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can airware be the operating system to connect the world's drones?
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i have more than 20 drones of different sizes, some of them are big.i am never going to buy a drone that is not mine(closed source) when i could buy machines that are totally under my control.being closed source means the nsa could easily snoop what i do at every moment, in europe, send the gps coordinates, the telemetry, pictures and videos all the time without my consent.us companies are becoming increasingly spies of the us gobertment all around the world, specially people that worked closely with uncle sam, like those guys from airware.i don't see chinese or european companies buying into this, when they can tailor open source into their specific needs. we already do that, so it is not that complex thing to do.i see this article as pr.
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good luck. there's so much diversity in the equipment, payloads and use cases for these systems that it's incredibly difficult to standardize. cutting integration costs has been a dream for many years, but previous standards introduced more complexity than they eliminated.
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can airware be the operating system to connect the world's drones?
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good luck. there's so much diversity in the equipment, payloads and use cases for these systems that it's incredibly difficult to standardize. cutting integration costs has been a dream for many years, but previous standards introduced more complexity than they eliminated.
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it sounds like vaporware :)
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can airware be the operating system to connect the world's drones?
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it sounds like vaporware :)
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i don't think the operating system to connect the worlds drones is going to be closed source. 3dr and their open source base is going to give airware a run for their money as the de facto standard "operating system for drones" in the consumer and more and more in the commercial space.in the meantime people like drone deploy and skycatch will fill the gap when it comes to data collection and processing which is where the real business is long term. drones themselves will continue to become a commodity. also, it's worth remembering that a chinese company, dji, has about 80pct market share in the us for consumer and prosumer drones. lots of competition for everyone.
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can airware be the operating system to connect the world's drones?
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i don't think the operating system to connect the worlds drones is going to be closed source. 3dr and their open source base is going to give airware a run for their money as the de facto standard "operating system for drones" in the consumer and more and more in the commercial space.in the meantime people like drone deploy and skycatch will fill the gap when it comes to data collection and processing which is where the real business is long term. drones themselves will continue to become a commodity. also, it's worth remembering that a chinese company, dji, has about 80pct market share in the us for consumer and prosumer drones. lots of competition for everyone.
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"that kind of stovepipe way of doing things isn't going to scale,"it's amazing how many times this argument is made by proprietary systems people. in their world the web should have never happened.the only chance they have is to use lots of vc money on certification bs that tries to lock out open source projects.i smell pr as well.
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compasses don't work on mars, so how do you navigate?
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venus too - and this is also why neither have water - no strong magnetic field to hold the heliopause at bay, so the solar wind blows water out of the atmosphere.
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celestial navigation plus accurate clocks. i'd think this would be especially good on a planet without clouds (as long as your planet rotates fast enough, so i guess mercury is out). anyone know if mars has any polar stars?<link>
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compasses don't work on mars, so how do you navigate?
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celestial navigation plus accurate clocks. i'd think this would be especially good on a planet without clouds (as long as your planet rotates fast enough, so i guess mercury is out). anyone know if mars has any polar stars?<link>
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does having "no strong magnetic field" mean no ionosphere and thus no shortwave radio?
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compasses don't work on mars, so how do you navigate?
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does having "no strong magnetic field" mean no ionosphere and thus no shortwave radio?
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i am surprised that no one has yet mentioned the gyrocompass: <link> post mentions manually-set directional gyroscopes, but gyrocompasses are a step ahead of that; on any sufficiently-quickly-rotating planet, a gyrocompass will point you towards the geographic poles by noting the axis of precession of a gyroscope with arbitrary orientation. that's even better than a magnetic compass on earth, since the magnetic poles do not line up exactly with the geographic poles, and the magnetic is non-uniform anyway (which is why navigational charts include notations of the magnetic deviation in different areas).
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compasses don't work on mars, so how do you navigate?
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i am surprised that no one has yet mentioned the gyrocompass: <link> post mentions manually-set directional gyroscopes, but gyrocompasses are a step ahead of that; on any sufficiently-quickly-rotating planet, a gyrocompass will point you towards the geographic poles by noting the axis of precession of a gyroscope with arbitrary orientation. that's even better than a magnetic compass on earth, since the magnetic poles do not line up exactly with the geographic poles, and the magnetic is non-uniform anyway (which is why navigational charts include notations of the magnetic deviation in different areas).
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kret develops stellar navigation system for russian strategic bombers<link>
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influxdb 0.9.1 and telegraf 0.1.2 released
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influxdb ceo here. happy to answer questions about influxdb or telegraf
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i'd love it if you could comment on how influxdb + telegraf + grafana + $opensourcealertingtool compares to commercial offerings like datadog or signalfx?also, is telegraf meant to replace cadvisor for influxdb users?
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influxdb 0.9.1 and telegraf 0.1.2 released
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i'd love it if you could comment on how influxdb + telegraf + grafana + $opensourcealertingtool compares to commercial offerings like datadog or signalfx?also, is telegraf meant to replace cadvisor for influxdb users?
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so, next two product will be* one for chart uis
* one for alertsgood luck with the tick platform.
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influxdb 0.9.1 and telegraf 0.1.2 released
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so, next two product will be* one for chart uis
* one for alertsgood luck with the tick platform.
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"some users logged issues about a large number of iops during heavy write loads. to address this we implemented a write ahead log, or wal. no migration is required to take advantage of this feature and it is available as soon as you upgrade. it’s worth noting here that if you are testing a high write load scenario, you will get occasional pauses of up to 3 seconds during wal flushes (depending on hardware and schema). set your timeouts accordingly. we’ll work on smoothing this out over time in future 0.9 point releases."this is a pretty major change and a big caveat!
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influxdb 0.9.1 and telegraf 0.1.2 released
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"some users logged issues about a large number of iops during heavy write loads. to address this we implemented a write ahead log, or wal. no migration is required to take advantage of this feature and it is available as soon as you upgrade. it’s worth noting here that if you are testing a high write load scenario, you will get occasional pauses of up to 3 seconds during wal flushes (depending on hardware and schema). set your timeouts accordingly. we’ll work on smoothing this out over time in future 0.9 point releases."this is a pretty major change and a big caveat!
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careful about installing influxdb and telegraf on the same system via rpm (maybe deb too), they both share common paths and filenames, and cause one (or the other) not to start.<link>
<link>, the changelog items for telegraf all point at influxdb issues.<link> am really excited about telegraf, but am worried about long term maintenance of yet another stats collector. it is very easy to setup, and seems like it will be quiet easy to extend.
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recognising a bad user interface at first glance
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edit: disabled zoom?it's weird to me that google fails, hard, on so many ui things.here's one example from the gmail app on ios, from the feedback screen.<link> [done] button is where the [return] button usually is; and it's directly over the [send] button. so if you don't notice that return is now done, and tap it twice to get a new paragraph, you just sent your unfinished feedback.i blame google, but it could be apple being stupid with the dreadful ios keyboard.> possible to get a pretty good impression of whether the user interface was thought about or rather just an afterthought.i'm sure google spends a lot of time and money on the ui. which just makes it more frustrating to me. eg chrome's (on ios) address bar does not let you select and copy an address until the page has nearly finished loading. and to paste an url into the bar you don't tap the cursor but some mid-point of the address box - except it's flat ui so you just guess where to tap. items in the burger menu take five seconds to become clickable.
