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Does anyone have a copy of Google at home that they hack on in their spare time? Or Apple? Or Facebook?

If any SAP consultants are out there reading this, can you give me some insights on how to get up to speed with the SAP products and ecosystem? I'm a developer/consultant (primarily Salesforce) but am interested in exploring SAP product offerings. Infos in profile.

I think there are probably many of us that are interested in this side of the "enterprise" but SAP is sort of its own universe and difficult to understand/penetrate from the outside.

I agree, there is cause for some to be concerned about a "reputation damaging" attack. For most of us, however, this would be an annoyance and mere blip in our social presence. Also, what I mentioned is that there is not much incentive for anyone else to spend a lot of time and effort damaging my reputation. What would they get out of it, especially if the perpetrator remained anonymous?

LastPass also contains such a password generator. Even better, it remembers the passwords for you!

Yep, I use the exact same strategy as VonLipwig and recognize that many of my accounts could be compromised. However, without having a central email account compromised, the ability of attackers to find other sites or extract meaningful value from them is quite limited, IMO. In fact, I'm not sure that there is anything meaningful to be extracted outside of email / dropbox / bank accounts / lastpass / github.

Would love to help curate the new plugins site.

Clarification much appreciated. Original email (e.g. request for upvote) probably would have been fine if you hadn't presented the 2 months of SEOMoz as a prize for the upvote.

Got an email that if I upvote this item on Hacker News I get two free months of SEOMoz. How much of that sort of stuff happens here? How many of the 127+ points this item has are from incentivized SEO?

In the recent Thiel debate he said in fact that he supported undergrad education inclusive of non-technical degrees and was personally glad he did what he did. The larger question related to increasing price tag vs. decreasing value.

Good point, although I virtually always am looking for a specific article on wikipedia and not searching the site.

My impression is that Google also always returns wikipedia when you have "wiki" as a search term. Only an extra two characters.

If the problem is that you are too timid to get things done normally, the solution is not to get drunk. The solution is to get some balls.

I'm sure there will be another Bitcoin. I'm also sure the founder is smart enough to know (e.g. in his note about Wikileaks) that something like this must be introduced in stages. In fact, the design of Bitcoin (e.g. the sharp inflationary tendencies stemming from lack of supply) more or less guarentee that it will be adopted by a few enthusiasts but not make it to mass consumption. Frankly, I think Sir Nakamoto also knew this from the beginning and considered this nothing more than a test run.

Abbreviated version:

(1) One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys (running instances, typically including a production and one or more staging sites)

(2) Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies (e.g. GEMFILE for ruby)

(3) Store config in the environment NOT code, "A litmus test for whether an app has all config correctly factored out of the code is whether the codebase could be made open source at any moment, without compromising any credentials."

(4) Treat any service the app consumes over the network as attached resources, a 12-factor app "should be able to swap out a local MySQL database with one managed by a third party (such as Amazon RDS) without any changes to the app’s code."

(5) Strictly separate build, release, and run stages.

(6) Execute the app as one or more stateless processes. "The twelve-factor app never assumes that anything cached in memory or on disk will be available on a future request or job."

(7) Export services via port binding. "The twelve-factor app is completely self-contained and does not rely on runtime injection of a webserver into the execution environment to create a web-facing service. The web app exports HTTP as a service by binding to a port, and listening to requests coming in on that port."

(8) Scale out via the process model. "processes are a first class citizen... the share-nothing, horizontally partitionable nature of twelve-factor app processes means that adding more concurrency is a simple and reliable operation."

(9) Maximize robustness with fast startup and graceful shutdown. "Twelve-factor app’s processes are disposable... should strive to minimize startup time...shut down gracefully when they receive a SIGTERM signal from the process manager...should also be robust against sudden death"

(10) Keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible. "Twelve-factor app is designed for continuous deployment by keeping the gap between development and production small... resist[ing] the urge to use different backing services between development and production"

(11) Treat logs as event streams. Twelve-factor app "never concerns itself with routing or storage of its output stream"

(12) Run admin/management tasks as one-off processes.

Yep, I'm about 110 wpm without adjustment last time I clocked on a regular keyboard, but I can't maintain this for long periods of time. I suspect that ergonomic keyboards allow you to maintain high speeds, not necessarily to reach them. I don't personally don't find myself slower on, for instance, my old natural elite.

