IMHO Rails has become the very kind of spaghetti web "muck" it set out to replace 5 years ago. This is my primary reason for switching to Node.js for as much as possible going forward.
What ever happened to the original spirit from 2007 of "build a blog in 10 minutes using Rails"? Good luck doing that now in under an hour!
I think Rails has drifted very far from the "convention over configuation" mentality. It's inevitable that this happens to any awesome software after you let programmer geeks pile on for 5+ years.
Now you'd be lucky to get Bundler working in 10 minutes on your new Rails app.
And then you'd have to visit railswizard.org or find an app generator to handle all of the boilerplate configuration choices you'd need just to get the conventional Rails app running.
And then you'd have to make a million other choices just to build a blog.
Developers are like water, always following the path of least energy, flowing downhill.
The moment any software becomes difficult to use, it's dead, as the zeitgeist shifts.
Right now Node.js feels very similar to the way Rails felt in 2006-7, where you can sense the growing momentum of a large shift in the developer community.
To paraphrase an old anecdote, No software company ever went broke flipping Skype.
I do hope Microsoft flubs up like Ebay did, and purchases Skype, but make the same IP mistake and neglect to license the core software that runs Skype.
Anyone recall the old news about the Skype founders selling Skype to Ebay, but retaining the licensing of the core software, then pulling
the plug on the license years later, and regaining control over Skype?
I'm looking forward to 2014 when Microsoft has to pass the football
again, though hopefully this story will get more interesting next time.
It's worth noting that Ricky Ross was one of the few people to actually be convicted and incarcerated as a consequence of the Iran-Contra scandal.
Colonel Oliver North, the top Navy Admiral, the secretary of Defense,
the ambassador to Iraq, the later director of DARPA, the former director of the CIA, and dozens of other high level military & executive branch staff were all convicted or plead guilty to charges in the Iran-Contra scandal.
But Ricky Ross went to jail. He unfortunately was the inadvertent pawn in a shocking scheme where our government gave transport planes to illegally ship weapons to guerrillas, and then turn a blind eye when those same guerrillas used the planes to ship cocaine to southern California, directly to Ricky Ross, all the while taking advantage of the cover of military diplomatic immunity.
If you're one of the gov't guys on top, not only are you untouchable, but if you do fall in public, the very system itself will bend over backwards to rescue you. But if you're one of the guys on the bottom, like Ricky Ross, you'll be the fall guy who takes the full brunt of the heat.
Isn't it funny how the American justice system appears to work entirely backwards?
Been there, done that, never again.
Consulting really sucks when you're stuck with a client who deserves to be fired.
My horror story was having to quote excerpts from California labor code 200-243 to the CTO of a ~$200 million corp, and threaten to take it to court after not being paid after 90 days, and after essentially being told to take a flying fuck. However, telling the CTO to go fuck himself to his face did feel good. They eventually paid.
Under California law, if you're contracting and they don't pay you within a set number of days, then they have to keep paying you the same amount until they pay what is owed, and they also have to pay huge penalties.
I don't think Higher Education is in a bubble for one very specific reason: there is no way to open the investment flood gates and attract a large number of speculative investors.
You can't flip college degrees the same way you'd flip a house or a startup. They have zero re-sell value. It's pretty difficult to base a bubble on a product that cannot be resold.
The only option is that more kids and families go into further debt to pay increasing fees to colleges. I don't see a way to combine this with the derivatives markets by the mass re-selling of investment products to mostly non-professional investors. So the hallmark characteristic of a bubble is not to be found here.
I'll agree higher ed is in a true bubble only after some financial wizards figure out a way to re-package college loans into "special investment vehicles" and re-sell them to the general public, and then those securities rise in value by a respectable bubble multiple. Until then, high ed can be argued to be an inefficient, get-your-ticket-punched diploma-mill of bureaucratic drain on society's resources that does more harm than good, but it's not a financial bubble.
Someday, probably around 2027, Google will once again become like a startup company. Whatever that even means. Many years after some new-new-competitor arises and steals Google, Facebook & everyone's users, revenue and hype, and after the ever shifting dunes of the industry's dynamics change notions and models of profitability, and well after these former titans of tech are delegated to subordinate roles under a new cohort of tech titans, then Google can be like a startup again.
Imagine that wondrous day when Google's annual revenues dip under $1 billion! Imagine when their global head count contracts to a mere 4k! Imagine the date when the last new Google Doodle appears on the homepage!
I wish Google luck in reaching their lofty goal to become a pale shadow of their current self.
This whole issue can only get worse, since Apple has committed to a long bet against the web, because native apps can be controlled and they can snatch a 30% cut of the revenue. People don't pay for web apps.