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i agree with some of the points (like ambiguous icons and vague error messages), but not all of them.‘if you are an x, then you have to fill in y and z. if you are not an x, please only fill in z, unless z=1, then you should fill y too.’this could be simplified considerably: "fill in z. if you are x or z=1, fill in y." although i'm not surprised that refactoring boolean expressions is something that a lot of people seem to have trouble with.in some cases it can be better to have a more human, relative notation, e.g. ‘within the last hour’, ‘yesterday’, ‘next week’…actually i really, really abhor this style of date formatting since e.g. seeing events all dated "yesterday" - possibly on different sites - make ordering/comparing them nearly impossible. is iso 8601 really beyond comprehension for most of the population?the user interface is totally empty when starting outunless you mean completely empty (as in devoid of any buttons or other widgets), i don't think that's a bad thing. it's funny that it mentions adding an explicit instruction "click ‘add contact’ to add your first contact." when the next point is "visual clutter", since it could very well be the case that the users are confused because after removing that "visual clutter", "add contact" doesn't even look like a button anymore! incidentally, this trend of "flat" ui designs is another thing i loathe.am i the only one who thinks it's rather sad that, despite society spending great effort over the last few hundred years to improve literacy (which was quite successful), we're now dumbing-down software to encourage basically the opposite?
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recognising a bad user interface at first glance
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i agree with some of the points (like ambiguous icons and vague error messages), but not all of them.‘if you are an x, then you have to fill in y and z. if you are not an x, please only fill in z, unless z=1, then you should fill y too.’this could be simplified considerably: "fill in z. if you are x or z=1, fill in y." although i'm not surprised that refactoring boolean expressions is something that a lot of people seem to have trouble with.in some cases it can be better to have a more human, relative notation, e.g. ‘within the last hour’, ‘yesterday’, ‘next week’…actually i really, really abhor this style of date formatting since e.g. seeing events all dated "yesterday" - possibly on different sites - make ordering/comparing them nearly impossible. is iso 8601 really beyond comprehension for most of the population?the user interface is totally empty when starting outunless you mean completely empty (as in devoid of any buttons or other widgets), i don't think that's a bad thing. it's funny that it mentions adding an explicit instruction "click ‘add contact’ to add your first contact." when the next point is "visual clutter", since it could very well be the case that the users are confused because after removing that "visual clutter", "add contact" doesn't even look like a button anymore! incidentally, this trend of "flat" ui designs is another thing i loathe.am i the only one who thinks it's rather sad that, despite society spending great effort over the last few hundred years to improve literacy (which was quite successful), we're now dumbing-down software to encourage basically the opposite?
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>use of image-only icons/buttons that have no distinctive meaningthere's nothing worse than this, along with no alt-text on web pages. with font-icons being so common nowadays, designers want to remove all text and revert back to hieroglyphics.
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recognising a bad user interface at first glance
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>use of image-only icons/buttons that have no distinctive meaningthere's nothing worse than this, along with no alt-text on web pages. with font-icons being so common nowadays, designers want to remove all text and revert back to hieroglyphics.
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> "too much text/instructions"i disagree that too many characters or too much instruction is a sign of a bad interface.for users trying to complete their desired task, an interface lacking instruction/explanation will often cause lower task completion rates and longer average task completion times than an interface with verbose instructions. this is especially true for new users.don't get me wrong: i dislike wordiness and consider myself an advocate for simplicity, minimalism, and concision – and that might be the author's sentiment. however, while bloated instruction may hinder task completion and user engagement, incomplete instruction will prevent it.i believe more useful measures of good instruction are when it is presented, where it is presented, and how well it is understood by users.for example, a well-designed mobile app avoids a text-heavy interface by disclosing the appropriate amount of instruction at the appropriate time. limited screen real estate happens to be a handy constraint in this case, and transfers more instruction responsibility onto a well-designed onboarding wizard. that wizard will really only get one shot to educate users, usher them to their 'aha' moment as quickly as possible, and hold their hand through the few actions that strongly influence successful user engagement and retention.
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recognising a bad user interface at first glance
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> "too much text/instructions"i disagree that too many characters or too much instruction is a sign of a bad interface.for users trying to complete their desired task, an interface lacking instruction/explanation will often cause lower task completion rates and longer average task completion times than an interface with verbose instructions. this is especially true for new users.don't get me wrong: i dislike wordiness and consider myself an advocate for simplicity, minimalism, and concision – and that might be the author's sentiment. however, while bloated instruction may hinder task completion and user engagement, incomplete instruction will prevent it.i believe more useful measures of good instruction are when it is presented, where it is presented, and how well it is understood by users.for example, a well-designed mobile app avoids a text-heavy interface by disclosing the appropriate amount of instruction at the appropriate time. limited screen real estate happens to be a handy constraint in this case, and transfers more instruction responsibility onto a well-designed onboarding wizard. that wizard will really only get one shot to educate users, usher them to their 'aha' moment as quickly as possible, and hold their hand through the few actions that strongly influence successful user engagement and retention.
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recent stupidity: ui asked for postal code (knowing the address being entered was canadian.) without thinking, the user (not me) put it in as l6a 3z3. when the form was submitted, it was rejected with the field flagged in red. the error message said like "please enter the canadian postal code in the correct format, ananan with no spaces." (ananan? cryptic to non-coders; the user was baffled.)postal codes are written with the space:<link> you're already validating the format, how much effort would it take to recognize and accept the common variant which has the space in it? a [ ]? in the regex, and a strip spaces function call.
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airbnb javascript style guide
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looks like a lot of good stuff but it's incredibly verbose and dense. it's important to adhere to standards but i'm not entirely convinced this doesn't end up being counter-productive. but as long as it's a guide and not a 100% "you must follow every little thing" and you can change things then maybe it's not so bad.still hard to get used to so many using es6 already. i'm still not a big fan of transpiling but some days i feel like i'm the only one.
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regarding using single quotes for strings (<link>, i found it interesting that it's one of the rare sections where there's no rationale offered.i guess it's just a stylistic choice in the end, but when we set up our own internal/informal style guide, my teammate and i spent a little while trying to come up with a justification for single vs double quotes. we ended up choosing double quotes based on the fact that json already made that decision for us: it requires strings be double-quoted.(although again, it's far from an important matter, as long as you're consistent), anybody has interesting rationales to share in favor of single quotes?
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airbnb javascript style guide
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regarding using single quotes for strings (<link>, i found it interesting that it's one of the rare sections where there's no rationale offered.i guess it's just a stylistic choice in the end, but when we set up our own internal/informal style guide, my teammate and i spent a little while trying to come up with a justification for single vs double quotes. we ended up choosing double quotes based on the fact that json already made that decision for us: it requires strings be double-quoted.(although again, it's far from an important matter, as long as you're consistent), anybody has interesting rationales to share in favor of single quotes?
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the fact that `typeof` is no longer safe [1][2] is news to me - it feels like they put in air bags and removed the seat belts. [1]: <link>
[2]: <link>
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airbnb javascript style guide
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the fact that `typeof` is no longer safe [1][2] is news to me - it feels like they put in air bags and removed the seat belts. [1]: <link>
[2]: <link>
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i didn't know you could do this! // good
const obj = {
id: 5,
name: 'san francisco',
[getkey('enabled')]: true,
};
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airbnb javascript style guide
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i didn't know you could do this! // good
const obj = {
id: 5,
name: 'san francisco',
[getkey('enabled')]: true,
};
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the best part of this guide is that they included a eslint and jslint rules file.<link> team adopted this style guide and was easily able to add it as a eslint step to our existing gulp files and run it automatically. this let us use the guide without making everyone memorize the syntax differences between their personal style first.
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study: attractive men fare best in gaining venture capital
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time to start a fund that only invests in ugly people. "butterface ventures' investment thesis entails value generation through arbitraging network effects across the lower end of the visual anthropomorphic spectrum"
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attractive "anything" fare best in gaining "everything".
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study: attractive men fare best in gaining venture capital
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attractive "anything" fare best in gaining "everything".