My only written reference is the material by "ergonomic experts" included with my Kinesis Advantage -- a bit on the unreliable side. Would love to know if you and Google can turn up anything else.

Just got my first Github spam message today. Coincidence? Is this being used as a spam tool?

Anyone else got something like this in all caps? <<GREETING TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILY, IN MY SEARCH FOR A... >>

Ergonomic keyboards ease strain when one is typing a lot, which can easily happen when one types for a living. They are a necessity for many who end up with wrist strain (I had my first serious episode at age 17, another one at age 22, and another one at age 24).

They also can enable you to type faster. This isn't very important for coding, but it may be important in a variety of other contexts depending on what you do. I've been trying to push over 90 awpm myself.

Here are the keyboards I've had and tried:

MS Natural Elite, classic, affordable, does everything right. I feel the same way about this keyboard as I do the classic MS intellimouse, which was superceded by (IMO) inferior products. The spacebar felt a bit loose and broke on me a couple of times.

MS 4000, never felt as smooth to me as the Natural Elite, but easier to obtain. I think they made the spacebar more stable, but not as easy to reach. I was in the habit of putting my natural elite in my lap and pounding away, the adjusted curvature of this model didn't allow this and otherwise annoyed me.

Kinesis Advantage, major price tag and major pain to use if you have to use a mouse periodically. Also more difficult to adjust to. That said, gives you a slight advantage w/ typing speed (+10 or so words per minute) and allows you to easily touch type the numbers, something that very few people can do. Also, very very comfortable.

Do you really need an ergonomic keyboard? Depends on what you do. I predominately use a laptop keyboard (on my 13" Air) these days and haven't had a major issue with strain for some years, largely because (I assume) I do other wrist intensive exercises (primarily yoga). That said, if I ever did something again where I really needed to push 100 wpm, esp. over an extended period of time, I would definitely crack out my ergo keyboards.

Yep, I try to keep an extra one or two in the basement myself in case my main one goes bork. I think the feel is far superior to the 4000. I also put down the $$$ for the Kinesis and, though I like it a lot in many ways, it is a bit more than I need. I'm doing this primarily for comfort and speed, not out of CTS-induced necessity.

Do you mean the classic Natural Elite or the one of the intermediate versions? The classic Natural Elite still feels a bit better to me than any of the new versions (including the 4000), which is why I keep a stockpile in my basement.

For a just-released handpicked plugin repository, you would think that all the plugins would work. Not so... (FF 7, OSX Lion). There are even a lot of plugins that reduplicate the (generally much better) functionality in jQueryUI.

Are nuclear bombs good? Do the heads of our national security agencies take technologies that could potentially kill the whole world's population and, because they, like every other executive in the world, are an MBA-types, sell it to whoever they happen to meet at a cocktail party? You may not be a teenager, but I can't say that you aren't a troll.

I take it you think there are MBA types that wander around NSA headquarters, grab the dragonfly-size spy robots and bring them to market?

"But is made public by the university researchers who usually create it" <-- yeah, the stuff you know about is made public, and the stuff you don't.... isn't. That's what secret means. I think I heard that 50% of the research in Neuroscience labs today is DoD sponsored and never sees the light of day. Mind-hacking anyone?

Unusually, I don't think it was butchered particularly badly. The sea I believe existed inside of the attacking "angel," and had certain psychological-probing properties.

A bit of an aside, but one of the best Evangelion episodes invovlves a Dirac Sea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aoLMp6q3js

Great quote: "In my own naive way, I would never build a company anywhere but Iowa so maybe I just don't know any better. My personal feeling is, if you want to build it, where you are is just an excuse. Figure out what the area has to offer you and then leverage that. Hustle your ass off and make it work."

Ha, there is also more to beer than how much hops you put in it.

Compared to Munich? I assume you've yet to have a good wheat beer in Bavaria ;)

You are completely right -- and it's really too bad because some combination of the two would be ideal. I wonder if it is easier to start a "startup culture" in Munich or a "get stuff working" culture in Berlin. I guess since I'm also "stuck" in Munich for the moment myself I'd prefer to work on moving things forward in here (hosting hackathons, etc.)

btw, what makes you think Zurich would be better?

It is ultimately not about clout and incentives; it is about drive. It is just like when a lot of people know what the right thing is to do but are too short sighted to pursue it (wasn't Google just trying to acquire Zynga, for example).