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Portland OR, San Fran -- New Relic

http://newrelic.com/about/jobs

Node.js, Java, Rails

Are you excited to delve into the internals of frameworks and VMs? Come help us work on an amazing beloved product! We especially need a Java Engineer who knows the nitty-gritty of class loading and byte-code rewriting, and a Node.js Engineer with an expert level knowledge of the Node.js implementation.


I think this is the result of an A/B testing article which showed higher follow rates for "You should follow me" than "If you feel like following me" and other less imperative wordings.


I believe this is the article you're referring to? http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter....


Yup. So, anyone who cares more about manipulating their readers into being more likely to follow them on Twitter than about not being rude should totally do that.

(Is it really rude? I dunno; it doesn't offend me when I see it, though it does grate a little. But when someone says "X is rude" it seems pretty weird to respond by saying "There is some evidence that X achieves something the person doing it wants", as if that were actually responsive to the complaint.)

Incidentally, I can't help suspecting that with more people using the "You should ..." form, its effectiveness relative to other ways of asking to be followed might be less these days.


I'm the dishwasher...bitch!


The solution to the wikileaks hype parade: Someone needs to start leaking stuff from wikileaks.


  If I could live again my life,
  In the next one – I’d try to make more mistakes,
  I wouldn’t try to be so perfect, I’d be more relaxed,
  I’d be sillier than I’ve been,
  In fact, I’d take things much less seriously.
  I’d be less hygenic.
  I’d run more risks,
  take more trips,
  watch more sunsets.
  I’d climb more mountains, swim more rivers,
  I’d go to many more places where I’ve never been,
  I’d eat more ice cream and fewer peas,
  I’d have more real problems and fewer imaginary ones.

  I was one of those people who lived
  prudently and fully every minute of his life;
  of course I had moments of joy.
  But if I could go back I’d try
  to have only good moments.

  Because if you don’t know, thats what life is made of,
  only moments; don’t lose the now.

  I was the type who never went anywhere
  without a thermometer,
  a hot-water bottle,
  an umbrella and a parachute,
  If I could live again, I’d travel lighter.

  If I could live again, I’d go barefoot
  from the beginning of spring
  and stay barefoot until the end of autumn.

  I’d ride in more carts,
  I’d watch more sunrises,
  and play with more children,
  If I had another life ahead of me.

  But now I am 85…
  and I know that I am dying.


The author of that appears to be Jose Luis Borges:

http://books.google.com/books?ei=zvzWTNPpKsT_nAf7j7DpCQ&...


It's often misattributed to Borges. It was written (in prose) by columnist Don Herold in 1953 for the _Reader's Digest_. Since then it underwent several changes, has been attributed to several authors, was broken into a verse form, was translated to Spanish, acquired a Spanish title, "Instantes", was then re-translated back into English often retaining the Spanish title...

It's lived a long and colorful life. But Borges didn't write it.

There's a detailed study of this poem's history at http://www.borges.pitt.edu/bsol/iainst.php. It's in Spanish, but Google Translate can give you the gist of it in English.


In the end of every person's life the one thing they'll have, no matter what, are the memories that they've made throughout their life.


Unfortunately, that's not the case. Watching someone and his family suffer through Alzheimer's is really tough.


It's not always the case, but I believe it is in the majority of situations it is.

I'm deeply sorry for what you went through though. Tough does not even begin to describe the utter destruction that Alzheimer puts a family through. My ex-girlfriend's father went through that. I can't easily put into words the absolute despair I felt watching him fade away from an outsider's perspective. I cannot, and hope I never can, imagine how she felt.


CrowdSorcery.com (.net, .org)


I'm interested and sent you an e-mail.


Scales are nice. Too bad most people must learn twelve per mode. I encourage all to renounce the normal piano's inefficiencies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janko_keyboard


That's the Scheme of musical instruments if I ever saw one. Nice in theory, but problems with practicalities overwhelm any advantage you could possibly gain by using it.


I bought one from Japan a couple years back, and I like it a lot. I see it more as the Dvorak of piano keyboard layouts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82xaEGgiiRs


Very interesting. As much as I love the piano, sometimes it feels pointless to struggle just to play chords and arpeggios.

I see that the Chromatone costs "only" 190k yen now (~=U$1700),


actually, more like 2200 $US these days...


http://www.c-thru-music.com/cgi/?page=prod_axis-64 is an alternative. There are many others like it if you look around.

I dinked around with a prototype iPhone app for this before the iPad was a twinkle in Jobs' eye. Someone's probably got out an iPad app for this by now.


I'd prefer we just discard the concept of sharps and flats entirely, and name each of the 12 notes as an individual.


This completely ignores the fact that the chromatic note relationships in different keys are not the same. F# is not the same pitch as Gb. In fact, I find thinking about notes in terms of a moveable do solfege (not as static names at all) to be by far the most effective system, since it really manifests the relationships in the key that you're playing in. When you realize those functional relationships, along with the requisite tensions in pitch, which you can emphasize on a non-justified instrument, music making becomes a lot more fun and easy.


