jrogers65

Likewise. This is the rationale:

> We have an unusual requirement when it comes to developing the BBC website – it carries advertising internationally but not in the UK, and we have to build and design for both these situations simultaneously. The site carries advertising internationally so that UK licence fee payers don’t cover international costs.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/help/site_versions.shtml

So essentially the reason that we cannot view the page is because we would see adverts when we have already paid for the content. What a Kafkaesque situation.

Another aspect of depression is dependent on BDNF levels (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor).

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21749907

If you haven't already tripped on DMT, do yourself a favor and seek it out. It's not quite like mescaline, psilocybin or LSD.

Well yeah, that's what I'm arguing. Asian women are going to, on average, do better in field X than individuals from other genetic groupings - just as Jamaican men excel at sprinting.

Another example:

> Different studies have found different results, but most have found above-average verbal and mathematical intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews, along with below-average spatial intelligence. Some studies have found IQ scores amongst Ashkenazi Jews to be a fifth to one full standard deviation above average in mathematical and verbal tests.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence#D...

> sometimes do

> rarely do

Are terrible for maintainability. Imagine that you are reading through the code of a programmer who used this library - What is 'sometimes'? What is 'rarely'? It would need to be documented on each usage to save half an hour of digging and cursing for the poor sap who encounters it.

> 1.percent_of_the_time do

For the same reasons, this would be better named "times_out_of_one_hundred" since The Time usually means a time of some sort being somewhere (i.e. the 21:43:21 type of time).

At least you foresaw some peoples' reactions to this:

https://github.com/sudara/sometimes/blob/master/test/helper....

I believe that we're talking about Asian women being at the top of whatever field the conference referenced in the blog post was about.

I don't really understand where you're going with this. If the best speakers happen to be Asian females then what is the problem, exactly?

There is not one caucasian person in the top 10 fastest 100m sprinters (http://www.toptens.com/sports-track-sprinters/). Do you believe that this is somehow problematic?

Genes and gene expression affect neurotransmitter levels and neurotrophic factors which, in turn, affect cognitive performance - just as Jamaicans and Africans are on average better at sprinting than English and French natives. Particular genetic groupings are going to fare better at task X, not too badly at task Y and terribly at task Z.

This is not privilege, it is reality.

http://www.webmd.com/parenting/news/20110809/genes-play-big-...

Your sentiments on overreacting aside, why does it matter what gender or skin colour the speakers have? If they are qualified and best of class then they should be the ones speaking, no? Should we also invite granite rocks to presentations so that they are equally represented?

I beg to differ on your first argument. Learning Vim was one of the best decisions I've ever made in terms of how I write code. Other editors feel like toys in comparison.

I'm siding with mrb on this one. Learning flexible tools gives you immense power in comparison to low-learning-curve ones. The time invested is considerably smaller than the time spent figuring out how to solve edge cases with simple tools. This is something which appears to be impossible to communicate to people with words. Learn some of these tools and you will see for yourself.

By 'learn' I do not mean, for example, becoming familiar with hjkl for navigation in Vim. I mean mastering the tools to the point that using them requires no effort - where just as you experience the impulse "I want a glass of water" and without any effort go to fetch one, you experience the impulse "I want to create a new class in file X, navigate to file Y then modify method Z", your fingers start moving and suddenly you're done. I get frustrated watching my IDE using co-workers write code - it takes them a very long time to do very simple things. Their tools are narrow and do not facilitate expression - they constrain it.

Pre-emptive strike on the argument that code completion is better - Eclim (Eclipse with a Vim frontend) solves this problem very well. Nonetheless, I have it installed and configured but can barely find a use for it.

That is devolution.

Psychedelics are merely tools. Just as coffee is a means to an end when you need to stay awake and work, so psychedelics are a means to an end when you are trying to figure yourself and the world out on an emotional level. Just eating them and expecting benefit is fallacious. It's like buying a hammer and being surprised that you don't suddenly have a shed - you need to pick the tool up, apply it to the relevant things and be skilled in how you do so.

Personally, I see psychedelics as a compliment to meditation. I would not recommend that anyone trip before they have a solid foundation. If your mind wanders easily, if you cannot look inside yourself, if you cannot sit in silence and be OK with it then you are not ready. Meditate regularly for a year first and then you will be able to reap some real benefit from tripping. Don't pick up a hammer before you know what a nail is. You might hit the wrong thing and end up with a hole in the wall.

