Kortaggio

That piece of software exists, it's a popular audio player called foobar2000 https://www.foobar2000.org/

For everyone wondering "What's the music in the background?" It's here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsMewmMTA_c cleverly linked to via an autoplaying, hidden embedded iframe in the page.

Currently the rule set says only "startup" and "rocketship" can turn into dead pool, not "real business". Adding the "dead pool" rule to "real business" would indeed approximate that. (Or make it conditional to > a certain number of neighboring "startup"s if you like)

"Real business"es have to have the probability of being obsoleted by new startups, or else you end up with a cash factory that spits out investors that cover half the world: http://imgur.com/Bg1SV3g

This reminds me a lot of PG's essay on how Yahoo was a beneficiary of its own advertising bubble that it created in the 90s:

> By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in.

http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

Whoops, you're right.

Mint's 2010 VP of Engineering answers this question on Quora: http://www.quora.com/How-do-mint-com-and-similar-websites-av...

Apparently, it's stored encrypted but will be decrypted on-the-fly when Mint needs to refresh your banking data.

Edit: Here's the patent he referred to that handles the decryption: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=H...

Flask was the framework that finally made web frameworks "click" for me - the biggest advantage of learning about Flask is you can build up your knowledge of web services piece by piece, allowing you to take time and fully understand each component before moving on to the next. That way you're not trying to comprehend all the "magic" that's going on behind the scenes all at once.

A good keyword is "attention economy" if you're interested in further research on the topic--it's an interesting hypothesis about how "information" is no longer the dominant mode of economics. Your post reminds me of this article: http://markmanson.net/attention

What I'd like to know is where the graduates from 3-month programs are working, it seems like the vast majority of job postings I come across look for only mid-level or senior engineers.

That's a good idea, I'll look into it. Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback! I settled on the current speed after showing it to my friends, but it seems like your computer is rendering it in a different framerate leading to the jitter. Do you know of a way I can increase the CSS animation framerate without changing the speed? Otherwise I'll just reduce the speed to reduce jitter.

I have autocomplete on my to-do list for features but decided to just ship it before the scope of the project got out of hand. Thanks for the suggestion.

Nice! This is a great resource to reference. Up until this point I've been using a checklist I created with specific lines of code I can copy paste off of this gist: https://gist.github.com/Kortaggio/5156687

Wow the number of fake testimonials is unsettling--have you had to resolve inquiries from people you know in real life who found one of your imposter profiles?

For anyone interested in knowing how the UTF8 attack works, Mathias Bynens has a fantastic presentation which describes the technical details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFfjJ8pOrWY

Here's the slide deck: https://speakerdeck.com/mathiasbynens/hacking-with-unicode

Interesting anecdote from the talk: This isn't just unique to Wordpress. Spotify was vulnerable to this at one point.

I like the structure of the game 2048 https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/2048 and I think it will be highly instructive for you since it implements the MVC pattern without using a framework, and you want to be framework agnostic. 2048 is simple enough that it's an accessible introduction to software design.

Daniel Janus wrote a great analysis of the source code and architecture; I highly recommend reading it: http://blog.danieljanus.pl/blog/2014/04/02/2048/

FYI You probably don't want upload your secret keys in plaintext to GitHub: https://github.com/crobertsbmw/deckofcards/blob/687881c8408a...

    Location: Canada; but prefer large liberal cities e.g. SF/Bay Area, Austin, or New York.
    Remote: Yes
    Willing to relocate: Yes (Eligible for TN if in U.S.)
    Technologies: JavaScript, Python, jQuery, Flask, HTML/CSS, SASS, Bootstrap, Git
    Email: bill.mei (the-at-sign) kortaggio.com

Résumé/CV/Portfolio: http://www.kortaggio.com/cv

I'm a full-stack JavaScript/Python web developer who's also super interested in machine learning, data science, and EdTech. I think there's a lot of unexplored opportunity in these fields, but in general I'm looking to work in an industry that has a potential to make a big impact on the world. We probably won't be a great fit if you're working on anything related to social media.

I've been freelancing for the last two years and my previous clients include the president of a million-dollar digital-advertising firm in Toronto who hired me for my business advice. My previous projects include running a bus company that our competitors appraised at $1,184,000 in revenue. I look forward to chatting if you're working on something interesting!

Find out more about me: http://www.kortaggio.com

Wikipedia has many "History of X" pages. Plug in X = Software Engineering and you get a general overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_software_engineering

Here's the original paper (PDF): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-_F9a3KJf3LWmlWdzd6OU5MM28...

I'm surprised this wasn't linked anywhere in the press release.

Another gem in there is

  <!--[if lt IE 7]>
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/iesucks.css" />
  <![endif]-->

Weird idea to think about: what if in the future most of social media consists of bots responding to what other bots have posted?

If you're comfortable with meeting a stranger in a public place and paying a small premium over market rates there's always the option to purchase Bitcoins with cash in person. Simply find your counterparty on a message board or LocalBitcoins.

That's a great insight, it's incredible as adults how much we take credit cards for granted. An increasing proportion of my non-essential spending (e.g. non-food expenses) now come from online shopping and it's an incredible business opportunity for companies to accept something other than credit cards online, either for teenagers or for adults who can't get a credit card for whatever reason.

This is great, I never had intuitive understanding of why the naive shuffle was bad other than a vague notion of the fallibility of pseudo-random number generators. Seeing a math equation is one thing but seeing a tree of all possible outcomes visualized in front of you not only makes the bias blatant, but also makes it obvious why the bias is occurring.

This is really cool! For people who don't want to wait to upload their data, here are some annotated screenshots of interesting locations from my data (I had ~140 MB of it, accumulated over the last year):

http://imgur.com/a/9H6vb

It's amazing that I can zoom into a city that I've been to and nostalgically recount the story behind each location on the map. I can see this being a great storytelling aid that goes with your photo albums.

Given the number of websites that rely on jQuery and other hosted JavaScript libraries, I can't believe there isn't yet a well-publicized way of verifying external scripts before loading them. If someone managed to compromise a jQuery CDN, we're looking at a Heartbleed-level vulnerability in terms of scale and impact.

I've never seen the hash attr before. Is this an experimental feature that is already available on live browsers, or only a proposal?

The Ship.DIRECTION_VERTICAL and Ship.DIRECTION_HORIZONTAL are correct. :) It just seems backward because by a quirk of how the the grid cells are generated in JS, the x-direction is actually visually up/down and the y-direction is visually left/right.

  "A good model should be probabilistic, not deterministic."

This is probably the most important thing I've learned about modelling. One of the biggest dangers in sharing results from a statistical analysis with laypeople is that they will interpret the exact numerical answer as evidence of certainty in your predictions. Often times it's as important how a model is presented as how a model is built.