This reminds one time when I first started playing Counter Strike. I found myself alone one night and could finally play CS without anyone bitching, so I indulged late into the night teaming up with this very highly efficient group of players. Their usage of team commands was incredible and I, being a newbie, followed the better players around closely, often being the support gunner. The teamwork was magical and you just felt the chemistry.

After a few hours, I decided to start making small talk. Then, to my horror, I realized I had been playing with bots the entire time.

I just hope the rest of you are real.

Well, almost. I once saw nickb sneaking into a phone cabin, and pg rushing out shortly after. I reckon I didn't notice the discrepancy; my only thought at the time was "you'd think those guys would have cell phones."

Now it all makes sense!

His posting here has potentially saved many other people much more than that, though...

Conferences to show off new startups are a good thing, but it seems like a bad plan to make the startups launch at the conference. Unless the date happens to be exactly when the startup would have launched anyway, this constraint is going to force them to launch either too early, or too late.

Launching late is very dangerous. Someone else is probably doing what you're doing, and if you launch even a couple weeks later your company could for the rest of its life be described as an X-like site, where X is your competitor's name.

Launching too early is even more dangerous. The right time to launch is as soon as you have something (a) useful and (b) not totally broken. Which means that launching early = launching something useless or broken.

My view:

SOAP is for people who bought the "XML is the universal language" line of bullshit.

REST is for people who know how HTTP actually works.

Neither. The problem isn't aspies or the rest of the world. The problem is a lack of understanding of neurodiversity.

Everybody is different neurologically, weird, undefinable, sometimes subtle ways. The only way our society can grasp that now is by using the disorder/disease/problem mentality. Which is way better than nothing, but not ideal.

I have an uncle that tried that when he opened a pub. It didn't quite work.