josephmosby

True, but they aren't readily apparent to someone who isn't digging through the weeds of both languages.

I looked at 'Hello world!' and FizzBuzz written in both Python and Ruby, and thought that the implementations looked fairly comparable. I haven't seen enough to convince me that Ruby is vastly different - not to say that it won't happen, but I haven't experienced it yet. I think that's why the gut reaction is to think of Ruby and Python as parallel languages.

It is an attempt to get help, but not in the sense that you're thinking.

Writing helps me solidify what I'm learning as I go, because I have to formalize and explain what I'm experiencing. When I wrote my first gist-post, I was simply trying to capture my own thoughts so I could move on to the next learning experience.

However, I discovered a side benefit: Ruby-ists cannot resist commenting on Ruby posts. The comments, even if critical of me or my approach, have been HUGE in helping me understand what I'm experiencing at a different level. That alone is enough for me to want to post more.

I think the "understands the language and ecosystem better" is critical, but my expectation is that I need to learn a subset of key gems better more than anything else.

Every hardcore Ruby-ist that I've known has owned a Mac as their primary dev machine. I'm sure that there are plenty of Linux devs out there, but my experience has been that it's heavily Mac-driven. However, by sticking with Linux as my development platform, I'm probably going to learn the guts of gems because I have to get under the hood to make them work on Linux.

Maybe I'll continue to have gem conflicts, but that's okay - I'll know how to hack around them.

Your second paragraph was huge for me. I think that's a critical learning point for someone making the jump from Python to Ruby.

I'll probably still have some frustrations, but knowing that gems are written to look natural by design rather than by accident will likely keep me from throwing my computer at the wall. Two completely different communities operating here.

Thanks for the feedback. It looks like there were plenty of approaches to doing easy unit tests... which is part of why I kept scratching my head with "why the hell did they do that..."

I agree with you that RSpec is confusing as hell - thus the blog post.

A lot of my frustration with Ruby tutorials is that a large pack of them are geared for someone who has never, ever coded before. Syntactically, Ruby isn't that bad. I tried a few courses in Ruby and eventually just switched them off for being too slow.

Part of my issue with Ruby (currently) is that the language can be so flagrantly violated with a gem. I am sure that Python could receive similar treatment... but it would be difficult to pull off, and the community would rip it apart for not being "Pythonic." There's not as strong of a "Ruby-ic" approach to doing things as there is with Python, from my first interactions with the language.

You could twist that the other way, though. The Democratic organization was highly decentralized, leaner and more effective than the Romney campaign bloc, centralized and huge in Boston HQ.

Two things to consider before immediately going to the "yay Nate Silver" default:

1. GOP had a consistent polling advantage on voter engagement, even going as far back as August. The Romney campaign placed a lot of stock on this. (see here: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79665.html) The polls might break for Obama, but the Romney campaign was banking on something else...

2. Polls attempt to account for the simple error that people are more likely to say that they'll vote than will actually vote. (see here: http://www.gallup.com/poll/111268/how-gallups-likely-voter-m...) The Romney campaign was predicated on the idea that GOP voters were likely to get out and vote, while Obama voters would say they were going to vote but then drop out on Election Day. That is a polling blind side that Nate Silver couldn't account for.

The Romney campaign didn't accurately test their engagement assertion. They relied on journalist polling, but engagement didn't turn into votes. The Obama campaign did the opposite: they targeted voters who might be disengaged and directly went after those with their GOTV efforts.

There is a HUGE debate that always goes on around election time with politicos around who matters more. Is it more important to try to sway independents (i.e., go after the middle), or is it more important to fire up your base? Romney won independents but Obama got the base turnout, indicating that a GOTV effort targeted at the base might have worked, had it been used effectively. (see here: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/exit-polls-obama-loses-i...)

Struggling to wrap my head around the nature of the issue. If the White House has nuclear football data in the same network that handles the president's communications, then we have major network segmentation problems. There's a lot more insecure traffic that's going to flow back and forth between the president's scheduler and outside parties.

