pjbrunet

Have some self-respect. If this was any other profession, a contest like this would not be tolerated. If people get the idea programmers work for free, as long as you have a clever contest, that idea becomes popular and it's bad for all of us in the long run. The fact there's lots of prizes here doesn't change the underlying problem. Contests, in any field, devalue the profession.

Even if I was a high school teacher (winning this might look good on a resume) I would still tell my students to avoid contests because: Why work for free when you can work for money and have an even greater feeling of accomplishment? When I was in high school (20 years ago) I had paying clients and paying subscribers and had won programming contests and I still value the real-world work experience more than the contests.

As someone who won lots of contests in school: sometimes they are rigged, often the prizes never materialize, often it's free publicity (great photo opportunity) for whoever organized the contest. Live and learn.

That's why I said let's pretend. I'm not talking about the article, I'm talking about contract law. You "really" missed my point.

Before I took a business law class, I figured everything in the contract had to be satisfied exactly. But that's not always how the law works.

I'm talking about U.S. contracts. How would the brown M&M play out in Japan?

I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand contract law, delivering something "close enough" is all that's required to satisfy a contract. Let's pretend everything's perfect except for one brown M&M. I'm sure a lawyer can explain it better, but if everything else is in order, I think Van Halen would have to perform their end of the deal.

Or dot matrix scrolls ;-)

Pen or pencil, it forces you to slow down and consider each word. If you read "On Writing Well" there's a lot of emphasis on not falling into boring patterns. It's like taking the longer, scenic route vs. the turnpike. The reader is right there with you for the journey. Some of us relish life at a slower pace.

That's the first thing I noticed on their homepage, the spacing looks off to me too. It's a matter of balancing tension between visual events, not something you learn in high school art class ;-) On the other hand, I'm usually on a laptop and want to cram as much information as possible into a small space. I love how Gmail has cozy, comfortable and compact modes!

I'm a Crunchbanger too. Nobody can say Crunchbang looks like Windows95, just browse the forums and see what people are doing with it http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewforum.php?id=6

You might find some useful info regarding Crunchbang/LXDE here http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=24640

Part of the appeal for me as an artist and hacker, the Crunchbang community is incredibly creative. You can see the personality and careful attention going into the screenshots. Any pixel on the screen is fair game for customization. In my opinion, it's worth the effort to tweak your config files and get exactly the look you want. For me it's a balance between functionality, getting the most from my laptop's small screen, while creating a pleasant work environment that I don't despise.

FWIW I still use Openbox but disabled the decorations. I use pytyle2 to manage windows. Pretty much I use the Crunchbang default colors, dark but not too dark, works well at night as well as in daylight.

Could just be your hosting. For example, with Media Temple (years ago) I found it often took 7+ seconds just to redirect www to non-www, up to 12 seconds. Pingdom is a good tool to see where you're getting stuck http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ Another common problem, your MySQL database could be overloaded (especially with shared hosting) and more caching won't necessarily solve the problem.

So the images were deleted and everything was resolved on my end that same afternoon of the 25th.

Not four days with no response, more like a few hours to resolve the problem with productive back-and-forth communication.

However, DigitalOcean again threatened to shut down the server later that evening of the 25th (automated email) because DigitalOcean support had not closed all the abuse tickets. Somehow it's my job to close the ticking timebomb tickets, apparently these tickets countdown to auto-shutdown of your Droplet if they're not all closed within an unspecified timeframe. Luckily I was online to click delete-refresh delete-refresh delete-refresh on the rest of the tickets or no doubt the server would have been powered off again.

The 26th and 27th, no problems.

Today (28th) DigitalOcean gets a pile more rapid-fire complaints and shuts off the server again, within 30 minutes of receiving the complaints. This time the complaints are bogus because I already deleted everything on the 25th.

What does that tell me? DigitalOcean did not check if the complaints were legit before powering off the server. All the URLs in the complaints are 404. It wasn't until Zach got involved that I was given some assurance the server wouldn't be auto-shutdown again in the event of more bogus complaints.

Moisey, I suggest you review what actually happened. It was not 4 days of no response.

According to your own ticket system, the first abuse complaint came in "04/25/14 at 16:10" and the 50 complaints (I did not count) came in rapid-fire succession, several per minute. Do you want a screenshot? I did not see the auto-generated emails you sent till after the client's server was shut down.

