L0j1k

Nobody's quite sure if this is a real alternate reality game, a government recruiting effort, or something else entirely. It consists of dead drops around the world, strange phone numbers, obscure message desks, and encrypted messages to "agents" out in the world.

Join us in #ARG at irc.freenode.net as we try to decipher the purpose of this "game" together! If you're not interested in jumping into an IRC channel right away, take some time and read the wiki. It will give you a good background.

Because it's clearly going to... I tell you downvoters what: ONE year from today, let's look back on this thread and talk about where WF and Quora are going, if they're even still alive. I'll be here.

From the website's testimonials: "Prediction: @WorkFlowy and @Quora will each revolutionise significant parts of education in the next 5 years."

LOLOLOL.

If you create something, no matter how completely ridiculous and stupid and dangerous and outright retarded it is, and then release it onto the population, someone somewhere will do it. In all likelihood, many people will.

Interesting observation, about ageism.

That of course could be the case, but I've built a vision of this guy in my mind after reading his diatribe (against himself). He's clearly just incredibly insecure, frustrated, and possibly self-loathing because of it. It's possible he had/has an axe to grind and nowhere to grind it so he just comes off like an ass. When people get like that, it's almost as if they put off an aura of failure as soon as they open their mouths. After reading his post, it's no surprise this guy doesn't do well interviewing. If your friends -- who are developers -- are telling you in no uncertain terms that you're not a bad developer, and you don't believe them such that your next step is to then seek the validation of complete strangers on the internet, there's obviously something much bigger working against you (in concert with lack of confidence). Perhaps he has very poor hygiene -- or, as you mentioned, poor social skills -- or something else that makes a horrible first impression. First impressions are everything, and this guy clearly isn't making a good one. Then again, maybe it really is the case that he's a bad developer with shitty friends.

Having faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles that involved my nearly getting killed for years on end (and a divorce, and death of friends, and what amounts to enormously difficult daily hard labor), I have ZERO sympathy for this kind of crap. Can't find a job after your little vacation? Boo hoo. At least you have all your limbs, can go to the market without getting shot at, and your wife and daughter haven't been executed.

AWP lol.

I'm glad to hear you enjoy MUME! If you didn't know, there is a huge OOC community called ElvenRunes (elvenrunes.com) that is where a huge number of us congregate outside the game. I've been playing MUME since '95, and I went to a MUME-meet in Stockholm in 2009 where I met my wife at a traditional Swedish dance class. You're absolutely right about that special "je ne sais quoi" that MUDs have. And it's definitely something that extends beyond simple nostalgia.

I'll be a lifer when it comes to MUDs (though damn it all to hell if things like Eve Online and Skyrim don't carve out a lot of my self-rationed game time). Perhaps on that subject, I should mention that (for me) MUDs are great for keeping open if I'm spending a lot of time compiling.

I will definitely take a look at your MUD engine. Thanks for the link! :)

YAY!! I preordered months ago. Can't wait!

Though I do agree that JavaScript needs an indescribable "something" to make it less formulaic and demanding ("opinionated" is good here but I don't want to steal your wording).

Just use EventEmitter to avoid callback hell. Or pubsub.

You make a good point here, and it's true that I shop around for "the right kind" of client. I read an article some years ago (on HN) about firing terrible clients at the same time we were having trouble with one client in particular. I resolved to never even negotiate with a client that I think is going to cause problems for myself or my team. We haven't looked back, and it's been one of the best decisions I've ever made for the company. When a potential client starts insisting on this magic time/money saving thing called WordPress even after I explain my concerns, I know that they're probably not a good fit and start recommending other developers in the area that we know that do quality work with WordPress. And there is absolutely no shortage of those kinds of developers, so the client will end up getting what they want.

On security, the custom code we have written and deploy for our customers is stuff that I trust, because it's something we built ourselves and are extremely familiar with. Our products also come with a built-in automated "security service" that helps tremendously in keeping us from being the lowest-hanging fruit. Importantly, not even using WordPress immediately shuts down the near-constant traffic on the internet devoted to finding insecure WP deployments. While I completely agree that a WordPress deployment in the right hands can be as secure as anything out there, I don't trust the codebase in general, and certainly not as much as I trust my own code, despite there being a large number of coders sifting through WP. And all bets are always off if an attacker gains entry into the hosting provider.

As a specific example, WordPress doesn't use PDO at all, instead using the mysql_ functions (not even mysqli_). This is a pretty glaring problem from my point of view. The excuse WP core developers have used is that it's basically too tightly-coupled to use anything but MySQL (and specifically the mysql_ functions). That's a pretty big red flag to me, when a developer says that their product is too tightly-coupled to stop using functions that have been officially deprecated in the language for quite a long time. In fact, the feature request for PDO in WP is a kind of in-joke to outsiders (http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/21663).

Also (and importantly), I don't sell myself as a WordPress developer, but as a custom web and mobile applications developer. I have done this intentionally so that I won't succumb to the temptation to start rolling out quick and dirty WP deployments, but instead focusing on providing a custom-built, quality product that I can honestly say they can trust to function well and function securely for a long time to come.

"the encryption on the credit card information is 4096 bit RSA."

This language, however, is awesome.

It's not dramatic if you appreciate not having panicked clients calling you at 2am because Turkish hackers have swapped out the main page or worse, RBN is distributing BlackHole from their site. I am not particularly keen on pretending I'm a hosting provider (even if it's extremely profitable), because I don't want phone calls at 2am about problems from something I built six months ago. I'm old enough that I know what I want and what I don't want in life, and I am not ashamed of this.

I'm a developer, not a babysitter, and while I can stand guaranteeing a product I build, I cannot and will not try to guarantee a product that stands a very good chance of being hosed by some retarded exploit (relative to a custom product). Since I'm not in the babysitting business, "better" for my clients is a product that won't be the Turkish graffiti or BlackHole distribution engine in six months' time.

