kennon42's comments

My initial thought was that this was yet another post about serverless!

I would recommend checking out Faktory (https://github.com/contribsys/faktory), by the author of Sidekiq. It's fairly new but looks interesting.

For something production-tested already, I've found RabbitMQ to be very easy to operate as a single server. You obviously don't get HA with a single server, but it's been a breeze to manage.

American Citizens Abroad (https://www.americansabroad.org/) is another non-profit organization working on behalf of US persons abroad. They are doing some great (but probably ultimately quixotic) lobbying work in favor of changing to Residence Based Taxation, and they have also spearheaded a way to have a US bank account even when you aren't able to be physically present.

Their newsletters also have general good advice etc. and are generally a great resource.

While reading this, I couldn't help but think of Black Mirror S03E01 Nosedive. I understand the dynamics of all of the players involved in this, but I can't help but feel a little sad about the co-opted "authenticity" in the influencer industry. Is there a middle ground between authentic content and actually being able to monetize it as an influencer?

(list co-moderator with jetsnoc here)

Well, it is currently a fully moderated list, and we will do our best to maintain the guidelines so hopefully you won't get any spam at all!

Right now we are checking sign ups before approving, so if someone signs up with an obfuscated email and we can't find their linked in page etc (so that we can check that they are really a CTO/engineering director and not a spammer) they won't even be added to the list unless we follow up directly and get a bit more information.

It's not that PHP (or virtually any other non-purposefully-arcane/obscene language) is inherently "terrible", it's just that the syntax, organization, standard library, and most of all mainstream community do not encourage well written, well architected, well "conventioned" systems.

Because PHP really is so trivial to cut and paste, and will often "just work" (as in, be interpreted w/o syntax errors and produce some output), the vast majority of PHP code actually out there in the wild is absolutely terrible and leads to an insane number of vulnerabilities on the Internet, not to mention complacent developers who do not really understand how/why their code is working.

Obviously it's POSSIBLE to write excellent, performant, secure PHP code - see Facebook and, presumably, Mailchimp - it's just that virtually everything in the PHP ecosystem is fighting against you.

While I suppose Laravel and co are trying to reverse this trend, they just aren't what the "average PHP developer" is actually using - the median PHP developer is almost certainly copy pasting snippets from Stack Overflow into their hobbled-together Wordpress theme.

The primary thing that determines overall group performance (assuming no interpersonal biases like peer pressure or coercion, etc) would be the probability that any individual chooses the "right" answer. If this is greater than 0.5, then according to the Condorcet Jury Theorem, the limit of the group as a whole choosing the right answer is 1 as the group size increases.

Perhaps having a smaller size allows the "noise" in the group to still produce the "right" answer more often than it would in a larger group?

Except that going from 9 atmospheres to 1 is way more dramatic than from ~1 to ~0.

One of the most unintuitive concepts in thinking about Cold War strategy is the assertion that explicitly targeting the opponent's civilian instead of military targets was morally superior: targeting military first (counterforce targets https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterforce) would potentially prevent retaliation and thus allow an aggressive first strike. Targeting civilian (countervalue targets https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countervalue) would ensure destruction and thus be inherently defensive.

It makes my head (and heart) hurt to think about it and I'm glad that I didn't have to make those kinds of decisions. I can see how it can (and did) lead to madness and the kind of irrational thinking satirized in Dr Strangelove and other stories.

For you German speakers, this is a hilarious article (on the German answer to The Onion) about having to create a new verb tense in order to discuss the airport: http://www.der-postillon.com/2012/08/neue-zeitform-futur-iii... (2012)

Hyperion by Dan Simmons would make an /amazing/ miniseries. The narrative structure is apparently based on the Canterbury Tales and so each chapter is fairly self contained with an overarching plot tying the characters together. It's one of my all time favorite books, and as a scifi work it brings a strong literary sense to the genre.

Studio Calico | Junior backend/Rails developer (FT) | Remote (KY or TN, USA)

Founded as a scrapbooking kit club, we have grown into a force in the specialty papercrafting and memorykeeping world by consistently innovating in both product and technology, and have now begun to leverage our expertise by partnering with other brands to power their platform and product development pipeline.

Okay, so that last paragraph read like your standard marketing copy, but here's the lowdown: we solve a lot of complex web, data, logistic, and process problems, every single day, and we're looking for a junior-level, backend-focused developer to both grow with us and help us grow as we continue to expand like crazy in the coming years.

While you might think of scrapbooking as old grandmothers sitting around gluing pictures of their grandkids into photo albums, the world has changed: those grandmothers are now rocking their iPads and pinning profusely on Pinterest, and not only that -- there are a whole lot of other people becoming interested in storing and sharing their memories in a form that they put together themselves with their own hands. We're here to help!

You can read the full details here: http://www.studiocalico.com/careers#career_posting_31

If you are interested, please apply via the link or you can email me directly at kennon |at| studiocalico |dot| com

NB: While this job is remote-able, you will need to be a Kentucky employee or within driving distance due to the wonderful state nexus laws of the USA

If you liked Maciej's talk, you should definitely check out his blog: http://idlewords.com

Warning: kiss the next several hours goodbye because he's simply an outstandingly interesting and funny writer - imagine something like a cross between Bill Bryson and Douglas Adams and you wouldn't be too far off the mark.