endersshadow

Yes, but why? They're up there fighting Boko Haram -- this is a war-torn part of the world. Why is the Cameroonian military killing the people they're charged with protecting?

It's something I'd really like to know, after reading through this. I don't understand anything but the most superficial issues facing this region, and it rather shocked me that the national military that's up there to quell the Boko Haram insurgency is committing these atrocities.

I mean, yes, people kill people for fun. People kill children because they're monsters, and I get that. But is that what's happening here? Or is this ethnic cleansing? Or is this something else entirely?

Yeah, it was a few years ago. That's amazing, though. I'm going to have to show my wife this map!

The thing that's difficult in Ireland is internet access if you're living outside of Dublin. We looked at moving to Dingle for a bit, but we couldn't find anything available (from America) that had high speed internet. Granted, it was out in the countryside, so I completely understand, but it was a non-starter as far as going there for a remote job was. It's just something you have to keep in mind that if you're coming from an American city you may not think about.

The way this typically works is that they were told from on high that their budget was getting cut, so they had to figure out a way to do so. Not sure if that happened here, or if these are just folks who are really interested in governing well, but that's been my experience.

If I have a single-region service, I always put it in us-west-2. It's super reliable, and gets updates after us-east-1 and us-west-1, which means all the kinks are out before they hit us-west-2.

On days like today, I without fail get a message from my friend who works at a shop where everything is in us-east-1 (multi-AZs) about how much he hates me for avoiding east like the plague.

So snow is super hard to forecast because snow bands. These happen at a mesoscale, and typically one 1-2 grid points of the models used to forecast. The exact processes that contribute to banding are not very well measured, either, so it's very difficult to get a good prediction for it.

Due to the banding, you can get extreme variations in snowfall, leading to, "I thought we were supposed to get a foot, but we only got an inch!" type of comments. Or, bands will line up with the storm motion and just pelt an area harder than expected.

Example: http://imgur.com/i0j4I7g

Soundcloud recovering from this failure and S3 being operational are two separate issues. We use S3 and it will take us nominally an hour to recover after S3 went up, for example.

S3 has started working as of about 20 minutes ago, and things are running smoothly.

What's an example of them? I'm interested to learn.

One of the nice things about the Kiva robots is that they will actually organize the warehouse based on popularity of the SKUs automagically. Things that are low volume get placed farther away from the pickers, and things that are high volume are never far away from the pickers.

I don't know enough about the others to make too much of a sweeping statement on them, but the heart of Mythical Man-Month is absolutely true and valid. It just has a bad title, so people assume it means something it doesn't.

The heart of the story is this: Adding developers to a delayed project will only delay it further. It's not about parallel vs serial. It's about project management and how to handle delayed projects. I have yet to meet a PM in my career who really understands this, and almost all of them have referenced the saying, "Nine women can't have a baby in a month."

To claim that it's "crap," "critically flawed," and "wrong" strikes me as naive, overly general, and dismissive because you can throw it into a "Gladwellian" bucket and be done with it. Fred Brooks learned his lessons from years of project management. This wasn't a guy who conjured up an idea for a book or a TED talk and just slapped some crap together.

Whoa. Timeout. This isn't political correctness--it's basic human decency. Political correctness is replacing the use of a term for a euphemism. Even putting this in euphemistic terms should be completely unacceptable. If I told somebody at work that they were so stupid, I wasn't sure how they survived childhood, I'd be asked to leave, post haste.

I think that the OSS community (and IT community in a broader sense) has this idea that "they're just words," and so therefore, they should just be able to say what they want without consequence. But, words matter. A whole lot. Empires are built upon words. People rally around words. Words convey ideas, thoughts, feelings, and everything that goes with them. Why is rampant bullying accepted in this culture? Why is it the norm?

I'm not saying that things have to be all sunshine and rainbows. Yeah, sure, it's stupid to read a byte at a time, but you don't have to be an asshole about it. You can say, "Hey, that won't work," and be done with it. People should be treated with a modicum of decency. Remember the human, and all of that.

From the article:

"The patient developed symptoms days after returning to Texas from West Africa and was admitted into isolation on Sunday at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas."

I'd go quite a bit further. Most users have no idea what they actually want. I think the key to building a dashboard is to ask three questions:

1. How do you measure success? -- or -- How will you know that life is good? How do you know that the sky is falling? 2. If you see this number (something specified in #1) go above or below a certain value, what are you going to do? Anything? 3. When and where do you need to have the info from #'s 1 and 2 to actually take action? i.e.-Do you need to be inside the warehouse? On your phone? At your desk? Daily? Monthly? By the minute? Push?!

1 tells you what to put on the dashboard, 2 tells you how to prioritize the information (something that's important but not actionable will be something that can be found, but isn't prominent or on display above-the-fold), and 3 tells you the form factor/latency that's needed.

I've built a lot of dashboards over the years. Some have completely changed businesses. Some have languished in obscurity. Most are used fairly regularly (at least monthly), but don't actually add much value beyond time savings of having the numbers automated. The ones that really changed businesses and provided some benefit beyond just time savings have had clear answers to those three questions.

Interesting. I really like the idea of using the UNIX sockets to be, essentially, a message queue before going to Kafka. This may be used on my next project.

I've been in the BI and data warehousing industry nearly my entire career, so hopefully I can help a bit.

