thenonsequitur

Turns out if you trace the etymology of sycophant, you end up with "fig-shower" (sykon = fig in Greek), where "showing the fig" meant something along the lines of "flipping the bird" today.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=sycophant

The opposing hand gesture to bird-flipping might be peace-sign-showing. So how about "pacophantic".

(And FWIW, I thought the sarcasm in your question was immediately clear, not sure how other people misunderstood it).

Agree with the colors. That would turn your screenshot there into a Jackson Pollock :). It could also use some more base shapes, I think (triangle, line).

This.

Many people seem to have this Platonic form in their head for "start-up", complete with brogrammers, X-box, and 70-hour work weeks (okay, perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but you get this gist -- there are certain aspects with lots of hype right now). While those do companies exist and some of them are now in the spotlight, they are not actually a majority. Don't be fooled by that myth about start-ups. There are plenty of really good young, small start-ups in between that and big co, including some that are still small but already established in their niche, and these seem to be the sweet spot you're looking for.

This is pretty silly thing to watch out for. Being a zealot about anything, especially something like unit tests, is certainly not a good idea when searching for a good job. Setting aside the fact that whether unit tests exist and how they are managed often does depend on the project/product/client (and the fact that many good web start-ups don't do unit testing for very good reasons), it's just a bad idea to discount a company based on some technical aspects you may disagree with (especially if you only have a few years of experience and really don't have a strong foundation for evaluating this).

Instead, you are looking for good co-workers, good management, a comfortable work environment, and a compelling or at least interesting-enough business. You are not looking for a company that merely subscribes to your pet programming philosophy.

I can second this data point.

I love DDG, and tried it out as my default search engine for about a month, but just got tired of how slow it was compared to Google and switched back to Google as my default (on DDG I found myself adding "!google" about 30% of the time anyway). If DDG was faster, I'd probably still be using it.

I like this because it allows me to ssh into a machine and then run lynx to browse the web. Meta-browser, baby!

It's not clear that this strategy is possible within the the framework of the game show though. The host instructs both players to look at the concealed choices before they're allowed to talk to each other. To employ the blind strategy you'd have to explicitly not look at them (and probably say something at that point to make it clear you don't plan on looking at them). This would be directly contradicting the host's instructions. While the host might allow it, I think it's more likely they'll say "sorry, but you have to look at them".

Metacrawler was awesome at this time.

The detection may not be more sophisticated, but the UX is a bit better now. Now it says "Our automated system will not approve this name. If you believe this is an error, please contact us." The "contact us" links to https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=212848065405122. In that FAQ, it explains that you need to use your real name, and leads to another link where you can appeal the automated decision: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact/?id=237843336274237. You have to upload a government-issued ID to get the account.

Well done.

I'd like to see some more pro tips!

The truth is, programming is honestly not so hard. It just seems that way to you because it's so easy to convince yourself of that. I want to emphatically remind you that it's not. You have to believe that it's not hard before you can get good at it.

And it doesn't help that programming courses, like much of school, sometimes suck the excitement and imagination right out of you while simultaneously instilling fear.

Forget that, and just start coding. Anything! It really doesn't matter what. The only way to get good it programming is to program a lot. It doesn't matter if what you make is good, well-written, useful to anybody (even yourself), etc. Find something interesting to you for whatever reason, and just start programming--start now and don't stop--and you will become proficient way faster than you realize is possible.

Interesting. As a professional web developer with ten years of experience behind me, my cure (well, one of my cures) is the opposite: getting re-acquainted with making desktop games. They let you make something fun that can instantly be played ;).

Have you seen the book "Imagine: How Creativity Works" by Jonah Lehrer? It explains how the above process works in a general way, and it's really interesting. It's a pop-science book, to be sure, but still a really good read.

http://www.amazon.com/Imagine-Creativity-Works-Jonah-Lehrer/...

Cute :)