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new study: attractive people fare best in getting what they want
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study: attractive men fare best in gaining venture capital
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new study: attractive people fare best in getting what they want
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i have zero trouble believing that vcs are biased, but this is a terrible terrible study.first, their study collected literally zero data about venture capitalists. their first experiment looked at "pitch competitions", where people give speeches and/or submit business plans to a set of judges, and the judges pick a winner. this is distinct from events like demo day because there is no follow-up or due diligence: choices are made solely based on the speech/written plan. for obvious reasons, these "competitions" usually don't involve serious money. picking three at random from google, the first prizes were $1,000, $3,000, and "a meeting with andreesen horowitz", plus a bunch of discounts from rackspace and so on.the second and third experiments were even sillier. they literally recruited a bunch of random people on mechanical turk, asked them to watch a pitch video, and then asked them to judge which company they thought was more likely to succeed.and even if you did a study showing that vcs invested in men more often, that wouldn't mean vcs are biased: you have to control for a bunch of other factors too. if, eg. startup employees preferred to work for companies run by attractive men, a perfectly unbiased vc would invest in attractive men more often, just because their companies were objectively doing better.here's a link to the original paper: <link>
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study: attractive men fare best in gaining venture capital
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i have zero trouble believing that vcs are biased, but this is a terrible terrible study.first, their study collected literally zero data about venture capitalists. their first experiment looked at "pitch competitions", where people give speeches and/or submit business plans to a set of judges, and the judges pick a winner. this is distinct from events like demo day because there is no follow-up or due diligence: choices are made solely based on the speech/written plan. for obvious reasons, these "competitions" usually don't involve serious money. picking three at random from google, the first prizes were $1,000, $3,000, and "a meeting with andreesen horowitz", plus a bunch of discounts from rackspace and so on.the second and third experiments were even sillier. they literally recruited a bunch of random people on mechanical turk, asked them to watch a pitch video, and then asked them to judge which company they thought was more likely to succeed.and even if you did a study showing that vcs invested in men more often, that wouldn't mean vcs are biased: you have to control for a bunch of other factors too. if, eg. startup employees preferred to work for companies run by attractive men, a perfectly unbiased vc would invest in attractive men more often, just because their companies were objectively doing better.here's a link to the original paper: <link>
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"what's the most important factor in making partner at mckinsey? a good hairline."
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luhn algorithm for validating credit cards
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i find the most interesting thing about the algorithm is that, as mentioned in the article, it was originally designed to be computable by a simple mechanical device.
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the first time i've seen the luhn algorithm was on a compromised web server. the cracker has put several fake ebay login/registration pages, as well as a couple of javascript files.the pages were obviously intended to be used for phishing. however, what really made me go "wow" was the extra mile they went: one of the javascript files contained methods that took the credit card number from the fake registration page and checked its validity w/ the luhn algorithm before emailing it to a random email address. if the number was invalid, the user got an error and they forced him to re-enter.i didn't know about the algorithm at the time (this was around 2005), so i was a bit baffled what the heck they are trying to do.
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luhn algorithm for validating credit cards
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the first time i've seen the luhn algorithm was on a compromised web server. the cracker has put several fake ebay login/registration pages, as well as a couple of javascript files.the pages were obviously intended to be used for phishing. however, what really made me go "wow" was the extra mile they went: one of the javascript files contained methods that took the credit card number from the fake registration page and checked its validity w/ the luhn algorithm before emailing it to a random email address. if the number was invalid, the user got an error and they forced him to re-enter.i didn't know about the algorithm at the time (this was around 2005), so i was a bit baffled what the heck they are trying to do.
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i had come across this while generating test credit card credentials while integrating a payment gateway. had written a small python utility for that. here - <link>
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luhn algorithm for validating credit cards
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i had come across this while generating test credit card credentials while integrating a payment gateway. had written a small python utility for that. here - <link>
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i wrote a bit of code that generates a random number that passes the luhn test.[0] it was one of those random things i did in high school when i was learning to program.[0]: <link>
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luhn algorithm for validating credit cards
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i wrote a bit of code that generates a random number that passes the luhn test.[0] it was one of those random things i did in high school when i was learning to program.[0]: <link>
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this was an interview question at both square and braintree. its weird that interview questions trend from year to year.
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server farm setup for knife depot
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i would remove varnish and use nginx anyday. varnish config makes baby jesus cry.
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thoughts as i run a similar (but completely different) setup on do.1) have you considered dns round robin for your nginx and varnish servers? running 2 of each (at half size) would let either one die and nothing bad happen to your site.2) are you ok with mongodb being a spof?3) are you okay with your main db being a spof?i ask this not to be snarky, but i see that you are 84% of the way to having a spof proof setup, but not quite all the way there. i know i sleep a little better at night knowing that if my nginx box blows up, i have more with dns round robin to keep everything running till the morning.
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server farm setup for knife depot
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thoughts as i run a similar (but completely different) setup on do.1) have you considered dns round robin for your nginx and varnish servers? running 2 of each (at half size) would let either one die and nothing bad happen to your site.2) are you ok with mongodb being a spof?3) are you okay with your main db being a spof?i ask this not to be snarky, but i see that you are 84% of the way to having a spof proof setup, but not quite all the way there. i know i sleep a little better at night knowing that if my nginx box blows up, i have more with dns round robin to keep everything running till the morning.
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nice diagram, i'm borrowing it as a reference for the setup i'm going to be designing for work soon :-)did you consider running nginx for your php application servers as well?also, can i ask what sort of traffic you get per {{ time period }} ??
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server farm setup for knife depot
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nice diagram, i'm borrowing it as a reference for the setup i'm going to be designing for work soon :-)did you consider running nginx for your php application servers as well?also, can i ask what sort of traffic you get per {{ time period }} ??
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that's a great diagram. what do you use to create your diagrams?
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server farm setup for knife depot
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that's a great diagram. what do you use to create your diagrams?
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like others have said, i'd ditch apache/varnish for nginx/php-fpm with the ngx_cache_purge module. that's what i've done, and it's far easier to maintain. the vcl language has always struck me as overly complicated, but that's just me. any reason you chose mongodb over redis? (i work with mongodb and redis on a daily basis, so i was just curious as to why you chose one over the other for session storage).
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nava, a startup that wants to fix the government's crappy design
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> for example, the department of defense and department of veterans affairs spent $1.3 billion on a program to build an electronic health-records database and abruptly stopped the project in 2013 after it failed to progress as planned. more staggering? in the past 10 years, about 96 % of all government it programs that cost over $10 million were deemed failures, meaning they didn't meet their budget, timeline, or user expectations.if this startup (and ones like it) is successful in getting traction taking over some of these projects, there are going to be a lot of very unhappy it companies that were riding the gravy train for decades.> a lot of the work we did last year for retooling the healthcare.gov application process was figuring out which questions were necessary to ask of everyone and which ones were only necessary for certain people. instead of having one online form with dozens of entry fields on a single page, the new healthcare.gov application process asks a few general questions—like income and household size—then directs you to more specific questions based on your replies.jesus. you'd like to think there'd be some minimum baseline of common sense required to design an application of this level of importance.> the newfound optimism about the government's technical future is inspiring, but can a 10-person startup really make a difference?obviously. you'd almost have to be trying to screw it up as bad as the original team did, unless this story isn't an accurate portrayal.
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i'm a (non-us) federal public servant who worked for a small, and now defunct, agency with the mandate to embed 'user-centric' design principles in the creation of public services. at the time we were wound up, i concluded we had failed. now i'm less sure. i still occasionally see instances where our work has influenced other public servants, so perhaps we've had some measure of longer-term success. you should carefully think about and define your metrics for 'success', both in the short and long term.all that aside, the key reason for poor design in government is this: lack of incentive. and no, the ballot box is not an effective incentive; very few voters will punish a government because their tax return form was poorly designed. private companies possess this incentive: if your product is hard to use, people won't buy it and you'll go out of business. government doesn't have this incentive: if people find your products hard to use, they'll use them or they'll (eventually) go to jail, won't get their welfare payment, won't receive a driver's licence etc.outsourcing or privatising these kinds of services is not the answer: you're just substituting a public monopoly for a private one, which arguably leads to worse outcomes for citizens (and great ones for the private monopolist). this kind of action only makes sense if a competitive market will form after government gets out of the way. it's helpful to think of government services in this fashion: a service market that is dominated by a monopolist.so that's the problem you are attempting to solve: how do you get a monopolist with no profit incentive to design better products and services?
