d2xdy2

> I work at a school that has that right now, and we do have lots of people who don't make it very far.

When it comes to those "who don't make it very far"; how do you handle tuition and possible refunds?

I'm not really advocating that they deserve or should get a full refund; I'm just skeptical that an open enrollment type thing where anyone can join (like I've experienced with a MOOC)-- you'll have a lot of students starting out, and end up with very few. The one's who couldn't make it should have been screened out, as they're both spending a lot of their own money on this, spending a lot of their own time on this, and potentially taking time away from others with remediation or tutoring-- at the very least, there could be various levels of classes for them to work things out before being introduced into the subjects where they might tend to fail.

From the perspective of someone who has been taught and who has taught, in both cases I prefer small group sizes of people I have some confidence in being relatively adept at what's going on-- the need to reiterate and reintroduce certain core concepts on things goes down a bit as well.

On a tangent, how do you feel about Tesla doing OTA updates for core functionality on their cars? Stuff like "autopilot" and whatnot.

Fairly random, though they generally break it into sections. Typically something to do with a high level overview of something, then digging into some finer details of it, then off to whiteboard some very unrelated code (fizz buzz, fibonacci terms, etc). Sometimes (not as often as I'd like) want to talk about my background and prior projects.

Pretty sure Plenty Of Fish is a single guy.

I'll typically make a fairly simple template by 'hand' in my editor, then port it to Jekyll or WordPress or something else like that.

As far as writing + deploying a simple HTML site, it's been 2-3 months since I've done that, if only because no one I contract with or work with wants to spend the time or money on me hand-writing and pushing a site-- templating it and then generating the rest of the site is at least a little quicker than that, and still doesn't come with the burden of using a backend language.

Well, like I said, I'd have never known about it if other people hadn't told me. I can't speak to what Reddit "should" do; in _my_ niche area, Reddit works just fine the way it is.

If they were to start "doing something about it", it'd likely not affect me in the least.

In my 5+ years, I tend to agree with you; there are occasionally little spats that I see, but by and large-- I'd never have known about all of this "bad" stuff if it weren't for other people telling me about it.

I wasn't insinuating that everyone should make their own form handler; I was just agreeing that formspree is pretty good for what it is, and I haven't really felt the need to utilize another service (or reinvent the service and shove it to HN).

> I thought programmers -- especially when doing side-projects like this -- liked creating new things, thinking about newer ways of solving problems, or solving new problems.

I half-jokingly / half-seriously blame TodoMVC for a lot of this stuff; I don't really think a form-to-email redirector is the next TodoMVC-- but I would suggest that newish devs' first experiences are cookie-cutter assignments / tutorials for inventing the same damn thing over and over again.

I haven't seen a person solving a "new" or "interesting" problem at my local hackerspace in over a year; they're still arguing about what the best way to make a Todo app is.

I'm amazed this warranted research and an WSJ article.

Not really sure; I've been using Formspree for a while now with no complaints. Typeform looks interesting as well, but I haven't really found a persuasive argument to get me off of Formspree for most things.

Slightly different domain, but I recently had to work on a system that retained email addresses that were known targets of aggressive spamming (450MM rows).

In a nutshell, the idea was to compare lists of emails and test to see how many accounts in the given list were also in the database. We'd typically get 10k item lists to test against the database.

Initially, I was creating a temporary table and doing a unique intersection on it. That took about 45 minutes on a modest machine. Next, I hacked up a bloom filter search (since all we cared about was whether or not the items in the sample were in the database); that ran in a little under a second for a set of 10k, but got a little unwieldy with sets approaching 1MM+.

We talked about it, and decided to just use Elasticsearch, and to just split the database into a bunch of buckets. Search time went up a small bit for small samples, but went waaay down for larger samples.

Also of note, going from spinning platters to SSD did make a pretty huge improvement in things when we were using a relational database. Now that it's all basically in memory, it doesn't matter so much.

Interesting. I'll have to play with it this weekend. Thanks for the information.

I use Neo4j for two projects at the moment, though I make pretty heavy use of the REST api as I'm not working on the JVM. What advantages does Stardog have over Neo4j?

> Work remotely for someone, work for some clients.

I do work with clients, every day, often times remotely (my office is at a co-op, almost never on premises).

> I honestly can't think of a reason to attend GA. It's like the anti hustler attitude.

I can see where you're coming from with that statement.

> Everything prettily packaged in a nice little box to be "an epic programmer!"

That might represent some people's attitudes on going into and coming out of something like GA; it doesn't represent mine. I tried to convey that in my original reply, but I might not have done as good a job as I had hoped.

I think an opportunity to mentor/teach at a place like GA would be golden, and would probably land me some place I'd actually like to be-- I've just run into so many problems with not having something tangible saying I know what I know and can do what I can do (I've never once had an interview that asked me to share or describe my own code and work, even though I've provided it and asked to talk about it). It could just be isolated instances with the companies I've interviewed with, but its still a problem I've had.)

The places I'm interested in working at probably wouldn't care much about me not having a degree in CS, but I would like the benefit of having someone outside of myself and my work stand behind my resume. I'd like to think GA will give me that benefit of the doubt when I go to apply for jobs I really want.

