cparedes

> University students don't become experts in anything.

You're absolutely right. A bachelor's degree is supposed to be a mark of well roundedness, not specialization.

> English literature students, for example, just leave with some long essays under their belts, they don't graduate as well-read authorities on different epochs of literature.

They're not supposed to be authorities - if they wanted to dedicate time to become authorities, it's well understood that you'll have to specialize in English lit, likely in some kind of subfield, which is what a masters/PhD is for.

> As in, if a member of the public needed any of those skills/knowledge to do their job, they could acquire them privately without much difficulty.

That doesn't necessarily mean that University education is all for naught. University education purports to teach us how to be better thinkers, not necessarily produce people who are skilled in one kind of thing.

The latter definition that I gave above is what the article is trying to defend.

Wait, what?

ssh is simple.

I suspect that the typical person needing to SSH into a box is already someone who knows how to operate in UNIX. Otherwise, you're using the wrong protocol.

Clopen software?

I believe syslog-ng is non-blocking. You don't have to reinvent the wheel.

I'm a sysadmin, and I can tell you that it only exacerbates the problem.

I've met too many devs who think that using Chef will give them systems clue.

I've met too many devs who think that caching everything in memory is, indeed, the cure-all for everything.

Ted has it right - make the devs completely responsible for the code that they deploy. That's it. There's no magic pill, it's going to be tough, and no software package is going to make anyone into a "devops" or a "sysadmin."

I had an article published about MySQL tuning a while ago:

http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2011/02/10/understanding-d...

Always tune for your workload. Be sure to index your damn tables. And yes, measure.

No, I think you're not granting enough charity to what I'm saying.

1. The incompleteness theorems basically say, "if you have a logical system that includes Peano arithmetic, even if the theory is consistent, it will be an incomplete system." Also, "if you're trying to show that said system is consistent within the system, then you have an inconsistent system." These statements drop the Hilbert program to a dead halt.

2. I'm not talking about a perfect theorem proving system. However, what I _am_ saying is that you still need humans to verify the results - we do have automatic theorem provers already, but we still need to make sure that the steps are logical. Not only that, but the theorem needs to connote something useful. Also, we tend to use axioms that we can't say are consistent within the system (for instance, the axiom of choice; yet, mathematicians use it like candy in order to show useful results in analysis, and weird, unintuitive results in topology [slicing a sphere and producing two spheres with the same volume.]) I understand that the article is saying, "yes, such a proof produced by a computer still needs to be independently verified." To be honest, I think a system that could make mistakes and whatnot is not necessarily what people would want to see - reason being that mathematicians probably have not much trouble trying to figure out the larger details and overall plan of attack.

3. The reason why I'm doubtful that we'd ever see such an AI for proving math statements is because the entire enterprise is still very much a creative one - you not only have to generate the logical forms somehow, but also figure out whether it gets you closer to your goal or not. I suppose you could have some sort of heuristic that could show that a generated theorem or lemma could in fact get you closer to your goal, but my god, math is filled with so many potholes and garden paths that could lead one astray.

Don't get me wrong, it'd be awesome to see such a system - however, I'm very doubtful that such a system could ever be created, and if it is created, that it'd be actually useful to practicing mathematicians.

All I have to say is, "Incompleteness Theorem."

Hilbert tried to come up with a method of generating theorems by just cranking a wheel that churns out different logical forms. Ends up that we still need verification to make sure that these things actually make _sense_. (Even if we have incompleteness in any logical system that contains arithmetic, we still have to figure out whether a certain logical form "makes sense" to use.)

In some ways, reddit gets it right - they put games in the ad space, which trains the users to look at that area a bit more often.

There needs to be a reality check at some point, however.

A company's needs might not be in tune with Heroku's general security policy. If you're creating an app that handles personal information, then I hope to god that your developer/ops guys are security minded.

This particular vulnerability is quite embarrassing, however: separation of environments should at least be a given on Heroku.

I'm reminded of Marshall McLuhan when I read your thoughts on the subject, and when I read the article.

The "amputation of our limbs" with devices that seem to enhance our senses is quite a striking metaphor from McLuhan's books.

Nah, they don't at all. I'd wager that the tech field is mostly a trade more than anything; I'd like to say that my math and philosophy degrees have actually helped me, but if they ever did, it'd be way more subtle than what would actually land me a job.

I make a decent bit of money by the way, though I'd wager that I would've made the same amount sans college degree. Not yet willing to disclose my exact salary.

This is the thing that I don't really like about PowerShell. I know I can parse clear text really easily and can do it in many different ways, but I have to rely on methods that are provided in any other type of output.

Look at my post above about a story where homeless people aren't exactly scum?

Lots of homeless people I've come across are usually looked down upon by other people for god knows what; silent assumptions suck.

I've talked to a few of them and I've been amazed, every single time, what sort of stories they bring to the table, and the sort of intellect a lot of them possessed.

After talking with an old homeless guy at length over a period of a year about literature and various other things, he carted over a basket full of books to give to me and a few of my friends - he was a huge book nerd and talked a lot about McLuhan, life, and literature.

It was pretty obvious that many people didn't have much of a high opinion of him - it was only after you've decided to so much as look at him and say something that you'd find out the truth.

