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I call bull.


Beyond bull, the article doesn't even come close to making sense. They predict a 3% drop in 'computer programmer' jobs over the next decade, but a 32% increase in 'computer software engineer' jobs over the same timeframe. Futher confounding the issue, the distinction they draw between the two is "computer software engineers [are] the guys who write the software" while "computer programmers [are] the guys who write the instructions for the computer to use that software". I have no idea what they think that means their version of a programmer does, or how it's supposed to be different from a software engineer. At worst, it looks like 3% of the programmers in the US will have to change their job titles to software engineer and start writing software instead of writing instructions... or something.

(As a side note, did anyone else notice that programming was the only profession in the list that was explicitly gendered in its description?)


I think:

  "computer software engineers" = "application developers"
  "computer programmers" = "systems programmer"
In other words, programmers are spending more of their (paid employment) time writing applications instead of low-level stuff. Maybe because of how much of the development of lower-level stuff is happening in the open source world?


I dunno. I think you're reading a lot into that train-wreck of a sentence.

software engineer: write the software

programmer: write the instructions for a computer to use that software

That doesn't actually line up very well with what you said. I think you're trying to interpret these words within the realm of your own knowledgeable perspective, rather than seeing it from the point of view of someone who probably doesn't even know what the word "software" really means -- like Cindy Perman (the author of this terrible article).

I think Cindy tried paraphrasing some random definitions without actually understanding them well enough to understand them, attempting to transliterate the definitions from terms too technical for her walnut-sized brain to terms she found more comforting, and hosed things up so badly that (like the credulous customers of a fortune teller) we impose our own interpretations on what she said to it seem true.


I think you're right. I'm thinking the computer programmers are the COBOL programmers that are still writing code on the mainframes at banks and utility companies while the software engineers are replacing spreadsheets with .Net and Java apps (or on the web of course).


1. I don't think that's exactly what Legion was saying.

2. I don't think that's exactly what the article's author was saying.

3. I think that makes a lot more sense than whatever cockamamie BS the article's author was saying, though, and I think you give her too much credit by applying such a reasonable sounding interpretation to her ridiculously uninformed statements.


Couldn't one send this kind of stuff to a third-world country as a donation? It could help feed a starving family for 3-4 months, no?


God help us.


Why they have only two database servers running (with their database in memory, no less) with 200 million check-ins, is completely beyond me.


They are dealing with web scale sharded NoSQL realtime geo scala. Old rules don't apply when 80% of the words describing your company didn't exist two years ago.


I honestly cannot tell whether or not that comment was serious.


Any comment with the words "web scale" should be considered a joke until proven otherwise. :)


Just as I was thinking that this thread was getting worse the further I scroll down I come across the best summation of this story


I cracked up at this. Well played.


They actually said 4. Two shards with slaves for redundancy. It was apparently working fine until they lost track of what was going on. :)


Yea but like you said, since half of them are just for redundancy, they were in effect only running 2 database servers. I must say I find it stunning that a service with that much traffic, especially one with an infrastructure that requires the entire database to be in-memory, would be operating with just 2 database servers running on EC2.

I know hindsight is 20/20, but I can't imagine the foresight was any worse than 20/30.


Shameless plug: try out http://core.hostroute.com. I personally think our domain lookup tool is the best I've used. I've probably used them all ;-)


It is probably just a concatenated string of his credit card number or social security number and random words. I wonder if they are currently trying to crack it using some kind of dictionary brute force mechanism, or if there is some kind of lock out enabled after five tries.


If they have physical access, then there is no effective lock-out mechanism. Presumably they can determine which encryption software is used, and can use the algorithm as many times as they want.


I just recently implemented this. The thing I'm having trouble with is the fact that they don't limit the amount of time (or specify a limit, rather) which is acceptable to make the crawler wait. For instance, what if it take 20 seconds to load an acceptable amount of JavaScript-created HTML?


I've got it down as a feature request. I'll keep it in mind. Thanks!


Fixed the scrollwheel issue, and allowed you to zoom in further.

The reason the zooming out is limited is because of the area which is required to legibly see the markers, labels, etc.


I can zoom in if the text is too small. I want to be able to zoom out til I can see it in relation to where I am.

Also would be nice if I could zoom out and see every active storm. I don't see a way to have all storms show up at once.


Thanks for the link! I'm very open for any technology questions, concerns, feature/other suggestions you all may have.


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