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nava, a startup that wants to fix the government's crappy design
|
i'm a (non-us) federal public servant who worked for a small, and now defunct, agency with the mandate to embed 'user-centric' design principles in the creation of public services. at the time we were wound up, i concluded we had failed. now i'm less sure. i still occasionally see instances where our work has influenced other public servants, so perhaps we've had some measure of longer-term success. you should carefully think about and define your metrics for 'success', both in the short and long term.all that aside, the key reason for poor design in government is this: lack of incentive. and no, the ballot box is not an effective incentive; very few voters will punish a government because their tax return form was poorly designed. private companies possess this incentive: if your product is hard to use, people won't buy it and you'll go out of business. government doesn't have this incentive: if people find your products hard to use, they'll use them or they'll (eventually) go to jail, won't get their welfare payment, won't receive a driver's licence etc.outsourcing or privatising these kinds of services is not the answer: you're just substituting a public monopoly for a private one, which arguably leads to worse outcomes for citizens (and great ones for the private monopolist). this kind of action only makes sense if a competitive market will form after government gets out of the way. it's helpful to think of government services in this fashion: a service market that is dominated by a monopolist.so that's the problem you are attempting to solve: how do you get a monopolist with no profit incentive to design better products and services?
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i spoke to one of them on the phone recently and was very impressed! if i didn't have a couple of other compelling things occupying me right now i'd seriously consider joining their team in dc pronto. they are preparing to introduce more government clients to speedy iterations in clean modular application development and i'm eager to see them continue to impress.
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nava, a startup that wants to fix the government's crappy design
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i spoke to one of them on the phone recently and was very impressed! if i didn't have a couple of other compelling things occupying me right now i'd seriously consider joining their team in dc pronto. they are preparing to introduce more government clients to speedy iterations in clean modular application development and i'm eager to see them continue to impress.
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hi! we don't have a jobs page up yet, so i'll leave this here in case anyone's interested in working with us (nava)nava | washington dc* | experienced full-stack developers/devops/product manager/operations | on-site - full timewe're a small team of engineers from silicon valley that came out to dc last year to help fix healthcare.gov. it turns out there’s a lot more to fix. and it’s surprising how much can be fixed by a small group of resourceful people with a silicon valley mindset, deep technical experience, and the willingness to work closely with dedicated civil servants in government.our revamped healthcare.gov application has been used by millions, converts 35% better, and halves the completion time. the login system we rebuilt is about two orders of magnitude more reliable and two orders of magnitude less expensive; for example, it’s about $70m less per year to operate. we’re just getting started, and we’ve started nava to help fix everything else. [0]people die because the veteran's administration is months behind in processing claims. the social security administration pays benefits to millions of deceased americans. $80 billion is spent every year on federal it contracting, and 96% of projects are deemed failures [1].that’s not because there’s some conspiracy or because government is inherently incapable of doing it right. these are complicated legacy systems and processes, and there are very few people with modern tech industry experience who are aware of these problems and willing to help fix them. you can help change that.our team is 10 people (stanford, google, yc alums), and we plan to bring on a few people every month through 2015.we’re looking for:
- experienced full-stack engineers
- experienced devops engineers
- a product manager with a technical background
- a hyper-resourceful operations personwe have a social mission (we just incorporated as a public benefit corporation (pbc) this week), but we pay market compensation (above market, for dc) and equity (above market).if you'd like to build software and infrastructure that radically improves how our government serves people, we’d love to hear from you at [email protected].*not in dc / able to relocate, but intrigued and in sf? talk to us.[1] <link>
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nava, a startup that wants to fix the government's crappy design
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hi! we don't have a jobs page up yet, so i'll leave this here in case anyone's interested in working with us (nava)nava | washington dc* | experienced full-stack developers/devops/product manager/operations | on-site - full timewe're a small team of engineers from silicon valley that came out to dc last year to help fix healthcare.gov. it turns out there’s a lot more to fix. and it’s surprising how much can be fixed by a small group of resourceful people with a silicon valley mindset, deep technical experience, and the willingness to work closely with dedicated civil servants in government.our revamped healthcare.gov application has been used by millions, converts 35% better, and halves the completion time. the login system we rebuilt is about two orders of magnitude more reliable and two orders of magnitude less expensive; for example, it’s about $70m less per year to operate. we’re just getting started, and we’ve started nava to help fix everything else. [0]people die because the veteran's administration is months behind in processing claims. the social security administration pays benefits to millions of deceased americans. $80 billion is spent every year on federal it contracting, and 96% of projects are deemed failures [1].that’s not because there’s some conspiracy or because government is inherently incapable of doing it right. these are complicated legacy systems and processes, and there are very few people with modern tech industry experience who are aware of these problems and willing to help fix them. you can help change that.our team is 10 people (stanford, google, yc alums), and we plan to bring on a few people every month through 2015.we’re looking for:
- experienced full-stack engineers
- experienced devops engineers
- a product manager with a technical background
- a hyper-resourceful operations personwe have a social mission (we just incorporated as a public benefit corporation (pbc) this week), but we pay market compensation (above market, for dc) and equity (above market).if you'd like to build software and infrastructure that radically improves how our government serves people, we’d love to hear from you at [email protected].*not in dc / able to relocate, but intrigued and in sf? talk to us.[1] <link>
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fixing it too well may be incompatible with some personal liberties and privacy. a big problem is that the government has no really solid way to authenticate you online. if it did, you'd need to provide far less info when signing up for something. some of the scandinavian countries work that way.should the us? should government web sites work on the policy that you should never have to tell the government something it already knows?
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illustrated book on indian mars orbiter mission
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i find it interesting that sending a probe more than 200 million kilometers to another planet is a lot easier than launching multi-ton payloads into the geosynchronous orbit.i am referring to the fact that india still relies on the esa to launch its communication satellites.
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of all the excellent casual script typefaces out there, they had to choose comic sans.
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illustrated book on indian mars orbiter mission
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of all the excellent casual script typefaces out there, they had to choose comic sans.
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i like how they made the great red spot on anthropomorphic jupiter into a bindi. who knew that jupiter was hindu :)
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illustrated book on indian mars orbiter mission
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i like how they made the great red spot on anthropomorphic jupiter into a bindi. who knew that jupiter was hindu :)
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this is meant as a book for kids to bring more passion to the field.. dont worry about the scrolling and fonts. its the pdf of the printed copy..
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illustrated book on indian mars orbiter mission
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this is meant as a book for kids to bring more passion to the field.. dont worry about the scrolling and fonts. its the pdf of the printed copy..
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off-topic: is it just me or does this page mess with scrolling?
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show hn: tunemachine, version control for spotify playlists
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very cool — nice running to you in sf last week, jake :)
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this looks nice!on a slightly related note, has anyone already run into a spotify to apple music playlist converter? i'm curious to see if apple music has all the music available that spotify has. i'm thinking about switching after all the changes that spotify has implemented over the years.
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show hn: tunemachine, version control for spotify playlists
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this looks nice!on a slightly related note, has anyone already run into a spotify to apple music playlist converter? i'm curious to see if apple music has all the music available that spotify has. i'm thinking about switching after all the changes that spotify has implemented over the years.
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i've always wanted a local script that would back up all the playlists automatically (instead of having to copy-paste things manually like you can do now), and be able to run it whenever you want to back it up. i don't even care about restoring, i just want to keep my playlist info in any plaintext format so that if spotify disappears or i leave, i can still have the playlist info and rebuild them elsewhere.does this exist, or would i have to hack my own script together?
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show hn: tunemachine, version control for spotify playlists
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i've always wanted a local script that would back up all the playlists automatically (instead of having to copy-paste things manually like you can do now), and be able to run it whenever you want to back it up. i don't even care about restoring, i just want to keep my playlist info in any plaintext format so that if spotify disappears or i leave, i can still have the playlist info and rebuild them elsewhere.does this exist, or would i have to hack my own script together?
