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datapimp

96 karma · joined April 18, 2010

rubyist. javascript. hacker
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datapimp··on Why it is important not to have children
it just is either or -- or probability wise close to it. from the time and demand it takes to be a good parent, to the many things you have to do to afford children, to the fact that being responsible for somebody makes you largely beholden to people with money and health insurance, it just is.

at least for the salary earning classes.

people's range of behavior is narrowed by the hierarchy of needs. having a child amplifies this effect.

if you want to do something revolutionary that potentially threatens the status quo, it is better to be either independently wealthy or have much fewer economic needs and pressures.

datapimp··on Why it is important not to have children
it is true. they're not.

as a father, i may go out of my way to disagree with him to justify my own past decisions. as an unattractive social reject, i may go out of my way to agree with him.

we are naturally going to have very intense feelings and be very egotistical one way or another about the subject of spreading our own DNA.

datapimp··on Step by step from jQuery to Backbone
My bet is when you get back to "basics", you will end up writing some ( probably worse ) rendition of views, models, collections, and events.

They are the most basic components of any good UI and if you find yourself deviating from them too much you're probably in the early stages of Dunning Kruger. My advice. God knows I learned the heard way. Develop a little humility and learn from the decades worth of history of people who came before us.

None of these application architecture problems are new. Backbone is simply the re-introduction of time tested historical principles to all you young amnesiacs.

datapimp··on Gene Sharp: A dictator's worst nightmare
Power accumulates first in the hands of the people who make the guns and the bullets, who package them, ship them, write the accounting software, process the orders, pack the trucks, etc.

The only real violence we should worry about is the every day violence that is used against these people ( mainly the threat of starvation, unemployment, poverty ) if they don't do their jobs. And that violence is surprisingly effective considering that violence changes the world by making it every day, and remaking it, over, and over, and over. Making people choose to get out of bed before 8am instead of sleeping in and making love and eating pancakes. Over and over and over.

Any one who talks about revolution without talking about first about every day life has a corpse in their mouth. Debates about violence and non-violence represent a decision that represents maybe 0.0005% of the experience of human beings.

There are so many more interesting, probably 100x more revolutionary decisions one could make, where this debate isn't even relevant.

Should one work on optimizing life for the sustainability of multiple concurrent romantic relationships instead of for the stability and predictability of a mortgage payment? If so, how? What effects would this have on the economic and military stability of a country?

Want to topple a regime? Make its subjects fall in love and want to bone more than they want to go to work.

Start by writing an app for that.

datapimp··on Gene Sharp: A dictator's worst nightmare
Young man.

I have been in your exact shoes and tried this exact strategy. Hated the exact same things you do. Told every internet forum that would accept me that the US Government has worked in order to support economic interests and supremacy through out the world and in the process has benefitted from and knowingly participated in serious crimes against humanity. I gave hundreds of examples backed by our own documentary record and declassified history. Chomsky style. I could go on for hours on just central America.

It doesn't work. Your words are going to fade into a black hole and eventually only you will remember them. And probably not, even.

This is not going to help you achieve your goals. Detach and think about why. It is obvious.

datapimp··on Backbone UI
Well, it is a disaster that has been waiting for a while now. Several large production apps on that stack, and not really any problems.
datapimp··on Backbone UI
Check out luca: http://Github.com/datapimp/luca

Sandbox: http://datapimp.github.com/luca

datapimp··on Backbone.js views done right
Check out the Collection GridView in luca. http://datapimp.com/luca/. Source: https://github.com/datapimp/luca/blob/development-tools/src/...
datapimp··on Baked In: How BenchPrep Is Turning e-Textbooks Into Virtual Study Groups
the benchprep webapp is a great use of the backbone.js framework
datapimp··on Inmates forced to farm gold online in Chinese prisons
See: mandatory sentence laws. Convictions didn't yield prison time before them at the same rate they do after.
datapimp··on Working Best at Coffee Shops
My theory is that by opening up myself to the possibility of meeting a woman keeps me on my toes and harnesses my darwinian energy which I then channel into my work. Working at home in my underwear doesn't create this psychological situation.
datapimp··on Backbone-redis, model persistence with Socket.io and Redis pub/sub
At watermelon express ( beta.watermelonexpress.com ) we have developed a webapp textbook which makes heavy use of this stack. It is a pretty heavy implementation of backbone ( in coffeescript, jashkenas i think we owe you a case of beer. ) I am in the process of weaving in redis pub/sub for our next iteration.
datapimp··on Scott Adams: How to Tax the Rich
Really? I think the ecosystem created around large government contracts is pretty significant, and that it would cease to exist without government spending, which naturally would decrease economic output in that a lot of people would be unemployed, a lot of businesses whose customers are the employees of these businesses would shut down, etc etc. It is most obvious in the case of military spending related to manufacturing, but just think about it for medicaid as well.

I think you're off your rocker with this one.

datapimp··on Rush: the ruby shell
the majority of that punctuation isn't part of the ruby syntax, to be fair.
datapimp··on Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?
I am a huge fan of Vagrant ( http://vagrantup.com ) which is virtualized development environments, package-able. Works with chef and virtualbox. I don't know if I can state just how game changing this is for me.

DocumentCloud really dropped some bombs this year. backbone.js, underscore.js are really great.

Socket.io saved my ass. I promised some big clients that I could make websockets driven apps for the iPad and then apple pulled websockets support without saying anything. So I was able to get socket.io for the win.

datapimp··on Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?
I started work on this a little while ago, and shared a starter template on https://github.com/datapimp/backbone-express-mongoose-socket.... I am starting a new job in 2011 where we will be using this template heavily, so expect major updates in the first couple weeks of January.
datapimp··on Mojolicious 1.0 released - A new Web Framework for Perl
I believe Mojolicious is by the same author as Catalyst.
datapimp··on What does it feel like to be stupid? An anonymous Quora user explains.
I agree. People who only plagiarize and never innovate or attempt to increase value or utility, who can only copy...let them suffer with that on their conscience. That condition is punishment enough.

But if you find something valuable on the web, copy it and spread it around. I could go on for hours with a sob story about tens thousands of combined hours of thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis that represented real philosophical progress evaporating in the into the ether because there was no redundancy and we took its existence for granted.

datapimp··on Ask HN: I made a site to help freelancers find work. Feedback?
I don't know if I'd add email.

Filtering out the freelancers who don't have a dedicated business line and who aren't reachable by phone is a good service to provide to your clients, and it is a reason I'd use tekbob over any number of your competitors.

There is no excuse not to have a phone number. Get google voice and Skype. As a freelancer you are in the customer service industry, one. Two, your competitors have phone numbers.

I regularly look for people to subcontract work to and I persons's skills or experience are great but if I can't call them and reach them by phone to have a conversation, that is an immense disadvantage when I'm comparing one worker to another.

datapimp··on Is node.js best for Comet?
socket.io with node.js is working out very well for me. If you want to throw redis and rails in the mix, check out github.com/maccman/juggernaut
datapimp··on How do I know if I am good enough?
You should take it because being slightly under pressure, and worried, creates the emotional environment that is most conducive to learning. You are forced to focus on what is essential, and have a constant source of external motivation.

Just think about why human animals have the capacity for learning and knowledge in the first place. It was for survival in a much harsher setting. Jumping in water which is just a little too deep is a good way to simulate this.

Good luck

datapimp··on htty, the HTTP TTY
This is really good work. Any plans to support ncurse or something along those lines, so that I can arrow up through my command history?
datapimp··on Hello, my name is Reginald and I am a Socialist
Since Capitalism ultimately depends on the social relationship between owners and workers, where owners purchase the output of worker's activity for less than they sell it to an outside party that desires that output, accumulating and reinvesting the difference ( i.e. Capital ) I think that is a much more important attribute to focus on than the means Capitalist organizations use to determine prices. ( Markets vs State Planning ). The argument you are repeating is a distraction from this central fact.

From the point of view of the 95% who have no Capital, the 95% who only have their ability to exchange labor for currency, life is fundamentally the same. >40 hours a week traded to somebody else for the currency I need to pay for food, shelter, and entertainment. The value I create in that 40 hours is always greater than I was paid, and the difference is always accumulated by a better connected and more socially powerful minority. Markets and State Planning are superfluous details in this equation.

datapimp··on Hello, my name is Reginald and I am a Socialist
You sound more like a traditional Anarchist. Industrial Worker of the World type than a Socialist.
datapimp··on Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age
I love that you're fighting the good fight, but to these people who run things, code is in fact a commodity and so is the person producing it. From the owner's perspective you buy coders low, you maximize their output and sell it high, accumulate the difference, and repeat. If you're a more liberal owner, you buy them free lunches and build up a "culture", let them wear sandals, send them to conferences, tell them they're not little units to be counted, but at the end of the day these pretty lies are just costs -- costs, which may or may not yield profit over the long run.

As a coder, and somebody who loves the craft and identifies strongly with it, I "disagree" with this relationship ( as much as that is possible, since nobody asked me to vote on it or anything ) and I think it is dehumanizing. But wishing it away or romanticizing what we do, avoiding the fact that we are commodities just like every other worker in a corporate enterprise is just a terrible strategy for overcoming it.

I like what the guys at http://www.bettermeans.com are doing with the open enterprise governance model. I don't want human activity to continue the process of commodification, and this is a big step taken to change course.

datapimp··on No, You can't retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup
I'd like to see a source for this. It seems counter-intuitive. A lot of the peasantry were sent to the United States as indentured servants. Most of the white poor land working classes from 17th century on. And it would be consistent with birth rates everywhere else in the agricultural world, that these people had more offspring than the wealthy. So. It just doesn't seem that this would be correct.

That being said. What we call 'The Middle Class' in the United States is kind of deceiving. Class can't simply be a function of how much cash income you bring in a year. Class has more to do with where that income comes from.

Those of us trading our time in exchange for money are working class, even if ( in the rarer case ) it is a greater dollar amount from a person whose primary source of income is the buying low, and selling high of commodities... such as, human labor, or pork bellies... and accumulating and reinvesting the difference.

datapimp··on Ask HN: Looking for help (Co-Founders)
Site is down. I'm in Chicago and might be able to help, refer you to some rails developing friends of mine, etc
datapimp··on Sex at Dawn -- evolutionary biology misused
On the point about male's appetite for variety and novelty, life experience can give you enough of a hunch that this is biologically innate, and not cultural. Stacks and Stacks of books on human history, recent tabloids, and the NSA's archive of everyone's web browser histories can pretty much confirm this hunch for you if you're still not convinced
datapimp··on Sex at Dawn -- evolutionary biology misused
I found myself very irritated by quotes like this:

"The book argues that humans are not “naturally” monogamous. That might be true. But Sex at Dawn doesn’t prove it."

"males evolved a strong appetite for sexual novelty and a robust aversion to the overly familiar.” But they don’t have any evidence for that"

If they don't, I think it is safe to assume it is because the authors assume their readers have a bit of life experience. And not because there aren't volumes of biological and historical evidence to support these claims if they wanted to include it.

I just don't see these two points as even being controversial enough to be up for debate. You don't need that much romantic history to know that men have a strong appetite for sexual novelty, and that highly desirable men are not monogamous, that women know this ahead of time and are willingly complicit in their non-monogamy.

Ok, I guess for the type of guy who would write these critiques, some things need to be spelled out on paper. You can just step outside in the world though and not need it to be.

datapimp··on Ambition - AR Adapter to write db queries in Ruby
This is pretty much exactly what Thoughtbot's Squirrel does. They decided to discontinue work on Squirrel though.
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