netmau5

Most decent charities deliver far more per unit donated than the US government could ever wish to achieve. If you're interested in pure charity, you're not going to get much bang for your buck at the federal level.

It bums me out that a single press release can cause so much of the world's wealth to evaporate. Worldwide capital was something like $80T iirc, 2% of that would have solved every budget crisis in the world.

TLDR: Power button or inconsistent results, now you can choose.

We live in a capitalistic society. I'd like to think that means IF !STOLEN THEN PAID and its contrapositive IF !PAID THEN STOLEN. Patents say IF USED THEN STOLEN. Companies tend to license these patents into their capitalistic form for many reasons, but the fact that they have a decision in the matter allows for monopolistic behavior.

I believe all patents should come with a required provision that lists a fair market value for licensing it which anyone can use, thus IF !STOLEN THEN PAID. In turn, this forces the USPTO to actually quantify (to some degree of error) the "useful" requirement of a patent and, by small extension, if it is "statutory" (product or productizable) and "nonobvious" (existing competition?). I think it also forces the requestor to give some detail on the intention of the patent rather than making an arbitrary claim to an underlying concept.

It's all about the money; they need to stop pretending and judge it that way. As it reads now, the current patent system was a premature optimization which planned for a society out of Star Trek instead of, well, lets not go there today.

Our latest side project: we built this notification app using MacRuby. The tooling has a little ways to go, but it was generally much nicer than using Obj-C.

I'm speaking generically. It is difficult to imagine a moral code by which al'Qaedas actions are not objectionable (although there is obviously at least one). That being said, we often conflate absolute morality with personal perspective. Some causes have more gray areas than others for certain.

Good point on the cartoon, I had forgotten it was published there and can understand the outrage stemming from it.

I suppose bad people do bad things, regardless of an honorable ideology. Still, I see Norway in the same way as I see Canada. They do not take strong statements for or against others, they do not engage in the affairs of others, they have had a long (modern) history of peaceful relations/intentions. The most aggressive thing they've done is commit handfuls of troops to a multinational "peacekeeping" missions.

I guess I just feel like they have more important enemies, from their perspective, to attack.

Is there any reason to want to terrorize Norway?

And they could have benefitted mightily from acquiring Sun, moreso than simply owning Java. How was Groupon worth 6B in their eyes and Sun not 7B? Maybe hindsight is ruining my perspective more than I can see.

Well done. Backpacking an existing fad to get visibility from early adopters on your project. Case study in excellent blog-marketing.

Thanks for the buttons too~

Awesome. The #1 thing I hate about Slideshare is that I will find presentations that I wanted to see for myself.

I also find TDD to be rather useless when you haven't quite figured out what your architecture is going to be yet. My general process is model -> test -> code. If I can't yet determine my model because my knowledge isn't deep enough yet, the tests are all garbage that will have to be rewritten anyway.

I get the argument of tests as interface specification, but I just don't buy it. Some people may not like to model outside of code, aka UML or variants, but any reasonably complicated system needs a high-level concept drawn up before you can safely start pushing through individual components.

I love TDD for known problem/known solution scenarios, but I've found it to be a pretty bad time sink for unknown solution combinations. YMMV, and I think everyone finds their own comfort zone with TDD after some experimentation. The big lessons for me were that [x] testing is a net time saver versus the spray and pray code like hell strategy (yes, this makes sense before you realize you're not a programming messiah after all!) and that taking the perspective of a code consumer helps you write more fluent APIs.

If you want someone to look at something, only give them one thing to look at.

Love the idea as well, even commented on the blog (something I rarely do these days). My partner and I might be interested in hacking on it too. Now if we can get tansey to do our ML~

I built http://www.sparkmuse.com and http://thesparkfoundry.com on AppEngine. You'll have to write a little more code to handle not having a RDMS, but that's only if you need joins.

Speaking of sharing ideas, I'd love to get some feedback from you guys on a recent side-project I developed at http://thesparkfoundry.com . The premise is that you sign up for various mailing lists for voting on ideas and entrepreneurs can access those lists by agreeing to build them (http://www.sparkmuse.com/foundry/howitworks). Highly voted ideas would then be attractive to a developer as you'd get a built-in pool of potential beta subscribers or people willing to give feedback. Unfortunately I never had the time to fully promote it, but it was fun to build.

This is awesome. My only concern is that I'd end up interviewing with the same companies in the same format anyway. If that is the case, I'd just be making it easier for the hiring side but not gaining myself any advantage.

I suppose people who don't interview well (like me) would benefit from some facetime.

I built http://www.sparkmuse.com just for that purpose. We've gotten nearly 100 ideas now, but not alot of traction, so I wouldn't build another :)

I've not see Economist Debates before but it looks to be a very well thought out environment for debate. They roleplay the form of a debate so well that it inspires courteousness from the general audience. The timetable and structure of the debate as well as the expert commentary is all very nice.

I'd like to see such a system for political discourse. At the local, state, and national level, it would be a welcome place to share ideas. If all the major news organizations are going to keep spewing opinionated journalism, we may as well take it to the logical conclusion. With opinion should come debate.

