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sasha-dvon On Atwood's Please Don't Learn to Code

But the worst part is that we may have more of unskilled and unaware of it.

sasha-dvon Please Learn to Code

A slightly off-topic question:

How much can you learn about computers by doing the code year?

Isn't this (http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/code-year) just a JavaScript course?

(not being a jerk, just curious)

sasha-dvon N Reduce opens up as alternative to ultra-elite startup incubators

Do you want to join an ultra elite ninja brotherhood?

Hell yeah! Let me fetch my nunchucks.

I would like to see this project succeed, but the language used (too much enthusiasm?) makes me skeptical. Anyhow, good luck guys.

sasha-dvon Why we moved from NodeJS to Ruby on Rails

Learning new technologies is something I do, not because I'm interested in getting hired or in becoming the DHH of node. I would do it even if I were by profession a truck driver.

This may sound "romantic", but when your love of technology interferes with you actually being productive and getting things done, ... it's frustrating.

If you are a student, then jumping on a new platform and making a name for yourself is a great thing to do. But I'm an old fart, I was there when Java applets were "the thing that will change the world".

>There will be new kinds of software that directly result from the new possibilities of Node, CoffeeScript, Meteor, Firebase, Parse, etc.

Like what? (not rude, just curious)

As far as I can see there's nothing new under the Sun, so to speak.

sasha-dvon Plagiarism

>Someone has to explain to me exactly what we should have done differently here.

Well, besides writing an original content or asking the original author for permission to republish the article:

1. Don't copy an article word for word. Change the words and the structure.

2. Once caught, don't back-paddle and be defensive. Apologize.

sasha-dvon We got a takedown notice from LifeShield for our positive review

Monetizing your website with affiliate offers doesn't make it spam. Having no other purpose than to redirect a visitor to an offer - does. Especially if you use less than lilly white SEO techniques. Here's a nice way to put it:

Google believes that pure affiliate websites do not provide additional value for web users, especially if they are part of a program that distributes its content to several hundred affiliates. Because a search result could return multiple sites, all with the same content, they create a frustrating user experience.

And here's the rest of it: http://bit.ly/KWS1cz

>For example in the UK there are sites that offer money back on all purchases

I don't see the relevance.

sasha-dvon Why we moved from NodeJS to Ruby on Rails

This reads like my life story. Falling in love with a new technology, trying to use it in production, only to find out that it just isn't there yet :)

Node.js will become a great option for web development, but I don't think that node, at this moment, is ready for "mainstream" use.

sasha-dvon Refer.ly (YC S12) Lets Regular Folks Earn Affiliate Revenue

Thank you for answering my questions. I sincerely wish that you succeed in your mission.

sasha-dvon Refer.ly (YC S12) Lets Regular Folks Earn Affiliate Revenue

First of all, congratulations on your new venture!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, refer.ly is basically a middleman. If that's so, I have a couple questions:

1. What incentives do I have to sign up with refer.ly instead of going directly with companies that run affiliate programs?

2. What makes refer.ly different from existing middlemen like Commission Junction?

sasha-dvon VLC has been downloaded over a billion times

I disagree.

Regarding user-friendliness they are about the same to me. Can you point out something that I maybe missed that makes mplayer "definitely far more user-friendly than vlc"? (not rude, just curious)

edit: missed a word

sasha-dvon We got a takedown notice from LifeShield for our positive review

@silverbax88 - exactly!

No matter how well designed or "active" websites may appear, if its only function is to send you to some affiliate offer - it's spam. The best of them are very good at faking legit websites (even having an active "community" engaged in "discussion"). They are extremely good at faking normal human activity and I don't see the end to it. There's virtually nothing you can do that a script can't do also.

sasha-dvon We got a takedown notice from LifeShield for our positive review

No, I don't think so.

They have so many links from various sources that any effort at generating enough "bad links" would be virtually unnoticeable. Other than that, they don't care about their rankings. I mean, would you go to google.com (or bing.com) to find a search engine by typing "search engine"?

You can have a few laughs by doing a google bomb, but that's it. You can't hurt google with negative SEO.

sasha-dvon We got a takedown notice from LifeShield for our positive review

Although Matt Cutts claims that this is an algorithm change and does not involve any human review of individual websites - this is not true. They went after specific guys who sold links on their splog farms, but those who didn't are up and running. A lot of people who hired "SEO experts" were burned just because the expertise of those "experts" was buying links on said splog farms.

The thing is that google's algorithm looks like this (http://imgur.com/XxhZg) and the real "SEO experts", the black hat guys, run circles around it. If you doubt that just look at the results of your search queries. See any spam?

I've built a blog in 2005 which I basically abandoned in 2007. That blog was scraped and its content republished by a few BH guys who didn't bothered to remove links pointing to my original blog which resulted that today my blog has over 75% of its links coming from the splog farms. I'm not talking about a few links here and there. I have over 40000 of those and yet I have no warnings in GWMT and the blog ranks #1 for its main keyword.

If you're running an online business avoid hiring "SEO experts", they are not just useless they are dangerous.

So, how can you get hurt by some asshole?

First, he can buy links on the splog farms already penalized by google. Second, he can create extremely transparent splog farm and link to your site. (by transparent I mean autogen content, no keyword variations in anchor text, trackback spam, ...) Third, he can just "xrumer blast" you out of google index.

