eogas

You're free not to buy books through their affiliate links.

You're only free to do this if you know that it's an issue. Unless you know about the affiliate program, you may be supporting this person against your own will. Even if you do know about the affiliate program, you may not know that after you click an affiliate link, the owner of the code gets a chunk of ANY Amazon purchase you make in the next 24 hours, whether or not it is related to the original link.

I just finished The Phoenix Project recently, and I thought it was great. It is effectively a novel about a large software project which is being mismanaged and on the brink of failure, and the steps that the team (and related teams) took to save it from the grips of death. The point of the book seems to be to explain the types of situations that are improved by focusing on devops and agile development.

Personally, this book really hit home, as I had recently left a team/project much like the one described in the book, however I think anyone working on a software project at a decent sized company will be able to relate to many of the problems presented early in the book.

Nearly every submission you've ever made to reddit is either directly to your book, or to a post on your blog, most of which include a massive ad at the bottom for your book. That's spam. Even if there was no ad on your blog and you receive no compensation in any way, it's still spam.

Here's another good informational link that delves into this aspect: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion

I'm glad you've bought ads (though I don't remember ever seeing one), but that doesn't exempt you from the rules about self promotion.

You used to (still do?) spam this heavily on the programming subreddit. It annoys me to see that it's selling rather well, yet you apparently can't be bothered to buy an ad.

Please see: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_what_constitutes_spam.3...

That defeats half the purpose though, because if the string is null, you won't be able to call the method without throwing an exception. Or is that not the case for extension methods?

You may want to leave it in. As another user mentioned, the official stable release is still 1.9. It does warn you that the default will change in 2.0, and prompts you to decide whether or not you want to keep "matching" as the default, but the version that most people will be working on won't have "simple" set as default yet.

Ah yeah, my phrasing was poor on that. 2.0 has yet to see a stable release, but they started warning about the default setting changing a while back.

#3 is no longer the default behavior since 2.0 was released.

http://blog.nicoschuele.com/posts/git-2-0-changes-push-defau...

Are you a robot?

Not to mention HDCP. The first time I tried out Prime streaming, I turned off my second monitor after starting up the video, and Amazon took that to mean that I was a criminal, and that my video should be stopped.

I groaned and fired up Netflix.

Just to clarify, what you're saying is that Nathan Myhrvold is a complete piece of shit?

EDIT: Oh wait I forgot, HN isn't crawled.

That was the FIRST commit to that repo. Not that it's great reasoning, but really how much info does 'Initial commit.' convey as opposed to 'asdf'?

HN really loathes humour, doesn't it?

This seems like a rather hostile change to an already hostile community. HN has never felt like a welcoming place to me, and I don't think this will help. Maybe PG prefers the community to be small, so he's trying to trim it down? Because I'm fairly certain this will drive users away, and not just the ones he wants to keep out.

Please noble 1000+ers, free my humble comment from the depths of the low-karma peasants. For I have but 522 karma, thus I deserve to be spat on and excluded from the flawless utopia which is the HN comments section...

nyar should have specified "unpaid interns":

http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm

How is it pronounced?

Is it Zah-pee-err, as in, more zappy?

Or is it Zah-pee-eh, like it's a fancy french service?

Or is it Zah-peer, like a fancy Frenchman pronouncing "the peer"?

This is pretty damn cool, but I can't help but notice that the UI seems to be severely limited by Sublime's API.

/r/programming thread

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/197dn1/introduc...

>How do they ensure that teachers know what they're talking about?

AFAIK, they don't. There was a big fiasco recently when some guy who was teaching a C++ course was featured as "course of the week" or something, which got posted to /r/programming, and they basically tore him to shreds.

A lot of people were claiming that some of the problems were nit-picky, but there were certainly some significant issues with the code. It was the sort of stuff that someone who read C++ Primer probably wouldn't do, but someone who read "How To Program C++ in 21 Days for Dummies: the Absolute Moron's Guide" might.

The presentation was pretty terrible too, but that doesn't necessarily speak towards whether he knows what he's talking about.

EDIT: Here's the thread http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/197dn1/introduc...

WPF is definitely the way to go. I started a modest sized project a few years ago at an internship, and this past summer I was allowed the task to move it from Forms to WPF. Let me tell you, working with WPF is so much better. Especially when you get into anything custom. Custom drawing in Forms is always a hack, and you basically have to do it in code. WPF is essentially designed to make creating custom controls with custom drawing incredibly easy.

Not to mention all the awesome databinding stuff, and now with async in C# 5, it's easier than ever to create responsive UI. Just reading about the async stuff had me thinking back to that project, saying "yeah, that would make [some chunk of the code] a lot more intelligible".

I contribute a lot in the /r/learnprogramming subreddit, and when new programmers are asking about UI with C#, I generally suggest just skipping Forms. There's really no reason to use it anymore. I can't believe I used it so long while WPF was right there, ready to free me of the Forms peril.

This hasn't solved the problem though, it's just passing the buck. If the app facilitates what people perceive as spamming, shouldn't that be something you want to look into? If you can improve the experience for the recipients of these e-mails, then you can be more honest about the app's association with them, and possibly draw more customers in from a "secondary" userbase.

Yeah, maybe this is hard to solve, but startups are always claiming that they're solving hard problems. So...solve!

I also enjoy enchiladas by the way.