I don't know what the hell happened to him, but I didn't see him after that year.

I miss him dearly.

I haven't used the Air and I don't plan on using one in the near future. I currently use a 2006 MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM.

Why not use the Air?

I need a ton of RAM. I'm actually currently limited because I need to spin up VM's on my local machine (for various reasons, often to test out, say, PXE booting in a confined environment.) If I wasn't in the business of testing systems vs. software stacks, then I'd be all over the Air.

For my day job, I work on technical improvements for our infrastructure at Blue Box Group, and I help out in the support queue when there's especially weird problems to debug. Most things I write are shell/Perl scripts and Ruby code.

On the side, I'm always reading books on computer science and programming. One of the projects I'm working on is a toy compiler written in Ruby.

Yes. It helps keep me in check if I use my real name (or rather, an amalgamation of my real name) in online discussions.

You'll have to design your stuff to tolerate failure; use things like Chef for quick deployments so that provisioning new servers isn't a huge pain in the ass.

Further, the biggest thing to keep in mind is that your resources are shared. This is not too big of a deal for some applications, but for a database server, this can spell certain death (I/O doesn't virtualize too well; you can mitigate some of this by deploying a lot of slave machines for your reads.)

I think my friend said it best during a conversation we were having a few weeks ago:

Him: "So, what was high school like for you?" Me: "It was pretty shitty. I didn't really fit in anywhere." Him: "That makes sense - this sense of being the outcast always seems to carry over to anyone's next endeavor."

And I can see that, too. I never really fit in anywhere, not even with the nerds nor the AP kids. While everyone was postering and bullying me around, I worked on Linux machines in the back area of an IT office in our school. Then after school, I would usually go home and hacked on Linux and played video games all day.

It was pretty soul crushing, though I'm better for it - now I work on UNIX systems all day, and I couldn't have asked for a better job than this. However, I still struggle with depression and feeling like an "outcast" no matter where I go. Maybe my friend is right - this sense of ennui was a bit of a carry over from my high school (and even college) days. (for those wondering, one of my old alma maters, Seattle University, was a hell hole. It was high school extended to another four years. I didn't want any more of that shit.)

I second Baby Rudin.

The problem sets are nearly legendary and the writing is terse. I might have to read through it again myself sometime.

"Algebra" by Artin is also a great choice if you want to learn about modern algebra. There's some good stuff in there for looking at linear transformations in, say, 2-space, as groups.

Ow, ow, those sharp edges of those tables!

I think what I did, when I was using lighttpd with Wordpress, was to look at the .htaccess files that were being used, then translate them (by hand) to lighttpd rules. It requires a bit of expertise in both Apache and in whatever web server you're using, but it's another solution to consider if you're looking to "use" .htaccess files.

AFAIK, .htaccess files are strictly for Apache web servers - if you're even using lighttpd or nginx, you're pretty much boned.

One of the best classes I've ever taken was a class on set theory at the University of Washington. It was a philosophy course taught by a law professor, even if it was, for the most part, a math course.

The way he had setup the class was that he'd give lecture for three days out of the week, give us two week long assignments, and nothing else.

These limits were extremely reasonable, he went far and beyond in explaining a lot of concepts in easy to understand language, and he was a tough grader. But everyone came away anyway with at least a 3.5 or higher in the class.

Why? Because he was also very very reasonable with the workload. The assignments were anything but busy work - he gave two weeks because he really wanted everyone to absorb the material before tackling the mind crushing assignments.

There was another math class I took in college (that I failed miserably) - it was a senior level analysis class. I think within the first week or two, I was on the list to give a proposed solution to a problem in the problem set. Within two or three seconds of giving a solution, a fellow student shot me down and the professor said in front of everyone that "it was alright, it just meant I didn't understand the material." Never went to class after that.

If we want to be a bit more precise with our thoughts, then we sometimes have to break out the longer words for instant clarity (given a dictionary, that is.) Technical fields need jargon in order to communicate a lot of metaphors / concepts in the least amount of paper and time as possible.

But I agree with lotusleaf1987: sometimes, I just want to yell, "JUST SPIT IT OUT IN PLAIN LANGUAGE." I think it's easy for someone to fall into the trap of getting too enthralled with the jargon and not understand the concept behind it, so they can reformulate the concept into a more understandable metaphor...

I would kill for nicely designed API's for the things I work with.

Then maybe I can stop writing stupid shell script wrappers.

It was under construction.

No.

I put as much money as I possibly can into my student loans, and I leave everything else in my checking account. If I carry a balance from one month to the other, then I win. If not, then I try again next month.

Eventually, I'll dump my excess income into my savings account, and once I'm done with paying off my loans, I'll start dumping the money I used to dump into my loans back into my savings.

Mine is extremely messy at the moment; it's currently centered around what sort of VCS I decide to use / pull code from.

With that said:

~/repos : root directory of all of the repos I'm using.

~/repos/git

~/repos/svn

~/repos/cvs

...

And then underneath those, I have a smattering of repos from various sources. It's ugly as hell, and I'm really liking this thread mostly so I can get a better idea on how I should reorganize my stuff. :)