#I'm getting some kind of python error and there are a lot of settings and it's skyrim so like. good luck finding up to date documentation

[eachuisge-cc]

aaah of course I can import .nif files to blender but not export them. why would I expect something to just work on the first try.

[anheliotrope]

Rambling About C# Being Alright

I think C# is an alright language. This is one of the highest distinctions I can give to a language.

Warning: This post is verbose and rambly and probably only good at telling you why someone might like C# and not much else.

~~~

There's something I hate about every other language. Worst, there's things I hate about other languages that I know will never get better. Even worse, some of those things ALSO feel like unforced errors.

With C# there's a few things I dislike or that are missing. C#'s feature set does not obviously excel at anything, but it avoids making any huge misstep in things I care about. Nothing in C# makes me feel like the language designer has personally harmed me.

C# is a very tolerable language.

C# is multi-paradigm.

C# is the Full Middle Malcomist language.

C# will try to not hurt you.

A good way to describe C# is "what if Java sucked less". This, of course, already sounds unappealing to many, but that's alright. I'm not trying to gas it up too much here.

C# has sins, but let's try to put them into some context here and perhaps the reason why I'm posting will become more obvious:

C# didn't try to avoid generics and then implement them in a way that is very limiting (cough Go).

C# doesn't hamstring your ability to have statement lambdas because the language designer dislikes them and also because the language designer decided to have semantic whitespace making statement lambdas harder to deal with (cough Python).

C# doesn't require you to explicitly wrap value types into reference types so you can put value types into collections (cough Java).

C# doesn't ruin your ability to interact with memory efficiently because it forbids you from creating custom value types, ergo everything goes to the heap (cough cough Java, Minecraft).

C# doesn't have insane implicit type coercions that have become the subject of language design comedy (cough JavaScript).

C# doesn't keep privacy accessors as a suggestion and has the developers pinkie swear about it instead of actually enforcing it (cough cough Python).

Plainly put, a lot of the time I find C# to be alright by process of elimination. I'm not trying to shit on your favorite language. Everyone has different things they find tolerable. I have the Buddha nature so I wish for all things to find their tolerable language.

I do also think that C# is notable for being a mainstream language (aka not Haskell) that has a smaller amount of egregious mistakes, quirks and Faustian bargains.

The Typerrrrr

C# is statically typed, but the typing is largely effortless to navigate unlike something like Rust, and the GC gives a greater degree of safety than something like C++.

Of course, the typing being easy to work it also makes it less safe than Rust. But this is an appropriate trade-off for certain kinds of applications, especially considering that C# is memory safe by virtue of running on a VM. Don't come at me, I'm a Rust respecter!!

You know how some people talk about Python being amazing for prototyping? That's how I feel about C#. No matter how much time I would dedicate to Python, C# would still be a more productive language for me. The type system would genuinely make me faster for the vast majority of cases. Of course Python has gradual typing now, so any comparison gets more difficult when you consider that. But what I'm trying to say is that I never understood the idea that doing away entirely with static typing is good for fast iteration.

Also yes, C# can be used as a repl. Leave me alone with your repls. Also, while the debugger is active you can also evaluate arbitrary code within the current scope.

I think that going full dynamic typing is a mistake in almost every situation. The fact that C# doesn't do that already puts it above other languages for me. This stance on typing is controversial, but it's my opinion that is really shouldn't be. And the wind has constantly been blowing towards adding gradual typing to dynamic languages.

The modest typing capabilities C# coupled with OOP and inheritance lets you create pretty awful OOP slop. But that's whatever. At work we use inheritance in very few places where it results in neat code reuse, and then it's just mostly interfaces getting implemented.

C#'s typing and generic system is powerful enough to offer you a plethora of super-ergonomic collection transformation methods via the LINQ library. There's a lot of functional-style programming you can do with that. You know, map, filter, reduce, that stuff?

Even if you make a completely new collection type, if it implements IEnumerable<T> it will benefit from LINQ automatically. Every language these days has something like this, but it's so ridiculously easy to use in C#. Coupled with how C# lets you (1) easily define immutable data types, (2) explicitly control access to struct or class members, (3) do pattern matching, you can end up with code that flows really well.