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nice.how much should i believe this site will stay around? i'm currently using an ugly, manually-updated google spreadsheet as a backup for my largest playlist project, bachify [1] -- it's got 1075 tracks, one for each bach bwv number with an available recording.i dread what i'd have to do if i ever accidentally lost the playlist. is it reasonable to consider tunemachine as the backup instead?[1] <link>
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show hn: tunemachine, version control for spotify playlists
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nice.how much should i believe this site will stay around? i'm currently using an ugly, manually-updated google spreadsheet as a backup for my largest playlist project, bachify [1] -- it's got 1075 tracks, one for each bach bwv number with an available recording.i dread what i'd have to do if i ever accidentally lost the playlist. is it reasonable to consider tunemachine as the backup instead?[1] <link>
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this is ironic because spotify's playlist backend ("playlist4") is actually implemented as a distributed version control system with automatic conflict resolution. this is what lets you edit the same playlist on multiple devices, some of which might be offline, and then have a consistent view once everything is synced. it's also what lets our cs staff revert and restore user playlists if there are any accidental or catastrophic changes.we've just never found the demand or a reasonable ui for exposing the underlying complexity to users.
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ask hn: as a junior developer, how do i learn to better architect software?
i don't quite know how to ask this, so bear with me. i feel like there's a large gap, a lack of direction between the common advice - dry, kiss, design patterns, clean code, etc. - and understanding how to tackle actual architecture problems.<p>on the small team i work on, we have various problems that are affecting our ability to maintain and extend our code, and, more importantly, hindering our ability to scale.<p>an example: we've been using mysql basically as a data processing platform for transforming data overnight (and storing it transformed in separate tables), so we can do even more aggregation for requests during business hours, albeit more efficiently; i want to be able to simplify the role of the database, move the processing logic up, and get away from long overnight jobs. however, we lose the benefit of having our pre-processed data resting in the database waiting to be aggregated at a moment's notice; doing both the processing then aggregation on the fly would be far too expensive. how do i research how to deal with that?<p>this also extends to architecting our code. the front-end especially is rough, the usual story of pent up technical debt. our web interface has gotten more and more complicated, and while we can get very far by just revisiting it with experienced eyes, there's still glaring problems with complex interactions of components.<p>i'm pushing (and succeeding) at moving towards efforts to clean up the mess that has accumulated (maybe even a whole rewrite, woo!), but i want to be able to really pull my weight and contribute to the process. i'm a recent graduate, and my design experience is relatively limited, but considering the number of resources available to me to learn how to become a better _developer_, i'm missing what's available to become a better _architect_ (beyond the usual "it comes with time"). i hope that makes sense.
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without knowing much detail about your platform or what it does, you should be using the database to be doing the heavy processing, it is likely to be more efficient than application level code. in my opinion the declarative nature of sql means that is less buggy than application code (though that may not always be the case).i usually find if my application code is getting to complex is time to update the data model.is the database properly indexed so that the queries run optimally? if you aren't sure, this site here is an excellent resource. <link>
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start with episode 1 of se-radio [1] and listen in order. some of it will be dated, some of it might be a challenge relative to your experience, a lot of it will probably be not directly applicable to your job. but they discuss a lot of software architecture at the hardcore uml, big systems, legacy integration, phd research level and you will get to see how experienced architects think about problems and ideas and solutions and discipline. you will encounter abstractions, and applying useful abstractions is the heart of design.good luck.[1]: <link>
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ask hn: as a junior developer, how do i learn to better architect software?
i don't quite know how to ask this, so bear with me. i feel like there's a large gap, a lack of direction between the common advice - dry, kiss, design patterns, clean code, etc. - and understanding how to tackle actual architecture problems.<p>on the small team i work on, we have various problems that are affecting our ability to maintain and extend our code, and, more importantly, hindering our ability to scale.<p>an example: we've been using mysql basically as a data processing platform for transforming data overnight (and storing it transformed in separate tables), so we can do even more aggregation for requests during business hours, albeit more efficiently; i want to be able to simplify the role of the database, move the processing logic up, and get away from long overnight jobs. however, we lose the benefit of having our pre-processed data resting in the database waiting to be aggregated at a moment's notice; doing both the processing then aggregation on the fly would be far too expensive. how do i research how to deal with that?<p>this also extends to architecting our code. the front-end especially is rough, the usual story of pent up technical debt. our web interface has gotten more and more complicated, and while we can get very far by just revisiting it with experienced eyes, there's still glaring problems with complex interactions of components.<p>i'm pushing (and succeeding) at moving towards efforts to clean up the mess that has accumulated (maybe even a whole rewrite, woo!), but i want to be able to really pull my weight and contribute to the process. i'm a recent graduate, and my design experience is relatively limited, but considering the number of resources available to me to learn how to become a better _developer_, i'm missing what's available to become a better _architect_ (beyond the usual "it comes with time"). i hope that makes sense.
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start with episode 1 of se-radio [1] and listen in order. some of it will be dated, some of it might be a challenge relative to your experience, a lot of it will probably be not directly applicable to your job. but they discuss a lot of software architecture at the hardcore uml, big systems, legacy integration, phd research level and you will get to see how experienced architects think about problems and ideas and solutions and discipline. you will encounter abstractions, and applying useful abstractions is the heart of design.good luck.[1]: <link>
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personal projects. as a junior it's hard to get the authority to make long-term architectural decisions in the workplace. it's not really enough to work inside someone else's architecture; seeing something grow from nonexistence is the one true path.
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ask hn: as a junior developer, how do i learn to better architect software?
i don't quite know how to ask this, so bear with me. i feel like there's a large gap, a lack of direction between the common advice - dry, kiss, design patterns, clean code, etc. - and understanding how to tackle actual architecture problems.<p>on the small team i work on, we have various problems that are affecting our ability to maintain and extend our code, and, more importantly, hindering our ability to scale.<p>an example: we've been using mysql basically as a data processing platform for transforming data overnight (and storing it transformed in separate tables), so we can do even more aggregation for requests during business hours, albeit more efficiently; i want to be able to simplify the role of the database, move the processing logic up, and get away from long overnight jobs. however, we lose the benefit of having our pre-processed data resting in the database waiting to be aggregated at a moment's notice; doing both the processing then aggregation on the fly would be far too expensive. how do i research how to deal with that?<p>this also extends to architecting our code. the front-end especially is rough, the usual story of pent up technical debt. our web interface has gotten more and more complicated, and while we can get very far by just revisiting it with experienced eyes, there's still glaring problems with complex interactions of components.<p>i'm pushing (and succeeding) at moving towards efforts to clean up the mess that has accumulated (maybe even a whole rewrite, woo!), but i want to be able to really pull my weight and contribute to the process. i'm a recent graduate, and my design experience is relatively limited, but considering the number of resources available to me to learn how to become a better _developer_, i'm missing what's available to become a better _architect_ (beyond the usual "it comes with time"). i hope that makes sense.
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personal projects. as a junior it's hard to get the authority to make long-term architectural decisions in the workplace. it's not really enough to work inside someone else's architecture; seeing something grow from nonexistence is the one true path.
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in order to find solutions for your problem (redefining the role of the database) you should look at how to analyze your software processes (data flow, dependencies, coupling). being a good architect, in my opinion, is all about analyzing "what's there" and finding ways to transform that into "what should be there which is better because x". what helps me most when analyzing an existing system/architecture is visualizing it. when i can see the thing with my eyes, there are usually all sorts of visual cues that lead to the actual problem(s) with a specific architecture and that is often a good starting point for making changes.
sorry, if my advice may seem a bit generic or simplified.
