mattlanger

There's something so profound about that.

To think of how many jobs I've held in my comparatively short life, how many minor career changes I've had here and there, how many massive shifts in interest and passion I've had over the years, and to hold these up beside someone who has been wholly dedicated to the same singular goal since before I was even born--that's just mind-boggling.

And it was selfless! This one singular goal to which he's dedicated himself, every one of the fifty years of work that went into it, ultimately ended up becoming--at least when boiled down to a headline--a footnote to someone else's greatness.

Five decades. I can't even begin to fathom what sort of drive and passion and commitment that must require.

Bravo.

http://twitter.com/#!/hotdogsladies/status/1453581139

Thanks, oojacoboo. You're a lifesaver!

There's no evidence of pharma companies lobbying for more lax FDA regulations.

There's no evidence of the automative industry lobbying against higher CAFE standards.

There's no evidence of utilities companies lobbying against net neutrality.

There's no evidence of the last midterm election cycle seeing an amount of private spending nearly double the previous record.

Meanwhile there's an abundance of evidence that poor people are successfully lobbying for a higher living wage, longer unemployment benefits, and access to quality healthcare.

And your second: this seems to be both a distraction (I don't see how arguing that an educated citizenry is a necessary ingredient of democracy implies that one should necessarily agree with denying participation to those deemed incapable) and somewhat misguided (seeing as we already do deny the right to vote to a certain class of people unable to make correct judgments--we call them felons).

I suspect that same sentiment speaks to quite a few HN'ers as well.

Anecdotally, at least, I very rarely (if ever) recall the details of a text by attempting to actively recall some specific fact, date, historical accident, or the like, but this by no means suggests that I have no memory of something I've read because it is so often the case that details I'd completely forgotten about return at the most unexpected times, triggered by the most unexpected stimuli.

It's actually not at all uncommon for wildly profitable companies to take an additional round so they can continue to ramp up at accelerative rates.

Each problem poses different challenges, and it doesn't seem fair to attempt to invalidate a given example by theorizing about hypothetical complexities the original authors never alluded to.

This showed up here a while back and is also an interesting read: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/08/western-civilization...

Sometimes in all my eagerness to keep up and constantly re-educate myself on a daily basis I forget that there are still a lot of very, very old systems out there.

The entire subsection on "Choosing your data storage setup" is completely inconsistent precisely because it attempts to tackle such a huge problem in the space of a few paragraphs. Couch and Redis don't even partition out of the box, Tokyo Cabinet only does so with the help of Lightcloud, Mongo's auto-sharding is still unready for production, and Cassandra and Voldemort are fully distributed clusters for whom replication and partitioning mean very different things (and, incidentally, using "partitioning" and "sharding" interchangeably is one thing; doing the same for "shard" and "node" is very different).

And of course by muddying the waters with respect to the datastores themselves the entire treatment of designing a schema is similarly inconsistent. How can you have a universal keying strategy when you don't even know the terms of your discussion? Are you hashing to shards or to a ring? On the client side? With Zookeeper? Or with a messaging service?

Anyway, I wholeheartedly agree with the author's spirit of building for customer acquisition while also building for scalability, but I guess my advice would be "do plenty of homework and never expect to learn everything you'll need to know after reading a hundred blog posts--much less after reading just one."

I assume this feature made its way into the genre as a legacy from the traditional email clients that seem to have inspired most feed readers, but while an unread count has a place in email (albeit a complicated one, cf. Inbox Zero) it seems utterly bizarre in the world of RSS. And for two reasons.

First, it's just stressful. It represents yet another item on this long list of things I haven't accomplished (and probably can't accomplish), a list that only grows longer as I come across more sources of information on the internet, subscribe to more feeds, follow more Twitter accounts, etc.

And second, as an offline analog, I've never walked into a library or a bookstore or a newsstand and been given a list of books or periodicals I've not yet read. Similarly, when my newspapers pile up in the recycling bin they don't proffer me with a running tally of all the articles I skipped. While I understand this is a feature that an RSS reader can offer that these examples cannot, it still seems to me to be a stifling and oppressive thing whose benefit doesn't nearly outweigh the stress it adds to my life.

At the end of the day it's ok to miss something. As Dave Winer said, "if it's important it will come back around again; if not, well no one can know everything."

(related/full disclosure: I'm actually hard at work on my own RSS reader intended to address this and other issues, which explains why I've been thinking so much about this stuff.)

Considering how impressively thorough their policies and guidelines are the FBI's action comes as something of a surprise.

In both cases the summary bore a headline which significantly altered one's initial understanding of the article at hand, and in both cases it led to a more difficult and/or unrewarding read.

Otherwise, as much as I'd love to toy around with node.js or Tornado or some such, I've got no good excuse and I'm sticking with Django because a.) I'm already familiar with it, b.) batteries are included, and c.) I can move very quickly with it.