rads

"His group has published the code for its experimental bots online, 'to allow people to be aware of the problem and design countermeasures.'"

The code: http://www.webecologyproject.org/2011/02/complete-source-cod...

"Okay, Lindsay, are you forgetting that I was a professional twice over - an analyst and a therapist. The world's first analrapist."

The best example of this I've seen is the Arcade Fire's "interactive film" called The Wilderness Downtown, which asks for your hometown address and… well, you'll see:

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

In emacs you can press C-Space, start typing, then use C-x C-u to capitalize what you just typed.

Because people voted it up! Pretty cool site if you ask me.

> That literally blew my mind, even though in hindsight it is a blindingly obvious thing.

Must have been messy.

I'm a freshman majoring in CS at Wisconsin-Madison looking for an internship this summer. I'm experienced in Ruby/Rails and PHP, and I have some experience in Clojure and Java. Location isn't too important. My email is rjsmith9@wisc.edu

I came across a library for persistent data structures in Ruby yesterday: http://github.com/harukizaemon/hamster

I had a problem with this today when upgrading from jQuery 1.3.2 to 1.4. The AJAX functions worked fine in Firefox, were returning "parseerror" in Safari because there was a non-UTF-8 character in the JSON response.

The latest Rails is at GitHub: http://github.com/rails/rails/

As for the release date: "[T]he Rails 3 release date will likely be in the first quarter of 2010, or even before Christmas 09 if things go really well." (http://railsnotes.com/745-rails-3-release-date-news/)

Clojure is important because it's a Lisp that runs on the JVM and uses existing Java libraries. It has taken big steps to improve Lisp's accessibility.

Do you like Lisp? If you like Lisp, Clojure is its most pragmatic dialect. I personally enjoy the simple, consistent syntax and functional programming style that Ruby lacks.

Note that while Clojure was designed with concurrency in mind, it's also good at other things — like Ruby, it's a general purpose language. However, you're going to be more productive writing a web app with Ruby right now because there are no libraries for Clojure that are as robust as Rails. That may change as Clojure's ecosystem grows.

If you aren't patching something, don't use monkey patching. It's a band-aid fix: eventually your code gets better and you get rid of it.

And code that modifies core classes, like your Array#pack example, is almost always bad code. It doesn't matter if you're working alone or with 100 people.

What's an example of one your extremely difficult questions?

If you want to be king of productivity, avoid anything other than work and feel empty inside.

Why not REST? What's wrong with HTTP?

This is fake. From the comments:

"As part of the INFECTIOUS Festival in Dublin, this is a collaborative contest to try and reach 1 million page views by the end of April. The contest is open to anyone, and the rules are simple: TRY TO MAKE SOMETHING VIRAL.

This isn't real."

Jeff Atwood's posts read like brochures. I wish he'd stop the bold type and barely relevant graphics.

I love this key-value store trend. Looking at CouchDB in particular has made databases are fun again.

I don't get much from productivity "tricks". I get excited for a little while, but the excitement wears off a week, maybe a few days later, and I'm back where I started.

The best long-term advice I know is to just do it fucking now. If you have to get up, then get out of the bed and get ready, whether you feel like it or not. It's not what you wanted to hear, but maybe you'll feel better hearing it from Paul Graham:

"But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right."