tdavis

Is it harder to find tutorials for PostgreSQL? Yeah, maybe. Is it harder to get high-quality advice and resources from subject matter experts? No; in fact, it's far easier. I have used PostgreSQL for many years and in all of them every question I've had has been answered quickly and properly by somebody in #postgres who knows way more about postgres and SQL than I'd ever even want to know.

And what about hires? When a million people "know" MySQL it takes a lot more effort to find somebody who actually does. There may be fewer contractors for PostgreSQL but they are practically by definition better than the average MySQL contractor.

unlike learning a programming language, with databases, the domain knowledge is harder to discover and more risky if you don't understand it

Exactly. So should you trust the ecosystem that relies on lazy, bandwagon developers for the majority of its market share, or the one that has been silently doing shit the right way for years? There may be a whole lot of really skilled MySQL admins out there (I guess there must be given how many huge sites go to extreme lengths to make MySQL work for them), but I can find you a handful of grossly overqualified PostgreSQL admins in no time. The same can't be said for the former.

Don't get me wrong, it's still embarrassing to everybody that we've had pre-orders waiting for so long; that was never the intention. It's a shitty way to treat our first customers, but it was an honest mistake. Many such mistakes were made—especially with regard to communication—but knowing what I know now I don't feel the pre-order taking itself was one. In fact it's probably the only reason the product is nearly out now.

I clarified your question in an above comment.

To make it 100% clear: the only entity to profit from pre-orders has been PayPal, from interest earned on locked funds. We have not made a single dime.

Generally, you want to stay out of insert mode as much as possible (memorize most of the movement commands and use them), use splits liberally (if you have a big monitor) and use generic awesome plugins such as: NERDTree, surround.vim, snipmate, taglist.vim, etc. Use a complete mode that works with your language of choice or a third-party one that gives more. Omnicomplete is a good place to start and it's built in.

Check out the vim sub-reddit, vimcasts.org, and the Daily Vim blog. There is a wealth of information in those places.

Shoot me an email (see profile) if you want more specific guidance. I initially planned to type stuff out here but remembered how awful the formatting is.

Why we as a Python community need Bento is another question. In my mind distribute, pip, and virtualenv combine to create a simple, robust, portable packaging, building, and installation system that I have been very happy with. Dependencies are automatically resolved, environments are self-contained, and portability/backup is a copy command away.

I love aptitude for installation of global dependencies; beyond that I've never found a use for it.

Does something take too many key strokes? Too much repetition? Do you need auto-complete for languages, projects, etc.? Do you have trouble navigating? Changing surrounding syntax? Give a bit more detail and I'd be happy to point out stuff you could/should be doing.

Most people will just throw out a laundry list of cheat sheets and useful plugins; while there are many of these, you should concentrate on efficiencies that will gain you the most productivity for your specific tasks.

And this is great news, as far as I'm concerned. Generic shortened URLs are becoming a plague upon the web and are marginally useful at best outside of Twitter. Even more props to Twitter for demystifying links where applicable instead of taking the easier route of pure obscurity. The sooner third-party shorteners disappear from Twitter the sooner they can disappear from the rest of the web and we can have link transparency back again.

On a related note, I'm actually quite happy that Twitter is starting to close up their platform. People can stop pretending it's some open platform for global communication and finally realize it's a novel service thanks to its popularity, but little more.

What did she expect to happen? That Bitly would concern themselves with her reputation? If you want a URL shortener who cares, your only option is to run your own. Bitly's only concern is for their business, nothing more.

For instance, The Deck (http://decknetwork.net/): 30 ad spots per month, currently $7,900/ad, equals $237,000/mo (and they're always booked solid.) This doesn't even count their "roadblock" ads which are an additional $7,900/day. The best part about their ads are they're good. I've found quite a few excellent products through them over the years.

  1. Nullify all the arguments in the post because people
     imagined wearing monocles must be wrong.
  2. Point out the fact that it is wrong for anybody to hold
     an opinion on anything.

As far as I'm concerned, a program which automatically purchases tickets through TicketMaster is more of a feature than a federal crime; the process for a law-abiding citizen is horrendously convoluted and a complete UX disaster. Too bad TM gets away with it, thanks to their monopoly.

I've spent enough time in the ticketing industry to know that it's right up there with "accai berry" and the like in terms of shadiness. Anybody who thinks StubHub et. al. are "fan marketplaces" is severely delusional; 99% of all tickets are listed by brokers who do it for a living (most of whom use less-efficient ways to circumvent TM security, however. That 25MM number is the only reason this is being prosecuted so vigorously.)

This made for some fast decision-making. The only downside has been that following his death I am still being charged for services I wasn't even aware we had and for which I have no non-violent method of cancelation. However, this is obviously a rather extreme edge case that most people won't have to deal with.

The main issue highlighted in the post regarding cell plans is a bike shed-style decision. These are problematic because anybody can take a few minutes to research the space and come up with valid arguments for/against another person's recommendation. Generally, the best thing to do in these cases is to simply defer to whoever broached the topic and have them make a decision; they had a head start on research and cared enough about it to bring it up so it makes sense for them to own it.

  Despite iPad propriety, higher res + HTML5 make web apps   
  much more relevant and far cheaper/faster to develop & iterate.

You're right, they should have just looked 10 years into the future and started writing full web apps using open technologies. Except that would have cost orders of magnitude more than everything they've had to pay in IE6 support costs up to now, because they would have had to invent them all.

It's easy to judge the past from the perspective of the present.

(and I think it's already in the Alpha)