clutchski

How?

I heard you built one website a month, hunting for the right idea, until delicious clicked.

Would you ever fund a person you believed in for that kind of exploratory work?

"they aren't cutting down old growth forests"

That's because there are none left. Check out the maps over time here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest#Importance

"the lumber industry gets the bulk of their wood from farms and tracts that are continusouly replanted"

I believe most commercial logging is clear cut. This is devastating to not only trees, but soil, animals, watersheds, migratory birds, and who knows what else down the line.

We need wood, so we have a lumber industry that grows trees and cuts them down. But don't think for a second that replanting a clear cut wasteland with monoculture seedlings is in any way "renewable" or "encouraged".

If you have any doubt about the effectiveness of replanting, zoom in and around British Columbia with google maps. What appears to be a massive unbroken forest is actually riddled with clearcuts.

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=54.361358,-125.178223...

"Its far too easy to simply skip over it as a simple assignment operation."

This can be mitigated with parenthesis around the conditional statement.

"ternary notation ... [is] great for saving (a little) time"

I like it because it allows for immutable variables (enforced by fiat, of course), without writing four lines of "if ... else .."

That being said, it can be abused: http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=%22%3D%...

Overlaying the company logo on a different place on the homeless dude's coat in every picture is creepy. That's a person, not a billboard or a wall in the subway.

“An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he's 'at' somewhere. You always have to realize that you're constantly in a state of becoming, you know? And as long as you can stay in that realm you'll sort of be all right.”

- Bob Dylan

Agreed. Graph theory, set theory and statistics are all great tools for a web developers belt.

Interesting. I wonder how Google would react if the American government did the same thing.

Yeah, the headline is a poor analogy for an otherwise well-written and useful atricle.

Other: sql

Roughly how many points does a recruiter get?

GitHub showcases communication skills via project documentation (the documentation for bottle[1] is great), commit comments (kangax[2] often has concise, prescient suggestions for changes), and the like.

[1] - http://github.com/defnull/bottle/ [2] - http://github.com/kangax

Starbucks is one of the rare places in New York that will let you use the facilities without buying anything.

listen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF2x5IKxmAQ&feature=relat...

It depends on your risk profile. For a bank, no. For an lolcatz photo site, sure.

already in book form:

http://www.amazon.com/Twitter-Wit-ebook/dp/B002LUHZB4/ref=dp...

i'm all for cross pollination.

i wish python would rip off ruby's fileutils library. the *nix function naming conventions are beautiful (e.g. rm, rm_r, rm_rf). python's mish-mash of os + shutil requires a deep dive into the docs to find the equivalent methods (os.remove, shutil.rmtree)

the phrase "it is what it is" does not mean "fuck it", but rather "i accept this is beyond my control".

agreed. i'd also add a native assert statement allows for very clean test cases.

good to know. thanks.

In addition to the cultural shift it brought to the web community, Rails' is due a debt of gratitude for its technical innovations as well. Django, Merb, Pylons and others are all iterations on the Rails approach to web development. Django, it seems, is like a teenage boy nearing the end of his adolescence and realizes that just maybe his parents aren't as stupid as he once thought.

wow. reminiscent of this skit from SNL.

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?sho...

"Postgres Plus includes, among other things, compatibility with Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL)'s PL/SQL data access language."

This is huge (if it works). At my job, PL/SQL has us locked in a loveless marriage with Oracle. Sign a pre-nup, use stored procedures judiciously.

sure. just wanted to note the author's belief that rails is a language undermines his credibility.

"Finally, if you still don’t know what language to pick, choose Ruby on Rails because it is the best"

um. ruby on rails != language.

the lesson: hire talent and get the hell out of the way.

also, get this record. it is a masterpiece.

be thankful. history we can laugh at is rare.

an intro:

http://www.sqlite.org/testing.html

"The MUD I started when I was 14 ... I taught myself C and C++ and Java and UNIX networking for it ... eventually ... gave it up."

sounds more like a good learning experience than a failure.