unshift

many employers request that employees provide a disclosure when discussing their products on social media

It gets elaborate but you can essentially buy email address -> cookie mappings or make your own. You then sync those cookies with the ad exchange and then they're returned to you with every ad auction for that user.

Successful spammers are absolutely targeting their emails. It's similar to when you search for something on Amazon and then see ads for it on Facebook -- the goal is to put an ad in your inbox (essentially for free) instead of paying for ad impressions.

Google runs display ads, which are bid on by third parties who can use that data to target emails.

gunicorn + meinheld is even better than gevent in my experience. meinheld is written in C and offers a monkey patch option, and is a little bit faster than gevent. i'm using it with flask + sqlalchemy + redis with great success.

forget about the $3k you have left, what about the money you've already put in? it doesn't look like I can sign up anywhere to get any sort of service, so you have no way to generate a return on your investment so far -- so why would you want to put any more in?

my suggestion is to set up yourself a prgmr-like website, do the administration yourself (by hand), and spend a few hundred dollars trying to get some traffic and signups. if that starts to work out then take it from there. realize that more SSDs aren't going to generate any money; signups will.

a new website would be nice, but you don't have the money for one, and it's not clear it's worth trying to get one at this point. the pure ASCII look could actually instill some sort of confidence that your current website does not.

good luck!

your library has no tests! it's a good effort but I honestly wouldn't use it yet.

a few nit picks: i can't imagine a scenario where i'd want my logger to close stdout (or any other file descriptor) for me.

there is a lot of missing error handling, which is really important for something critical like a logger. what happens when disk space runs out? no timeouts on network operations?

also your SMTP and Gmail loggers don't form valid MIME messages (I can't log non-ascii?). you also seem to just swallow exceptions which is totally not what I would want or expect from a logging library.

keep at it though, the logging module's API (inspired by log4j) is fairly painful.

please don't do that. part of what makes using jquery plugins so horrific is that every new version is a "total rewrite" and/or drastically changes the API.

the API might use hungarian notation, and you might have fallen out of love with it, but so what? it's a pretty decent API and there's no real benefit to users in changing it. they'll all to have to update/rewrite their JS to stay up to date with the library for effectively no reason.

why? college is not a job training facility and shouldn't be treated like one. high school's goal is to provide a broad education so a graduate can have the basic knowledge necessary to function in society. not everyone goes to college.

i've found scrum to be the worst possible "methodology" on the planet and can't stand pair programming. i've also been known to get things done on occasion.

nothing about making software is one size fits all. forcing scrum and pair programming sounds like a really good way to get an enthusiastic team, but guarantees little else.

couldn't agree more.

if i had to come up with a permutation algorithm as part of writing code, you'd better believe i'd look one up so that i'm sure i'm doing things optimally. i wouldn't trust myself to come up with the exactly right algorithm on the first try.

if i had to deal with some weird half-sorted array, i assume i'd be working in the same context as the problem and wouldn't have to make up a solution on the spot with limited details. why do you have a weird-ass data structure like that to begin with? that's the first question i'd ask.

personally i always ask a couple of simple questions (like FizzBuzz) and then talk experience. if you want to see a code sample, ask for one -- written on a computer, without someone hovering over the candidate's shoulder. coding solutions to weird questions on a whiteboard doesn't help anybody.

that question is a bit of a turn-off to me. obviously "benchmark it, see what's slowest, and make it faster" is a correct answer, and so is a 40 page essay about browser rendering, minification, full page caching, fragment caching, AJAX, etc. have you tried anything more specific?

it's very common for people to be as compliant as possible during the hiring process so as not to jeopardize the job, especially their first job out of school.

that tends to be the result of years of people saying "you're lucky to get a job at all" combined with a long search and endless interviews.

and while yes, she did sign the non compete, it doesn't mean it's not bullshit, which is the entire point of the article. of course you can be a hardass and say "she signed it", "should have read it more carefully", "her fault", etc, but now she's on the dole until the clause expires because someone had a hissy fit and threatened to sue her employer. it's a crappy, stifling situation all around which is what the article aimed to point out.

they don't expect the work to be done solely by volunteers, and are going to ask for donations on their website. it's laid out in the first paragraphs:

     The task is huge and it's unlikely that it will be 
     completed shortly based only on volunteer work, so we 
     came up with the following proposal, which splits the 
     work into several steps and sub-steps, togheter with an 
     estimate of how much money is needed to complete each 
     one.

your kernel is already thin and light. if you're using a modular kernel, as most distros default to, you're only loading the modules you need and can use.

