munger

Meh, it's novel for about 10 seconds... But seriously, did you complete the level? I dabbled with it for about 10 seconds and then realized how long it would take and lost interest.

Because there is one huge problem - the power usage of the CPUs / GPUs / ASICs. If you buy a "mining rig", probably an ASIC costing $1200 - $6000 (you can spend as much as you want scaling up and across) up front and it consumes something like 800 watts of power 24/7, you have the up-front cost of hardware plus the power bill (800W continuous is 584kWh per 30 days which depending on your area might be like $62 per month per 800W rig).

You may never recover those costs, especially if newer more powerful ASIC rigs are release each year since more overall network computing power diminishes your existing rig's efficiency.

Also - hardware breaks down under maxed out continuous usage, so there's that too.

I can relate to this. There is a real risk in freezing up when you attempt for your first writing of code to be the fully architected solution.

I would still go one step further and at least apply the strategy pattern/polymorphism when you have a large if/else/case block going beyond 2 or 3 conditions in a controller or model or something. (assuming MVC web apps)

The fact is you can write out some ugly code directly in a controller where it might get some code working fast and prevent the freeze up of your output, but once working you should immediately move it to the appropriate place like a model or library, and apply a basic OO strategy pattern (perhaps not with factory/interfaces etc until needed later) where appropriate to cut down on spaghetti/nested conditionals.

This really does not take much more time than stopping at working code that is ugly, and is a good middle ground where it is not painful to return to later.

There is still no good excuse for "taking a dump in the corner" of your code base just to get a marginal gain in output.

I totally agree with you. I could barely finish reading the article myself and you have put into words perfectly why it was subconsciously painful to read.

Good points about bad articles in general. =)

Also don't forget - by the time you read the news about a company, the news has already affected the stock price (in the short term).

So in other words if you read big news the minute it comes out about a company, automated systems and institutional traders have already made their moves based on the news before retail investors have a chance.

Also in this article that seems sensible to me. Spending on higher quality foods, medicine, sewing machines, blankets, savings, starting businesses and even the occasional "luxury" like a TV or wedding.

"... in villages receiving payments, people spent more on eggs, meat and fish, and on healthcare. Children’s school marks improved in 68% of families, and the time they spent at school nearly tripled. Saving also tripled, and twice as many people were able to start a new business."

"...one showed the sewing machine she had saved for over a year to buy, another proudly announced she had nearly finished paying for her family’s television set, and another held up a 300-rupee blanket for the winter, of far better quality than the one it replaced..."

Sounds like overall they are responsible about what they spend on.

I think the main confusion of hot keys going from windows to Mac (as a developer that tried it) is, "On Mac, command is control and on Windows, control is control" - but then Mac also has a control key... but then if you open up a terminal/iterm to a remote server, Mac control is terminal control so you have to remember which "control" you want depending on application context.

For me, kind of annoying after using windows and Putty for remote servers where control is always control.

Nice looking site overall.

As others have mentioned - image optimization will help you a lot. Taking a look at firebug Net profiling, the homepage footprint weighs in at 2MB. 500K is your "studio" image, followed by the bridge bg photo at 370K.

So just optimizing these 2 images will reduce your bandwidth by around 660K or 33%. I'm guessing you can do both in 210K (150K bridge, 60K studio = 210K) possibly better.

EDIT: decided to actually fix it instead of just talking about it.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6653594/pantastic-there-i-fixed-it....

studio.jpg photoshop jpg 70 quality ggb.jpg photoshop jpg 80 quality

old: 494k + 369k = 863k new: 64k + 1k + 70k = 135k

savings = 728K or 36% of your total homepage footprint.

Save more by splitting all your polaroid shadows to png, and the photos to jpg 60-80 quality.

Requires html/css change to layout studio image as 2 images stacked on top (separate shadow png)

I think college, aside from a few useful things you learn and problems with student debt - if nothing else is a good education for playing a game (and learning some discipline). You have rules and constraints - structure. You can determine what the point of the game is.

For example, the point could be - to get the most A's (high marks) with the least amount of effort and the most free time left over for fun. You don't have to take school itself seriously, but it is similar to a career where it pays to play the game.

Well crafted. =)

I didn't down vote you, but my experience with writing specs has been positive.

Maybe you are talking about running your own start-up where it might not be successful yet? And you're trying to find your market fit? Then sure, maybe just writing new code and changing the product on a whim is what is best without writing up a spec.

Now consider a software consultancy with enterprise customers. The enterprise usually wants time and cost estimates, which usually means agreeing on precisely what you will be delivering in advance. You WANT to write a spec, to prevent scope creep and limit your liability, and they want you to tell them how long and how much (and a spec helps estimate those things). It's win-win.

Most enterprise customers can't wrap their CFO's head around true agile with iterations and open-ended times and costs. They want as much of a guarantee as you can give them for what/how long/how much.

Not saying one way is better or worse - but maybe it's a case of the right tool for the job?

I was actually considering adding "sad but true" to the end of that line... because... it is.

=)

Also what app do you have to use in Mac OS X for sane window management? One thing that bugged me about giving a 15" MBP a chance was how "maximizing" windows doesn't actually maximize them and that sort of thing. I guess I thought window management was supposed to be built into the OS out of the box.

