abscondment's comments

abscondment | 13 years ago | on: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

This seems specious. Correctly assigning blame won't matter to readers; most people couldn't care less. Sticking a different brand name on the failure is side-stepping the issue: nothing stays up 100% of the time. Create a custom page that treats the situation with a little bit of levity.

If legitimate downtime happens often enough that someone would actually internalize the difference between your failures and Heroku's, you have bigger problems than your error page.

abscondment | 14 years ago | on: Megaupload: A Lot Less Guilty Than You Think

> Then they conspired (shown in leaked emails) to only follow DMCA requests coming from large US entities (while ignoring requests coming from Mexico, for example).

Color me ignorant, but this doesn't sit right with me. Does the DCMA have international scope? Does the FBI enforce Mexican law?

abscondment | 14 years ago | on: Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0

> Also, shouldn't these simple bugs be quickly and fully discovered by automated tests?

Do you actually believe this?

Tests are a nice first pass, but they'll never fully discover every bug -- especially with a huge change like this.

abscondment | 14 years ago | on: Hiring Employee #1

IANAL, but this is only partially true.

* Marital status is a protected class. You can't consider it when hiring. * Age is a protected class. You can't consider it when hiring. * Pregnancy is a proxy for sex, a protected class. You can't consider it when hiring [1]. * Parental status is a protected class, but apparently is not applicable to Employment cases [2]. So you could get away with avoiding parents in some places. But man, what a great way to violate the No Asshole rule. Frankly, I'd rather not work for a startup that would want to go down this path.

[1] http://users.aristotle.net/~hantley/hiedlegl/statutes/title7... [2] http://www.seattle.gov/civilrights/discrimination.htm

abscondment | 14 years ago | on: Hiring Employee #1

I'm 27, with a wife and three kids. I've been working full-time on my own startup for the past 9 months. Without salary.

See, there are plenty of us who can kick ass and raise a family at the same time. Not to mention plan and budget responsibly. In fact, you might really want to hire people who are good at that sort of thing, rather than the Red Bull-chugging, couch-sleeping, college codemonkey stereotype. But I suppose stereotyping is what got us here in the first place, and that's not fair to Red Bull aficionados.

I guess I'd just rather you let me and other prospective employees assess the risks for ourselves. That means frank discussion about clear, accurate information. But don't curtail things because of personal bias.

abscondment | 14 years ago | on: How does SOPA threaten Stack Overflow?

Personally, I find myself disagreeing with both sides too much for this to be effective at all.

I'm not going to say one should or shouldn't vote Democrat. But, there are too many considerations on which I'm unwilling to compromise to just vote for the enemy of my enemy. Neither party is your friend.

abscondment | 14 years ago | on: Equations True Computer Science Geeks Should (at Least Pretend to) Know

I assume you overlooked O(n). You've probably used Bayes' theorem and the binomial coefficient, if only indirectly.

But I tend to agree with you: many of these are skewed by the author's perspective on what should be considered foundational. Someone doing webdev will not ever calculate eigenvectors. Someone doing machine learning will not be able to avoid them.

abscondment | 14 years ago | on: Want Smarter Kids? Space Them (At Least) Two Years Apart

If time and attention really are the determining factors, maybe we parents should just chuck our smartphones and tablets for the first 5 years.

I'm only partly joking. I ditched my iPhone after my 2-year-old started saying, "Dadda, put your phone down! Come play!". It's relegated to my office now.

abscondment | 14 years ago | on: Rich Hickey: "Simple Made Easy" from Strange Loop 2011 [video]

For some reason, these slides are only available in a flash widget that's synchronized with the video. Here's a little script to grab the flash and build a PDF for yourself.

ImageMagick and swftools required.

  #!/bin/bash
  for s in {1..39}; do wget http://www.infoq.com/resource/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/en/slides/$s.swf; done
  for swf in *.swf; do swfrender $swf -o $swf.png && rm $swf; done
  convert `ls *.png -x1 | sort -n | xargs echo` slides.pdf
  rm -f *.swf.png
[Edit: required packages]

abscondment | 14 years ago | on: Clojure vs Scala - Anecdote

It's interesting that rewriting in Clojure was "less work and more timely" than migrating to Akka or waiting for Scala 2.10. Any insight as to why? Having written no Scala, I'm not sure what the Akka changes would entail.

abscondment | 14 years ago | on: A Visual Introduction to Chef

High level:

Capistrano is a tool for deploying your applications. You use it to push out new versions of your own codebase.

Chef and Puppet are tools for provisioning/configuring servers. You use it to install the right third-party libraries, programs, config files, etc.

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