Still, I bet that email traffic is going to tighten up a LOT at the White House after this.

IT internal controls and audit support.

Also, I don't just work for a CPA firm, I am a CPA. Subject to all the CPE requirements set by the state society if I want to maintain my title. For me this year, my requirements were satisfied by six paid days of learning but I could have done it through a series of one-hour online courses if I hated myself.

Same thing for me as a CPA. Even though I'm not specialized in actually putting an entry into the books or doing taxes, I still have to keep up with forty formal hours of training a year. Courses have to be approved by state societies before they'll even count for continuing education.

The author doesn't make a very good case in favor of MBAs (or, in my opinion, college in general). He does, however, make a great case in favor of management and experience working with other people.

Mark Zuckerberg might not have ever run a company, but he clearly knew how to inspire the people he asked to work for him. I think the fact that he had to learn how to at least manage his small team before receiving funding worked well for Facebook, and he grew at a pace that allowed him to continue to learn.

Giving a 19-year-old genius enough funding to do damage before he's ever learned to manage people is a much larger risk than funding a team that has proven it can work together. By the time Mark had gotten that funding power, he had already gone through the trials of managing employees on a small scale.

This type of post is really easy to say if you have some sort of personal equity in the business. The larger the business, the more that equity gets diluted.

I work in a MegaCo, which has these sorts of referral bonuses. In addition, teams in the company are spread out over individual clients. If I refer someone, it is more likely than not that I won't ever work with this individual. I'm paid by salary (not profit-sharing) so I don't have a financial stake in the efforts of the firm. I'm not management, so many decisions about what this new employee would be doing are removed from me.

If I don't get to work with my referral and I don't stand to gain equity from their work, a referral bonus makes the economic seesaw balance. Saying it's "pants on head stupid" is short-sighted and only applicable to extremely small companies.

It does make sense - the Apollo 11 command module is already on display in the Air and Space Museum, as is one of the Saturn 5 rockets.

Ritholtz doesn't say it, but I would add "and then they should put Jack Dorsey on the fast track to CEO."

Dorsey's one of the few CEOs out there who looks like he could be the next Jobs. I'm not saying he's ready to run Apple yet - but it might not take long before he is.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news to the interwebs, but this probably won't go anywhere.

Facebook and Twitter are public outlets, and if you aren't monitoring your privacy on them it's your own fault. If you make friends with random folks on Twitter or Facebook, that person very well might work for DHS - but you didn't have to be friends with them. And if you're running a completely unfiltered account, there's nothing that they couldn't find by using the Twitter Search API anyway.

While the specifics of the program are not declared, they did publicly announce that the program was going on and gave some generalities. Anything further would be basically asking them to reveal either their analysis or their methods...which won't happen and is likely already shielded from FOIA.

This is especially true in the ed-tech startup world. Many entrepreneurs are creating applications for teachers without ever speaking to a teacher or school administrator. They have experience with receiving education and self-education, but they don't know how teachers use technology.

Teachers and administrators have to manage multiple learning styles in a classroom of ~20 kids, and what works for the kid who will grow up to be an entrepreneur doesn't always work for the kid who will grow up to be a historian or accountant. As such, the initial abstraction of projecting our own educational experiences onto entire classrooms generally ends up flopping.

Counterfeit goods are not just media/entertainment/online content. Many of the organizations in support of the bill are brand-name manufacturers whose goods are easily counterfeited in other countries.

AFL-CIO members could argue that SOPA/PIPA would allow the AG to block foreign sites that sell counterfeit goods, thereby forcing individuals to buy the "official" goods domestically (where they would be manufactured by American labor). Granted, I don't know if there are any brand-name manufacturers still making their goods in the U.S., but that would be the obvious argument to my eyes.

It's important to also continue striving for self-improvement. If you hit a level where you've stopped wanting to learn more and started wanting to simply compare yourself to others, of course you'll look good by comparison - but you're not getting any better.