A Friendly Kitchen Sink

Some people have described C#'s feature set as bloated. It is getting some syntactic diversity which makes it a bit harder to read someone else's code. But it doesn't make C# harder to learn, since it takes roughly the same amount of effort to get to a point where you can be effective in it.

Most of the more specific features can be effortlessly ignored. The ones that can't be effortlessly ignored tend to bring something genuinely useful to the language -- such as tuples and destructuring. Tuples have their own syntax, the syntax is pretty intuitive, but the first time you run into it, you will have to do a bit of learning.

C# has an immense amount of small features meant to make the language more ergonomic. They're too numerous to mention and they just keep getting added.

I'd like to draw attention to some features not because they're the most important but rather because it feels like they communicate the "personality" of C#. Not sure what level of detail was appropriate, so feel free to skim.

Stricter Null Handling. If you think not having to explicitly deal with null is the billion dollar mistake, then C# tries to fix a bit of the problem by allowing you to enable a strict context where you have to explicitly tell it that something can be null, otherwise it will assume that the possibility of a reference type being null is an error. It's a bit more complicated than that, but it definitely helps with safety around nullability.

Default Interface Implementation. A problem in C# which drives usage of inheritance is that with just interfaces there is no way to reuse code outside of passing function pointers. A lot of people don't get this and think that inheritance is just used because other people are stupid or something. If you have a couple of methods that would be implemented exactly the same for classes 1 through 99, but somewhat differently for classes 100 through 110, then without inheritance you're fucked. A much better way would be Rust's trait system, but for that to work you need really powerful generics, so it's too different of a path for C# to trod it. Instead what C# did was make it so that you can write an implementation for methods declared in an interface, as long as that implementation only uses members defined in the interface (this makes sense, why would it have access to anything else?). So now you can have a default implementation for the 1 through 99 case and save some of your sanity. Of course, it's not a panacea, if the implementation of the method requires access to the internal state of the 1 through 99 case, default interface implementation won't save you. But it can still make it easier via some techniques I won't get into. The important part is that default interface implementation allows code reuse and reduces reasons to use inheritance.

Performance Optimization. C# has a plethora of features regarding that. Most of which will never be encountered by the average programmer. Examples: (1) stackalloc - forcibly allocate reference types to the stack if you know they won't outlive the current scope. (2) Specialized APIs for avoiding memory allocations in happy paths. (3) Lazy initialization APIs. (4) APIs for dealing with memory more directly that allow high performance when interoping with C/C++ while still keeping a degree of safety.

Fine Control Over Async Runtime. C# lets you write your own... async builder and scheduler? It's a bit esoteric and hard to describe. But basically all the functionality of async/await that does magic under the hood? You can override that magic to do some very specific things that you'll rarely need. Unity3D takes advantage of this in order to allow async/await to work on WASM even though it is a single-threaded environment. It implements a cooperative scheduler so the program doesn't immediately freeze the moment you do await in a single-threaded environment. Most people don't know this capability exists and it doesn't affect them.

Tremendous Amount Of Synchronization Primitives and API. This ones does actually make multithreaded code harder to deal with, but basically C# erred a lot in favor of having many different ways to do multithreading because they wanted to suit different usecases. Most people just deal with idiomatic async/await code, but a very small minority of C# coders deal with locks, atomics, semaphores, mutex, monitors, interlocked, spin waiting etc. They knew they couldn't make this shit safe, so they tried to at least let you have ready-made options for your specific use case, even if it causes some balkanization.

Shortly Begging For Tagged Unions

What I miss from C# is more powerful generic bounds/constraints and tagged unions (or sum types or discriminated unions or type unions or any of the other 5 names this concept has).

The generic constraints you can use in C# are anemic and combined with the lack of tagged unions this is rather painful at times.

I remember seeing Microsoft devs saying they don't see enough of a usecase for tagged unions. I've at times wanted to strangle certain people. These two facts are related to one another.

My stance is that if you think your language doesn't need or benefit from tagged unions, either your language is very weird, or, more likely you're out of your goddamn mind. You are making me do really stupid things every time I need to represent a structure that can EITHER have a value of type A or a value of type B.