Perhaps he was using a wider net to see if there were any other problems which, given the level of (in)competence displayed by the techs working for the college, was a distinct possibility.

> but his explanation doesn't jive with his actions.

I think it's perfectly congruent. An entity has your data as well as information on many other people. You come across and report a vunerability. You check that something was done about it. I see no holes in this (aside from the ones in Montreal college's security).

Thanks for the heads up. Too many hours of work and no sleep.

This is essentially an argumentum ad hominem. It is an irrational position to take. Arguments should be judged on their merits, not who's mouth they came from. I'm quite disappointed to learn that HN is censored in this way. I had no idea.

Does anyone know of less draconian social news sites which still try to maintain a high quality discussion?

I try to refrain from making emotional political statements on this site but I cannot resist.

> Go to North Korea if you can. It is very, very strange.

This is essentially advocating a visit to a huge concentration camp which is still in operation. The abuses that go on in this country are beyond belief. This whole article brings about a feeling of sickness in me.

I heartily agree that good code makes sense on it's own.

One of the things which good code and inline documentation (comments) do not communicate very well is a high level overview of the architecture of the application. In my opinion, it is better to describe such things using external documents and diagrams.

The same goes for the deployment procedures and the way the servers are laid out as well as dependencies. For example, the place I'm currently at had no documentation what-so-ever for the libraries and modules necessary to run the in-house web application and, consequently, it took us more time than it should have to figure out what needed to be installed when we moved to a new server.

Thanks for the book recommendation, seems like a great one judging by the reviews. It's always useful to learn more - will add it to my 'to read' list.

> It's so tempting to keep build quick and sloppy

That's normal when you're starting out. The only reason more experienced developers do not give into this impulse is because they've learned of the consequences through painful experience.

I would recommend looking at the people who contribute to Rails, Ruby and related projects on Github. The core developers will be far too expensive but people who throw some code out every so often (assuming that their pull requests are usually accepted and nobody is shouting at them in the comments) will likely know their stuff and may have reasonable prices.

IRC channels on Freenode such as #ruby and #rubyonrails will likely prove useful too. Look out for people who answer a lot of questions (and get them right). One strategy is to try to design a solution for a feature by yourself, then summarise the design (i.e. show the relevant code snippets) in a Github Gist or pastebin page and ask for feedback. If there are any glaring faults or simply better ways to achieve the result then they will be pointed out to you.

I appreciate that resources are always tight in these situations so I would recommend that you hire an experienced developer to review your code. It's cheaper than hiring someone full time and you should still be able to get a lot of value out of it. They will know about nuances and gotchas that only years of working on code can teach. Addressing those early rather than late is probably a good idea.

A cheaper (no money but more time spent) alternative is to use forums and IRC channels to get advice. There are plenty of knowledgable people who are more than willing to help if you ask.

Some basics which are vitally important to cover are ensuring that the object model and database schema are solid and extensible, that there are automated tests in place (especially for business critical functionality), that everything is documented (otherwise you will waste inordinate amounts of time explaining how things work to any developers you hire in the future and/or relearning parts of your own code after forgetting what it does) and that everything is backed up to multiple locations. Addressing those concerns puts you well ahead of the pack.

Yes and no. The problem is that most of the time the train of thought goes something like:

* we already have a working product

* we might aswell just add the features and visual polish we need and then launch as soon as possible

* we have too much work to do to rewrite it

* we can't refactor effectively because automated tests are mostly missing

This results in the project becoming increasingly burdened with technical debt, where it becomes impossible to add new features without breaking something. The next step after this is usually a rewrite (which, given the low quality of developers already in the company, since nobody sane will work on such bad code, is also likely to fail, unless IT is restaffed completely).

If the prototype is binned outright and the rewrite happens at the very start, I imagine that this can be avoided. Again, the trap here is that if the founder learned to write code in 6-12 months then they will be in that cute phase where they think that programming is easy and will not realise this.