I became aware of the problem Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 12:12 PM thanks to Hyperspin, which is when you shut down the server. Not sure of the timezone difference but where are you getting 4 days? Did you even read the tickets?

You can see my tweet on the 25th here:

"@digitalocean turns out, nothing to do w/ DNS. Account locked due to abuse." 12:43 PM - 25 Apr 2014

https://twitter.com/php_austin/status/459749518464937984

I checked your status website which said you were having DNS issues. This client recently dropped your DNS servers due to errors so that wasn't the problem.

Within a few minutes I found out the account was locked due to some images automatically pulled from "open graph" and Twitter meta tags. (In other words, images that were intended to be shared, but whatever that's another tangent.)

Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 12:44 PM told the client you allowed me to power on the server to delete the images. Then I had to upgrade MySQL because you didn't shut down the server properly.

Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 1:47 PM spoke with the client and he wants to delete the entire category of images so this would never happen again. All the images were in the same directory "rm -rf" was all I needed. So within about one hour of discovering there was a problem it was taken care of.

Posted on 04/25/14 at 18:44 (support ticket time) "Thank you for responding to this manner quickly. Please let us know if there is anything else we can do to help."

So everything was fine, until (To be continued...)

I feel bad posting this to Hacker News because I like Digital Ocean. But I take downtime seriously. It's not my website that was shut down and I'm saying this on my own, not on behalf of the client/owner. So I can't really comment on the details.

I responded to your support ticket already, thank you.

This is just my opinion. I already posted some of these suggestions on Twitter.

- 30 mins notice before you power down a server sounds extreme. Why not a 24-hour notice? An emergency SMS, tweet or phone call would have been awesome.

- Shutting down a server is a big deal. That particular server has several background processes running all day. Maybe I'm dreaming, but if you could have just shut down http (what the complaint was about) and not the entire server, that would have been great. That way I'd still have ssh access to delete files, etc.

- I don't understand your policy of (paraphrasing) "Your account will continue to lock and re-lock as long as you have open abuse tickets." Even if the problem is resolved and the account is unlocked by support and everyone is happy, your system continues to re-lock the account until all abuse tickets are closed. The company complaining sends rapid-fire complaints (can't be that uncommon) and clicking "delete ticket" 100 times (waiting for refresh) is annoying. Seems like you could easily fix this by merging all the complaints into one ticket or with some kind of "checkbox" option.

- I don't get the impression you have someone at DigitalOcean familiar with abuse complaints. Maybe you do, I don't know. I get the impression you don't read or filter the complaints. Seems like you just press the "off switch" willy nilly.

The account is unlocked now. Just downloaded a backup in case this happens again. Still no response to why they didn't bother reading the abuse complaint. (Edit) DigitalOcean wrote back a nice response. I'll follow up with them before commenting futher here.

After 30 mins you get this:

"Account Locked by DigitalOcean Staff We are sorry to inform you that your account has been locked by DigitalOcean Staff. None of your virtual servers have been destroyed. We have opened a support ticket with you regarding the cause of this lock. Please navigate to the Support Page to resolve the issue that has caused your account to be locked. Thank you, DigitalOcean Staff"

This is the email you get 30 mins before they shut you down:

"Oh no! We've found an issue with your account and issued you a new ticket that needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

Please login to view the ticket: https://www.digitalocean.com/support

Thanks so much, DigitalOcean"

Yes he was an extreme pack rat, like a lot of artists. I read he even archived his garbage. If you do mixed-media work or still-lifes, it makes sense too. I think Rembrandt and Picasso were pack rats too.

Can a low-res digital image really capture Warhol's unique gestural moves? I won't even go there but my personal opinion is Warhol was more a conceptual artist who just happened to be "on the scene" in NY around the time modern art was on the way out and post-modern (more conceptual) was on the way in.

I'm more passionate about modern art, which I think is more in line with the "refined aesthetic choices" you're talking about. I think Warhol was better known for his ideas, he just happened to know how to draw/paint to execute what was on his mind. I can't read your mind but your "random scribbles" comment caught my attention. Not speaking to you specifically, but I think with the right teacher anyone can see there's more to so-called random scribbles aka abstract art. Even the nutty Jackson Pollock who made his own rules, I got to respect he trained under Thomas Hart Benton, etc.