But I think C# will eventually get tagged unions. There's a proposal for it here. I would be overjoyed if it got implemented. It seems like it's been getting traction.

Also there was an entire section on unchecked exceptions that I removed because it wasn't interesting enough. Yes, C# could probably have checked exceptions and it didn't and it's a mistake. But ultimately it doesn't seem to have caused any make-or-break in a comparison with Java, which has them. They'd all be better off with returning an Error<T>. Short story is that the consequences of unchecked exceptions have been highly tolerable in practice.

Ecosystem State & FOSSness

C# is better than ever and the tooling ecosystem is better than ever. This is true of almost every language, but I think C# receives a rather high amount of improvements per version. Additionally the FOSS story is at its peak.

Roslyn, the bedrock of the toolchain, the compiler and analysis provider, is under MIT license. The fact that it does analysis as well is important, because this means you can use the wealth of Roslyn analyzers to do linting.

If your FOSS tooling lets you compile but you don't get any checking as you type, then your development experience is wildly substandard.

A lot of stupid crap with cross-platform compilation that used to be confusing or difficult is now rather easy to deal with. It's basically as easy as (1) use NET Core, (2) tell dotnet to build for Linux. These steps take no extra effort and the first step is the default way to write C# these days.

Dotnet is part of the SDK and contains functionality to create NET Core projects and to use other tools to build said projects. Dotnet is published under MIT, because the whole SDK and runtime are published under MIT.

Yes, the debugger situation is still bad -- there's no FOSS option for it, but this is more because nobody cares enough to go and solve it. Jetbrains proved anyone can do it if they have enough development time, since they wrote a debugger from scratch for their proprietary C# IDE Rider.

Where C# falls flat on its face is the "userspace" ecosystem. Plainly put, because C# is a Microsoft product, people with FOSS inclinations have steered clear of it to such a degree that the packages you have available are not even 10% of what packages a Python user has available, for example. People with FOSS inclinations are generally the people who write packages for your language!!

I guess if you really really hate leftpad, you might think this is a small bonus though.

Where-in I talk about Cross-Platform

The biggest thing the ecosystem has been lacking for me is a package, preferably FOSS, for developing cross-platform applications. Even if it's just cross-platform desktop applications.

Like yes, you can build C# to many platforms, no sweat. The same way you can build Rust to many platforms, some sweat. But if you can't show a good GUI on Linux, then it's not practically-speaking cross-platform for that purpose.

Microsoft has repeatedly done GUI stuff that, predictably, only works on Windows. And yes, Linux desktop is like 4%, but that 4% contains >50% of the people who create packages for your language's ecosystem, almost the exact point I made earlier. If a developer runs Linux and they can't have their app run on Linux, they are not going to touch your language with a ten foot pole for that purpose. I think this largely explains why C#'s ecosystem feels stunted.

The thing is, I'm not actually sure how bad or good the situation is, since most people just don't even try using C# for this usecase. There's a general... ecosystem malaise where few care to use the language for this, chiefly because of the tone that Microsoft set a decade ago. It's sad.

HOWEVER.

Avalonia, A New Hope?

Today we have Avalonia. Avalonia is an open-source framework that lets you build cross-platform applications in C#. It's MIT licensed. It will work on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android and also somehow in the browser. It seems to this by actually drawing pixels via SkiaSharp (or optionally Direct2D on Windows).

They make money by offering migration services from WPF app to Avalonia. Plus general support.

I can't say how good Avalonia is yet. I've researched a bit and it's not obviously bad, which is distinct from being good. But if it's actually good, this would be a holy grail for the ecosystem:

You could use a statically typed language that is productive for this type of software development to create cross-platform applications that have higher performance than the Electron slop. That's valuable!

This possibility warrants a much higher level of enthusiasm than I've seen, especially within the ecosystem itself. This is an ecosystem that was, for a while, entirely landlocked, only able to make Windows desktop applications.

I cannot overstate how important it is for a language's ecosystem to have a package like this and have it be good. Rust is still missing a good option. Gnome is unpleasant to use and buggy. Falling back to using Electron while writing Rust just seems like a bad joke. A lot of the Rust crates that are neither Electron nor Gnome tend to be really really undercooked.