For the PC world, I'm happy with a 13" ultrabook running Windows 7 (Asus Zenbook UX31A).

At least I can get work done on it from the recliner and plug it in to an external 24" monitor and keyboard for more serious work.

In my opinion the greatest thing about Windows 7 (other than general stability and being less annoying than Vista) is its window key + arrow hot keys to move application windows around super fast on multi-monitor setups. (and to do exact right/left splits on single monitors)

There is nothing appealing to me about Windows RT/Surface or Windows 8 for laptop/desktop, they both look like they will just get in the way of creating or working on anything.

Thanks to Chris Cardinal for taking the time to write this up! I think it's important to be aware of current fraud like this since a lot of HN readers are probably also amazon customers (as I am myself).

Also interesting to know about gmail "dot blindness" - kind of like "plus addressing" you could use it to track who adds you to spam lists, by giving out different versions of your gmail address to different vendors (not that most people have time for that - I've never done this).

Plus addressing looks like this: myusername+whatever@gmail.com sends to myusername@gmail.com, but some site's email regex check do not allow this, so dot addressing could be used instead.

A nice slide deck that goes in-depth.

The gist of it is using number values (not percent or em or px) is generally the best all around solution to scaling line-height with differing font sizes proportionally, and it suggests tweaks for issues with this like subscript/superscript and IE 6 inline images.

So... use number values. And if you care why it is best or why workarounds for superscript are necessary, check out the (99 slide!) slide deck.

display_errors can be convenient on non-production sites. I think a lot of beginners are trying to hack stuff on shared hosting, and transfer their php files in via FTP and don't understand how to access logs and do appreciate this feature.

It's just too bad they are hacking on their live site, and/or not ever turning it off after they don't need it.

Don't get me wrong, FTP/live editing a site on production / shared hosting are all crappy ways of doing things for serious development but I can see how it might be useful for beginners.

We've all been there, yeah? even if it was back when php 3 and 4 were common.

Consider something like the start of instagram - no revenue and huge data transfer costs after getting tons of users. Although I realize OP is suggesting building something with revenue that is sustainable.

Not unless you consider every request needing to use disk swap "running" which I can assure you is orders of magnitude slower and terrible.

In my experience on Rackspace cloud 512MB instances are the minimum you should use for tiny production apps. Also, they're discontinuing 256MB on OpenStack - these were suitable for single-user dev instances, but I got more swap and or locking if ever attempting to run publicly with traffic. 512MB instances solved that issue.

Edit: Also I should mention I'm assuming you mean wanting to run a fairly standard stack, not a stack targeted toward tiny memory footprint.

AnalTrack.js

Yep, me too. I have an iphone 4/iOS5 and have also delayed upgrading to iOS6 due to the bad press and my need of transit directions. I have a car too, but I frequently ride the bus to the airport for longer trips.

And I still might wait for some google maps app reviews before I upgrade...

A couple issues with this though. Realtor commissions (possible to avoid if you have enough knowledge), and/or loan fees, closing costs, title insurance, etc. Also in the US, capital gains taxes if you don't live in it for at least 2 years. So the appreciation or difference in price would have to be significantly large.

Yeah! Atari 800XL with cassette! We had one of those, my favorite game you had to load in by tape was Zeppelin. I was 5 or 6 at the time, so this game was frustrating as hell and probably made me cry more than once.

Video of Zeppelin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBLUmXUprvU

My dad also had a computing magazine where you could transcribe small programs or text based games into your 800XL and make your own simple programs - which probably has a lot to do with why I'm a software developer today.

That and the IBM PC junior. Good times.

Gotta love any explanation and suggested resolution for being overweight and wanting to lose it that doesn't mention exercise.

If you exercise enough, your diet doesn't have to be so strict, and you're way more likely to actually lose weight and feel good. Some rough guidelines of eating higher quality foods helps, but certainly exercise or lack of it is much more the root cause of so many weight/health related issues.

Most of the time it's very simple. Basic healthy eating and exercise. The problem has always been people don't want to exercise, and there are consequences to that.

Also, bring back 16:10! Stop putting 1366x768 screens on laptops that are 14, 15 and even 17 inches and saying it's HD! Get off my lawn!

Our experience with Rackspace email at $12 per user per year has also been great. Although I suspect our pricing is grandfathered in, looks like they have doubled their price in recent times to $24 per user per year:

http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/

As I recall, recent X Games and Olympics had all their online video content accessible only through Silverlight players also. I remember trying to watch some of these events and being annoyed because the Silverlight player was locking up Firefox.

Good starting point for this stuff:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/04/so-youd-like-to-sen...

I put info like this in a password manager for sanity (Keepass, I work on a PC).

One easy way to manage it is make a folder for each hostname, and add things like mysql root password, ssh port, public IP, pivate IP as different entries relating to the all aspects of managing the host.

Another gem from this video, not that there is a shortage of them - at 3:55 - "It makes us into a vortex machine, sucks things in at the top and shoots them out of the bottom"

As someone who doesn't follow CPU manufacturers closely, it is still surprising to me AMD is in a tough spot - don't their CPUs power a huge portion of commodity hardware based cloud servers like AWS and Rackspace cloud? It seems like demand for that space is huge and only going to grow.