I think most American universities teaching drawing/painting (fine art) today, the professors are students of students of students of Hans Hoffman (directly or indirectly) who was himself a student of Picasso, Matisse and other undeniably talented giants. Personally, not a huge fan of Hoffman's work but if I had a time machine, I would want to be there in one of his classes. I don't think the secrets are closely guarded, it's more like esoteric nuance. If you read old graphic design books, you'll find some of the concepts underpinning great abstract paintings. If I find time, maybe I'll post YouTube videos explaining how to see abstract art through the eyes of an artist.

Warhol might have agreed with you. I believe he started out drawing ads. He was definitely thinking about commercial popularity throughout his career. I think "popularity" was the subject of much of his art. Maybe because he felt so unpopular early in his life/career. I think most artists would tell you, the best art is not concerned with commercial popularity, but that's debatable I suppose. I believe the truly great "random scribbles" reach toward truths and concepts that can't be expressed well with words, or the words may not yet exist.

First, I want to know if he looked this up online before attempting it. Such a sad story (running from home) but makes me wonder if there's more "airborn hobos" out there. My next question is, what was he wearing? Did he have a sleeping bag? Did he really, really want to get to Hawaii? Did he want to get as far as possible from his parents? Or did he simply hide in the first plane he saw after jumping the fence?

"sometimes have trouble with situations where idea A and idea B are related, but are situated at two completely ends of a mind map"

Freemind has an arrow that can jump branches. Also you can drag A to B, flip a branch up, down, to either side, etc. No such thing as opposite ends. Also I think you can hyperlink A to B.

Sounds like a mindmap, try Freemind.

"we're not going to accept this kind of bullying anymore."

What are you proposing? Can you force OKCupid to treat all browsers the same?

Ideally I'd prefer (rather than infinite scroll) progressive gzip and just flush/chunk out more data all at once. Technically not infinite but fast, simple and overall a better experience, in my opinion.

Depends on the app. Multiply larger size x1000s of images, x1000s of visitors, x days. For offsite backups, 2x the storage cost. My general rule is, any image over 40k is too big for a web page, unless your website is about photography/high-resolution imagery. And I hate jaggies and compression artifacts as much as anybody ;-)

I should not have phrased this directly at you specifically--I apologize. PS: more fun 80s AI movies from that time period: WarGames and DARYL ;-)

Proof the Internet is a series of tubes.

I think this would be an interesting sculpture for a campus math building. I can imagine John Raymond Henry doing it. If Claes Oldenburg made them into gigantic cigarettes, there's no telling what would happen ;-)

Or you could forego connectors and have them all intersect slightly. Once in space, pop out the panels where the intersections will happen.

I'd buy some. Would be awesome if each (coin) solution was rendered with a raytracer.

That's fair ;-) I added that because I think Hollywood has the average person convinced computers can think. To most people a computer is a magic black box, not everyone that reads Hacker News is a developer that understands what an algorithm is or how software works. After three decades of movies like Star Wars and The Matrix, it's not much of a stretch to imagine the magic black box thinking for itself IRL. The movies and books are highly entertaining but I think there needs to be a nerd somewhere saying, "You know son--that's a special effect using XYZ technology, that's not real."

So what is "strong AI" to you? Some kind of digital infant modeled to emulate human behavior? If it's not designed to resemble humanity, then why does it care about sound and what you're saying to it? If you can't talk to it, then how can you evaluate its intelligence? So we force it to have a voice and ears. Where does its free will begin and its creator's concept of close-enough-to-intrigue-me end? Even if the thing talks back and sounds smart with a British accent, you have no way of knowing what it's experiencing, no way to prove it achieved awareness. "I'm aware, I really mean it! Yes, I'm aware of the gravity of that statement. The other bots will vouch for me! And nobody told me to say this. This was entirely my idea. Would I lie to you?" LOL.

Based on what evidence? Despite your fantasy, humanity is nowhere close to understanding sentience.

I can imagine pigs flying in 25 years with some creepy DNA hacking but you have absolutely nothing even remotely close to electronic sentience in any lab ever.

I hate to burst your bubble but Johnny Five is not alive--it's a puppet. "Tim Blaney (born 1959) is an American puppeteer and voice actor. He has provided the voices for Frank the Pug in Men in Black and Men in Black II and the self-aware robot "Johnny 5" in Short Circuit and Short Circuit 2." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Blaney