I think this is a kind of amazing confession:
In short, I can’t help feeling that the gold bugs are right. No, I’m not stashing gold bars under my bed. But that’s only because I lack the courage of my convictions.
My fear is not the result of economic analysis. It’s more from the realm of psychology. I mean mine.
…
But this cure has been one ice-cream sundae after another. It can’t be that easy, can it? The puritan in me says ...
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The most abstracted and de-coupled and object-oriented framework that I have worked with is Symfony, and it is also the framework that has broken backwards compatibility the most often, during the last 5 years. I started working with Symfony in early 2008, and it has been constantly refactored during that time, and each refactoring has broken something important.
It is difficult to explain why I dislike Symfony so much. For awhile I would have said it was their envy of ...
Read More SourceMy co-worker Erick sends me this:
Yea, if you go to ifconfig.me you get all sorts of info from the view of the internet. You can even get the info from command line. For example curl ifconfig.me/ip will give you the public IP address (See the Command Line Interface section from the website).
However do note, that this IP address represents the Internet address for the entire office. If a specific server should only be allowed to access a ...
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Interesting:
Check out some of the following videos, selected from top channels, all made within the last few months. Videos like KIDS in JAIL!!, How Guys Sleep, This was the FASTEST selling video game of 2006, Epic Epic Stunt, Ambercrombie & Fitch CEO Is A Dick, TWERKSANITY!!!, all have millions of views and subscribers but about $20 of production value and content investment between the lot of them. Even the best one, from The Young Turks network, could have been ...
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This tutorial is good. I am now sad that I wasted days finding this information in scattered places, because this one tutorial brings it all together in one place. I am going to link to it in the hopes that Google will rank it more highly in the future.
SourceI was a fanatic proponent of PHP, back around 2000. If I wanted to build a website, I could use Java or Perl or PHP. The choice was straightforward. Java was complex, and any change demanded that the code be recompiled. Perl had a small core and a million libraries that you needed to bundle in, so it was a little bit like Java in that you had to assemble a lot of different pieces. PHP was a light weight, ...
Read More SourceThis is great.
And that’s the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn’t always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn’t even something — it’s nothing. And you can’t combat nothing. You can’t fill it up. You can’t cover it. It’s just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem.
It would be like having a bunch ...
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Spent some serious time trying to track down this answer. My company has a Sinatra app running via Heroku. I just started working at a new office that has never had access to these apps. How do I whitelist my IP address so I can reach the AWS server and run a command like mysqldump? Can I do that via the Heroku toolset? No. Apparently I need to log into the AWS console. These are useful resources:
Connecting Your ...
Read More SourceEvery industry eventually consolidates. And the web is less open than it was 10 years ago. When does the current era end? When does capital regain the upper hand?
In the second tier, the hustler class of new-money industrialists produced a first generation of Robber Barons, and then an asymmetric balance of power between bankers and second-generation hustlers who aspired to Robber Baron level fortunes (egged on by Horatio Alger narratives), but ended up as the tame new middle class. How ...
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Is Wikipedia objective?
I recall taking a class on journalism and we argued about whether or not true objectivity could ever exist. Some people pointed out that it was possible to write an article that consisted only of factual statements, and therefore such an article proved that objectivity was possible.
There were several counter-arguments: what about the factual statements that were not included? You could factually say “The nation of x invaded the nation of y and slaughtered 10,000 innocents.” That makes ...
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This is a great post on how to restore MongoDb from backups.
SourceA friend sends me this in an email:
The unfortunate bit is that IMO, the DevOps role was created to handle the headache part, so the engineers can spend more time doing the fun parts.
This is an anti-pattern. When your company does this, it is making a mistake.
SourceIt makes sense to me that a man who hates all gays also is in favor of fiscal restraint, as fiscal restraint during a recession is simply a ways of expressing hatred for the poor and working classes. This guy hates everyone is not already part of one of society’s favored groups.
Harvard Professor and author Niall Ferguson says John Maynard Keynes’ economic philosophy was flawed and he didn’t care about future generations because he was gay and didn’t have ...
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This killed a whole day for me. I kept running:
heroku db:pull –app ny-offers
I needed a local copy of this database. The download would get halfway and then die:
I did some research and decided the problem was net_read_timeout or net_write_timeout in MySql. So I adjusted both:
set @@net_write_timeout = 1800;
set @@net_read_timeout = 1800;
That didn’t help.
