Duhveed

"It doesn't do anything useful and it only loads Saturdays at 3am, but it sure has some syntactically awesome stylesheets!" ...Anyway, it sounds good on paper.

They did NOT "slam on their brakes" and it was NOT a large hazard. I understand that, if something had happened, they would have FELT partly responsible. But it's the kind of responsible that people with a lot of bumper stickers experience when someone wrecks because someone was paying too much attention to the stickers and not enough attention to the road.

Yes, they created conditions that might have made it possible for a lousy driver to wreck a car, but, no, they did not do anything inherently dangerous. A driver--ANY driver--is expected to be able to handle gently decelerating cars on the highway. They should also be able to pay attention despite big billboards, confusing traffic signs, and attractive people gallivanting on the sidewalks.

The average traffic jam is much more likely to cause an accident, but it typically doesn't and, when it does, we blame the driver that rear ends someone, not the masses of people who have actually stopped on the highway, often NOT gently.

I was thinking about how dangerous it was while I was reading it too, but I came away far less concerned than you I guess. The deceleration on the highway was the most worrisome, but it's not even in the ballpark of common driving hazards like distracted folks on cellphones or flying debris. A crash from such a thing is unlikely and the inconvenience is pretty minimal.

Even you, the busybody who called the cops because you read an article, said "What was the plan if the trucker approaching at 70mph hadn't seen the Jeep stalled early..." which implies that the trucker would have been following too closely or not paying attention (or both).

It's worth pointing out that the driver was aware of the situation and they didn't do anything dramatic like lock the brakes or throw the car in reverse. They chose a gentle deceleration in a stretch of road that had no shoulder to make it feel dangerous, but, on the spectrum of hazards that most drivers face every time they take the car out of the garage, this is pretty tame.

The fact is, had something happened, it wouldn't have been the disabled car that was at fault.

I think the researchers are in the clear, and for you to have read the article and been bothered enough to call the cops (and post the number for, presumably, the convenience of other hyper-sensitive folk who might otherwise just go back to staring at the neighbor kids from their bedroom window with their phones in their hands and 911 on their speed dial) is nuts.

Oh, and to veer back to being on-topic, I'd likely use it and I don't know of another service like it.

I like it. I agree that there are limits to what can be accomplished in such a short timeframe, but there's plenty of work that could fall within those constraints. I'm often asked for opinions that don't involve code at all, just an overview of the tech that's out there that could be applied to a given problem. That sort of thing could easily fall in to a couple hour time frame. It could be the twitter of freelancing. :)

especially when a cable snaps

love tensegrity! I'm working on a springy tensegrity bar stool.

Thank you for a great answer. I've known about this problem for a long time and never had a way to intuitively think about it. I will now be stealing yours. :)

"So our data crawling team built a simple algorithm that would crawl through the Today I Learned subreddit and count how many times a given article was submitted."

Without actually proffering an opinion on the government, your argument has a problem. To the extent that streamlining some bit of the government with software frees up resources to be used elsewhere in the org chart by folks engaged in activities with which you disagree, a software developer would absolutely have enabled the offending activity.

I suppose you could counter that the abhorrent practice of intentionally wasting resources to ensure that subsequent budgets don't shrink will tend to prevent the torturers from getting the additional funds you free up with your advanced tax or road planning software, but there remains a good chance you'd free up resources for something within the department that would cause someone to be worse off than they were before. The only winning move is not to play. (OK, that was an opinion on the gov't)

Good for Groupon...it's the right thing to do.

Personally, I'd want an opt-out too...I don't mind a default of charitable, but for me to be on board, it'd be essential to be able to disable my contribution should I find the organization uncharitable.

More than that though, I think it'd be neat if this group hooked up with giv2giv.org and each day/dollar would create a new, well-funded endowment. And maybe give users a way to vote for their favorite reruns or something so there'd be a bit of a feedback loop.

Anyway, congrats to them for a basically good idea. I agree that there are some refinements that would make it a bit more palatable for me personally, but I dig it. I love innovation in this space.

Nevermind the folks complaining that ESRI's years-old template site is more functional than what you built in a few days. I've built a few gis sites for municipalities and I think it's pretty great.

I've used side projects to learn every valuable skill I have. Open source projects are a great way to publicize your new talents, but I don't think it's a prereq for landing a job that makes use of the new skill. Being able to talk intelligently about a subject during an interview goes a long way. As does having a depth of knowledge on a variety of languages, environments, technologies, etc.

w.t.f.?