bfell

This is my favorite quote from the article: “I’ve been the principal who’s stood there and said ‘Oy, kid! Get off your bike! You’ve got to walk your bike!’ Then I’d go away and think ‘Why the hell did I say that?’”

I think this article does an OK job of outlining parts of the decision tree for cloud vs. self-hosted (while ignoring other options like traditional hosting providers). The other things to consider are staffing and materials costs if maintaining servers in house, DR/business continuity, time value of money depending on how the servers are financed, replacement of aging hardware and operating environments, and differences of how the infrastructure would be built (clustered, load balanced, geographic load balanced, etc.). The reality is cloud providers provide a lot of building blocks for you to use to design infrastructure in a more robust manner but that doesn't mean that other options should be ignored - it’s another decision that depends on the factors laid out in the article and a lot of others that are specific to each organization.

Same thing happened to me except for the bitcoin magically reappearing. Since this is now Coinbase's unofficial support forum - issue 52050 - 4 weeks and counting....

I wholeheartedly agree with this - it's been 3 weeks since bitcoin "disappeared" from my account and still no response from Coinbase despite multiple requests from me.

I use the devil's advocate approach to gathering software requirements. I argue against what I feel are good ideas and argue for what are seemingly not so good ideas. As long as you don't get too far off track the discussion is often very enlightening about what your customers actually want to build. The downside is that you either end up feeling like or looking like an idiot because you're seemingly on the wrong side of idea (BTW I'm not claiming that I'm not an idiot). Letting everyone know that this is your approach doesn't have much, if any, downside and alleviates this problem. Having another person to tag team with makes it less exhausting. It works for the same reason that Stern's approach works - people love to tell you how you are wrong.

When I scanned the headlines, I misread this as Obama Code School, I guess that's where the healthcare.gov developers went...

This is a good point and one that I considered and wish I followed up on. I'm in the "support queue" with Coinbase right now because they absconded with 10% of my bitcoin holdings for no discernible reason. In case you're concerned, I'm not the one with $150M in bitcoin - it was 1 btc that went missing (greatly appreciated in value from when I acquired it).

This is a great point which I just boiled down in my head to: people don't want a product, they want to solve a problem.

I think entrepreneurial developers lose sight of that a lot of times even though it is common sense.

There seems to be a common fallacy that is propagated by media that bitcoin is untraceable. A visit to blockchain.info pretty easily dispels this myth. Bitcoin is anonymous (in the same way that cash is) but it is not untraceable. If money being exchanged to/from bitcoin is coupled with the same money transfer regulations as standard currency it ends up being more traceable than standard currency because there is a log of all transactions. This is likely why there won't be much resistance to bitcoin from regulators as long as they can control the endpoints.

The labotomy that put him in that state, granted it relieved his seizures but I suspect the end result wasn't what Dr. Scoville was going for.

I guess you could argue after a few hours he wouldn't care any more either because he didn't remember it. I was hoping that ultimately he wasn't just a science experiment to the people that surrounded him and that he was treated accordingly.

This part made me sad

“My interest in Henry had always been primarily intellectual; how else would I explain why I had stood on a chair in the basement of Mass. General, ecstatic to see his brain removed expertly from his skull? My role as a scientist had always been perfectly clear to me.” This was no time for sentiment or reflection.

How terrible that a man who had been so wronged by "science" had a caretaker that viewed him more as an intellectual pursuit than a person who had just passed without anyone by his side that truly loved him. While I understand the remarkable learning that came about as a result of this man volunteering his life to science, you would hope that there is another part of the story that wasn't written about the people around him that truly mourned his passing.

There could be an element of trustworthiness associated with apologizing for anything since you are inherently taking responsibility for something. But also it could have been that leading in with a request (with no foreplay, regardless of the type) may have come across as being brash.

This happened to someone I know (really, it wasn't me). Not only did it encrypt the local drives it also hit all of their network drives. As reprehensible as it is to pay the ransom they really had no choice since the encryption happened the prior night before the last backup.