of people with great products an entitlement complex.

Is there any way to apply this to a full-time salaried job where you can't change your "price", but are still asked to evaluate commitments of various sizes over the course of your position?

God this stuff drives me insane. The "robot journalist" wrote a good article because the person who created it PROGRAMMED IT to write a good article! There were no skills inherent to the software that eclipsed the requirement of having a creative human involved in the process. Articles like this don't mean anything.

It would have been funny if no one could see the point total for the options on this poll itself.

This argument is circular: "Keeping your salary private benefits you when negotiating a new salary"... which is difficult mainly because everyone's salary is private.

One risk behind hiding comment scores is that people will lose a cue for when they accidentally downvote.

"The harder I work, the luckier I seem to be." - Thomas Edison

From this, I take "hard work" to mean working mindfully, not "counting photographs" as in the article. To work and live mindfully is to do each thing as if you did nothing else: you are fully present in each moment, drinking in your surroundings without judgment or abstraction. A hundred trees are not a hundred trees--each one is a new experience, with different patterns in its bark and different rustling in its leaves. To use the article's example, a party is not a "party". To the "lucky" person, to the mindful person, they are not "at a party"; they are simply talking, laughing, connecting.

I strive for this kind of mindset, and grasp it sometimes. Like zen, the harder you try to hold on to it, the quicker it slips away. At least, I can always look at the trappings of my privileged middle-class life and know that, for these things, I am lucky, and that helps me stay mindful.

And great alimony?

I'm surprised that people view this as a destructive or loaded question. As a self-taught programmer, this sounds exactly like something I would ask as a way to fill gaps in my own knowledge.

> Logplex handles input streams (which we call “sinks”)

Considering the complementary term they use ("drains"), wouldn't it be more intuitive to call them "faucets" or "spouts"?

Just sayin'.

> They are supposed to mean...

Url?

I use vim almost pathologically, but I gave up on set -o vi. Since there's no visual indicator of which mode you're in, it's easy to make confusing mistakes and not the right feedback. It just wasn't worth it.

I found this article extremely difficult to read, as he seemed more concerned with enunciating through italics than with expressing his point in a clear and unambiguous manner.

I still think the old logo looks just like the "Morph Ball" from the Metroid games.

http://www.google.com/images?rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS397US397&q=...

But what's the point of making a response that everyone understands if you're not really saying anything?

Strong agree. It confuses me when people respond to articles about Anonymous and /b/ by saying, "You know, there are lots of other boards on 4chan!" My perennial answer is: So what? /b/ is the only one whose influence leaks out of 4chan itself, like rainbow-colored smog billowing out of a dilapidated smokestack. The article isn't like an encyclopedia entry on Asia mentioning only China; it's like a little kid opening a package of Starbursts and eating only the pink ones. Everyone knows they're the tastiest, and only candy apologists insist otherwise.

> If I'm committing some large assets...

(Isn't version control mostly for text files?)

> If, while the upload's been happening, I've made more changes to my working copy...

(So you're uploading a large--presumably binary--file, and you're continuing to work on it while it's committing...)

> I have to carefully pick out my new changes and keep them separate from my old changes.

(Wait, what? In a binary file? Or did you commit the binary file and changes to smaller text files in the same changeset? If so, you should be committing them separately. Either you're making small commits to text files that commit almost instantly, or you're making large commits to binary files that you can't "pick out" changes from anyway. Gotta pick one.)

> As soon as the commit is published, other people may check it out and try building it...

> ... if I can't access the repository server – if it's gone down, or if I'm working remotely – then I can't commit at all.

> ... but there are many reports [weasel words] of it being somewhat prone to error. If your mergeinfo property has been corrupted somehow, it might be extremely hard to spot...

I see a lot of inconclusive beating around the bush here. The author doesn't want to come out and say that any of these are concrete showstoppers because they are all, at worst, edge cases that experienced svn users mostly know how to deal with anyway. Every VCS has its own bugbears like these, git included.

I have been using subversion for years; I do all kinds of insane nonsense with private branches, merging and merge-tracking, large asset commits and all of the things this article uses for its doomsaying. I run into big problems maybe two or three times a year.

The writer suggests that git is better.

For some reason, even though I have read numerous manuals and guides about git, and have grilled git experts, and have regularly used git myself, and presumably understand how it works, I have to go on a farcical journey into its implementation details every time I do ANYTHING. I always end up in #git, or calling a more git-savvy friend. Everyone inevitably has a different answer that involves a lot of shrugging and "Oh, I guess this actually happened." This was the result even when all I did was follow the instructions at help.github.com/forking, TO THE LETTER.

Perhaps I am just a moron, and subversion is just VCS for morons. If so, I am too far gone to realize.

I think there's a typo in the submission--this looks like installation instructions, as opposed to just "join & use" instructions.

Isn't this basically a tenure thing? AFAIK public unions make firing a First-In-Last-Out operation, which means the senior teacher you hired 10 years ago is there to stay until every single other teacher that came after is gone.

In my completely non-expert opinion, tenure seems to be a multiplier. From a students' standpoint: A good teacher with tenure is a godsend, because they feel comfortable challenging the system to make sure their job (educating the kids) gets done. Conversely, a bad teacher with tenure is a cataclysm, because they don't really want to be there, the kids don't really want them to be there, and the school administration doesn't really want them to be there, but by God, they're staying, because it's easier to collect a paycheck and hate your job than change your situation. To use a metaphor from Kevin Smith's Clerks, tenured crappy teachers are perennially shitting their pants instead of lifting the lid on the toilet seat.

Is it permissible in American courts to require the prosecutor to unambiguously define "hacker" before answering?

If not, can you feign ignorance of the definition and explain that you are thus literally incapable of providing an honest & informed answer; and since you are under oath, require a definition before answering?

"Jeez. This guy really drives a lot, for a student."

Out of curiosity, how does your app know when a real human gets on the line...? Do you have a database of the automatic messages ("Please stay on the line while we sip Cognac and chortle") for each company so it doesn't get false positives?

Also, a lot of phone service reps are literally not able to end a call. Often, the customer has to do it.

This was a work of art, man. Dig it. Yeah, mannnn. The MAN is stealing our MOJO, mannnn. Oppressing our SOULS. You gotta fight the man, man. The establishment. Big Daddy Warbucks and Uncle Sam, they're in cahoots. Fucking vampires is what they are, man. Gonna suck out our spirits through our paychecks. You dig?