sazpaz | 11 years ago | on: Servers are fun: Ansible
sazpaz's comments
sazpaz | 11 years ago | on: How odd is a cluster of plane accidents?
Robert Cialdini also brings the same theory in his book Influence. Not only that a tragedy prompts other to the same action, but he showed some studies where a type of tragedy prompted a seemingly irrelevant event.
For example, 2 days after a suicide appearing on the news, it is significantly (don't remember the exact numbers) more likely for there to be a plane crash. He attributes this to the fact that some pilots that have had suicidal thoughts are triggered by the suicidal news.
Another interesting study looked at how mortality rates of car accidents are higher after suicide-related news. This study found a surprising number of car deaths in which the driver was stepping on the gas pedal, instead of the break, which might be an indicator of suicide.
sazpaz | 12 years ago | on: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage
I've been wanting to build a quick side project for a couple weeks, so decided to give it a try today and put it up in App Engine instead of heroku.
Put simply, App Engine has a higher learning curve. I remember using heroku for the first time a couple years ago, and it was smooth and seamless. Can't say the same about App Engine. Installation isn't a blink, docs are scattered around, and even a simple Flask app isn't straightforward.
I understand they might offer more features, better prices, so side-projects are unlikely their target audience, but nevertheless if they want developers love, it should "just work".
sazpaz | 12 years ago | on: Blonk – a Tinder for Jobs iOS/Android app
Is this built on Ionic?
sazpaz | 12 years ago | on: News is bad for you
His account on the plagiarism story. http://www.dobelli.com/book-corrections/taleb
It's definitely easy to see his book as heavily influenced by Taleb, but I supposed everything would be correctly referenced to Taleb — I never actually went to check references. Despite that, the book is a great summary of thinking biases and is clearly explained.
sazpaz | 12 years ago | on: What kind of procrastinator are you?
Here's when setting a work-in-progress (WIP) limit is really useful. Don't allow you to have more than say 3 tasks on your plate. Can be painful at first — you can be stuck in all tasks, and not being able to do work at all — but helps so much getting shit done.
sazpaz | 12 years ago | on: Setting up a new Mac for development
Just got my first Mac and I've been looking for this type of articles and general articles for people power users switching to OSX from Windows. While not a definitive guide this one has some good stuff. I was surprised by how few articles there are on this topic.
One of goodies I found around: http://carpeaqua.com/2012/10/15/my-ultimate-developer-and-po...
sazpaz | 12 years ago | on: Open Source Google App Engine Clone
I think it's absolutely great and how software development should be done,
They should be teaching it to everyone and it should be the default - you start with app engine on any project and only choose something else if it can't be used.
Curious about your argument here. Care to explain?
sazpaz | 12 years ago | on: Simple technique puts graphene capacitors on par with lead-acid battery
We've been following Moore's Law for decades now. What's really stopping us from a real mobile and internet-of-things revolution is a breakthrough in charge storage devices. I wonder how long until one of the many "new discoveries on X material to create new battery" can be practically feasible and marketable.
sazpaz | 12 years ago | on: Google Launches Mobile Backend Starter, Cloud Backend For Android Apps
Has it been announced if it will support iOS apps?
sazpaz | 13 years ago | on: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
And then you have more time to focus on your shopping instead of distracting over the awful submenus.
sazpaz | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: My Weekend Hack - Stack-Ed: Learn from the best on StackOverflow
Would seem to me that he has a Node backend. Most of the heavy lifting seems to be done in the front-end with Backbone/jQuery.
sazpaz | 13 years ago | on: Google Effect
The classic way of learning has evolved with history. Before having books, everything was memorized with a few exceptions. The Google era is just another step in this evolution. Why would we waste time memorizing stuff if we can just look it up? Might be argued that Googling takes time. Of course it does, but there will come the next era where our thought could prompt a query and get an answer without physically doing it. That will be the next step in human learning.
Sounds like sci-fi? So did the idea of having all the information available on the tip of your hands 30 years ago.
sazpaz | 13 years ago | on: Introducing the Predictive Interface
I can see something like this hitting the IDEs shelves in a few years. Need to use an unknown API for this very specific part of your project? Don't worry about the documentation, suggestions are going to tell you what you'll want to write.
sazpaz | 13 years ago | on: Why did Google get rid of the centered design of YouTube?
Perhaps they're making space for new ads aligned to the right. People naturally tend to look to the right, so right-aligned ads might get higher CTRs.
sazpaz | 13 years ago | on: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Academia
Agree with pseut. I would need a Siri smart enough to aggregate and manage news for me. We need someone to build that great aggregator, and then we'll talk about Siri integrating that.
sazpaz | 13 years ago | on: World's tallest skyscraper to be built in just 90 days
This is being built under the same principles that we build software on. I think that it is huge that many industries are using what I would call DRY development on their manufacturing.
sazpaz | 13 years ago | on: The humans who outrun horses
I haven't read the book, but there is a pretty good TED talk by him based on the book.
http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_mcdougall_are_we_born_t...
sazpaz | 13 years ago | on: Introducing human.io
I think that you should consider white labeling. Or perhaps not necessarily white labeling, but releasing SDKs to allow to use the platform from third-party apps. Obviously many app developers and companies could benefit from having it available from their own apps.
I can also see value for it in the academic world. Academia is starting to dip their toes in the crowd research and this could be very valuable. But again, I don't see a benefit to actual users to download the human.io app, it seems as an unnecessary hassle. Having it available from other apps allows third-parties to offer their own benefits.
sazpaz | 13 years ago | on: A Faster Facebook for iOS
Despite more uniques coming from Android, maybe iOS user show more engagement.
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I'm not a sysadmin or servers guy, but these days I happen to manage most of the devops and so getting servers and machines set up is my responsibility.
Ansible docs are not great for getting started, and I pretty much just learned by skimming through some Playbook, and figuring it out their — often intuitive — purpose.
After a few hours I got to a close to getting my machines set up with most of my Django stack: Nginx, Gunicorn, Redis, supervisor, celery, etc. The only thing that I couldn't properly set up was PostgreSQL. And here is something that most of these automation tools lack: debugging. When my postgres roles was failing, I had no clue how to even start debugging it, so after an hour or so, I just stepped back and went in to set it up manually.
I feel some of these tools need to be more friendly with devops that don't have quite the same knowledge and experience than the target audience of sysadmins and ops people. That said, I learned a ton starting to use Ansible and automated a big chunk of the process.