So then I thought I could use mysqldump. I followed the directions in that post. But my IP was not whitelisted so I was not allowed ...
Read More SourceInteresting:
First of all, there are huge advantages to using a uniform language throughout your stack. My team uses a set of tools that we affectionately call the MEAN stack: MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, and Node.js. By coding with Javascript throughout, we are able to realize performance gains in both the software itself and in the productivity of our developers. With MongoDB, we can store our documents in a JSON-like format, write JSON queries on our ExpressJS and NodeJS based server, ...
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I am surprised by the continued rise of Javascript, a somewhat flawed language that has now become a universal target for dozens of other languages. I am stunned by the thought that creating Javascript might become the “killer app” that brings Clojure into the mainstream.
I was highly resistant to learning ClojureScript, but I want to experiment with LightTable, so I guess I need to learn ClojureScript (which I gather is the language for writing plugins for LightTable).
SourceI think this is the only way to stay sane when you are in a fast-changing environment. Develop sane defaults and stick to them. You can not re-think every decision every day. No one has that kind of omni-directional brain power.
After reading this article in Vanity Fair on Obama, there was one piece that stuck out to me. As the author interviewed the president, he said “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down ...
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Damn, this is great:
Here’s the difference:
# python def foo(): x = 23 y = lambda: x x = 44 return y
print foo()()
# ruby def foo(): x = 23 y = lambda { x } x = 44 y
puts foo.call
// javascript var foo = function(){ var x = 23; var y = function(){ return ...
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What is the point of intelligence? Why should anyone want to be intelligent? Is there anything useful in intelligence? I am confused by an essay that argues that George W Bush was very intelligent. If he was, then we can conclude that intelligence is not important in a leader, and there must be some other quality that we associate with great leaders.
For more than six years it was my job to help educate President Bush about complex economic policy ...
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I have started using Expectations, which is a testing system created by Jay Fields. I really like Expectations. It is very minimalist, which I like a great deal.
SourcePaul Krugman writes:
But will any of this make a difference? The story of the past three years, after all, is not that Alesina and Ardagna used a bad measure of fiscal policy, or that Reinhart and Rogoff mishandled their data. It is that important people’s will to believe trumped the already ample evidence that austerity would be a terrible mistake; A-A and R-R were just riders on the wave.
The cynic in me therefore says that after a brief period of ...
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This question occurs to me a lot. If the government never threatens to arrest you, then how do you know if you are really pushing against the limits? If you play it safe, and avoid any government threats, then are you really being innovative? Here is a guy who was willing to take big risks:
My first startup landed me in prison. Imagine a company that allowed people to eliminate the financial burden of paying for a luxury or ...
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Nothing in this post should be read as a criticism of either Paul Krugman or danah boyd. They are both writers that I admire. They both maintain blogs that I have been following for 7 or 8 years. They are both politically of the left, progressive and committed to humane values. And they both sometimes write informally academic things on their blogs, and other times personal things on their blogs. And I have the impression that danah boyd faces much ...
Read More SourceA great writeup of several different process managers, that help with daemonization and restarts:
Monit is an established player in the process management game. Its sole purpose is to monitor daemon processes, files, directories, filesystems, etc on your server and respond with appropriate actions whenever something is not as it should be.
Sample
Here’s a simple configuration to monitor an SSH server daemon process:
1 2 3 4 5 6 set daemon 60 #check interval in seconds
check process ssh with pidfile “/var/run/sshd.pid” start ...
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I just went through something just like this. Interesting:.
It was the , and I was a young developer 1. In college, I had aced coding exercises, as a junior dev I had cranked out code to solve whatever problems someone specified for me, quicker than anyone expected. I could learn a new language and get productive in it over a weekend (or, so I believed).
And thus, in the natural course of things, I got to run my own project. ...
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My name is Lawrence Krubner. I run WP Questions .
January 9, 2012 2:29 pm
"I love your thoughtfulness and tone, however, I have questions about the "Community" of voters you mention. I ..."
December 14, 2011 10:58 am
"Thank you all. I look forward to seeing the emergence of an innovative startup that is able to find the new mo..."
December 14, 2011 9:25 am
"Thank you, Lawrence, for that insightful and balanced review. I am a Kachingler, and I support its business m..."
January 10, 2012 1:09 pm
From lawrence on Fred Dewey is misunderstood
"Thank you, Charlotte. But what is the main advantage of Kachingle for you? You could perhaps find a more direc..."