It also needs to be said that for some reason lately, clients have consulted developers who have put it into their heads that using WP automagically brings your price and development time down by half, regardless of the circumstances. That's absurd, but it's usually the first real question I field about the technology we use to build products and services. If a client really wants to know the specific reasons why we don't use WP, you can bet that I don't have a problem explaining this exactly as I've explained it to you, albeit perhaps with different terminology. Simply put, I don't use WP because it is too risky versus the custom product we build, and that whole mess is something I don't want to clean (for free, which is what they'll demand when it happens). Even if I "maximize" some profit margin using it, I still feel that I'd be doing a disservice to my client. I'm totally honest with my clients, and if they insist I use WP, I insist they go somewhere else. And at the end of the day, if you aren't honest with your clients, you're a bad developer and a bad person.

That's my opinion, and I realize other people feel very differently, and that's fine.

Tell your client you don't work with WP unless they sign forms indemnifying you in the event their site gets owned and everything they have stored electronically stolen. Which will happen eventually, because WordPress. When I explain this to clients, they become open to other solutions that don't involve WP. To me, WP is like jQuery: A useful tool in the right situation, but far too often used because a developer is either lazy or lacking the technical skill to use something more appropriate.

Now let's see how quickly this gets downvoted into oblivion because WP.

Mui elegante, sir.

You sound like a good recruiter.

I have a feeling in my soul that "social media" is going to move into a more organic space in a way that means the most to the advertisers (or governments) that want deep information about target demographics. What I mean by this is that as the companies grow (and thus move away from niche market into infrastructure), they become too large to retain meaning to end users in an important way. What I'm saying here might be a little too cerebral for 2am, but it's the same reason Google just doesn't have the granularity to capture the mom-and-pop advertising market like they want (and consistently cannot achieve, if you pay attention to their stream of product inventions and reinventions). Facebook has started to lose its appeal on an accelerating timeline, and I believe that companies like Facebook and LinkedIn -- that are desperate for growth curves and thereby "smoothing off" the niche market granularity in an effort to streamline the company to afford maximal growth -- are going to be a "yeah, I knew that chick in high school" kind of utility that contains cursory information, but really lacks the depth of social networking that is the sought-after distilled end product that everyone dreams about, where your close friends are able to keep up with you online in a fashion that closely resembles your real life social graph. This information and depth -- the kind that is highly marketable and extremely valuable to all kinds of enormous, information-hungry organizations -- will be contained in little "what app.net wanted to be" bubbles that all intermix through network APIs to other social media bubble companies.

Unless someone is capable of building a Facebook/LinkedIn that won't info grab and bother the shit out of every contact you've ever had, while maintaining that "niche market" feel for every user, and while keeping that "closely resembling real life social activity graph" feel.

Or maybe I'm just stupid.

I sincerely hope this guy kicks the door in at the heart of this financial industry in-crowd fortress.

I guess people aren't too happy that I dislike thinly veiled attempts at trolling for a job on HN, wherein the author has failed to plan properly for a four month vacation ("sabbatical") and thus requires validation from complete strangers. It's pretty clear here that OP wasn't affected at all by the recent recession if he's complaining about not being able to find a job after only a month and a half. OP clearly needs to burn off his baby fat, and it's likely that this situation might be just what he needs to grow up.

I think that's what struck me most about this, that it felt forced, and also written by someone that doesn't quite understand exactly what programming actually is and is not. Writing a novel? No. I'd say it's much more like building a bridge than writing a novel. We use small machines to build a bigger structure that serves a purpose. That's why I accused the author of not knowing much about programming (indeed, he is a self-described "product guy"). Otherwise he'd be much more likely to draw parallels with building bridges or some other kind of engineering than writing a novel or authoring some other literary product.

First world problems. Amirite? :)

Somehow, the MUD I grew up playing (MUME -- Multi Users in Middle Earth) is still alive and has a good amount of players. The game itself has served as inspiration for other worthy games (Ultima Online for example) and the PvP aspect is second to none. It is also an enormous world, covering Middle Earth from the dwarf fortresses of the Blue Mountains all the way east to the Misty Mountains, Lorien, and Fangorn.

www (dot) mume (dot) org

I have been in love with her since the modem image. <3

The title of this should read: "OReilly offers 50% discount on ebooks in celebration of 'Hoping To Sell More eBooks'".

To someone that doesn't actually write code, sure, it may be just that easy to use terminology alone to draw the parallel.

It's available for viewing at 12pm PST on May 2nd (tomorrow). I was sent a huge movie poster and 3D glasses as part of their #the1701 promotion for the new movie. In case you're wondering, the 3D glasses are not regular movie 3D glasses but the oldschool red/blue kind. :)

And this is why information security will always be lightyears behind any threat in the real world. If you introduce to a classroom of people a task intended to make them cheat, and then you're required to follow up with the information that they're supposed to cheat, well... Let's just say that the people they're supposed to be defending networks and systems against don't need to be told when and where to cheat a system.

This is beautiful, and even more so considering it's done so well in JavaScript. It's times like these when I reflect with disdain that our industry is so full of hipster brogrammers with tons of butthurt. Get over yourself.

"We are terrible at putting out fires" is what I read here. And that's not a quality I want in a service provider...

Yes, certainly, though I must mention that things were never quite "back to normal" after all that time over there. I've resigned myself to probably always being affected by those tours in some form or another. But again, I'm stronger through courage, perseverance and force of will than almost anyone I know (excepting naturally tough people who have seen more than their share of life challenges -- such as other veterans, or you, five years from now). I firmly stand behind the adage that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. :)