1. Get an MBA if you want to transition more to management. This will relinquish really any technical responsibilities. MBAs matter a lot trying to get manager roles at large companies. They also are brilliant for networking--you can have a safe haven to meet potential cofounders who are very good at the business side of things while you work on the technical aspects. That said, just like I wouldn't encourage a woman to go to college to find a husband, I don't encourage you to go get an MBA just to find a co-founder. It's something you should be open to, but it may not happen.

2. The space is definitely moving quickly, but there's still a lot of traditional data warehousing stuff out there. Unfortunately, it's increasingly commoditized. If you're not getting a job because you don't know the latest technologies, then you should probably learn them. This would most likely be a bit more valuable use of your time than an MBA if you really want to remain technical. It may or may not be Hadoop (you may want to latch onto Cloudera or Hortonworks), but whatever your local market is bearing--I actually see quite a bit of variation throughout the country in terms of tools being used. If, however, you're not getting jobs because your price is too high, you may want to take the time to learn the things that will increase your value while biding time on the lower paying projects.

3. I don't know immigration law well enough to have any sort of comment about a startup in the US vs India.

Clearly, no offer (in any realm) will ever be perpetually valid. Giving a reasonable amount of time to evaluate options and make a better decision is considerably less explosive than one that puts an artificially tight deadline on the decision.

Within Excel, ranges ignore blank cells in computation, but a reference to a blank cell returns 0. The idea being that if you specify a cell in a computation, you're expecting something to be there, whereas when you have a range, you may have sparse data throughout that range, and therefore, the result shouldn't break.

SQL behaves similarly. See: http://www.sqlfiddle.com/#!15/37025/5

It's really not: https://www.google.com/finance?q=GBPUSD

No; it's post hoc ergo propter hoc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc

I find that window functions are one of the least used aspects of modern SQL, despite them being incredibly useful. I've used them in T-SQL [1] and PL/SQL [2], as well (MySQL does not do window functions). If you're doing lots of SQL work, get very familiar with the OVER clause. It's a lifesaver.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189461.aspx

[2] http://www.java2s.com/Tutorial/Oracle/0320__Analytical-Funct...

I think what many people fail to realize, in a corporate setting, is that email is asynchronous communication. Email is not chat, and we need to approach it differently. When I send an email, I expect an answer when you get time--if it's something I need within 24-48 hours, I will call, visit, or IM you if you're online.

A few points of feedback:

A) I would absolutely limit comments and votes based on geography. The last thing you want is a popular event being loaded down with "Wish I was there!" comments.

B) Internal ranking of users based on votes, propensity to contribute quality content, and activity is certainly useful. You can use this to highlight things that are sure to be high-quality events, or even give extra spotlight to users who post quality events without a lot of traction. Exposing it leads to folks attempting to game the system. Not that they won't, anyway, but it makes it a bit more opaque as to what they can and can't get rewarded for if it's obfuscated.

C) The ability to use this on the web, without having to go to my phone to check the app. I want to be able to take a quick look, send a link via IM to a friend, and meet them some place there's an event going on. If I have to do it all within the app, then I have to hope that said friend (a) has the app and (b) has it set to allow notifications. I already have set communication paths for my friends--let me use those.

To the point of using it via web and locking down the distance, you should have to either (a) allow your location to be used or (b) be able to set a home city that you can use over the web. I'm not sure what the balance of restrictions is right on the posting only locally and allowing users to set their location, but say, limit them to posting/voting on only 2 locations per session on the web or something.

You're also forgetting the biggest thing, I think, standing in the way: Intimidation. Perhaps in their minds, they aren't expert developers, and are just learning, and therefore, their contributions to a very large project like Firefox or Linux would be unwelcome--as they probably are a little too scared to start. A self-confidence issue, as it were.

Through the lens of the internet, it certainly feels sometimes like everybody knows everything--you often forget that you're getting thousands of viewpoints rather than just one super programmer doing everything. I can definitely see how this would be intimidating for newer developers.

Cutting your teeth on obscure open source projects is a way to build up your self-confidence, work with others, and see your contributions make a tangible benefit.

I mean, it pays my bills. But they're mostly large corporations that hire consultancies that specialize in this sort of thing, rather than hiring freelancers--much less posting about it online.

This just means that they were running their business off of their account balance on B of A's site. It's also known as "flying by the seat of your pants."

Assuming this is a joke account, but that's not how trademarks work. In fact, it's so far from how trademarks work that whoever made this account should be ashamed at how ignorant they are.

This attitude is very pervasive on the internet, especially with amateur critics. Just because an initiative doesn't solve an entire problem doesn't mean that it can't help or isn't worth doing. Moreover, just because one group is more disadvantaged doesn't mean that the less disadvantaged groups (which are still disadvantaged!) shouldn't matter at all.

The idea that you have to solve the entirety of a gargantuan problem to be doing anything of value is stupid. Most gargantuan problems are solved with steps of progress, not sweeping changes. If we want diversity in our industry, we have to, step by step, start aligning the incentives for young people to get into software in ways that don't overwhelming appeal to white and Asian males. This is one (very) small step along the path.

Now, whether or not this fellowship will actually do anything to help women get into software is a different argument completely. If what you're trying to communicate is that you think this is just PR and won't actually accomplish anything, then fine--there are plenty of arguments that you can make for that stance, but you haven't.

Just so folks know, nicknames are very common in Brazil, and formal names are rarely used. That's why you have lots of overlap and whatnot. Slate did a quick primer on this before the start of the World Cup in 2006: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...

BT is blocking my site about my homebrewed beer. That's fun.

It could also be a combination of the two--they're not exactly mutually exclusive.