There's nothing special about sharps and flats in that regard. Depending on your tuning system C could be different in every scale. That doesn't make it something you want to encode in your notation.


Your point about the "white keys" is well taken, which is why I mentioned moveable do solfege. The absolute pitch of "C" takes on a different name in every key, which respects its relationship within that key.

However, there's a reason that scales like the melodic minor are written with sharps (or "sharped flats"/naturals) ascending and flats/naturals descending. Sharps emphasize rising pitch and flats emphasize falling pitch, and can thus be bent slightly higher and lower, respectively. You would lose that with fixed chromatic note names.

(And as an aside, recognizing when a note in a scale has been modified from its normal position, and in which direction it was modified, is yet another reason to practice your scales!)


That only works for music that sticks to a western scale though. What if you are playing blues or jazz or indian classical music?


Which is exactly my point. One size fits all doesn't work. The scale or notation system should be appropriate to the music. AFAIK, Indian classical has its own way of doing things, and most blues and jazz isn't notated the same way as classical music, either. Going to a fully justified/chromatically-based system is just sweeping the intricacies and nuances under the rug. Plus, naming "all twelve" tones doesn't even begin to address what you would do with microtonal music.


A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules. Which is why they have to steal it.


Not if the idea sits in someone's head. The execution is extremely important. I've had ideas that pre-dated devices like the ipad and iphone by 15 years, but because I didn't do anything with those ideas, they were essentially useless.


Now the question is, where is the limit beetween an idea and his execution. If the idea is a vague thing like "a computer that fits in my pocket", then it's just a dream. The most details you have about your idea, the most you're move close its execution.


Humans build cities; or robots that build cities, or robots that build robots that build cities.


Or people that build robots that build city-building robots.


I want:

  Many more examples contrasted with the equivalent imperative code.

  Examples with elaborate data structures.

  Implementation overview (current & objectives).

  Benchmarks on a multicore.


Well put.

Does the world not already provide enough difficult challenges? I encourage others to test themselves by endeavoring to make the world a better place.

Yes, I know that sounds condescending, but I cannot stand the author's self-absorbtion: "By making life harder for myself, I prove how macho I am!"


You're being downvoted, but I think you bring up an interesting contrarian position that I'm surprised so many here disagree with. Couldn't he be working on a startup, instead of living off rice in an ant-filled van?


> Couldn't he be working on a startup, instead of living off rice in an ant-filled van?

Why does "working on a startup" equate with "making the world a better place?"


Since the only way to make money is to provide something people want, if you are doing something that provides you with money, you are making your customers' world a better place, at least they must think so.


  I promise to take care of toxic waste for some large 
  manufacturing corporations. I take their money and 'dispose'
  of the waste. What if I dispose of the waste into waterways 
  (lakes, rivers,etc)? My customers are happy because the waste
  is taken off of their hands. If anyone ever finds out about
  the dumping, they can claim to no know anything (and they
  may well not know anything) and *I'm* the one that takes
  the fall, not them. In the meantime, they get to reap the
  benefits of cheaper disposal (since it's not being disposed
  of properly). I would hardly say that I'm making the world
  a better place though.
"happy customers" != "a better world"


So how does one make the world a better place?

Most methods I can think of cost a lot of money.


Love your wife and your children. Help out a friend. Clear your elderly neighbor's driveway in the winter. Sure, the effect is tiny, but you've got to start somewhere.


Let's say your customers are "everyone in the world," and your product is diamond rings. Your customers rank each other based on how big of a diamond ring they own. All customers want a bigger ring. When you sell one customer a slightly bigger ring he moves up a rank, and someone else correspondingly moves down a rank. In this abstract model if we assume rank is as important to each participant, you have provided no wealth.

This model corresponds well to bits and pieces of an absolutely massive portion of our economy.

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class


> instead of living off rice in an ant-filled van

Uh, I think you mean "instead of going to graduate school."


Plenty of people go to grad school on limited means and still manage to live in a heated, watered apartment. IMHO this whole exercise seems more like an attempt to escape consumerism (in whatever way the author has defined it), more than it is about being able to afford education.


The author is 100% clear that the exercise is an attempt to escape debt. He's got plenty of options if he just wants to afford an education.


Exactly our point. He's going to great lengths to avoid any debt, which in this society is a bit masochistic. A little debt for your future isn't going to kill you.


No, I didn't mean that at all. Loans exist for a reason. If he wants to be ultra-frugal, that's fine, but it's not necessary. Do you really believe taking a loan out for something as important as school is that terrible?


Well, he could move the van occasionally so that ants didn't set up shop inside!8-)


> but I cannot stand the author's self-absorbtion: "By making life harder for myself, I prove how macho I am!"

Aren't you projecting something unto him?


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