as for apps and packages, i don't care for most distros' dependency systems, but the only downside is more files on disk -- and who really cares if there's an extra 25MB of stuff you never use on there, assuming you have the space.

the economics might not work out. if it brings in $30k a year, it's not worth the long days and exhaustion of keeping the service running.

i'd be comfortable paying about $10/yr for my account (since i don't use it a ton) but at that rate it's hard to make a living and justify the time and effort. notifo is really handy but it's not something many people want to pony up for.

they'd do much better with twisted (python) than tornado. using Deferreds is nothing like opening keys with a beer bottle -- it makes a lot of sense.

and as a former ITA Software employee, i can scoff and say they aren't actually doing anything resembling flight search. they're just scraping websites and APIs. node.js might be fine for that, but so is anything else. at that level it's more a matter of preference than capability.

have any tips for applying? i sent in a resume the other day, but is there anything i can do/write/show to get a leg up on the process?

i'm pushing to github. reason i ask is that it segfaults -- see https://github.com/schacon/hg-git/issues/216

if hg-git uses dulwich, and it's all pure python, how come i see it running git-index-pack amongst other git (what i assume are shell) commands?

not mentioned in the article is that apparently Moose is a really good OO system for perl, but (in my opinion) about 10 years too late.

SEEKING WORK -- Boston, MA or remote

Mostly a Python coder, working with Django, Twisted, and whatever else. Have worked in product dev, QA, and operations/devops. Can work at high or low levels of systems.

http://github.com/unshift for some sample code, http://unshift.net for my new personal site, email in profile.

everyone wants to rag on the portfolio (fine, go ahead) but the long-form copy on that page is great. it's really well laid out, easy to read, and got probably everybody to scroll from top to bottom and read almost the whole thing.

as someone who's unsuccessfully been trying to coax something similar out of a designer, it's refreshing to see. my product requires a bit of convincing and explaining, so the standard business type website with a couple pictures thrown in isn't as effective. long copy is hard to get right and this guy nailed it.

> Life is too short to worry about when Google will delete your account for silly reasons.

which is exactly what you're doing...

anyone putting 30 second video ads on the internet just doesn't get it. it's not like tv where you have to recapture the viewer's attention -- they're hyper focused on a single place on the screen. i would imagine a 5-7 second "samsung phone X has features Y and Z" ad would be way more effective if only because people would consume it without immediately closing the window.

for what it's worth, my experience comes from getting hired at vmware and ITA software (now google). in my experience, the recruiters who source and filter resumes at those companies are rarely technical.

this may be true in startup land, where hires are evaluated by the engineers/managers/founders but it's absolutely not the case in the world of BigCorps. many recruiters (including internal ones) are less technical than anyone would like and have to operate on looking at key words in a resume before deciding what to pass along to managers. a github account with a bunch of code in it would be so confusing they'd just move on.

if you're looking for work, it's worth knowing how to put together a good resume just so it gets you by the HR department.

i've also had experience where i was required to write (non trivial) sample code with my application, only to find out months after i started the job that nobody even looked at it.

code samples and projects are great to have, and especially helpful if someone cares, but the resume isn't dead yet.

total aside but i went to set up Firefox sync for someone the other day and ended up ditching it all together.

in addition to a username/password for a sync account, you need to use an (unretrievable) sync key to add a browser. i understand the desire for security and privacy, but this is just horrible usability. i can get it all working obviously but there's no way this person (who is 80 years old) is going to be able to enter a key to set up the remote machines.

chrome's sync is much better. just use your gmail/google account credentials, and you're all set.

i agree on the overall sales tax issue (and in MA a year or two ago there was a ballot issue to eliminate it -- and for some reason beyond me, people voted to keep it). but if there's a loophole that lets me pay less, i'm going to take advantage of it and i'm not going to give the guys who closed it a pat on the back.

in theory, your income taxes are supposed to funnel back down to your state (same way state taxes go back to your city). you also pay a lot of money for state income tax, property tax, tax on every gallon of gas you use, heavy taxes on booze and cigarettes, taxes on utilities, taxes on your cell phone and cable bill, excise tax if applicable, tolls, parking and speeding tickets if you get them, and fees for doing just about anything related to the government (including fighting traffic and parking tickets).

i refuse to believe taxing out of state corporations is going to make a big difference. there's already plenty there, it's just used in the least efficient way possible. this whole thing with the affiliate programs is either a really lame money grab or good lobbying by big box stores.