slewis

This is article is very light on evidence, citing one engineer the author spoke with.

Having worked there I'd say the article is unfairly one-sided. There are plenty of Googlers who maintain a normal work-life balance.

Is it valid to compare the "fragmented Android OS means writing code for old versions problem" to the browser fragmentation issues we've been dealing with on the web for so long? I can't really answer this as I haven't written any Android code.

If that is a valid comparison then perhaps building a library to abstract away the OS differences (like e.g. jQuery) is a big opportunity for someone. On the other hand maybe there are some features that are impossible to emulate on older platforms, or there are orthogonal features that can't be abstracted away.

Fixed.

Thanks! We'll let you know what we end up doing.

I fixed all the issues except 1). Sent you an email.

Thanks!

Wow fantastic feedback. Consider all of this done. What browser/OS are you using?

So we can only use "his" or "their"?

But your initial decision was to turn off ads, in opposition to your desire to support sites you like, which led to your current notion of where things should be on the page.

Can correlation be assumed without sources and facts as was done in the article?

"Not all engineers are [figurative] robots" is certainly a fact and was meant as an upper bound on the number of engineers who believe that photography is merely technical in nature. I'm questioning whether the lower bound is statable as "generally engineers believe this", and claiming that I don't believe it is.

To further clarify my opinion: the line drawn by the author is too black and white. Its inhuman and unemotional itself to assume that another large group of humans can't see the emotional and human side of art.

How do you know this is true: "Engineers who become photographers generally spend an outsized amount of time making their images sharp, have true color, be adequately lit, etc."

Not all engineers are robots. It doesn't take an artist to realize art has both technical and human/emotional components.

No. His point is not about keeping a car on a road. Read the "Iteration" section.

Can you give some examples of some bad habits you might learn? 40 hour weeks?

I have to add a second priority: get enough sleep. For me sleep is more important to my productivity than exercise (though of course exercise helps with sleep).

I don't know if everyone is as dependent on a good night's sleep as I am, but I feel the effects of waking up even 30 minutes too early. Its like night and day (intended).

Its appealing simply because a compute by bus is generally faster.

You're right that the public transportation situation sucks, but wrong that people shouldn't want a new solution that works for them personally.

Couldn't agree more... happens to me all the time.

I've found my poor sleep correlates with how late I'm working on a problem. I try to go to bed around 11pm. If I'm done working by 6pm I'm more likely to sleep ok. 8pm is pushing it. Any later than that the problem won't be out of my head by the time I lay down, and it stays there all night.

The above study lacks all the important details (who was tested, on what content, and with what prompt), at least on the page linked to.

You guys don't care but they're reporting that the majority of users do. They're not saying its rational.

Its a well-written tutorial on using mapreduce to process a specific large music dataset. Now someone can jump right in and start writing their own processing code without worrying about all the boring details.

Maybe the headline is a bit misleading but I find the post interesting and valuable.

Why are people comfortable with paying for tiered connection speeds, but not comfortable with a monthly data cap (that can be removed by paying more for a business connection)?

Isn't it possible for a company to have more than one purpose? The people who run these companies aren't necessarily just greedy corporate bastards. Many of them want to change the world in positive ways. Ads are the funding mechanism. The article's viewpoint is one-dimensional IMO.

Regarding putting things in the hands of others: another good example is data analysis. Say you're the sole programmer at a startup and all your time is focused on building your product. But you also have lots of data coming in that needs to be sliced up and visualized. Write a script that sticks your data in a format your business-types can easily work with (hint: spreadsheet). And let them go at it.

Of course this is a general approach for analysis. Get the data into a tool that makes data exploration easier: R, Excel, matlab. That rather than writing lots of custom scripts.

I believe doing stuff like this is one of the big contributors to making a "10x-100x" programmer. The best programmers don't have to perform 20 clicks in their browser every 10 minutes. Everything is streamlined so that real work can get done.

Your multiplier also goes way up when you do work that makes everyone else in the team more productive. The test automation improvements in the article (automatic screenshots of the gui for failing tests) are good examples.

From the article: "Thus the result is not a language for real-world use but one that I hope embodies many different unique and novel design decisions in a way that triggers thoughts and ideas in those that take the time to play with it."

So its meant to be more thought-experimental than realistic (not saying your points are incorrect though).

dpatru might be using definitions you don't agree with but he/she is still positively contributing to the discussion. Seems on topic to me, just highly abstracted: what are possible systemic solutions to the article's issue? So I've upvoted dpatru's comments that were in the negative.

Thanks for the discussion, very interesting!

I went to craigandtim.com and there's no scrollbar in Chrome :(. I had to highlight text to scroll down.

Awesome job powdahound, and I support this comment. You could show the cost units for reserved instances as a range.

For example a small reserved instance's base cost is $227.50 per year so that's a lower bound of $.0263/hour. Then adding $.03 per hour used the upper bound is $.0563/hour.

So over the course of a year you'd pay within the range $.0263/hour - $.0563/hour depending on your usage.

I'm curious about your costs. "The worse case scenario for cost to service that customer is about $20 a month paid to Twilio." Which you say is for 100 appointments per month.

Assuming one text and one call per appointment that's $.04/appointment, or $4/month.

So what am I missing? Does your service let you fan out to 5 users per appointment? Or is that you can send multiple reminders to the same person for a single appointment (24 hour notice, 4 hour notice, 15 minute notice)?

Just Googled around and found http://www.backupify.com/ or maybe something like http://www.ltech.com/google-apps/products/google-docs-backup

Has anyone tried those products?