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brutimus

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Software engineer @ Greenspun Media Group in Las Vegas, NV.

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Having spent a lot of time in a truck, I can tell you it's extremely difficult to cope on high-traffic roads. Most car drivers will crowd around you giving you no chance to change lanes, etc. Sometimes you have no choice but you just start creeping over and scare everyone out from around you. Obviously most truckers know what they're doing and they won't actually run you over -- it's bad for them, too.

When I'm out on the highway in a car and I see a truck ahead of me trying to get over into my lane, I'll most likely slow down to hold up the lane behind me and give them a quick headlights flash to they can get over. I'm sure the other cars hate me for it, but who cares.

Commenting here because the post's comments are 6mo old.

I've had good luck with a combination of what both the author and the first commenter said. Go a week forcing yourself to eat smaller portions, your stomach will shrink and it becomes natural. I can't eat what I used to call "large" portions before (kind of annoying when you're at a really good restaurant or a holiday dinner).

I also dusted my bicycle off and got back out and started riding. I hadn't been active on that since I'd been moving around cities which are terrible for bicycling (Las Vegas being my current). But I found some good roads and trails, found the right times to ride them to avoid traffic and I was set. In the past 6mo or so, I've gone from 5-10mi rides to just over 60mi. When the time changed I lost my every evening ride after work as I hate riding at night around here. So I commute a couple miles to work every day on my bike, then do a nice long ride or two on the weekend.

All this together has taken me from my high school to college to post-college weight of 210 lbs down to just north of 170 in about 6-8 months. I'm now lighter than the weight I wrestled in middle school.

It definitely has. Two years ago, I even had issues with some features of KVM/QEMU (live migration, for instance), let alone trying to run that on a distributed FS. It's amazing how fast these techs are coming along.

I've been using Gluster in a production environment for over a year now with an absolutely perfect track record. I use it for the "centralized" filesystem for a virtualization cluster (using KVM). Currently, I have three virt hosts setup with dual NICs each to get 2Gbps throughput, sharing a RAID1-style filesystem (with priorities to the local copy for r/w speed).

I was (and still am) fairly skeptical about using Gluster in this role for a production environment having come from a fiber/SAN shop before. However, I gained a lot of faith in Gluster after a non-incident a few months back. One of our core switches fell offline (the one all three virt hosts were plugged into) and remained offline for about an hour I believe. When the switch was brought back online, Gluster managed to put everything back together and continue operation without any human intervention. All 20 or so VMs were still humming along like nothing had ever happened. fsck confirmed this.

Even in the case of a failure (which I've not experienced), your data is still sitting on disk (at least that's how it is with RAID1, I don't know how it's RAID0 setup works) -- you'll always have access to the raw files Gluster uses.

Viewing OpenStreetMaps through Bing requires Silverlight? That seems a bit contradictory to the "open" part.

(Note: I've tried Moonlight half a dozen times and have had zero success with it on Bing or elsewhere)

I'm a Mootools fan myself. I use it over the seemingly more popular libs like jquery because very little of my JS code is actually touching DOM. I usually start my projects by creating all my "classes" (actually prototypes, etc, but classes make sense to most OO people).

I primarily code in Py, but I do really want to sit down with GWT some day, it looks badass.

In a lot of my projects I just use raw JS. Big libraries scare me sometimes and honestly, JS isn't that hard if you know what you're doing and know how to code around the main browser issues. I like some of the functional paradigms from mootools though (well any other lib for that matter), and the XHR handling.

(sorry I didn't really answer your question -- just rambled a bit before I go to sleep)

"All check refund requests for wallet balances will be mailed to your shipping address no later than June 14th."

Does this apply to web song refunds as well? I was just wondering what linux users could do since they obviously won't have a use for iTunes credits.

This quote rubs me the wrong way a little...

"The relational database tool chain is not evolving. It has failed for large scale, real-time environments."

I've been a big user of Postgres for going on five years now and it has made giant leaps in both features and performance. You can't blindly say relational tools are done evolving. I know the other players have made a lot of progress lately too (Oracle, MySQL, etc).

News is so broken 16 years ago

You mention wanting to be a NYT/CNN/etc competitor instead of competing with digg/reddit/etc. Does this mean you want to be a news producer instead of a news aggregator? Or are you just looking for intelligence behind how you aggregate news (something closer to newsvine?) Also what sort of news? Big breaking headlines? Feature stories (research-based)? "Hyperlocal" news (like everyblock)?

