Reflections on the correlation between intelligence and success

Having recently reread Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book: Outliers - the story of success, I've been thinking about the correlation between high IQ and success in life. I think I may have come up with a nice way to clarify Malcolm Gladwell's conclusions. Malcolm writes that to succeed in a given field you need to pass a certain threshold of intelligence, but that having more intelligence than the required threshold will not increase your chances of success.

comment spam countermeasures (mollom, honeypots, hashcash, bad behavior)

The spam situation has recently gotten a bit out of hand and automated defenses have been giving in.

I've taken a close look at the problem and implemented a gauntlet of spam countermeasures that I'm hoping will give us back the upper hand for a while longer, without compromising on the user experience.

Previously, we only used mollom to filter out comments by anonymous users. This was easy to get around for two reasons:

Good design is harder than it looks

A few months ago I worked a couple weeks on a new website design. Just to be clear website design isn't one of my specialties. Not be a long shot. I'm much more of an engineer at heart. That means I feel more comfortable coming up with solutions I can test objectively. Visual design doesn't fit the bill. It's more art than engineering. Open-ended. A seemingly infinite solution space. No clear fitness function that doesn't involve wishy washy, vague notions like taste and style.

Blog Tags: 

Website monetization primer: how online advertising works

Money. A tricky subject to bring up. It's been proven that merely activating the concept will induce selfishness. But bear with me here. This is a public service announcement, not a get rich quick scheme.

If you have a website that gets a reasonable amount of traffic, you've probably considered adding advertising at one point or another. Maybe you're dreaming of quiting your day job to work full time on the site or maybe you just want to cover some basic costs.

Blog Tags: 

Two simple ways a script can detect if it's online

I didn't want installation of one of TurnKey's components to freeze up too long if it was installed offline so I looked for a nice way to detect that without bringing in additional dependencies.

Two methods stood out...

  1. ping Google DNS servers: one second constant delay, regardless if you're online or off: