futuremint

If its free, who is footing the EC2 bill?

Which gives me the idea: it'd be cool to have a service like this and have it use a user-provided AWS account.

So you could use a service like this to automatically manage the EC2 instances, and then if you need to take control to expand your instances' functionality you just stop using the service.

Just a thought...

I've actually taken time to think through my personal participation of the internet. I'm always cognizant of what information I'm exposing about myself with every post (including this one). I think one has to be if one wants to protect their own privacy.

These companies sure aren't going to protect your privacy for you. I think the answer is to be aware of what sort of information trail one leaves on a particular service, then to be aware of what information is given to that service.

I don't know if this will even help, only time will tell. But I do know that just sharing everything like the services prompt you to do probably won't end up being a good thing.

I couldn't replicate it directly either. See this page: http://support.cloudant.com/kb/faqs/im-having-trouble-replic...

I just cloned the git repo for Scrumptious and pushed it to Cloudant myself using CouchApp. It isn't that hard.

These remind me of flash stuff on praystation.com 10 years ago!

You can also get free hosting at Cloudant.com as well.

I have accounts at both, however at Cloudant they have a pretty nice UI for managing your databases and also give you a slick way to setup rewrite rules. That way your CouchApp can have a nice memorable URL instead of the sometimes hard-to-remember path to the design document.

Edit: You'll need to open up your permissions on your Cloudant DB to replicate his db. They default to all private.

With great power comes great responsibility. No, really! That's not just a cliche.

Macros are like guns. See gun ownership debates...

Creativity is an internal endeavor. How your environment effects you internally seems to be different for every single person. This article seems to gloss over this fact.

However I do agree that minimalism is certainly a periodic style. "Everything in moderation" (including moderation) is a motto I try to live by.

Yep, I visited it on a drive through Kentucky once. Dipped my own bottle, got the t-shirt, didn't have time for the tour though (had 2 little kids with me).

It was definitely cool to see where & how its made (and aged!).

He should start stopping at all of the little ports, marinas & marine supply stores on his way and tell them about his website.

He should then offer them direct advertisements on his website. Sounds like the ads were actually effective.

An ad buyer would of course want to do pay per sale instead of pay per click given the site's history :)

This. My first thought was "why didn't he use separate accounts?" Of course the mailing address for the checks would be the same. So then get multiple P.O. Boxes. Then I think they require a phone number too? I'm sure Google has some employee who has thought of this.

Also wouldn't surprise me if one person having multiple AdSense accounts is a violation of their terms.

Who owns Maker's Mark? It remains one of my favorite bourbons for some reason. I think its one of the best for its price range. I think it beats Knob Creek (similar price) hands down.

I think doing bourbon right is kind of like doing wine right. It certainly takes more finesse than beer.

However the difficulty in mastering a craft seems orthogonal to whether its a corporation or a single guy doing it.

If anything... bourbon whiskey being brewed by guys who have been doing it forever implies that if you're a craft distillery... just keep distilling and perfecting your craft and you'll do just fine.

This is the first time I've heard of Greenwald. I don't read Salon regularly. However the occasional article I have read has been decent.

I'm mildly surprised that a media outlet is actually calling this out at another organization.

In my opinion, every media outlet has been complicit in helping the U.S. powers that be try to discredit Wikileaks and distract from the contents of the leaks. Not to mention hiding corruption.

Wikileaks has done a great job at showing the world how much those in power don't care about anything but their own power (and their "conspiracy network"). But all I'm seeing is the same apathetic and head-in-the-sand response from the general population to reality.

Yeah, the one library I'm using is pretty lightweight. It just does JSON parsing of responses over a socket connection and handles a few HTTP details.

I've been really happy with it, and its been reasonably fast in the Cog VM. I haven't explored using CouchDB's list views yet, but I'm considering that for just loading pre-built HTML for larger document lists.

Pharo. The latest stable version runs in the Cog VM (a fast JIT VM), and runs Seaside 3.0 great.

However, choose your persistence carefully. The open-source Smalltalk landscape is littered with abandon-ware databases.

If you want an OODB, you can just save the image itself, use Magma (an open-source OODB, but its not very wel documented) or use Gemstone (through GLASS), which is commercial but well documented.

SQL support is weak if you want a nice ORM (like Rails' Active Record), and I've had success using CouchDB (a JSON document pretty much just maps straight to an object: keys -> values = instVars -> values).

Wait... the naive-Bayes was trained on Yelp data? Isn't Yelp data also crowd-sourced information? I may not be thinking about this right, but it seems to me that training the classifier on crowd-sourced data and then comparing that to Mechanical Turk... that in the end you're just comparing the quality of the crowd-sourced data to each other?