As the web converges on native apps, and as javascript libraries and performance nears that of native apps, what is Apple going to do? Of course they'll protect their app store cash-cow the same way Microsoft protected the Office suite by intentionally keeping IE several years behind other browsers.
And this is only going to get worse. What happens when Apple doesn't enable WebGL in mobile Safari nor UIWebViews withing two or so years from now? After Chrome and even IE support it by default? After everyone is used to using WebGL apps in their browsers?
Nope, you can't have that on a iDevice.
At the very least this might turn up a stone that was overlooked.
Think like a detective. Instead of looking for further evidence, maybe all we have to do is wait for any involved parties to make a mistake, and flub up their story, evidence trail, you name it. When the spot light
is on look for who is moving towards the shadows.
Then the shit really can hit the fan.
How fast can you say bank run?!
I'd say mathematics is closer to the hacker spirit than startups or icky things involving money & bureaucracy.
I like the proof of quadratic reciprocity by way of group theory. A novice might think the proof has no practical "utility". But Gauss invented it, and it's called the "jewel of arithmetic", so that's more than enough utility to me. Besides, doing it this way also shines light on the way group theory can be applied to other areas entirely, such as deep theorems in number theory.
Here's a short proof of the quadratic reciprocity using group theory by an exceptional high school student:
Hey you web-based Net Neutrality advocates,
Isn't this move a bit hypocritical? Moving to metered traffic pricing models is arguably identical to the big bad plan that the telco's are trying to push through to achieve their own metered pricing for bandwidth?
No matter what they build, ultimately it's based on public key crypto methods. So this is all a moot point after mathematicians make a break through and smash public key encryption methods. Sure, that might not happen for a decade, who knows really. But I still wouldn't want to place my trust in a vast gov't controlled multibillion dollar single point of failure that controls all authentication in society.
But good luck with your totalitarian schemes Big Brother guys, the more you try, the more the free society grows and strengthens like kudzu.
I think there's huge room in the market for another Craigslist. At least a few billion. I just don't think it can be done without a missing piece of the puzzle nobody can yet see. Like you said, the term "Craiglist" is almost a synonym, a diluted brand name for classifieds themselves. Even if tomorrow we had 500 new, cutting-edge, fully-featured, polished classified sites just waiting for users, and waiting for developers to do things you'd never think of on Craigslist, well, it wouldn't matter at all.
Are users going to visit, post and maintain their accounts across 500 sites? No way, they'll pick the biggest on and stick with it. It's the same exact strategy that Facebook used to the de-facto online profile. This is why no other classified sites have been able to pick up enough self-sustaining momentum to even make a dent in Craigslist.
As a "solution" to break this stalemate, either all the classified sites will need to federate their data, or they will all need to allow each other to scrape each other's content. Fat chance of either of those happening though.
So we're going to be stuck with Craigslist for a long time. No doubt something new and totally unexpected will develop and steal Craigslist's thunder, but I have no idea what that thing is going to be.
There are Ayahuasca tourist businesses in Peru and in that general region. They cost less than typical vacations to the same area. You pay a local Shaman to take you into the jungle with a small group of other Western tourists, and the group goes through the important multi-day long ritual and ceremonial process of consuming ayahuasca.
There's a lot more to the experience of ayahuasca than just taking it like a recreational drug. It is such a fundamentally different neurological/existential state that the ancient native ritual components are necessary in order to equip you with a conceptual context that can handle the experience. It's a belief system based on animism, where you seek out and encounter various plant teachers to learn their lessons about the Universe and yourself.
Being well prepared matters. After all, those mechanical chattering elves are just the first set of gatekeeping Platonic Archons along to way to total self-annihilation. (Whatever that is.)
This kind of trip is not exactly a major tourist draw, so there aren't that many shamans to choose from, but they do have their own websites!
What ever happened to the original spirit from 2007 of "build a blog in 10 minutes using Rails"? Good luck doing that now in under an hour!
I think Rails has drifted very far from the "convention over configuation" mentality. It's inevitable that this happens to any awesome software after you let programmer geeks pile on for 5+ years.
Now you'd be lucky to get Bundler working in 10 minutes on your new Rails app. And then you'd have to visit railswizard.org or find an app generator to handle all of the boilerplate configuration choices you'd need just to get the conventional Rails app running.
And then you'd have to make a million other choices just to build a blog.
Developers are like water, always following the path of least energy, flowing downhill. The moment any software becomes difficult to use, it's dead, as the zeitgeist shifts.
Right now Node.js feels very similar to the way Rails felt in 2006-7, where you can sense the growing momentum of a large shift in the developer community.