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ask hn: as a junior developer, how do i learn to better architect software?
i don't quite know how to ask this, so bear with me. i feel like there's a large gap, a lack of direction between the common advice - dry, kiss, design patterns, clean code, etc. - and understanding how to tackle actual architecture problems.<p>on the small team i work on, we have various problems that are affecting our ability to maintain and extend our code, and, more importantly, hindering our ability to scale.<p>an example: we've been using mysql basically as a data processing platform for transforming data overnight (and storing it transformed in separate tables), so we can do even more aggregation for requests during business hours, albeit more efficiently; i want to be able to simplify the role of the database, move the processing logic up, and get away from long overnight jobs. however, we lose the benefit of having our pre-processed data resting in the database waiting to be aggregated at a moment's notice; doing both the processing then aggregation on the fly would be far too expensive. how do i research how to deal with that?<p>this also extends to architecting our code. the front-end especially is rough, the usual story of pent up technical debt. our web interface has gotten more and more complicated, and while we can get very far by just revisiting it with experienced eyes, there's still glaring problems with complex interactions of components.<p>i'm pushing (and succeeding) at moving towards efforts to clean up the mess that has accumulated (maybe even a whole rewrite, woo!), but i want to be able to really pull my weight and contribute to the process. i'm a recent graduate, and my design experience is relatively limited, but considering the number of resources available to me to learn how to become a better _developer_, i'm missing what's available to become a better _architect_ (beyond the usual "it comes with time"). i hope that makes sense.
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in order to find solutions for your problem (redefining the role of the database) you should look at how to analyze your software processes (data flow, dependencies, coupling). being a good architect, in my opinion, is all about analyzing "what's there" and finding ways to transform that into "what should be there which is better because x". what helps me most when analyzing an existing system/architecture is visualizing it. when i can see the thing with my eyes, there are usually all sorts of visual cues that lead to the actual problem(s) with a specific architecture and that is often a good starting point for making changes.
sorry, if my advice may seem a bit generic or simplified.
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offering advice is difficult without more information... but i'll try. yet maybe i'm talking more about systems architecture than software architecture.a cutting-edge architecture is often using cutting-edge technologies. we don't have much details about your system, but it feels like "big data" is your keyword: be it nosql databases, map-reduce, or maybe streaming/events systems are areas to investigate.apache has many projects related to big data, which may give you a broader vision... and guide you. be prepared for a paradigm shift: you can't apply old recipes to new technologies. for example, believing cassandra could replace mysql because it has "almost sql" would be such a mistake: cassandra requires a different data model.try to understand how big data technologies could fit together for your problem, and you'll gain valuable insight. apply these technologies in a successful project, and you'll gain experience.as for your frontend, in terms of architecture, there's not much that can be done but to decouple it (with a rest api) if not already done... it could make a rewrite easier.sorry for such general advice. maybe it's too basic to really help you.
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music piracy is down but still very much in play
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i am in ireland, i wanted 1 single track (apparently there is no such thing as music shops or singles anymore, i feel old)so i went to amazon.com found the track for $0.99 and went to pay, guess what "your credit card has to be issued by us bank" error, despite me having positive amazon.com gift balance with no need to use credit card.
fine so i went to amazon.co.uk, same track gbp 1.00 (notice the markup) and similar error once again despite me having credit on uk site and buying for years electronics and just about everything else for myself.so in end i went to google and found what i wanted on mp3juices.is or something like that.these music companies deserve to go extinct for wasting half an hour of a prospective customers time and putting up silly barriers.
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i wonder how many people will pirate taylor swift's music since she's exclusively linked to apple music? i'm willing to bet a lot of spotify users will dust off utorrent (or whatever people are using for torrents nowadays) and just download the album she has restricted her fans from listening to legally.it's all about ease of access, surely? the introduction of apple music is good for music, but if it means that spotify and apple music are going to further fragment accessible libraries of music then piracy will probably rise.
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music piracy is down but still very much in play
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i wonder how many people will pirate taylor swift's music since she's exclusively linked to apple music? i'm willing to bet a lot of spotify users will dust off utorrent (or whatever people are using for torrents nowadays) and just download the album she has restricted her fans from listening to legally.it's all about ease of access, surely? the introduction of apple music is good for music, but if it means that spotify and apple music are going to further fragment accessible libraries of music then piracy will probably rise.
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piracy is the reason that labels license their content to streaming services like spotify. without the threat of piracy, they would happily maintain the cd-era pricing.
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music piracy is down but still very much in play
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piracy is the reason that labels license their content to streaming services like spotify. without the threat of piracy, they would happily maintain the cd-era pricing.
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situation in germany:
- gema causes video blocking on youtube
- there is the gema-vermutung (it is assumed that if you play music in public, it is from a gema member and you have to pay a fee or prove that the music was from non-gema-members)
- there is a pauschalabgabe fee for storage media (and devices) for the potential use as backup/storage for the music i already paid for (but i am not allowed to crack copy "protection" on media).
- there is a monthly fee for gez/rundfunkbeitrag for state "independent" media bound to just living in a flat/house even if there is no device capable of playing media and not bound to actual use of their service. most media on their online platforms is available for a short period of time (~1 week) and gets deleted after this, they use flash player and there are 3rd party tools [0] necessary so just search through all the media / get a direct link to feed into mplayershould i throw even more money on these unfair systems by buying music/media?[0] <link>
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music piracy is down but still very much in play
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situation in germany:
- gema causes video blocking on youtube
- there is the gema-vermutung (it is assumed that if you play music in public, it is from a gema member and you have to pay a fee or prove that the music was from non-gema-members)
- there is a pauschalabgabe fee for storage media (and devices) for the potential use as backup/storage for the music i already paid for (but i am not allowed to crack copy "protection" on media).
- there is a monthly fee for gez/rundfunkbeitrag for state "independent" media bound to just living in a flat/house even if there is no device capable of playing media and not bound to actual use of their service. most media on their online platforms is available for a short period of time (~1 week) and gets deleted after this, they use flash player and there are 3rd party tools [0] necessary so just search through all the media / get a direct link to feed into mplayershould i throw even more money on these unfair systems by buying music/media?[0] <link>
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i don't know if this is still true or not, but they make (made) damn sure their offer was so ridiculous people would actively try to go around it.the devices limitation? who the fuck came up with this idea thinking it will be good? greedy kids i won't cry if they disappear, which probably won't happen anytime soon.it's simple, people will go for the easiest solution.
i barely know anyone illegally downloading videogames since steam became the go to, and steam is like a big drm but so easy to use, always download at max speed etc, people just use it, including myself.
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why the dutch oppose windmills
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the energy situation now is:- a legal requirement to cut co2 emissions- a ban on building new nuclear plants as well as a commitment to close the remaining one- a moratorium on building windmills because they scare birds and pollute the horizon- the largest supply of natural gas in western europe, but an increasing limit on exploiting this because shifts in ground level are causing cracks in people's walls.- a ban on fracking- there so notoriously little sunshine that people refuse to take solar power seriously, even though it seems to be working just fine in germany.different groups want opposing things. the energy situation would be fine if environmentalists would allow the construction of more windmills and nuclear plants, or if the co2 reduction target was dropped. you can't have it both ways.the people in groningen would probably be fine with continued exploitation of the gas wells if the profits were spent there, but the money is needed by the national government to meet the eu's budget deficit requirements. now much of it will remain in the ground while we buy russian gas.in my opinion the very concept that a horizon is something that can be polluted is the dumbest thing i have ever heard. i think the dutch landscape is featureless and boring, and windmills are a vast improvement. they look modern, industrious, cheerful.
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i have 3 2mw+ machines a few hundred meters from my house and 10's of smaller ones (older models) a little further away. total impact on day to day living: none.i wouldn't mind it if they placed more windmills there either, it's not a densely populated area.so, not all dutch oppose windmills and renewables at this scale really do make an impact.