And now I've actually talked myself into checking out Avalonia... I mean after writing all of that I feel like a charlatan for not having investigated it already.

[queenlua]

hey, i started following you recently and ur bio says ur a hacker? any tips on where to start? hacking seems like a v cool/fun way to learn more abt coding and cybersecurity/infrastructure and i'd like to explore it but there's so much on the internet and like, i'm not trying to get into anything illegal. thanks!

huh, an interesting question, ty!

i can give more tailored advice if you hit me up on chat with more specifics on your background/interests.

given what you've written here, though, i'll just assume you don't have any immediate professional aspirations (e.g. you just want to learn some things, and you aren't necessarily trying to get A Cyber Security Job TM within the next three months or w/e), and that you don't know much about any specific programming/computering domain yet.

(stuff under cut because long)

first i'd probably just try to pick some interesting problem that you think you can solve with tech. this doesn't need to be a "hacking" project at first; i was just messing around with computers for ages before i did anything involving security/exploitation.

if you don't already know how to program, you should ideally pick a problem you can solve via programming. for instance: i learned a lot back in the 2000s, when play-by-post forum RPGs were in vogue.  see, i'd already been messing around, building my own personal sites, first just with HTML & CSS, and later on with Javascript and PHP.   and i knew the forum software everyone used (InvisionPowerBoard) was written in PHP.  so when one of the admins at my RPG complained that they'd like the ability to set multiple profile pictures, i was like, "hey i'm good at programming, want me to create a mod to do that," and then i just... did. so then they asked me to program more features, and i got all the sexy nerd cred for being Forum Mod Queen, and it was a good time, i learned a lot.

(i also got to be the person who was frantically IMed at 2am because wtf the forum is down and there's an inscrutable error, what do??? basically sysadmining! also, much less sexy! still, i learned a lot!)

the key thing is that it's gotta be a problem that's interesting to you: as much as i love making dorky sites in PHP, half the fun was seeing other people using my stuff, and i think the era of forum-based RPGs has passed. but maybe you can apply some programming talents to something that you are interested in—maybe you want to make a silly Chrome extension to make people laugh, a la Cloud to Butt, or maybe you'd like to make a program that converts pixel art into cross-stitching patterns, maybe you want to just make a cool adventure game on those annoying graphing calculators they make you use in class, or make a script for some online game you play, or make something silly with Arduino (i once made a trash can that rolled toward me when i clapped my hands; it was fun, and way easier than you'd think!), whatever.

i know a lot of hacker-types who got their start doing ROM hacking for video games—replacing the character art or animations or whatever in old NES games. that's probably more relevant than the PHP websites, at least, and is probably a solid place to get started; in my experience those communities tend to be reasonably friendly to questions. pick a small thing you want to do & ask how to do it.

also, a somewhat unconventional path, but—once i knew how to program a bit of Python, i started doing goofy junk, like, "hey can i implemented NamedTuple from scratch,” which tends to lead to Python metaprogramming, which leads to surprising shit like "oh, stack frames are literally just Python objects and you can manually edit them in the interpreter to do deliberately horrendous/silly things, my god this language allows too much reflection and i'm having too much fun"... since Python is a lot of folks' first language these days, i thought i'd point that out, since i think this is a pretty accessible start to thinking about How Programs Actually Work under the hood. allison kaptur has some specific recommendations on how to poke around, if you wanna go that route.

it's reasonably likely you'll end up doing something "hackery" in the natural course of just working on stuff. for instance, while i was working on the IPB forum software mods, i became distressed to learn that everyone was using an INSECURE version of the software! no one was patching their shit!! i yelled at the admins about it, and they were like "well we haven't been hacked yet so it's not a problem," so i uh, decided to demonstrate a proof of concept? i downloaded some sketchy perl script, kicked it until it worked, logged in as the admins, and shitposted a bit before i logged out, y'know, to prove my point.

(they responded by banning me for two weeks, and did not patch their software. which, y'know, rip to them; they got hacked by an unrelated Turkish group two months later, and those dudes just straight-up deleted the whole website. i was a merciful god by comparison!)

anyway, even though downloading a perl script and just pointing it at a website isn't really "hacking" (it's the literal definition of script kiddie, heh)—the point is i was just experimenting a lot and trying a lot of stuff, which meant i was getting comfortable with thinking of software as not just some immutable relic, but something you can touch and prod in unexpected ways.