In short, having a senior developer on board (at the very least as a consultant) from the very start appears to be mandatory for long term success and minimisation of headaches. It's just what I've seen in the real world. Companies which went for quality from the very start grew rapidly. Those which attempted to minimise development costs at the expense of quality did not reach the heights.

6-12 months learning how to code? Good luck building a business on top of software written by a junior-level programmer. Even better luck expanding and scaling it if/when the time comes.

It takes years to reach a reasonable level of competence in software development and on the order of a decade to master it.

The problem with taking people's word on how much work they do when they are involved in marketing and the soft sides of business is that they have a disproportionaly (as compared to tech specialists) large amount of experience in marketing, negotiation and soft skills. Hence, they market themselves and over inflate how important their contribution is. In my experience.

I feel that it's important enough to reiterate that PLOS is a non-profit organisation and relies on donations to keep it going:

http://www.plos.org/support-us/individual-membership/#make-a...

I do not know much at all about plan9 so I cannot comment on it but in regards to GNU -

GNU/Linux would never have gained mass adoption if certain compromises were not made. If proprietary code were completely outlawed in Linux and the GNU userland then we would not see it everywhere today.

Instead of looking at what one individual does, let's zoom out to the level of individuals working together. For an important idea to come to fruition, both sides of the coin we are talking about must invariably be addressed.

The interesting thing about us is that we can mesh our brains into bigger collective systems which in themselves act as brains - it's a fractal shape. Some individuals are capable of achieving zen on their own. Some individuals can serve as parts of a greater brain (a mass of individuals communicating with each other). That greater brain must address both sides of the coin if it is to yield something novel.

We need fanatics like RMS to jumpstart GNU but we also need pragmatists to make something truly useful of it. One does not work without the other, in both directions, in my opinion.

Thinking about it, GNU/Linux is a good example of this relationship. Stallman is an idealist and laid down very important groundwork with the GPL and GNU applications. Linus is a pragmatist and built something imperfect but extremely useful upon that foundation. If Linux did not exist then GNU would be useless (see: the HURD). If GNU & the GPL did not exist, Linux would have been bought up by a corporation and would have barely seen the light of day. The combination of idealism and pragmatism profoundly changed the world.

I've noticed that software developers (and people in general), at the highest level, are split into three camps.

One of them takes the "nothing really matters at all" attitude (see: the majority of PHP developers). These people do not subscribe to dogma in the least but lack structure to such an extent that everything is a mess.

The next category is of the opinion that everything must be done in a certain way (the Plan 9 creators, most Java developers). This camp emphasises dogma above all else, even at the expense of common sense.

The final group, which is in the minority, consists of those who are truly pragmatic while taking the ideal into account at the same time. They tend towards perfection but know that the universe is not perfect. These are the Zen masters of development.

I suspect a neurochemical basis for this - when one is rich and in the higher echelons of society, it goes to reason that their brains will have more serotonin swimming around due to a) better food and b) more socialising.

Having higher levels of serotonin makes us more blind to unfairness:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/320/5884/1739.abstract

> We observed the effects of manipulating 5-HT function on behavior in the ultimatum game, where players must decide whether to accept or reject fair or unfair monetary offers from another player. Participants with depleted 5-HT levels rejected a greater proportion of unfair offers, but not fair offers, without showing changes in mood, fairness judgment, basic reward processing, or response inhibition.

> got tired of having to respond to things like building the Death Star.

Their loss, really.

I'm half joking - putting more money into space research might net us interesting things like cheaper energy (solar panels with no atmosphere or clouds to obscure them) and materials (asteroid mining). A major space station would certainly help with that.

A more reasonable place to start appears to be making a lot of money and then using it to lobby relentlessly.

I read a little through your comment history and it's good to see some fellow psychonauts/drug geeks in here.

I can't edit my post above and have a slight correction -

> Cocaine is not usually a synthesised drug - it's a plant extract.

There are ways to synthesise it but they are expensive compared to an extraction, which is relatively simple and only requires common materials.

Cocaine is not a synthesised drug - it's a plant extract. Amphetamine also occurs naturally in plants like Acacia Berlandieri, though it is synthesised when used for medical/recreational purposes.

We need a public education campaign on the difference between copying and stealing. All the media lobbying has tainted the terms.

Relevant: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel...

> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Journalists are people who know little of anything writing about everything.