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why the dutch oppose windmills
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i have 3 2mw+ machines a few hundred meters from my house and 10's of smaller ones (older models) a little further away. total impact on day to day living: none.i wouldn't mind it if they placed more windmills there either, it's not a densely populated area.so, not all dutch oppose windmills and renewables at this scale really do make an impact.
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i often (maybe once a month) buy the economist in print, because it is a good read, whether or not you agree with all their opinions, and is genuinely global in its scope. i once had a print subscription but didn't have time read an issue each week.i don't have an online subscription now, which makes hacker news submissions for economist articles are a little problematic.i wouldn't mind knowing why the dutch oppose windmills.
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why the dutch oppose windmills
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i often (maybe once a month) buy the economist in print, because it is a good read, whether or not you agree with all their opinions, and is genuinely global in its scope. i once had a print subscription but didn't have time read an issue each week.i don't have an online subscription now, which makes hacker news submissions for economist articles are a little problematic.i wouldn't mind knowing why the dutch oppose windmills.
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i actually have 3 windmills in my back yard (the local industrial estate across the busy through-road)you never hear them and hardly ever notice them once they are placed.<link>,4.506723,3a,75y,90t/da... < is one of them.zoetermeer used to have 3 other windmills about 20 years ago, those were replaced with these.only thing i would like is to get cheaper power, that has not happened :|
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why the dutch oppose windmills
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i actually have 3 windmills in my back yard (the local industrial estate across the busy through-road)you never hear them and hardly ever notice them once they are placed.<link>,4.506723,3a,75y,90t/da... < is one of them.zoetermeer used to have 3 other windmills about 20 years ago, those were replaced with these.only thing i would like is to get cheaper power, that has not happened :|
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i know someone with a windmill close by, you hear it constantly and at a certain time during the day the sun shines on the house via the rotor, when it rotates it's like a cloud goes in front of and away from of the sun, at 1-3 hz or so. it drives them crazy.
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ask hn: i am busy with too many things at once
hi nh.<p>a couple of years ago i realised i was a mediocre programmer. after 5 years of work experience with unfinished degree i knew only one language (php of all...) and some good practices on a surface level. i set that for change. for 2 years i studied in my spare time, learned a bit of java, go, clojure, learned some fundamentals and good practices classics (gang of four, dry) started reading blogs and following the industry.<p>except, it's too much. i realised i am into too many things. i know a bit of everything, but not too many things well. i want to study data science, maths, devops and find that my desire is driven by fear of becoming outdated and irrelevant. i would appreciate a piece of advise on managing the learning process, get the joy of tinkering back and conquering the anxiety of ever changing rules to the game. thank you.
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as some noted, the fact that you realized what drives your desire is very impressive. it takes a certain skill to understand those things!as someone who's been at it for years, i'll just give you one little piece of advice. if you've already been through the fundamentals, you've done enough. now, instead of focusing on learning technology, focus on building things, this is what real engineers do.let me explain. you'll probably get much better with at least one thing once you ship a real project to the end, and this is where you'll get better.one of the best programmers i've ever worked with was a php guy when i met him, and he was good because he shipped efficient, tested, and working code fast, all while being able to document and communicate about it with his team. that's what being a programmer is. you won't become a good professional programmer by chasing after hip technologies (even though learning different paradigms always help), but by building things, and preferably with people, because this is how things work in the real world.as long as you stay with startups and technology companies, you'll see that any cto or lead dev worth his salt would rather hire a smart perl programmer with strong fundamentals who shipped things over someone (maybe smart too) who knows a bit of js, a bit of java, and a bit of haskell. this is, however, not true with a lot of non-tech companies, where keywords on resume, a professional-looking attitude, and some good sales skills will usually get you better positions.it's never too late, don't fear irrelevance, build things, and have fun!
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i feel good when i see posts like this. i have suffered and in past month have gone from an employee of very good company to broke unemployed. i am typically starting from scratch.reason: i thought i wasn't a good developer. more i read hn, articles, stories, more i got anxious and left my job to pursue research degree. i figured out i lacked mathematical abilities to do research in the field i wanted to. i became depressed and i felt regret all the time.after 7 months, i realized i was chasing the horizon. i have realized it's not the new things you learn or the awesome technologies you learn that matters. things that matter are: being good at what you do, whatever it be...some people spent life juggling balls. they aren't genius in maths, science etc. but they are awesome at what they do. it makes you feel wow !second, it's about being happy. if you are writing this post in hn then you belong to very privileged class of people in the world. be thankful for what you have. love your family, friends. that is what matters. it doesn't matter what technologies you learn when you turn 60-65. all that matters is the happy moments you have shared with your loved ones.third. don't take what's written by founders or geniuses seriously. read, acknowledge and move on. if you question yourself over what others are doing and learning, you will be in mental hospital soon. so take things easy.last month i took a job in a company. technology wise it's crap. no process. but everything works there. people get things done. we laugh, chat and go home early. i go to gym after work and sleep well after i come back. i enjoy time with my wife on weekend and thank god for this life.it doesn't mean i'm doing nothing. i have compiled a list of books i want to study. i have read 2 chapters and i started a small project for fun. these are the only two things i'll work on..but no rush....slowly. after all they are last things i have to worry about in my life. first things first - enjoy life and be happy.lastly, watch this - <link> see how happy and cheerful she is. she isn't scientist or math genius or a great programmer but she is awesome at what she does. note her answers to questions.
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ask hn: i am busy with too many things at once
hi nh.<p>a couple of years ago i realised i was a mediocre programmer. after 5 years of work experience with unfinished degree i knew only one language (php of all...) and some good practices on a surface level. i set that for change. for 2 years i studied in my spare time, learned a bit of java, go, clojure, learned some fundamentals and good practices classics (gang of four, dry) started reading blogs and following the industry.<p>except, it's too much. i realised i am into too many things. i know a bit of everything, but not too many things well. i want to study data science, maths, devops and find that my desire is driven by fear of becoming outdated and irrelevant. i would appreciate a piece of advise on managing the learning process, get the joy of tinkering back and conquering the anxiety of ever changing rules to the game. thank you.
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i feel good when i see posts like this. i have suffered and in past month have gone from an employee of very good company to broke unemployed. i am typically starting from scratch.reason: i thought i wasn't a good developer. more i read hn, articles, stories, more i got anxious and left my job to pursue research degree. i figured out i lacked mathematical abilities to do research in the field i wanted to. i became depressed and i felt regret all the time.after 7 months, i realized i was chasing the horizon. i have realized it's not the new things you learn or the awesome technologies you learn that matters. things that matter are: being good at what you do, whatever it be...some people spent life juggling balls. they aren't genius in maths, science etc. but they are awesome at what they do. it makes you feel wow !second, it's about being happy. if you are writing this post in hn then you belong to very privileged class of people in the world. be thankful for what you have. love your family, friends. that is what matters. it doesn't matter what technologies you learn when you turn 60-65. all that matters is the happy moments you have shared with your loved ones.third. don't take what's written by founders or geniuses seriously. read, acknowledge and move on. if you question yourself over what others are doing and learning, you will be in mental hospital soon. so take things easy.last month i took a job in a company. technology wise it's crap. no process. but everything works there. people get things done. we laugh, chat and go home early. i go to gym after work and sleep well after i come back. i enjoy time with my wife on weekend and thank god for this life.it doesn't mean i'm doing nothing. i have compiled a list of books i want to study. i have read 2 chapters and i started a small project for fun. these are the only two things i'll work on..but no rush....slowly. after all they are last things i have to worry about in my life. first things first - enjoy life and be happy.lastly, watch this - <link> see how happy and cheerful she is. she isn't scientist or math genius or a great programmer but she is awesome at what she does. note her answers to questions.