I could be mistaken, however.

I'm attending GA's WDI cohort this November - March. I can't yet speak to whether or not its worth the cost; though I can highlight my goals during and afterward.

I've been writing code and researching CS in various capacities since I was about 14 (I'll be 26 in a few weeks). I contribute to FOSS as much as I can, I occasionally push out personal FOSS projects, and occasionally make screencasts / blog posts highlighting things I find interesting or have learned.

I get by at the moment doing freelance web dev for agencies in town, but its a dead market, and a lot of places have either gotten very complacent or segregated as far as design and development (we have lots of agencies that can make "pretty" things and lots of agencies that can make very "good" things, but no agencies that have a strong design _and_ development presence).

I don't feel like I have an opportunity to advance myself beyond where I'm at. There aren't any start-ups, developers don't talk to each other, and we're being taken over by three-letter-agencies (We're now home to US Cyber Command).

At the very least, from my perspective, I make serious improvements / contributions to local companies as a contractor, but get very little recognition / respect from the developers in those companies.

Its my goal at GA WDI, to gain better connections with individuals / companies that I want to work with and do interesting things with, and to get better understanding of where I'm actionable (right now I work in a lot of various environments doing a lot of different things; the only time I really get to discover where my interests and my strengths converge is in the evenings and on the weekends).

I learned from community college that you typically get out what you put in (at least in my limited experience)-- I'd like to think that if I'm able to put in what I already know and take advantage of an opportunity to learn more and be "in the right place", I'll be able to get a better and more stable job.

I hope that makes sense; its been a long day.

Why is that? Getting the CMS out of their way is one of the primary reasons they outsourced development (or implementation, or whatever) to someone else (agency, freelancer, whoever).

If what they're using day-in and day-out is in their way or not "simple to use", its hindering (to various degrees) their progress in doing what they want to do.

If I make a website for a musician, they want to probably publish musician / band related stuff and go on making music; if they're having to figure things out or call me every time they log in... I've done a very, very bad job at giving them what they need.

I can't say I've ever had a client comment to me that the system was difficult / non-obvious, especially when using WP (even the first few I pushed that used almost vanilla WP admin).

Thanks!

I must be incredibly dense... forgive me.

> http://imgur.com/7iNx4btl.png

is the releases page

> http://imgur.com/LTJ5AfWl.png

is what I see when I unpack either the Zip or the Tarball.

I don't see a binary anywhere on there. I'd really like to try it out, though!

The readme links to a releases page to get some binaries, but afaik it's just source.

I wouldn't necessarily take client praise as a testament to being good or bad. When I started out I was pushing WP sites; I usually gauged things by complaints (very similar vibe to when I was working on cars).

I have had very few calls / emails about complaints with the WP admin area, though I do/did generally drop them into a less privileged account with less flashy buttons to break things with, as well as set their dashboard up with some notes about how to accomplish tasks specific to their usage (how to post / edit / delete, how to clear the cache manually if they had to, etc).

I might be in the minority there, and I feel like that contributed a bit to the no-complaints thing... but even a vanilla WP admin area is very usable.

While not saying I whole heartedly agree with that statement, the admin panel is a major selling point.

How does this compare to something like NeDB?

That whole page is gorgeous, but GoL in the background is the icing on the cake

This is pretty neat. I just hope no one gets in trouble at work playing poker.

Albeit not on AWS, I typically just set environment vars to reflect configs I would have set in a .env (or .local.env, or .testing.env), or have some sort of config manager daemon type thing running that keeps that sort of stuff locked away.

> He didn't get a $6.5k bill because of a bug in VisualStudio, he got one because he didn't finish setting up his AWS account. Regardless of the public/private mixup, checking in AWS credentials to any repository is just bad practice and creates a huge risk of the exact situation that happened in this story.

I agree

> As a senior developer with over 12 years of experience in the financial services industry, I didn't think it was possible that I could be the victim of a data breach.

Ok...

> Better yet, move access keys to a seperate config file, and exclude this from Git deploys with a .gitignore.

No shit?

When I was a mechanic, this is how I differentiated myself from most of the other techs; multi-tasking with a priority queue. Waiting for approval? Stick that car outside and grab another. Parts wont be in til Tuesday? Stick it outside and grab another. It wasn't uncommon to have 6-7 cars in my daily queue in various states of repair and approval.

I haven't really run into this so much as a developer, though largely because I don't really work in an environment where there's a dozen things going on at once. At best, I'd say I can tackle managerial tasks or discovery processes while waiting for various approvals or decisions.

I mostly get restless when I'm excited about something (much like kids on Christmas Eve).

Its particularly bad tonight/this morning; I found Elixir a few days ago, and I keep thinking about doing things with it.

Often I'll try to go to bed, get in some weird thought-state, and "wake" back up with a fully planned project in my head I just absolutely have to get worked out.... or.... rather, usually, some really weird/dumb idea that I thought was great and probably shouldn't have wasted the night on.

How does something like this even get investors? The business model banks on the fact that start-ups are going to fail-- I could imagine scenarios where potential investors also have money invested into the companies that Shutdownify would be servicing.