Type safety does help a lot. The real hard ones I found to track down are the ones where you have to chase for a particular state to re-occur and you can't get a repro from ops or qa. At least for me these are the main bummers...
I know that at least from my experience debugging our apps in production did become harder as we scaled out in terms of servers, users and code. I do wonder if its something that should be handled at the code level (by being more defensive, taking a more immutable approach) or by having better debugging tools. Anyone knows if this supports Ruby?
I think that in the overall scheme of things having a limited internet is better than no Internet. Having said that I think the chinese peope should strive for a fully free Internet in china. I know easier said than done.. While working with engineers in China they had FB, which they would access through vpns. And proxies. Hopefully the day would come soon when do wouldn't have to resort to that or fear of the consequences of what they write.
There's a patent our there for just about any conceivable thing in computing. I'm pretty sure commenting on HN articles is patented and we're in violation right now. It's so ridiculous. No can ever really do anything with most of them (except maybe troll companies with deep pockets or if you're building a phone). I remember that 5 years ago when building a company people would still ask whether you had patents. I don't think they still do, but those are just my impressions.
I played d&d and R d&d, the latter is the one where you actually dress up and fight other people with rubber swords. When I tell people at the office they still laugh at me about that. But frankly, I don't really care - those were the best times ever!
I have to give a big kudos to Ted Krum on page 3 - going back to school 20+ years after you graduated to re-learn computer science with kids half your age is really a beautiful story. I wish him the best of luck and I really hope he finds a good job in his old/new profession.