(feels for you)

Same thing with my son. What's really heartbreaking is how he "tries" to make friends, i.e. walks up to kids at the playground and stuff, but is socially awkward so they inevitably tease him or disregard him. Which makes him sad.

Man, I wish there was a way to teach your kids that it'll be ok, someday he'll have a close friend or significant other and it'll all be ok.

P.S. You made me a little bit sad at work today. But that's ok. We're all in this together.

Interesting thoughts. Some pointers to things I'll have to go read about. Thanks for the discussion!

To be honest...CloudFormation. Being able to define the entire environment in code(ish), and letting the environment self-manage and self-heal. We don't have sysads who sit at the console and manually configure things, launching servers and whatnot. In fact, in the prod VPC no on logs in to any servers. If there's a new redhat patch or something, the base image gets updated and the instances in the production environment automatically replace themselves.

Check out the Netflix Tech Blog for some ideas on how to manage an environment in a controlled, hands-off way like this. We know EXACTLY what prod looks like because its strictly defined, and we run an exact copy of the CloudFormation in dev (except for external DNS) so we can do system/integration testing.

But from a developer perspective, we're actually moving away from even having our own VMs. Now I can write all my code as Lambda or Elastic Beanstalk or Elastic MapReduce, use RDS or Dynamo as the backend. Use SMS or SQS services so I don't even need APN/GCN direct access anymore. Host all my APIs consolidated with API Gateway, shared the APIs amongst my web and mobile clients. Now I've got my entire product line and services in a scalable, easily-managed environment.

To be honest, you can probably do this in Azure with a different set of services and things, but it does seem really easy and powerful in AWS to get things going, instead of just deploying to a hosted IIS/SQLServer combo.

I think this is where you hit it on the head, at least from a business perspective. Now I know there's a lot of Facebook haters ("You'll never catch ME on there!"). And hey, good for you. Seriously. But the bald truth right now is that facebook has like a billion users, so if you're in any sort of consumer-facing sector, if you're not leveraging Facebook in some way you're really missing the boat.

I guess you're modded up because you sound interesting, but really? I'm not trying to be insulting but do you know what you are talking about?

This article is a little old but AWS really is that far ahead of everyone else.

Plus, in terms of services and features, AWS is also ahead.

Now where Azure has benefit is if you're an MS shop and you want to just outsource your entire backoffice. But if you're developing....AWS has a lot more features than Azure, if you know what you're doing. No, you can't throw together a .NET wizard-based project, but if you're using an open source stack, or more of a LAMP-like MVC environment (python, rubyonrails, etc) then AWS throws so many tools for you to use (RDS, Dynamo, S3, etc) then its hard to see how you DON'T think AWS is a good environment for developers.

And what do you mean by "Platform Issues"?

And actually, all the enterprise developers I've worked with are looking more at AWS than Azure (not that I'm some sort of worldwide development expert or anything).

That's actually not the reality I've seen. Maybe this is true on the West Coast, but in Atlanta and the southeast there are more openings than people, seriously not enough talent. If my boss fired me I could walk into another job right away with no salary cut.

I don't know what its like in California or those big tech hubs, but in Atlanta if you've already got tech skills you're pretty much set.

Huh? It took like 5 minutes to find former students who TALKED about his lectures and in fact showed reporters notes from lectures he gave.

Here's one example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07...

Which is why Mass Effect is brilliant in this. Its set up those archetypes (i.e. Krogans are all dumb muscle) then tears them down (meet Dr. Okeer, brilliant Krogan scientist). It happens a lot in the series, and is one of the reasons I love Mass Effect.

Interesting point. I did not pick up on the GGP maybe being, if not a joke, at least tongue in cheek. Definately changes the tone of the post, and thus my interpretation. Thanks for keeping me in check.

Heh. Obligatory Oatmeal link.

Why is it silly shit? Because you haven't heard of it? Because hipsters like it? Does that make it bad? Hipsters like exercising, too. So exercise is bad? Google something like "interval training" and you'll probably get lots of marketing crap. That doesn't mean that running wind sprints is bad.

Dude, just because you, with your all-knowing all-knowingness, haven't heard of something doesn't mean its silly and its shit.

You wanna know what paleo really is, if you take away the marketing name? Stop eating shit. Don't eat convenience foods, don't eat junk food with sugar and HFCS and other crap. Eat meat and vegetables. Does that sound like shit to you? To eat healthier?

I guess what bothers me is that this single quote dismissing a way to eat better and improve your health makes a single remark and its somehow insightful. Especially when several other Slashdot articles actually encourage this type of eating. An alternative approach is to actually research something better than a glance at a Google search, and maybe consider that someone out there knows more than you on a topic. Especially when that topic can improve your life and the lives of other people around you.

I actually RTFA, because this interested me. And its a fascinating subject. I only sorta knew about these, i.e. hackathons, but I didn't realize there where giant, international, money-prize competitions. This, to me, is coding in its rawest, purest form. No business side, no integration, just problem solving in all its pure elegance and source code in all its unhindered, non-process, non-styleguide'd glory. I know I'm a huge geek but its honestly breathtaking.

That being said...this article is horrible. Ashlee Vance, you might be some sort of bestselling darling-of-the-tech-world author, and congrats on your book on Elon Musk or whatever, but I found this writing almost painful to read.

I just have to wonder, why are these writers such assholes? I thought we as a tech society were past nerd bashing. Apparently the "mainstream" is still all about jock-like superiority over other people. Yup, these coder competitors are really smart and hard-working, probably more so than you. So you have to bash them? Why?

I'll leave you with one last quote:

So does anyone know of any good online tech zines that embrace and exalt this culture, instead of trying to find ways to tear people down?

OK, I'm not saying that all this is not true, but every single link in the summary is to the same site, called "antipolygraph.org". So I suspect that every link would be to someone writing who is, well, anti-polygraph. I generally try to explore all sides of an issue, so it would be useful if someone researched this a bit more.

You know, what, never mind I'll do it.

APA thinks they're bunk: http://www.apa.org/research/ac...

ABC news sort of thinks so, too.http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92847&page=1

Interestingly, the ABC news article says that polygraphs are starting to be ruled inadmissible in the US. Not 100%, but in some courts.

The stupidness here, in my opinion, is that the FBI is ruining someone's career over this. Now, I suspect there's more to the story (there always is). Maybe the higher-ups wanted to get rid of this guy anyways and this was an excuse? Maybe its an inane policy that even the higher-ups hate but they are too timid to stand up to the system?

Here's exactly the one he's talking about. Last June.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

It wasn't that hard to find, dude. Probably took less time that it did for you to write your reply (which somehow got modded up).

Dwarf Fortress!!!!!!!!!1!!!1eleventy!!!!!

Here's a pretty cool article about Tarn Adams. His lifestyle sounds pretty similar to the guy in the cabin.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwarf-fortress.html