saturn

These days all variables created by me, in any language, are in descriptive_snake_case. I just can't see any reason to use anything else.

> I learnt that it's in my interest to make a consolation point toward people with opposite opinions in public places

Well, you've just been shown the opposite. By dismissing your own argument - by claiming it is just a matter of random, arbitrary preference - you kind of write yourself out of the conversation. I guess you are less likely to offend, but you're less likely for anyone to listen at all. You may as well have not spoken in the first place.

> just practice smiling at strangers

This is excellent advice. Actually, give anyone you interact with your dopiest, most shit-eating grin possible.

HOW YOU FEEL: Like a fucking idiot HOW THEY FEEL: Wow, this guy really appreciates this interaction! What a big smile! : D

You get used to it. I have gone through this too. I used to never smile in photographs. Now, I give every photograph my "retarded person who has just learned he is going to mcdonalds" huge idiot grin. You know what? Now I look like everyone else who smiles in photographs

> it will kill you if you drink it raw

Sorry, but this is total nonsense. I knew many a chem student with access to pure ethanol (not to mention the wits to manufacture it). They are still with us (as are the photos)

So, pure alcohol/ethanol will not kill you faster than the equivalent liquor. You may, of course, wish for death ..

Well, the iPod certainly dominated in Australia, at least. I have to think for a second to even remember another brand of mp3 player. Ah yes .. the Creative Rio, or Zen, or something. I have never actually seen one in real life.

I would also like to know where you are from. iPod was an incredibly strong brand here. It was basically synonymous with mp3 players. Anything else seemed, and in truth was, second best. I owned 3 or 4 of the things.

I have found that doing a class in theatrical improv to be a fantastic exercise for removing social inhibition and gaining skills in group dynamics.

Rackspace support has plummeted horribly from a few years ago. They still charge a huge premium, and act like prima donnas, but they are just not worth it.

I didn't mention softlayer because I did not want to look like a stooge but yeah, that is who I use these days. Decent prices, reasonable support, you would have to give me a reason not to go with them for a new deploy.

I came up with that theory because I couldn't think of anything else that explained my 2 hour waits to get a new instance. Not the other way round.

You mean availability zone. Well I guess me, Reddit, Foursquare, and plenty of other sites just got lucky in the bad availability zone.

Ah yes, here's the classic AWS apologist pattern in full effect. You don't use EBS! Of course you don't, you would have to be some kind of friggin' idiot to use EBS. So what do you use for, say, MongoDB data files, that is different from morons like me who stupidly assumed they could/should use EBS?

The cheapest zone, yes, so presumably the most popular. And who doesn't use EBS?

You sound like you think I'm being unfair. Why? Plenty of sites were badly affected by that outage; it precipitated a lot of self-examination at some companies I know of. I don't think I am overstating the issues here.

75% of motor vehicle purchases were "Made in America"? That is astonishing. Unbelievable, even.

Huh? North Virginia was down for something like 30 hours in April. I had some instances in there. Hardly "incredible luck". And it was not just me: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=AWS+Virginia+outage

Hm. Well, I don't like them. It's subjective, you might disagree. But off the top of my head:

1. Contracts. They want 1 years minimum contracts for any dedicated servers. For truly gargantuan orders I could understand this but for one puny server? Never.

2. Their definition of "cloud" is different from mine. To use their "cloud" services your servers need to be public facing, ie on public IPs. Want them on your own VPN? You can stil get the cloud prices but not the API. you create and cancel servers via tickets. This is different from VPS how?

3. Sloooow provisioning - even if you are able to use their "public cloud" API to provision a server - prepare to wait hours for it to be done, leading me to suspect it does nothing more than email a tech to provision a VPS and hook it up somehow. Oh, you can't pause them to save money either, again making me think these "cloud" servers are nothing more than slicehosts with an extra layer of abstraction

Is that enough? I could go on.

As someone who has put a considerable amount of resources moving things into cloud computing - I wanted to believe. But I have changed my mind.

Cloud computing scales the efficiencies, yes. It also scales the problems. And because of this, AWS is by several orders of magnitude the worst of my current hosts.

I have dedicated servers. No downtime in past year. I have a couple of cloud servers with rackspace. No downtime (although i don't recommend them). I have some VPSes with local providers. No downtime.

AWS? More than 24hrs downtime in the last year. Seriously, for someone trying to run web sites reliably - screw that. I'm not using AWS any more.

And don't even get me started on the apologists. "EBS slow as treacle? Well you should have been running a multi zone raid-20 redundant array! Duh!". "EC2 instances dying at random? Well you should architect and implement a multi-master failover intelligent grid!"

I used to be under some kind of crazy delusional spell that the above was correct and it was somehow my fault that I wasn't correctly adapting to AWS's numerous failings. Well, no more. Now I realise that I should just stick with the super reliable service I know and love from traditional operators. You need to programmatically grow and shrink your app server flock? Great, use AWS. For the other 99.999% of us - stick with what you were using before.

Well, at the risk of further downvotes, I think that's totally irrelevant. No-one is down at the soup kitchen asking what the volunteers have to say about intellectual property reform. It is a complicated topic and the personal altruism of the person making the argument has basically nothing to do with anything.