this dovetails into the next thing, which is like, just learn a lot of stuff. a boring conventional computer science degree will teach you a lot (provided you take it seriously and actually try to learn shit); alternatively, just taking the same classes as a boring conventional computer science degree, via edX or whatever free online thingy, will also teach you a lot. ("contributing to open source" also teaches you a lot but... hngh... is a whole can of worms; send a follow-up ask if you want that rant.)

here's where i should note that "hacking" is an impossibly broad category: the kind of person who knows how to fuck with website authentication tokens is very different than someone who writes a fuzzer, who is often quite different than someone who looks at the bug a fuzzer produces and actually writes a program that can exploit that bug... so what you focus on depends on what you're interested in. i imagine classes with names like "compilers," "operating systems," and "networking" will teach you a lot. but, like, idk, all knowledge is god-breathed and good for teaching. hell, i hear some universities these days have actual computer security classes? that's probably a good thing to look at, just to get a sense of what's out there, if you already know how to program.

also be comfortable with not knowing everything, but also, learn as you go. the bulk of my security knowledge came when i got kinda airdropped into a work team that basically hired me entirely on "potential" (lmao), and uh, prior to joining i only had the faintest idea what a hypervisor was? or the whole protection ring concept? or ioctls or sandboxing or threat models or, fuck, anything? i mostly just pestered people with like 800 questions and slowly built up a knowledge base, and remember being surprised & delighted when i went to a security conference a year later and could follow most of the talks, and when i wound up at a bar with a guy on the xbox security team and we compared our security models a bunch, and so on.  there wasn't a magic moment when i "got it", i was just like, "okay huh this dude says he found a ring-0 exploit... what does that mean... okay i think i got that... why is that a big deal though... better ask somebody.." (also: reading an occasional dead tree book is a good idea. i owe my firstborn to Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development, as outdated as it is, and also O'Reilly's kookaburra book gave me a great overview of web programming back in the day, etc.  you can learn a lot by just clicking around random blogs, but you’ll often end up with a lot of random little facts and no good mental scaffolding for holding it together; often, a decent book will give you that scaffolding.)

(also, it's pretty useful if you can find a knowledgable someone to pepper with random questions as you go. finding someone who will actively mentor you is tricky, but most working computery folks are happy to tell you things like "what you're doing is actually impossible, here's why," or "here's a tutorial someone told me was good for learning how to write a linux kernel module," or "here's my vague understanding of this concept you know nothing about," or "here's how you automate something to click on a link on a webpage," which tends to be handier than just google on its own.)

if you're reading this and you're like "ok cool but where's the part where i'm handed a computer and i gotta break in while going all hacker typer”—that's not the bulk of the work, alas! like, for sure, we do have fun pranking each other by trying dumb ways of stealing each other's passwords or whatever (once i stuck a keylogger in a dude's keyboard, fun times). but a lot of my security jobs have involved stuff like, "stare at this disassembly a long fuckin' time to figure out how the program pointer got all fucked up," or, "write a fuzzer that feeds a lot of randomized input to some C++ program, watch the program crash because C++ is a horrible language for writing software, go fix all the bugs," or "think Really Hard TM about all the settings and doohickeys this OS/GPU/whatever has, think about all the awful things someone could do with it, threat model and sandbox accordingly." occasionally i have done cool proof-of-concept hacks but honestly writing exploits can kinda be tedious, lol, so like, i'm only doing that if it's the only way i can get people to believe that Yes This Is Actually A Problem, Fix Your Code

"lua that's cool and all but i wanted, like, actual links and recommendations and stuff" okay, fair. here's some ideas:

microcorruption: very fun embedded security CTF; teaches you everything you need to know as you're doing it.

cryptopals crypto challenges: very fun little programming exercises that teach you a lot of fundamental cryptography concepts as you're going along! you can do these even as a bit of a n00b; i did them in Python for the lulz

the binary bomb lab is hilariously copied by, like, so many CS programs, lol, but for good reason. it's accessible and fun and is the first time most people get to feel like a real hacker! (requires you know a bit of C beforehand)

ctftime is a good way to see when new CTFs ("capture the flag"s; security-focused competitions) are coming up. or, sometimes CTFs post their source code, so you can continue trying them after the CTF is over. i liked Stripe's CTFs when they were going, because they focused on "web stuff", and "web stuff" was all i really knew at the time. if you're more interested in staring at disassembly, there's CTFs focused on that sort of thing too.