You can also search and do multiple selection with a regular expression, which is awesome. I've used this heavily in the past few weeks. The only problem I've had is that all searches appear to run on the main thread, so when working on a sufficiently large file, the whole application blocks like hell. And to make it even worse, they update search results on the fly, meaning that for every new character you enter it blocks. I've taken to writing my expressions fully in a random textfield elsewhere, and pasting them in all at once.

It's also free to watch on hulu for anyone who's interested:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/235712/beer-wars

Haha. Well, to be completely honest, I was recruited as a moderator for /r/programming because of a novelty account I ran that essentially bitched about any submission that could remotely be construed as not being related to programming, so I, and the mod who added me, are pretty strict about what belongs in the sub and what doesn't.

Looking over your blog though, it seems like most of the stuff you write about is fine. We'll only have a huge problem with it if you start indiscriminately submitting every post on your blog, relevant to programming or not. If you're not sure, just submit anyway. One of the admins just added a feature yesterday that allows us to remove posts that are off topic without training the spam filter (long overdue), so if we do decide that something isn't right for the subreddit, it won't harm your standing with the filter.

I know that most, if not all of the earlier admins are on HN. Reddit was originally funded by ycombinator. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to think that the new guys do as well.

As far as self promotion, there isn't a whole lot of consensus on it. The community aspect of the site is somewhat at odds with the link aggregator model. If bloggers submit all of their content, pretty much automatically, and don't contribute to the community in other ways, that doesn't really tend to go over so well. As a result, people who create content are expected to invest time and energy into becoming part of the community so they can accurately gauge how their content will be received.

It's not just supposed to be a place to dump all your links.

/r/programming is more biased towards the link aggregator model than the rest of the site, however the community aspect is still there. Someone mentioned a 10:1 ratio for other content to your own, however in /r/programming, I usually say that 50/50 is fine.

I believe that all the spam prevention measures are done on a per-subreddit basis, meaning that if you only submit to other subreddits, you will look like a new user to the proggit spam filter once you start submitting. A couple users have been plagued by the exact scenario you pointed out, where they had a ton of other sources, but they only posted their own content to /r/programming, which is problematic.

Weird. As it turns out, the feature that I was complaining about reddit not having (not being able to add/remove without training the filter) was added an hour after I made this comment.

I think you hit the nail on the head with your last point, though I wouldn't necessarily call it moderator abuse. The actions that moderators can take on reddit were built on a laissez faire model of moderation, where anything goes except blatant spam. This obviously doesn't work very well for moderators who choose to run their subreddits in a different manner, and this happens to be most of the big subreddits, because laissez faire moderation just doesn't work on a large scale.

For example, the sole /r/truereddit moderator believes in a laissez faire moderation style, and the subreddit is slowly getting worse and worse as the userbase increases. Every time a /r/truereddit post makes it to the front page, a virtual swarm of idiocy surrounds the entire subreddit for a few days.

But that's the only way the moderation system is designed to work. There's no way to remove/approve content without training the filter. If someone submits a codinghorror post to /r/programming that is completely off-topic, the moderators either have to remove it, effectively warning the filter that codinghorror might be spam, or hope that the userbase does the right thing and votes it down. Usually, they won't, especially the people who are voting from their customized front page, not paying attention to what subreddit something is in.

It's broken, and the admins have never really expressed any concerns about this fact.

I just approved that post. It should be fine.

And on your second note, the idea is not that you go seeking out content to mix in with your own. If you happen to come across a cool article, and it hasn't been submitted to proggit yet, just contribute it. This is probably part of the community vs content aspect you mentioned in a different comment, but sheer size of the site means that you cannot really ignore the community aspect.

I could probably get in trouble for saying this, but the reddit userbase, as a whole, is not smart enough to filter out what is good and bad. If a bunch of bloggers just auto submit every blog article they write, we will have tons of crappy, ad-ridden, off-topic posts being voted to the top. It still happens from time to time. HN might be smart enough to distinguish the good from the bad, but reddit surely is not. So we have to be at least a little restrictive.

I'm not saying your content falls into those categories, but we can't really give special treatment to people we like or are familiar with. There is one guy in the /r/programming approved submitters list, and he is a very noteworthy programmer who, for whatever reason, could not get any of his posts through the spam filter. He is the one exception. For the most part, everyone is lumped into the same bucket.

So when your posts get caught in the spam filter, just send us modmail. Sometimes we'll get them, sometimes we won't. That's just how it is. I saw earlier that you said you sometimes delete them if they've been filtered. This may be a bad idea. I cannot say for sure, because the admins don't really disclose this stuff, but deleting and resubmitting the same link has been known to hurt a user's standing with the spam filter, so just deleting it may do the same thing, I'm not sure. And there's really no reason to delete it. The only think it will clutter up is the spam filter, which is going to be cluttered no matter what.

Anyway, I hope this has been somewhat useful to you. Sorry about the massive walls of text. Let me know if you have any other questions or concerns.

The post will show up for the submitter on their userpage and in their submitted links panel, however it will not show up in the new queue, not even for mods. This may be different for shadowbanned users, but I don't think it is.

Actually, I'm almost certain it's the same for shadowbanned users, because we got two modmail messages today from shadowbanned users asking to have their posts taken out of the spam filter because they can't see them in the new queue.