I think we can all recall a teacher or teachers in our life who truly made a difference in teaching us something - sometimes _despite_ our interest (or lack thereof) of learning it.

I was forced in University to take a course in Propositional Calculus (it was a breadth requirement for computing science) - it was mid-day so I attended the class (unlike early morning classes in which my attendance was abysmal) - I went in with zero desire - no coding, or even math. But, the timing was right so I just sat in the class.

The instructor spent thirteen weeks walking us through Reductio Ad absurdum proof, tautologies, conditional proofs, etc.. He gave us homework assignments that built on earlier knowledge, and just as we were getting into new material, he'd throw some earlier sequent proofs at us to solve and refresh our memories.

Here is the thing - I had _no_ interest in this course, the only thing going for it was it's timing, and repetition. I was _killing_ myself trying to learn integration by parts, linear algebra, discrete math, spending 5 hours outside of class for every hour in class trying to master those other course, and basically just sitting in this one distraction course. I was a C+ student in the math courses (after _massive_ effort) - I walked out of the Propositional Calculus course with an A+.

Sixteen years later I look back at University and can honestly say that the most useful course, that I _continue_ to have rock solid knowledge of PLUS use almost every single hour of the day was that stupid Philosphy 210 Propositional Calculus course. For the life of me I can't remember much of graph theory, and wouldn't be able to invert a matrix if you held a gun to my head, but, I'll sit in a meeting and see a ton of possible alternative and immediately start applying Disjunction elimination to break us out of a log jam.

There really is something to this spacing method.

The single most effective sentence in the entire story; in fact, it could probably stand for the entire story.

To me, this is just insane. Walking a mile alone when you're ten years old shouldn't be an issue unless there's a riot going on or something.

What are you telling the kids about the world around them when you're terrified of letting them out into it? Not that people in general are decent people who can be trusted to not cause them any trouble, at least. Maybe this is connected to how "many" Americans feel they need guns to protect themselves?

What's really amazing is how much difference one person can make. We're used to thinking that way in our work, but sometimes it takes a selfless act on a bigger issue to show us that our efforts don't have to be restricted to our own projects.

Thank you, John. You are an inspiration.

The major inflection points (past the initial push caused by the LGBT press and places like Hacker News) was getting the story on the BBC. Key to that was Richard Dawkins. He simply signed the petition and said so publicly and then went on Channel 4 news. With him on board it was easy to tell a story to the journalists and off it went.

Nobody believes me when I say middle class Americans would call that child abuse.

What I want to know is who's the engineer he suckered into getting his first codebase up and running?

There've been a lot of times - most recently yesterday - when I've hacked up a solution, mailed it off, and got back a response of "I just did this a couple days ago. With a one-line change, my code could've covered your needs too." And then of course I'm like, "Oh. Shit. Let's modify your code instead and I'll throw away my changelist."

I get the feeling this happens a lot outside of my own personal/professional sphere as well. Google's famous for its NIH syndrome. Python's got about 5 different competing web frameworks. Lots of people still write their own machine code generators instead of using LLVM. I'm kinda curious how much coding people are willing to do to save one e-mail.

Ironically, the folks who insist on building their own stuff are often right. Google's certainly done well for itself, and it's great that we can use Django instead of Zope now. So maybe the problem is that communication really is so expensive that people are better off rewriting large chunks of code to avoid it. But if that's true, we should be looking for ways to reduce the cost of communication, rather than glorifying the folks who go to heroic measures to avoid it.

It's curious - yesterday, Coders at Work was at the top of the hotlist, and most of the comments said, "I'd rather learn about the business & management aspects than the technical aspects." Yet here's an interesting business & management problem, but everyone's commenting on the technical aspects.

1) How many children walk or bike to school every day? ~10 million?

2) How many of those 115 were kidnapped while on their way to or from school? Half?

3) How many of the answer to 2) were kidnapped while they were on their way to or from school alone? Half again?

Perhaps this is an artifact of how seriously the Twisted people and their 'lead hacker' take their project. But the twisted-centric view of the world leads to petulant posts full of odd statements:

My main point here is that if you're about to undergo a re-write of a major project

They wrote Tornado, they didn't 'undergo a rewrite of Twisted'.

For a tiny fraction of the effort invested in Tornado, FriendFeed could have worked with us to resolve many of the issues creating that chaos.

Interfacing with an another team to solve problems in a framework they didn't like (even if just aesthetically) would have probably taking significant resources for close to zero return.

There's quite a bit more in the same vein. It's wonderful that the Twisted people care. But perhaps a little too much.