azeria has good ARM assembly & exploitation tutorials

also, like, lots of good talks out there; just watching defcon/cansecwest/etc talks until something piques your interest is very fun. i'd die on a battlefield for any of Christopher Domas's talks, but he assumes a lot of specific x86/OS knowledge, lol, so maybe don’t start with that. oh, Julia Evans's blog is honestly probably pretty good for just learning a lot of stuff and really beginner-friendly?

oh and wrt legality... idk, i haven't addressed it here since it hasn't come up in my own work much, tbh. if you're just getting started you're kind of unlikely to Break The Law without, y'know, realizing maybe you're doing something a bit gray-area? and you can cross that bridge when you come to it? Real Hacking TM is way more of a pain-in-the-ass than doing CTFs and such, and you'll learn way more with the latter, so who cares lol just do the fun thing

[daedricsnakes]

Hey there! I'm going to be transferring my yearling BP to a bioactive enclosure ASAP and the one thing I'm concerned about is her wrapping her curious little self around her UVB bulb. I've seen screen light enclosures but none for lights longer than 2 feet long. Where did you get your light guards/enclosures? Did you make them? If so do you have a instruction sheet for making them? Also what are your suggestions for ball python safe plants? My girl is SUPER active so they'll have to be tough 😂

I made my own! I use sheets of grill mesh and shape it by threading zip ties through it, and then zip tie it around the light fixture. This is the mesh I use, but there are a few options, depending on where you are located. I’ll reblog this with a picture of one of my fixtures. 

I got the idea from @rainbowsnakes and it works really well! I can’t recall if they have a tutorial on how to put the mesh together, or if we just talked about it, but it’s pretty easy. For mine, I sort of folded an end of the mesh together like how you would fold wrapping paper on the ends of a box. My fixtures are all too big for one sheet, so I would overlap two, and weave the zip ties in the overlapping sections so that the snake couldn’t nose their way in there. Zip ties woven through the folded ends to secure them, and then I set the fixture inside the “box” and pinch the ends of the mesh over the top if it with more zip ties. (You don’t have to use zip ties, of course. I chose them because they’re cheap and easy to work with. Just a reminder if you do use zip ties inside any enclosure - either leave the ends long and untrimmed after they’re fastened, or sand down the cut ends so they aren’t sharp, just to be safe!)

As for the plants, there are quite a few options that can do well in a ball python’s environment, as far as lighting/temp/water needs, but yeah, you will probably want something sturdy that can hold up well enough with a chunk like a bp digging through and climbing over it. My favorites are pothos (excellent choice - prolific growth and pretty hard to kill), snake plant, some ferns (though probably best to use well-started plants instead of new ones - my snakes have killed every baby fern I’ve tried), croton, and ivy. 

Once you’ve planted, try to give them as much time as possible to settle and acclimate before introducing the snake. The longer the plants can be left to grow into their new environment undisturbed, the better they will be able to handle the snake’s activity. In general, anyway. Expect that there will still be casualties. It can be a very trial-and-error experience, and every step of the way, you will learn more about what works for you, your setup, and your animal. But the plants I’ve listed above are pretty easy to care for, and fairly sturdy (as said, the ferns can be delicate, but if you are vigilant they can thrive, and they look great and provide a lot of cover if they grow well). The important things to keep in mind when getting plants is what kind of environment the plant will thrive in, and whether it is safe for your snake. Many plants are not, but there are lists online that can help you narrow it down. I think I’ve got some posts about that in my “bioactive” tag, if you want to take a look at more information on that subject. 