Ah, ok. Yes, you're right then I'm probably not making "worthwhile contractor fees" then. We're pretty frugal considering we're a family of four living in a very nice part of our city.

However we also live in one of the cheapest areas of the U.S. So my rates would probably be seen as a pittance in any globally relevant metropolitan area.

Also this is certainly not the type of engagement the OP was talking about, I just thought I'd offer up a counter-point that you can also make a decent living contracting and not have a niche.

Or rather, make a living in an economic niche instead of a technical one (but still with technical skills).

Its ok, I wasn't really trying to set off fireworks... just to offer a little of my experience :)

I've found that there are quite a few companies that can pay me worthwhile contractor fees yet cannot budget to have a UI guy, a backend guy, and a product manager as employees.

I know the perspective of the post was from a specialist perspective, I'm just pointing out that there are also plenty of smaller companies that cannot afford 3 full-time employees, or perhaps don't even have enough work to keep 3 full-time employees busy.

This is typically handled by an "agency" of some sort (design agency, development house, etc.), but there is also a large market of small companies that prefer to just interact with one person for simplicity's sake.

Its kind of like serving the "long tail" of companies wanting some sort of software services but can't afford IBM's consulting fees, or a full-time employee to do what they need.

I have an interesting niche for contracting too: I'm pretty good at UI & back-end at the same time. So instead of a company needing to hire two different developers, they can communicate with one person about their overall product easily (having good communication skills is very important too).

Actually, I think to be a successful contractor your reputation is even more important than your skills (though they certainly can't lack either). Businesses appreciate clear writing, quick answers, politeness, prompt replies and humility when you break something (you will at some point).

If you respond more quickly and can communicate more clearly than the elite hacker next door... most businesses would prefer you. I think blogging also helps to sharpen your writing skills too.

Can this be used to edit/manage all HTML5/CSS3 animations? If this is like a Motion for HTML/CSS that'd be awesome.

Maybe I should have said any random combination of gems. Monkey-patching is fine for a small-ish ruby script, but start combining ActiveSupport with some others and you quickly run into weird order-depending loading issues because of the Monkey-patching.

I've found namespacing to be the solution and it doesn't really cause me too much friction when coding either.

I pity the poor sys-admins whose pagers are interrupting their late-night hacking. Visa & MC probably don't care at all (they're swimming in plastic money!), its the front-line guys that are feeling this the most!

Yeah, sorry I didn't make that clear :) PLT Scheme has become Racket... even though its still Scheme.

It looks to me like a lot of the core PLT guys were involved in the R6RS debacle, and didn't like what came out of the process so decided maybe they aren't quite an official "Scheme" anymore per R6RS. Oh the drama...

I would like to point out that popularity has nothing to do with software quality. I've found the > popularity == < library quality.

See Ruby: as it got more popular in the past decade, your chances of any random gem working in a production setup has approached 0.

I wrote a small GUI based HTML scraping client about 5 years ago with PLT Scheme. It was a wonderful experience and building a basic cross-platform GUI was pretty easy given the great documentation those guys write along with the language.

The executable was small, and it was easy for the users to pass around a little 1MB .exe file on windows (also had a separate compiled version for OS X) and they used it for years after I left until the web pages it targeted changed (and I don't work there anymore).

If somebody is open to learning Scheme, you can't go wrong building something in Racket, I was pretty surprised what I accomplished in a month.

Got em all except BASIC, Groovy, Scala, C# & Fortran. Not very interested in those languages anyway. I would have liked to see Haskell & Smalltalk on there. Apparently I do as much reading _about_ programming languages as I do _of_ them!

I'd like to see some code and a blog post for this! This is far more interesting to me than the iOS update :)

Thanks for pointing that out. I think that blog will get added to my regular reading, I like to geek out on language (programming languages mostly, but English too).

Wow, I was being a bit toungue-in-cheek about it as I don't read much Economist (when I do the author is rarely stating their opinion, I tend to prefer more factual/reporting pieces from them), but thats interesting. Learn something new every day it seems!

I also have found some success in trying to avoid pronouns when writing. It can lead to weird phrasings where one's opinion is stated as a fact but a majority don't seem to care much about that (pedants are in a minority). See!

Isn't this sort of the same philosophy as the way Lisps are built? It seems like having proper namespacing and a overall functional style lend themselves to smaller, more self-contained libraries.

Similarly there isn't as much of a need to have a monolithic stack like Ruby has, because Ruby's style tends to step on other's work a bit leading to preferring a all-in-one style for reliability.