I suppose that's the difference between now and ~20 years ago. Back then, the TI-81 had no way to load a program apart from typing it in manually. The TI-85 had a data cable, but that only allowed a program/data to be transferred between two TI-85s. If the calculator had simpler ways to load programs, there would have been huge potential for abuse. But we had to write the programs ourselves.

And it really isn't possible to write a program to perform a task without truly understanding it. It's a lesson that I learned during the course of my CS education. Whenever I've struggled to write code, it means that I haven't asked enough questions and I don't understand what I'm writing to the necessary level of detail. The challenge of writing code for a living isn't the writing part...writing code is easy. The challenge, when working on something really difficult, is asking yourself and others the right questions to solidify your understanding of what needs to be coded.

Yes they can, but is that a problem?

When I was in school, my math classes required the use of a graphing calculator (it was a private school, so they required students get either a TI-81 or TI-85). I discovered the TI Basic features and thought that I could ensure myself high test scores by simply writing programs that could solve all the types of problems that would be on the test--this wasn't illegal, provided we wrote our own programs. The first few times I did this, I fully intended to use them during the test, but I found that it was usually just quicker to solve the problem myself, though I'd occasionally check my answer using my program. It was basically impossible for me to instruct the calculator on how to solve the problem without fully learning how to do it myself. And it became clear to me that simply writing a program was the best method for me to study for tests. Prior to that, I would cram before the test and sometimes it would be sufficient and sometimes it wouldn't. But in writing the program, I could very easily tell when I was done studying and it took far less time than the traditional method. And, unlike cramming, programming was fun!

From the interest that I gained in programming TI Basic, I decided to take an intro to CS class the summer before my freshman year of college. That led to my majoring in CS and the fulfilling, enjoyable and well-paid profession that I've had for the past ~15 years.

I'm very grateful that my math teachers in high school didn't see things they way that you do.

The hardest thing for me is that there are so many different environments and the code needs to work in all of them. There's integrated dev, qa, staging, end-to-end testing and production and each of them are subtly different. When deploying code, the logistics around how to get it to the right place at the right time in a working state can be really hard. A simple Google search for branching strategies will show that there's numerous ideas on the best way to shepherd a team through the code freeze, regression, deploy and MR phases.

Things get even more complex in an elastic environment where you have to autoscale. A simple call to a database can then require service discovery, master election and a whole host of other technologies/techniques that adapt to the fluid conditions of an elastic environment.

So from a code perspective, you always have to built abstract interfaces to non-specific infrastructure. A simple file loading turns into loading a URI that loads via the proper strategy (file://, s3:// or even something custom that reads from a db). A caching layer may be distributed in production and a simple in-memory hash in development, so that has to be abstracted too. Making sure your db queries are performant can also be difficult when your local database is nowhere near the scale that exists in production.

We've had some limited success using vagrant/chef for development environments to make them more similar to the downstream environments (i.e. developers actually run multiple VMs with individual functions as we have in our prod environment), but there's a limit to how much you can run on an individual machine.

Naming is the easy...just get a thesaurus and understand that it's important. Though it does remind me of one of my favorite quotes about software development (credit to whoever said it originally...I'm too lazy to look it up):

I have a friend who works for a company that does gene sequencing and other genetic research and, from what he's told me, the whole industry uses mostly python. You probably don't have the hardware resources that they do, but I'd bet you also don't have data sets that are nearly as large as theirs are.

You might also get better results from something less general purpose like Julia, which is designed for number crunching.

The whole point is that they weren't contractors, or at least that they were individual contractors rather than a single contract firm. Romney went the contract firm route and his tech operations went down for the count 30 minutes into election day. That and the guy in charge of Obama's tech was ex-Twitter and made decisions that scaled really well.

In 2008, there were techies who volunteered to work on the Obama campaign who were told to go knock on doors. The 2012 campaign realized that that was a tragic misuse of skills and put a ton of effort into DevOps on AWS and centralized data services so that they could deploy an app written in any stack. That let them organize small, decentralized teams to code individual projects in whatever stack the developers were comfortable using. Romney outsourced the whole thing to contractors. Come election day, the Obama team had people manning the phones all around the country coordinated by software running in AWS. Romney had his entire team at the TD Garden in Boston. 30 minutes in, the spike in traffic led Comcast to believe that they were being DDoS'd and they cut off all connectivity. It's impossible to say whether anything would have been different had Romney's setup worked as well as Obama's did, but the fact that Obama's team had very few problems both on election day and in the months leading up to it was a significant advantage.