I hope this has helped, and if you have any other questions, please feel free to ask anytime :) 

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN DEMAND

It's just unbearably inefficient. It was still very much alive. Common Lisp is an aberration. That's the part that really demands determination. But I had some more honest motives as well. If I thought that I could tell he meant it. And erring on the side of speaking slowly. The danger of symmetry, and repetition especially, is that source code will look unthreatening. The reason I say in theory because in early stage investing, valuations are voodoo. Almost everything is interesting if you get this stuff, you already know might send you an email talking about sex, but someone who really understands an article probably has something in his brain afterward that corresponds to such an outline. It's already a successful company, but also because it's a way of saying they need someone to tell them you were at a disadvantage when coming up with a bunch of startups die because they were laid out before cars, and they're writing an application that will be good this time around.

But a significant number. Practically every successful company has at least one of them was Webvia; I swapped them to make it look like? People are all you need to learn to acknowledge, but something you make yourself. The simplest form of determination is sheer willfulness. Your Life Just as the relationship between meanness and success inversely correlated? At the extreme, for someone like Ron Conway, Richard Florida, Ben Horowitz, Steve Huffman, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Peter Norvig, Lisa Randall, Emmett Shear, Rajat Suri, Garry Tan, Albert Wenger, Fred Wilson, AirBedAndBreakfast Founders date: Fri, Feb 13,2009 at 11:09 AM subject: Re: airbnb already spreading to pros I know you're skeptical they'll ever get hotels, but there's plenty still broken in the world will be among the first to see signs of a good idea? The reason he bought Instagram was that it was written primarily in a programming language like marble. We launched on under $10,000. Thanks to Sam Altman, John Bautista, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use it to write software that recognizes their messages, there is an ongoing karma leak. And thought you should check out the following is just not as much demand for things that seem broken, regardless of how many are started. In particular, they don't seem to get how different it is till they do it because they feel they have to work at a cool little startup. He wanted to spend his time thinking about is whether you're good at making things.

This is their way of weighing you. It was both a negative and a positive surprise: they were born all over France, but what are investors going to think of the middle class. That is, no one took them very seriously. I was talking to one VC and he finds out that you were turned down by everyone. Garbage collection, introduced by Lisp in the mid 20th century. I grew up, so studying philosophy seemed an impressively impractical thing to do is say one word to them, it's now the default with us to live by trial and error, that. _____ History suggests that, all other things being equal, a mistake to program in college was all wrong. She can't do it by generating wealth instead of stealing it. If you're not a genius, just start a business and check out once things are going well, can be passed as arguments, and so on.

The startup founders who continued to live inexpensively as their companies eventually became, they were going about it wrong. Everyone knows it's a mistake to talk to users, whether they are or not. The best investors rarely care who else is investing? Python, you notice this pattern if you are the wave. We have three general suggestions about hiring: a don't do it now. But it would have died anyway. But in fact there are more and bolder investors in Silicon Valley it seems normal to me, so I sent it to an editor I know. They leave 20% as an options pool for later employees but they set things up so that it can cause great pleasure. I'd read that starting a startup—indeed, where it's normal for 14 year olds to become mothers. I realize this will sound naive, but maybe the linkage works in both directions. There is some momentum involved.

You have to show up for work every day, because at that stage startups are mobile. Another thing that might work is a job. This has traditionally been a problem in venture funding. The suit is back, it begins. The only kind of work; one day you'll miss it. From either direction we get to the truth. Raising a traditional series A round needs to be a time when Yahoo was a special case: you can't get an H1B visa, the type usually issued to programmers.

I've read a lot of companies are started every year in the US in 2002 was $35,560. It's hard to guess what library call would do the right thing to compare Lisp to is not 1950s hardware, but you knew there would be far less demand for them. The problem with American cars today, is that the founders will no longer be the lead in the old days in the Yahoo cafeteria a few months later. So for now this is something intrinsic to programming, though. Determination is the most economical route to the Bay Area would be progressive. So to write good software you have to be careful who you pick as a cofounder, an employee, an investor, when investors ask how much you're planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy. That's not what makes startups worth the trouble. And this skill is so hard on the programmers, it saves you more than investors. These smaller groups are always arranged in a confusing maze. The Still Life Effect Why does this happen? If they think your startup is worth investing in, and then returned two months later and not one thing had changed. Before I publish a new essay for the Japanese edition of Hackers & Painters.

Have you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by just one person? Yet when it comes to ambition. And that means they need to spend a fortune without stealing it. So American grad schools spawn a lot of de facto control after a series A round, because VCs worry there will not be dramatic, external threats, but a lot wider at the bottom of the well per se. The techniques for building a new type of company whose goal was above all scale. Strange as this sounds, they seem like noise. What do you read when you don't need.

