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hackula1

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I found it hugely useful in the .Net world. With closed source, obscure errors cannot be as easily tracked down, especially when they are not covered by MSDN or a prominent blog. A couple years after switching to an open source stack, I barely use it at all, and when I do finally hit a wall and ask a question, I get an answer ~20% of the time (compared to 90%+ when I was in .Net). I am a huge fan of SO, but good docs and readable code go a lot further.

I got distracted and was looking at your other posts, when I noticed that the 5 or so I had looked at all said "1 day ago". I thought you must be a lunatic until I actually went back and read this post and saw that your dates had been lost. :)

I have lost a couple blogs over the years, mostly out of laziness, letting them expire. I got an itch to write some posts recently and wanted to set up a new site. This time around I decided I would do it with something git friendly, so that I could throw it on github and forget about it if I lost interest. I wrote a "from scratch" site with this in mind and it was working well, so I open sourced the core engine today. It runs on express and is about as bare bones as it gets. http://morganherlocker.com/post/badblog

But if he can, we’ll get Node v0.12 delivered a lot faster and have a stronger community.

And of course, Strongloop could not help but make another half way claim that they are the ones "in charge" of node. This current stuff aside, I just cannot believe their lack of shame when trying to take commercial credit for a community project.

Ben is not a Joyent employee, but a Strongloop employee/cofounder. I Cannot say I am terribly surprised. Strongloop has rubbed me the wrong way from the very beginning. Since they have launched, they have displayed all the integrity of a used car salesman. I know they have some very strong core devs, and I know they are not all like this, but their public image has been max-sleaze ever since they started marketing in shady ways suggesting that they were the creators of node.js.

The stuff we are going through right now might seem scary, but McCarthyism was not exactly the golden age of trust. It was not so long ago that "mainstream" society did not trust blacks, working women, the japanese, or jews. We (royal "we" here, emphasis on the royalty) still don't seem to trust gays, atheists, or many other groups. Mistrust is what keeps humanity sharp, but it is also what has been holding us since the beginning.

This is a pretty important note. Especially on the east coast, C# is by far the easiest language to jumpstart a career in for young devs, and is a very safe bet for veterans as well. Java jobs are practically non-existent in many mid size east coast cities. I am now 100% node.js and python, but I probably would not have made it in the door if it was not for C# when I was starting out. The job market heavily favors devs, and the tooling makes it possible for self taught people to gloss over the fundamentals until they have enough time to go back and learn them. Also, if you think Stackoverflow is useful as a dynamic language dev, you would not believe how much more useful it is as a C# dev. I have no idea why, but SO seems to heavily favor C# over everything else. This is not to say that other languages get no love over there, but John Skeet alone has probably answered more obscure C# questions than all the other languages combined. I am only being half hyperbolic here.

For some reason it is saying that my ideal weight is 265, which is about 100 pounds to many. Also, it says I should be exercising 27 hrs/wk. 4 hours of exercise per day seems unreasonable.

A couple other oddities of geography I have noticed as a geospatial system developer.

- Outside the US and Europe things tend to get really wacky with geography and geospatial data. Many GIS products are licensed per country for this very reason.

- In the US, zip codes are the most terrible type of geography to use for any meaningful analysis, as they are constantly changing and do not actually have defined borders. Zip codes are basically just labels that get appended to street segments.

- If you look in the back of the ~200 page pdf that comes with most digital geographic data, you will find an appendix. 99% of the appendix is a section typically called "disputed territories", and 99% of the disputed territories are China claiming to own another nation. I never realized quite the extent of the megalomania until I read a few of those.

As someone who writes predictive analytics software, I can say that you are dead on. Most of analytics is a process of doing one of two things:

1) Extrapolation of data where samples are lacking.

2) Taking big data and making it little data so that you can actually comprehend it.

My goal in practically every algorithm/tool I write is to take a several billion records and condense it into something that can be put in a spreadsheet, put on a chart, or rendered on a map. Analysts roll their eyes every time some big data guru releases another map with 7 trillion points on it. "Oh so you took 3 weeks rendering a map that looks like yet another population map, when you could have rendered this instantaneously with a choropleth?"

This applies to type II diabetics, but not to type I. As a type I diabetic, I would be dead pretty quick without carbs. Proteins and fats can raise blood sugar, but they do it very slowly, so I would have no way to correct low blood sugars before they got out of control.

Minor nitpick, I know, but the two types get conflated often, leading to misinformation. I cannot count how many times people have been surprised that I am diabetic, since I am thin (which is normal, since it is not weight related, and actually leads to weight loss when untreated).

IDK, I feel like this has shifted in the last generation. Nobody is shocked nowadays when you inform them that Columbus was a bad guy, and the same historical rethink in pop culture is happening with Edison.

a Principal Engineer at Microsoft relies on Microsof[t] because it provides 90% of his income

I would not exactly call this hypothetical person completely independent. Sure, they can go off and find somebody else to rely on anytime they want, but they are currently relying on one company in particular.

Is this correct? It is my understanding that XAML is the client language that is used in WPF and Silverlight (which is a subset of WPF). Both WPF and Silverlight can be used for desktop or web development (although WPF leans to desktop and SL leans to web).

GitHub Résumé 13 years ago

At the same time, this probably cuts down on "me too" contributions. I have a repo that has been gaining popularity lately and have been flooded with pull requests that do nothing but add a jshint file or other dev environment changes.

...since interactive graphical tools are always categorized as being for novices.

Tools aimed at novices tend to ignore some of the fundamentals of solid software development, such as automated testing. In my space, GIS, there are lots of visual modeling tools, and these inevitably grow to a certain size, then get ported over to a textual programming language when maintenance becomes a nightmare.

There is a place for visual programming like there is a place for picture books (graphic novels even push into some pretty serious territory), but at the end of the day text wins with both prose and code, since it is far more expressive where it comes to expressing reasoning and logic. Doubly so perhaps, because unlike stories or art, code is typically not up for subtle interpretation.

If you are playing to win, you tell them you currently make whatever salary you are seeking. When they ask you what sort of salary you need, say something along the lines of "Obviously, I want to take a step forward, but I am pretty flexible, so if you can at least match my current pay, then I would be open to accepting".

While this tactic does fall into the grey area of morality, it is quite effective.

Fine, don't shut down the programs, but is it too much for the people paying for these programs to ask about their nature and to be informed of the accountability breaches?

Every citizen has a right to know the nature of what we are doing (how else can we decide whether or not we want to live with the trade offs or not?), and to be informed when something goes off the rails on the ethics side of things. This is a pretty low bar to set.