I started programming using Python. When I started, I wanted to understand the "feel" of Python programming, and that was all my mind could comprehend. Now that I have a decent smattering of Python knowledge, I now realize I don't have a total grasp of transfer protocols and I should probably learn a lower-level C language as well. I started off not knowing one thing, now I have added two more.

I'm still a better programmer, but now I realize I'm clueless about even more stuff than I was before.

David,

What about a curated list of open-source projects with defined needs, perhaps generated on a month-to-month basis? For example, you guys could comb through GitHub or any other repository and provide users with a top-50 list of projects/descriptions/languages used/etc.

Obviously, plenty of users will continue to contribute bug fixes to the projects they use on a regular basis. But some users might just want an interesting hack that stretches their knowledge and comfort zone - and if it fixes a problem for that project, why not?

This is accurate, and a big reason why the EU officially passed a resolution against U.S. domain seizures.

All SOPA can do without infringing upon another country's sovereignty would be to remove the DNS entry on the U.S. servers that ties back to a foreign server, but they can't impact the foreign content itself without violating world law. The EU resolution strengthens that by saying that if the U.S. had hoped they'd be able to censor foreign content, the EU isn't going to just casually allow that to happen.

The marketing of apps has switched from "we're making old styles of connecting easier" (i.e. Facebook being a re-hash of existing college facebooks) to "you would never have really wanted to do this in the first place, but now it's easy so you will."

Word of mouth is STILL the best way to spread ideas, which is why platforms such as Twitter and Facebook remain viable. They're capable of being used in all sorts of ways, but their core strength is that they're simply about connecting people and then letting people decide how they want to share information. The more app developers attempt to structure what information people are sharing, the less useful the tool becomes - especially when it's information that was never really shared in the pre-social web age.

Honestly, if the author line had said "Tyler Winklevoss" I wouldn't have been surprised. This individual has confused "responsibility is hard" with "responsibility sucks," which is a very poor comparison to make if you want to do anything well.

I have been monitoring this for a few weeks. No luck thus far (as of 10/24). Seth Godin has been a pretty big champion, though, and I think that helped really get the word out there.

I was an assistant to a university sysadmin when I was in school. I always wondered why we bothered locking the computers themselves from being opened when it would have been exceedingly difficult to walk out of there with anything...

Now I know, O Manual Deep Freeze Hacker. Solid work.

I'm doing similar contracting work in DC and still find tons of opportunities to use Python, even though it's not required for my field. Even as the business guy, you have to do a lot of your own business logic tasks (Excel dashboards, scorecarding, etc) - Python makes them all a lot easier.

If you want a way to wet your feet in the startup community, come to one of the two Startup Weekends coming up in DC. One's at Georgetown and the other at the Microsoft building in Friendship Heights. It's low commitment from you but still a way to meet people and maybe make something happen.

You have to approach this drawing a distinction between learning a skill and joining a community.

If you joined this community college program in Ottawa to learn a trick or two about programming, you approached it with the right mindset. You approached it looking for technical improvement.

It sounds like, however, you joined the program looking for rock stars. If Ottawa was a technology startup focused town, you'd know it already - there would be technology startups. Environment is so critical.

I come from another government town (Washington, DC) and there are a significant number of absolutely brilliant people here...who want nothing to do with a tech startup. They're government employees, or contractors, or even just policy wonks. That's not a slight against their intelligence; it's just that the culture in DC is not geared toward startups while Silicon Valley is.

There's not going to be an easy way or good time to rip yourself away from Ottawa - it's going to be frustrating and probably won't be an easy move. But if that's what you want to do, you'll have to find a way.

Having "The Social Network" be the first trailer would be awesomely meta.

I also seem to remember seeing the Automated Postal Center machines (the vending machines for stamps and scales and things) in post offices long before I saw automated cashiers in grocery stores everywhere. There's a lot of things going against USPS right now, but finding extremely usable technology that's casually ahead of its time doesn't seem to be one of them.

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