I believe that the approach google took recently will get a lot of small business (and webmasters) hurt, but it will have almost no effect on black hatters. Why? Because, with all being said and done, the only thing that really counts in SEO is the number of links and the BH guys are masters at creating those. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb)

Google screwed it up big time by making negative SEO possible, but I doubt they'll change their approach. I doubt that they even care about it.

sasha-dvon Why I ask "how many golf balls fit on a bus?" in job interviews

>Why I ask "how many golf balls fit on a bus?" in job interviews

Perhaps, you think that a direct question about realtime monitoring systems isn't tricky enough?

sasha-dvon Men In Tech

I'm a man (and yes, my first name is Sasha).

>If it got some guys thinking about how they would feel if this happened:

>"You don't look like a programmer! When did you get into computers? That's kinda hot..."

I get THAT all the time. People (both men and women) don't believe that I'm a programmer because I don't look like a stereotypical geek. I'm over 6 feet tall, I work out, and I have numerous visible scars.

So, how do I feel about it? I don't. Why? Because I believe that people are honestly surprised to find a guy who looks like a cage fighter in this industry. They are even rarer than women. Sure, I can turn this into people discriminating against me based on my looks and start writing pointless posts, but I have projects to complete and a life to live.

>If it gets guys to stop saying THAT...then it was well worth the whole thing.

No, it will not get them to stop. The only reaction you'll get from a guy who reads that article is: "What a suck up!" A personal story written by a woman about the pain she went through because of such behavior will make them think hard about it. Guys do feel and most of us are not assholes on purpose.

Don't get me wrong, women do face real problems just because they are women and I feel their pain, but I don't believe that they need men writing about it. Women can and do speak for themselves. I don't believe that they are some fragile creatures that need a champion.

sasha-dvon Men In Tech

Can you elaborate on that?

sasha-dvon Men In Tech

Just what women need!

Another middle-aged white man fighting for the women's rights. It's condescending. It's just a step away from "A Gay Girl in Damascus".

sasha-dvon Introducing DuckDuckHack

samdk has answered for me.

sasha-dvon Introducing DuckDuckHack

DDG is getting better all the time. These days, I use it almost exclusively. I love the !bang syntax.

sasha-dvon Incredibox - Background music for programming.

How about this? http://www.incredibox.com/?music=4F9C15381AD42

sasha-dvon Go East, Young Man

Thanks for the background story.

By reading the article I've got an impression of a successful escape from wage slavery. But the thing that struck me as odd is his new job in the promised land. How teaching English in China is not a dead-end job? I mean, one day you teach English to Chinese students, and suddenly you ... teach English to more Chinese students?

sasha-dvon Everything I need to know about startups, I learned from a crime boss

This article reads to me as "What I learned from watching Scarface and pretending to have connections with underground." I know I'm ranting, but what can you say about this bunch of vague cliches?

sasha-dvon Free Programming Ebooks

Thanks mekoka for this list.

The best free programming book, and one of the best books in general, I've ever read was Programming from the Ground Up. It's not on the citizen428's list, but the mofo's list has it.

If you haven't read it I highly recommend you do. Here's the link: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pgubook/

sasha-dvon Perl is no more accurate than randomly-generated language

You're absolutely right.

I blame the title for turning this into Perl sucks vs. no it doesn't discussion. Not going into the problems with their study (N=18, poor Perl samples,...), all they prove is that a novice will much better understand pseudo code designed to be easy to understand than a real programming language.

I'm a Perl hacker and I would be the last to claim that it has an easy to understand syntax. Perl is full of shortcuts and magic that is hard for beginners, but it makes my life as a programmer much more easier. If they compare their pseudo language with Perl, Ruby, and Python, Perl would be at the bottom of the list.

sasha-dvon Is Ubuntu Driving Users Away?

I know that and I respect it. What I don't know is why are they investing so much time in making it impossible to customize Ubuntu? What it has to do with their mission? Is it impossible to build a system with good defaults so that general population can use it with no configuration requiered, and let more advanced users pimp it up the way they want it.

The Unity developers had been answering questions on redit some time ago (http://gd.is/dgzY) and the majority of people were complaining about it only to find out that the developers have no authority to implement some basic conf tool.

sasha-dvon Is Ubuntu Driving Users Away?

> Is Ubuntu Driving Users Away?

It drow me away for sure.

The main reason I run Unix is the freedom it gives me to make my system the way I like it. For me Unix=freedom to customize. Considering that, the direction they've took at Cannonical is absurd. With each new release it's harder and harder to customize your system. If you want to configure it you have to hack it. Today, it's easier to customize Windows than it is to customize Ubuntu.

In the last few months I've played with Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Mint LXDE, Debian, OpenBSD, Arch, and ArchBang. I'm running ArchBang now and I love it!

P.S. I would have stayed with OpenBSD if it had a better support for flash. Flash on Linux sucks, but on OpenBSD it blows. Other than that, I was really impressed with it, installation is fast, it runs fast, it's stable, and it's secure, but you knew that already :)

sasha-dvon Kendo UI - a framework for modern HTML UI

I agree with your points. Tutorial-style documentation is a way to go.

The main problem this framework has isn't its reference-style documentation (if a framework looks good enough I'm willing to do some extra work figuring out how to use it). Kendo's real problem is its licence. Apart from seeing how "awesome" it is you can't do shit with it.

Here's the licence: http://gd.is/qDdw

sasha-dvon GoDaddy's New "Selective DNS Blackouts" Policy

I've been using namecheap for years. Never had any problems with them. They are reasonably priced and fast to respond. The only thing I don't like is their slightly confusing interface. Hiring an UX engineer and giving him free reign wouldn't hurt them :)

sasha-dvon Knockout.js vs Backbone.js

Thanks.

I'm working on a small project and while the code I'll write is small, my stack is rather colorful.

sasha-dvon Knockout.js vs Backbone.js

Just did and now I'm a victim of the paradox of choice :)