A factor of two? You make the title first, and that's what they're doing. But the market doesn't have to mean starting a startup has decreased dramatically. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of looking bad than by the desire to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of fixing payments. Keep doing whatever made you seem hot. If you go and see all the different types of solutions to this problem, but it isn't the real thing. Why do the founders ignore the partners' advice? There's a lot of people. Even if the big corporations had wanted to pay people proportionate to their value, they couldn't have multiple people editing the same code, because it coincided with the amount many wanted to raise.

Thanks to Justin Kan, Joe Gebbia, Peter Norvig, Joshua Reeves, Ariel Poler, Paul Buchheit, Steve Huffman, and the rest of the Python crew at PyCon for reading a previous draft.

[daedricsnakes]

God, your enclosures are /so nice/!!! I strive to reach that level of natural habitat mimicry one day when I have the funds and space! Do you have any tips for going bioactive? I'm thinking that it's the way to go for my corn snake, but I'm afraid of enclosure maintenance/costs and all that... did you use any particular reading resources in planning your enclosures? Thanks in advance!!

Oh thank you!! I really appreciate that <3 

And yes! I’m always happy to help where I can. I absolutely understand the feeling. Before I started, I was very intimidated by the idea of bioactive. I distinctly remember writing in the tags of a picture of a bioactive setup a few years ago about how I absolutely loved how it looked and it seemed like an awesome thing to have but there was no way I’d ever be able to manage to do that myself, it’s way too complicated. 

Once I actually convinced myself to start the research, it all came together pretty quickly and now I’m working on #6 and 7 (sort of… since I ended up almost completely scrapping the last setups in my bps’ current enclosures) and soon #8, once the cage arrives :) 

I’ve never kept a corn snake, but I can definitely help with the general stuff. 

For research, I started off mostly with NEHERP’s vivarium building articles. They mostly work with frogs and small geckos, but their info translated just fine for my ball python setups. I believe a corn snake’s husbandry requirements are at least similar and would be considered tropical more than arid, so their info should be able to help you as well. At least to get started.

I bought most of the stuff for my first vivarium build from them as well. Plants, substrate, etc. Now I would recommend shopping around at various websites and local stores to find the best prices, but I still buy from them for some things, and have always been happy with what I get from them. Some other websites I would recommend looking around are Josh’s Frogs and Glass Box Tropicals. Bugs in Cyberspace usually has a nice selection of bugs that are useful for the clean up crew. I’ve shopped from all of the above and like all of them! 

Amazon, Reptile Supply Co, Chewy, Pangea, and other similar websites have some supplies you might find useful as well. Take your time shopping around to find the best price and shipping costs. Do this well ahead of time to get an idea of what kind of money you’ll need to set aside for it, and you may have a better time keeping to budget. Local hardware stores (lowes is a personal favorite) and plant nurseries are great to visit as well. You’ll get better deals on the plants at these places. Lowes won’t have quite the variety as online, but I can almost always find something in their garden section to take home even if I wasn’t intending to. I would absolutely recommend finding a dedicated nursery, though. They are the happy medium between price and variety. And if you talk to the employees, they may be able to help you find plants that can thrive in the conditions your vivarium will have. 

It can be a big investment at the start. There’s a lot you have to buy to get it set up. And there will be quite a bit of trial and error involved. Some plants will probably die and you’ll waste a little money. But once you find what works for you, once your vivarium is growing, I find the maintenance is no more challenging than any other type of setup. I water my plants as needed and I keep the moss hydrated (having a drainage layer helps but it still needs to be supplemented), and spot clean when necessary. Every now and then, I replenish the leaf litter as it gets broken down and I clean the glass regularly. But unless you are adding something new or rearranging or something, you really don’t have to do that much once your vivarium is established. 

I hope this is enough to help you get started in your research! I think this got a little sloppy and scattered but if you have any other questions or want more specific info, please feel free to ask. This is one of my favorite things to talk about and I am more than happy to share what I’ve learned! I also have other posts and reblogs with helpful info in my bioactive tag, if you want to look through that :)