Back on topic, the site that was setup to take campaign donations likely had the same class of traffic as healthcare.gov does. Had Obama brought in the head of that project as a FTE with a workforce consisting of a few FTEs and mostly individual contractors and they could have designed a far superior application running in AWS for probably 1/10th the price. By bringing it in-house, he could have avoided the entire process of bidding for the contract, saved a ton of money and had something that actually worked.

I find it interesting that the team behind the technical aspects of Obama's presidential campaign were so capable (more here...it's a great read) and yet he still chose the tried and false alternate model of outsourced government contractors to handle this.

A methodology more similar to what was used on his campaign would have been far more successful and cost significantly less.

MicroUSB absolutely sucks compared to lightning. The one and only way that microUSB is better is its openness. Lightning, on the other hand, can charge significantly faster (IIRC, 33%...12W instead of a max of 9W for microUSB), is more durable and is easier to plug in. MicroUSB was unsuitable for the simple reason that they were getting too much flak for how long the iPad took to charge over the 30-pin connector. Switching to microUSB, which is actually a step down in wattage, would have exacerbated that problem.

Before calling on Apple to switch, the alternative needs to be even moderately competitive with Apple's proprietary version. But it's likely to fall on deaf ears as Apple clearly sees power consumption as a competitive advantage. The charge on my iPhones (I've had 3) consistently last between 1-3 days, depending on usage. The charge on my Androids (I've had 4) never really lasts beyond a day, and is usually dead by afternoon. It's clear that Google and Android manufacturers don't see this as an issue and Apple does. Google is content to focus on speed of the OS over resource consumption. And manufacturers seem to see quad-core CPUs and other power drains as a competitive advantage. These decisions have their rationale and lead to microUSB being an acceptable cable to live with, since users are forced to charge their phones every day overnight. But you can't expect Apple, who has made different decisions with regard to their OS and hardware to abide by a sub-standard connector which makes the trade offs they've chosen to make nearly worthless.

He's not on anything, but Terry Gilliam is directing his life story.

There's an excellent TED talk on what it means to be introverted and society's lack of understanding on the topic. For anyone who's introverted, interacts with introverted people or generally doesn't understand introversion, it's a good use of 20 minutes.

That room full of insightful, creative people gets their money from venture capitalists/angel investors. The only role the stock market has is making it easier for venture capitalists to exit from successful investments. Without the stock market, there could still be investment made in early stage companies, but investors would have be more discerning about what they invest in because they'd have to make their money back through company stock buy backs, dividends or acquisitions.

The way that investment happens would most certainly change but, in some ways, it would change for the better. There would be far fewer photo-sharing apps and other such nonsense that really doesn't need to exist. And I'm still not convinced that tying our retirement savings accounts (401(k), IRA, etc) to the stock market is such a good thing. The stock market continues to go up and up, in part, because of the millions that flow into it each month from workers saving for retirement. This has a Ponzi-ish feel to it...in the same way that Social Security will run into problems when the baby boomers retire, the market will also start to decline as withdrawals from retirement accounts outpace contributions. The whole thing feels like a Social Security that Wall St gets to skim large amounts of money off of.

The stock market is A mechanism for investment. It's not the ONLY mechanism. We should be able to separate stock market criticisms from the ad absurdum argument against all investment.

Wow...that was not my intention and I'm really sorry if that's the vibe I gave off. Burning Man is one of the most positive vibes I've ever found. Whether it's dancing, making art, talking, or however you put yourself out there, the people I meet rarely judge (negatively...there's lots of positive feedback) or try to inhibit you.

Ironically, I think that leads me to unintentionally judge others for not participating because I know how liberating it can be to participate in that kind of environment and I want to encourage others to participate as well. I feel that the world I inhabit the other 51 weeks of the year discourages participation and I end up assuming that people who don't participate at Burning Man are doing so because they wouldn't do it back in the real world. I think I need to be careful about saying the things I want to say in a way that sounds like it's a judgment of others' choices.