If you're doing "intelligent aggregation" and wanting the content to live within the context of your site, as you say, I think you've got a copyright nightmare ahead of you. There are several sites out there that do nothing but pull together AP content and smother the pages with ads -- I think a few of them are making enough profits to cover the outrageous cost of the AP feeds.

I'm not trying to discredit your idea -- just hoping to get some more details. I happen to work in the news industry (on the software side, but am still exposed to the mess that is news) and find ideas in this area intriguing.

I think a couple of us have little blogs that we sometimes post snippets and short notes to, but nothing substantial. I haven't posted anything to my technical blog for over a year now.

Since they are personal blogs, we try to not get too specific about anything work-related. Hopefully we can get something official and work-blessed setup soon. I've got about 7 pages of 'XFS on a 20 disk raid array' benchmarking I'd love to publish.

The last thing I expect to see when I come to HN is a post about the site I work on every day (well... one of the sites). I would love to have some sort of semi-technical blog on our sites to showcase what actually happens behind the scenes more often.

From the thousands of lines of code per month to the multiple tiers of network redundancy to the hours upon hours we spend optimizing page performance for a better user experience, I would love to show some of it off to a technical audience.

That was my exact thought. I doubt his numbers are even close to accurate as Flash doesn't stress windows machines like it does linux and osx. And given that most NYT users are probably windows users, I'd bet the real statistic would be way lower.

I don't understand the argument either.. I use multi-line lambdas with ifs and forloops all the time.

  f = lambda x:(
    x if (
      x**2 > 10 or x**2 < 5
    )
    else x**3
  )

The highlighted response was bullseye hit of what I noticed going through college. The couple classes I remember it being most evident in were the very low level programming classes: Intro to Java/Javascript and a PHP class. These were the classes that pretty much everyone in the business school had to take.

People would work through problems assigned out of the book, but if they ever ran into an issue not specifically outlined for them, they were usually stuck. I spent many nights in the computer lab helping classmates through problems which just required stepping back and taking it one small step at a time. And even if they couldn't work through it on their own, they had no idea where to start on researching a solution -- they didn't know how to ask questions, etc. (Disclaimer: I nearly failed every damn accounting class I had to take, 5 in total I believe.)

I find myself being the exact opposite of what the linked reply states as being the 'norm'. I can't remember simple facts to save my life. I love playing guitar, but I can't memorize notes/chords. To this day I can't honestly tell you what a noun/pronoun/verb/adverb, etc are. Forget about people's names, it ain't happening. I find no real joy in reading fiction, I forget it all anyways. I couldn't ever remember the bajillion accounting terms I had to deal with in business school, but I loves me some calculus.

Also, he seems to point out "America" quite a bit in his response. I have a hard time believing this trend only applies to Americans. I'd like to hear either a non-American or someone with a little international time chime in on this.

I've never seen such an article and in my own personal opinion, I don't see how such an argument could be made. I'm not a fan of Git in particular, but I love the "distributed" in DVCS. I use BZR on a daily basis and have never once found anything I missed from the days all of our projects were in SVN. You can use most of the DVCS tools just like SVN if you want (checkout, update, checkin), or go all out distributed with branches, merges, pushes, pulls, etc.

I guess SVN gives you real Trac support. :-) There are Git, BZR, etc plugins for Trac, but they all feel very hacked in and incomplete to me. I love BZR because it gets you launchpad.net (and it's got some stellar Py-bindings). I know Git has github, but I don't care for it either as a real project management suite.

EDIT: (Note: My opinions are from an open source developer perspective.)

I'm all for distributed services, but only when practical. All services go down, heck, even Google services have gone down several times recently.

So when your boss is screaming at you "why are we down?!", can you get by with just saying "because X (the cloud) is down". Highly unlikely.

In any situation like this I've been in and tried to attempt django, it's turned out to be a complete failure. You need an ORM that knows how to construct SQL properly and map existing tables. Go with your second option: SQLAlchemy. Use that with SQLSoup (an extension), mapping tables on the fly is a breeze and you can manually tweak your queries to do about anything you need: polymorphism, correlated subqueries, etc. I have a feeling that if you attempt the Django route, you're going to spend more time wondering "well why the hell doesn't this ORM do _____?" That's my opinion on the subject.

The one place where the functools.partial failed me was in partialing on class methods. functools.partial actually gives you a callable class, instead of the functional closure that this example gives you (though I don't really consider this to be that great of an example). When a class is instantiated, the method functions (unbound methods) are turned into bound methods, something a class can't be. Guido talks about this a bit whole process here... http://python-history.blogspot.com/2009/02/first-class-every...