While slowpoke's rudeness is to be deplored, you set yourself up for that. Attempting to tie your survival (ie whether you eat) with a political concept (support, or otherwise, of the current intellectual property regime) is a pretty poor argument. "Either you agree with me, or you want me to starve to death!"

I also don't appreciate the call to some kind of moral high ground - "I run a business which helps teach little kids to read". Yeah yeah. Maybe slowpoke has devoted his life to curing cancer in kittens. Wouldn't make any difference to his argument, either.

Dude, don't put me on the spot like that. I'm not going to judge your bloody photo. What is this, hotornot.com?

That said, you're pretty young, and your awful diet has evidently not caught up with you yet. When it does, I predict a swift re-evaluation of your ideas about nutrition and self-exceptionalism.

No offence, but only an American could make the argument that because their weight has stayed "only" between 95kg and 100kg that they are living proof that people can eat what they want and not get fat.

Unless you are a bodybuilder, which I am guessing you are not since they most certainly do care about what they eat, you are likely considered overweight in every other country on earth.

You were hoping for a list of companies where psykotic has friends who have shared their confidential salaries with him/her, usually small web businesses with a max of 5 or so programmers, so you can ring up and demand your $200k job?

That's not how the real world works.

Bloody hell. I guess I didn't realise they could make quite that much. Yep, that outpays all but the most exceptional programmers all right, I stand corrected.

Isn't it the case that if you want to get rich as a GP or specialist you have to start your own business, too? Also known as a practise? It is known that you'll never get rich working for someone else, but that applies to all trades and I don't see any reason why starting one as a programmer is dramatically different from starting one as a GP, or a plumber, or any other kind of highly skilled and valuable trade.

> The worst physician's salary averages about $50K more than the best programmer's salary. Nurses get paid as much as programmers

I was all primed with a fiery response about how good programmers in hot markets should be pulling more than 200k, lousy markets at least 100k, and anyone who wasn't is either a lousy negotiator or not good, but then I remembered where I was. The crème de la crème. Yeah, "staff programmers" (as I call them) might well earn less, on average, than nurses. And it's a guaranteed, standardised wage, none of this grasping meritocracy competitive nonsense.

The thing about programming is that it gives you a chance to shine. I mean really shine. God bless the nurses, etc, but realistically speaking any one nurse is not going to change the world just by being a bloody good nurse. I think the attraction to the high-stakes sink-or-swim pure meritocracy game is a very male thing.

Indeed, how were SpaceX and Scaled Composites able to do so much with such limited resources, 30 years later and having benefited immensely from NASA's pioneering work?

NASA could definitely be run better but let's compare apples to apples. I'm sure any given engineer at SpaceX has a computer on his desk superior to the entire world's computational capacity at the time the shuttle was designed.

Yep, matches up with my experience pretty well. Around 2 or 3 years is a good sign that the place isn't a terrible place to work, and also that it's not full of make-work existence-justifying lifers.

A bad place to work can actually be fun for a while, if you have good coworkers. It can be a bonding experience, a rite of passage, friendships forged in the fires of mt doom etc. But indifferent management and ashen-faced zombie coworkers determined to cling to their mediocre jobs until they rot to death in their seats? It's a different type of poison, but just as deadly ..

Not so sure about this. Good programmers can change jobs very frequently. I know many people who have never stayed at the same company more than a couple of years. That's just part of their ambitious, challenge-seeking nature, the will to improve and take things to the next level - it's not really an indictment of the places they stayed before.

I'd be suspicious of a departmnt with a turnover rate around 6 months, sure, but if it was 5 years I'd be equally worried, because unless working for that company was the shit then I'd be concerned with the kind of developers the company had hired in the past and what kind of culture such a bunch of unambitious seat-warmers had developed, and I'd be expected to fit into.

I share your concerns about data security etc, and I didn't make the decision lightly - in fact I used to host my own git repos (raw git, not web sites like gitorious). However, my trust in them grew in time and when genuine rock stars like Aman Gupta joined them (I use his stuff everywhere) I realised their brain trust far exceeded my own. They can probably do a better job than I can of keeping my data safe. And paying them for it helps; I'm just one customer but collectively we keep the lights on over there and I know they take it seriously.

Anyway YMMV but out of all the outsourcing decisions I've had to make recently, github was one of the easiest.

Well you're just going to have to un-grow out of that delusion because in the real world absolutely nothing is free.

That's what I considered doing. And then I thought about the amount of time I'd have to spend setting up and maintaining that server. And what if I wanted to give my friend access to some of my projects. And what if I wanted to give a client read only access to a certain repo. And what about backup and ssh keys and ...

.. and then I realised, github does all this for me, and for $50/m or something for an org account, and that is an absolute no brainer for a working professional. I cannot fathom these complaints about $22/m or what not. If you have enough knowledge to participate on HN and that amount of money is meaningful to you, you're doing something wrong.

This makes no sense. Firstly he says that he refuses to use anything with a command line .. then he says "accessible HTML isn’t that hard, really". Well, that's text based isn't it? How can you condemn text based control in one context and praise it in another?

In a great many cases it is impossible to make a GUI to perform every conceivable action you want to do. You need to drop down to a more basic level, and that inevitable means text, whether it be programming languages (like HTML) or command lines. Drawing some arbitrary line based on when you in particular decided to stop learning new things is pretty meaningless.

You're right, I shouldn't have taken the bait. Entirely deserving of the downvotes ...