You may apply on the Sparkmuse website, no need to spam here.

I know there are many great devs in the world, but sometimes I think these bullet points are a little too narrow. Full stack from CSS to server admin? An extrovert on social media? Also has time to keep up with 20 projects on GitHub?

I know these people exist but most of them devote a significant share of their time (work and free) to the craft to be able to say they qualify for these points. Furthermore, they balance between these activities such that they are learning new tech constantly only to be applying them to someone else's project and then hyping it up on Twitter.

Given the rare combination of talent, passion, and generosity these people engender, 12k is a joke. It's more than a joke, it's a disgrace. I'm paying 12k for a black belt, but I'm paying a million for the guy who trained from an early age in a monastery and has a lifelong dedication to his art.

I don't know, I think all the superlatives I'm seeing in job posts recently is making me a little nuts (to be fair, this one isn't the worst by a long shot). How about "generalist experience in n-tier web apps, likes to learn new things, and is active in the development community." Maybe employers think we're all too vain for such a nonchalant statement to appeal to us.

Sparkmuse is a new startup community for people to share ideas, engage with one another, and collaborate on projects. Beta started in early March and we've been doing everything in our power to create the best place for founders on the net. 99% of startup people do not live in the Valley so we're going to bring the Valley to them. We want to create an environment where you can find a cofounder, get feedback on your ideas, get help from some of the biggest and best entrepreneurs and startups in the game, or simply hang out.

I will agree that Java encourages some poor modeling around nouns, moreso than many other OO languages. That being said, most of us have "been there done that" with Java and current best practices do not encourage what Yegge fears. I do wish that we had more first-class language support for functions, however, as several lines of boilerplate to achieve them is straight up insanity.

We're building something called The Spark Foundry over at Sparkmuse that I think addresses #1. The basic premise is this:

1. A person enters their idea and commits to it.

2. That person can then spread the word via Twitter, Facebook, etc to get others to commit.

3. There are multiple levels of commitment, the user can commit to try a solution out, pre-register for a beta, answer a survey, or buy it. Each commitment puts their email on a list.

4. Founders at Sparkmuse can see how popular ideas become. The more commitments one has, the more validated it becomes. They can choose to build a solution for the given wish and then have access to a large mailing list of potential users (we don't give them the emails).

5. Thus, user has an incentive to spread the word on their idea as it can create an opportunity an entrepreneur wouldn't want to pass up.

We'll be releasing our first stab at this to the public in the next week. The premise is essentially a "Kickstarter for social capital." Right now it's on demo inside of Sparkmuse. If you'd like to check it out, please drop me a line. We're always looking for more people to join our mission.

I had obligations but now I am essentially debt-free outside of a mortgage (not underwater). I have been saving aggressively however I do spend some of it funding my side projects. I've got around 8 months of expenses saved up and hope to get to two years worth within the next 12 months. Without outside investment, that is when I'll hit my personal comfort zone for going after it.

Until then, I'm focused on building the resume and resources I will need in the future. In fact, that is part of the reason I'm working on Sparkmuse. Working a day job and at night can be brutal but I have no regrets.

I'm working on exactly this area at Sparkmuse. We're trying to build -the- startup community including all of the related disciplines (hackers, designers, marketers, etc). Although obvious, 4chan has an enormous community which is why they have so much activity. Successfully growing a community to that scale is immensely difficult.

Our community is based on a mission to help tech entrepreneurs succeed. That includes giving feedback on ideas, helping cofounders meet, providing discussion areas, and hooking founders up with good deals. If that is something you find interesting, I'm actively looking for people to join up with us and make it a reality.

I dream of the day I can have work/life balance. This is a huge problem for me and it bleeds into my personal life, psyche, and creativity. Unfortunately, I am a prisoner of my own obligations as I'm sure many are. Obligations mean I need income means I need a job. That doesn't mesh well of my incredible desire to run my own business one day.

My father and his father have run their own businesses. When I graduated college, I made a strange departure from that norm to get a job. The thought wasn't particularly exciting, but we had medical bills in the family that someone had to handle. I hate it because I feel like I've let that magical time where you have no bills and can live on the cheap pass by.

So I'm playing it the only way I know how. I work at day then come home to work on side projects into the early morning. My hope is that one day these can be used to convince an investor to float my living expenses so I can take a real shot. Until that day, what options do those of us with jobs have?

We're actually working on this at Sparkmuse. We call it Matchmuse, an e-harmony for cofounders. I'm actually glad this one was a joke, but it doesn't matter because ours will rock! Matchmuse generates introductions to other cofounders in our 1000+ member community based on multiple dimensions of compatibility (sounds familiar doesn't it?). Our goal is to help entrepreneurs, especially those outside of the valley, form their own core groups.

edit: If anyone here who would be interested in using it, we'd love to hear from you~

Using Java+Play!+GAE+Twig for Sparkmuse and Im very happy with the stack overall. The new Blobstore API will help with handling image uploads which is something Play! On GAE fails at horribly (GAEs fault mostly).

That would certainly be nice to know but most of those numbers are kept under wraps for various reasons.