tkaemming

I live in Springfield, and so far it actually seems like the most dangerous parts are the right hand turns from MO-13 on to I-44 (step 6 on the interactive diagram). A lot of people forget that although they have bypassed the traffic signal they still have to yield to the oncoming traffic from the opposite side of MO-13 that they would typically be looking at to check right of way.

Another canonical example is Everyblock: http://code.google.com/p/ebcode/

There's also a handy little project that allows you to Gist from the command line: http://github.com/defunkt/gist/

Saying it "doesn't mean crap" is an exaggeration. AWS's physical redundancy offers a marginal increase in reliability (roughly 3.5%, according to their stats) at potentially lower cost than providing the same system in-house because of economies of scale. They never promised to be 100% fail-safe (and would be foolish to do so.)

The Amazon EBS page states (which the author quotes):

> As an example, volumes that operate with 20 GB or less of modified data since their most recent Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume. This compares with commodity hard disks that will typically fail with an AFR of around 4%, making EBS volumes 10 times more reliable than typical commodity disk drives.

Nowhere within that does it say 0.00% failure rate, and later in the page they even describe how to mitigate the risk of losing data due to disk failure using snapshots, mirrored across availability zones.

I've always had an apprehensiveness towards classes or jobs that require you to memorize things before you've actually encountered the necessity to do so. If you're paying attention while you're working through math problems, programming assignments, etc., patterns emerge and you quickly realize what constants are important, which programming methods you should remember the argument order to (or keyword/symbol names), etc.

I guess I understand (begrudgingly) the necessity to memorize something for a high school math test where you don't have the resources at your disposal to actually find the answers yourself, but in the "real world" where finding the information you're looking for is so quick and inexpensive, it seems like a waste to invest in something that might not be necessary. (Also, for some people who don't have the skills to think through solving those problems on their own, it could be a pretty big disservice.)

I can't even begin to remember how many constants, dates, formulas, names, etc. that I've memorized for a test and then promptly forgot.

They could check the endpoint URL by following the HTTP headers on 301/302 redirects.

What would happen when those messages are delivered to a user's phone via SMS? There's still a nontrival amount of users having status updates/direct messages delivered to their mobile phones that probably wouldn't appreciate a message with a 50+ character URL (or the URL being stripped, effecting message integrity).

While the author has a right to be upset, her attitude toward the support staff — who likely have no control over the situation — is disgusting. ("Your apology is worthless", "Your refusal to check the link", etc. from the email conversation, and the ensuing comments on the blog post.)

A bit off topic, but double underscores don't actually make members in Python truly private, but mangles the attribute name to prevent you from accessing it unless you really need to: http://docs.python.org/tutorial/classes.html#private-variabl...

    >>> class Foo(object):
    ...     def __do_something(self):
    ...         print 'something was done'
    ... 
    >>> f = Foo()
    >>> f.__do_something()
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    AttributeError: 'Foo' object has no attribute '__do_something'
    >>> f._Foo__do_something()
    something was done