But at the same time, I'm not sure how to get across how great it can be to get in touch with parts of yourself that you didn't know existed. I've always been a shy, unartistic person. I'm not an artist that wants to show my art to others. I play and write music, but almost never share it with others (electric piano with headphones). But at Burning Man, I've gradually learned to come out of my shell and do things that push my boundaries. I make bad art with people who are better at it than I am, talk to strangers and generally put myself out there in a way that I could be judged by rarely ends up happening.

And this feeling is so powerful that I want others to experience it. But then again, there are many different experiences that people can have out there and almost all are valid. I hope I've given you a glimpse into the one that I've grown to crave and that I don't mean to judge those who don't have or seek the same type of experience...I only want people to know that it's possible.

Moreover, there are many different Burning Man experiences to be had and I think he had a different one than I've ever had or ever want to have.

For one, most of the fun happens at night...the day is too hot. I rarely return to my sleeping area before 5am and in those rare occurrences I'm usually not alone. Without a tent with a pretty serious sun shade, sleeping past 7am is almost impossible. I'm not sure how others deal with 2 hours of sleep per night for an entire week, but I can't function that way. I've realized that it's just easier to rent the RV so that I can sleep comfortably until noonish.

Second, his experience seems far more solitary than mine. I usually bring an outdoor sun shade, but I mostly don't use it. During the days, I tend to go around the event wandering into other camps making friends. It's my favorite part of going there...I love the randomness of not knowing whether I'm walking into a situation where it's clear after 2 minutes that I should leave or I'm going to have a pleasant hour-long conversation or even if it's the start of a serious friendship/relationship. The pleasant hour-long conversation is, by far, the most common, but I've had quite a few of the other two as well.

Third, I cannot fathom going out there without being sure that I have enough water. Flying into Reno just doesn't seem like an option since I can't bring the 3 5-gallon containers I feel I need for the duration of the event. Also, painting a cheap bike can be fun and make it really easy to identify yours in a crowd of other bikes. It also makes it really hard to steal (either intentionally or unintentionally) if it has a very unique look. Every few years I get a new cheap bike and put my own artistic imprint on it...I'd rather do this instead of renting both because I feel it's more in the spirit of the event and because it's annoying to have to constantly lock up your bike.

I get the distinct feeling from his post that he went because he was interested in it but basically wanted to blend in and observe. That's fine, but experienced burners will give you advice to based on what you should do to participate, not just watch. Had he followed the advice to build a hexayurt with PVC from home depot, people like me might have spontaneously stopped by to say hello...not so with his single-occupancy tent.

And it's not exactly unique. Caltrans uses the sensors for the FastTrak toll devices to monitor the flows of traffic and respond to accidents faster. It makes a lot of sense and you can opt out by putting the transponder in your glove compartment. You can test that this works (I've done it) by forgetting to remove it from your glove compartment when you drive through the toll collection area. The sign won't signal that you've paid, but the license plate recognition will resolve the fare properly.

Yes, there's a potential for abuse in stuff like this, but the benefit to everyone is undeniable. Faster response from officials to traffic conditions will help alleviate them sooner and may result in emergency personnel arriving on scene sooner and saving more lives. And I'd rather they use a technology that's both cheaper and easy to opt out of than to install expensive camera systems that track license plate numbers and give drivers no way of avoiding being tracked.

The fifth amendment doesn't even apply here. It's a first amendment issue. As a member of the press, his right to report on anything, including secret classified documents, cannot be curtailed. Forcing him to reveal his source falls under that protection because it limits his ability and the ability of other reporters going forward to receive similar offers of assistance from sources. It would be murkier if he had signed any sort of agreement to gain clearance to the documents, but he didn't.

If the situation were different and Risen had been found to have classified documents during a legal search, then he could be compelled to reveal where he got those documents so long as he wasn't incriminating himself. But it's not, he's an member of the press and the first amendment protects the press's right to keep their sources secret.

I agree completely. I'm hopeful that we'll elect a Democrat sometime soon. We haven't had one since Carter.