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you make 2 interesting statements:- i realised i was a mediocre programmer- ... (i) find that my desire is driven by fear ...the first is a good feeling :-) too many programmers don't have this realisation. embrace it!the second is something that worries me slightly. all of the programmers that i know who are driven by fear let it chase them into failure. getting the "joy of tinkering back" is what you need. forget the "ever changing rules". chase what you love and forget about the rest.now for some specific advice. you are at a level now where you need to integrate your knowledge, not learn bits and pieces. stop everything else you are doing and start a major project that will occupy your time for the next year or so. it doesn't matter what it is, only that it is something you love. this will help you more than anything else.
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ask hn: i am busy with too many things at once
hi nh.<p>a couple of years ago i realised i was a mediocre programmer. after 5 years of work experience with unfinished degree i knew only one language (php of all...) and some good practices on a surface level. i set that for change. for 2 years i studied in my spare time, learned a bit of java, go, clojure, learned some fundamentals and good practices classics (gang of four, dry) started reading blogs and following the industry.<p>except, it's too much. i realised i am into too many things. i know a bit of everything, but not too many things well. i want to study data science, maths, devops and find that my desire is driven by fear of becoming outdated and irrelevant. i would appreciate a piece of advise on managing the learning process, get the joy of tinkering back and conquering the anxiety of ever changing rules to the game. thank you.
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you make 2 interesting statements:- i realised i was a mediocre programmer- ... (i) find that my desire is driven by fear ...the first is a good feeling :-) too many programmers don't have this realisation. embrace it!the second is something that worries me slightly. all of the programmers that i know who are driven by fear let it chase them into failure. getting the "joy of tinkering back" is what you need. forget the "ever changing rules". chase what you love and forget about the rest.now for some specific advice. you are at a level now where you need to integrate your knowledge, not learn bits and pieces. stop everything else you are doing and start a major project that will occupy your time for the next year or so. it doesn't matter what it is, only that it is something you love. this will help you more than anything else.
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i think you have found two problems that many people will bump into: (1) there are two many subfields to keep track of everything; (2) in any particular subfield there are people who seem to be infinitely much better than you are :).both are true: there are simply too many subfields if you want to excel in all of them, for any particular subfield there are people who are much better than you are, because most of them have invested a lot of time to become an expert.my first advise would be to get the basics right: many commonly-used algorithms and data structures haven't changed the last 20-50 years. if you know then inside-out, you know what to pick to solve a problem. get a good book on algorithms & data structures or follow a course or two.my second advise would be to pick the area that interests you the most. read the foundational books, follow the leaders in the field, and do projects (they are good practice and help you to build a portfolio). put a strong filter on the stuff that irrelevant to your chosen area (only read the most interesting bits). you will find that you quickly change from novice to expert in your area.when it comes to programming languages: it's fun and useful to know some languages. but in the end what you ship is more important. so, just pick a language that feels natural for solving the problem and don't get too distracted by armchair pl philosophers ;).
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ask hn: i am busy with too many things at once
hi nh.<p>a couple of years ago i realised i was a mediocre programmer. after 5 years of work experience with unfinished degree i knew only one language (php of all...) and some good practices on a surface level. i set that for change. for 2 years i studied in my spare time, learned a bit of java, go, clojure, learned some fundamentals and good practices classics (gang of four, dry) started reading blogs and following the industry.<p>except, it's too much. i realised i am into too many things. i know a bit of everything, but not too many things well. i want to study data science, maths, devops and find that my desire is driven by fear of becoming outdated and irrelevant. i would appreciate a piece of advise on managing the learning process, get the joy of tinkering back and conquering the anxiety of ever changing rules to the game. thank you.
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i think you have found two problems that many people will bump into: (1) there are two many subfields to keep track of everything; (2) in any particular subfield there are people who seem to be infinitely much better than you are :).both are true: there are simply too many subfields if you want to excel in all of them, for any particular subfield there are people who are much better than you are, because most of them have invested a lot of time to become an expert.my first advise would be to get the basics right: many commonly-used algorithms and data structures haven't changed the last 20-50 years. if you know then inside-out, you know what to pick to solve a problem. get a good book on algorithms & data structures or follow a course or two.my second advise would be to pick the area that interests you the most. read the foundational books, follow the leaders in the field, and do projects (they are good practice and help you to build a portfolio). put a strong filter on the stuff that irrelevant to your chosen area (only read the most interesting bits). you will find that you quickly change from novice to expert in your area.when it comes to programming languages: it's fun and useful to know some languages. but in the end what you ship is more important. so, just pick a language that feels natural for solving the problem and don't get too distracted by armchair pl philosophers ;).
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for me, the major insight was to realize that the best of the best are struggling just as much as myself. i often come back to this diagram for relief, and it's true.<link>'s really all about focus. learn one thing at once. rinse and repeat, and come back to the topic later for more insight.<link>'t be afraid to say "i don't get that (yet)." - for me it's a sign of quality in an engineer, if he realizes he doesn't grasp a concept yet.all others are struggling too, even the best:<link> the end, if you're not embarrased about the code you wrote half a year ago, it's a sign you're not progressing.
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fda approves theranos test for hsv-1
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all that hype for a microfluidic sandwich elisa?
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what the heck, i posted this exact same link like 12 hours ago.
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fda approves theranos test for hsv-1
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what the heck, i posted this exact same link like 12 hours ago.
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one guess i have about theranos , is that they are going to radically change healthcare in africa. why ?well let's start with the fact that the main thing preventing labs-on-chip devices transforming africa today is business reasons - its just not seen as a good investment by western companies.but what's unique about theranos is that it is owned by holmes ,which seems very idealistic(as her main motivation here ) , and her father worked for years helping african healthcare .so i think holmes will use the strong business it will build in the west to create and extremely low cost african healthcare .that also explains why she has advisors like foreign state secretary and why bill gates is very impressed with her.
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fda approves theranos test for hsv-1
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one guess i have about theranos , is that they are going to radically change healthcare in africa. why ?well let's start with the fact that the main thing preventing labs-on-chip devices transforming africa today is business reasons - its just not seen as a good investment by western companies.but what's unique about theranos is that it is owned by holmes ,which seems very idealistic(as her main motivation here ) , and her father worked for years helping african healthcare .so i think holmes will use the strong business it will build in the west to create and extremely low cost african healthcare .that also explains why she has advisors like foreign state secretary and why bill gates is very impressed with her.
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the biggest problem with mass testing are the false positives. when you're testing 100 million people even a low false positive rate of 0.1% will still mean that 100 000 people will think they're sick when they're not. i once even saw an example where they calculated that when everybody did an hiv test most positives actually would be false positives.
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fda approves theranos test for hsv-1
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the biggest problem with mass testing are the false positives. when you're testing 100 million people even a low false positive rate of 0.1% will still mean that 100 000 people will think they're sick when they're not. i once even saw an example where they calculated that when everybody did an hiv test most positives actually would be false positives.
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i didn't realize that walgreens is already doing theranos tests.<link> tests do they perform? is this something that we should be doing yearly?[update] fixed typo
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react v0.14 beta 1 released
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we looked at what you can do with a ref to a dom component and realized that the only useful thing you can do with it is call this.refs.giraffe.getdomnode() to get the underlying dom node. in this release, this.refs.giraffe is the actual dom node.this only holds if you use facebook's particular flavour of flux, i guess.personally, i use refs a lot to bubble events down the component hierarchy. for example, when the browser window loses focus and gains it again, some sub sub component of the root component might want to do set some local state. whatever, display a "welcome back!" message or something. i can use refs to do this.refs.subcomponent.onwindowshow() and this makes my code very clean and flexible - it keeps browser event stuff out of my flux stores, and only the actual important user data in there.similarly, i use refs to ask an <input> component whether its value is valid according to some validation rule. i could also give the input an onvaluevaliditychanged prop, but that just increases the amount of bookkeeping i need to do. if i'm rendering a form with 2 inputs, name and email, calling "this.refs.name.isvalid()" in some onbuttonclick handler makes a lot of sense to me.i really liked how react was separated from particular architecture patterns, but this change makes that a lot more difficult. i really hope this change can still be reversed.
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i think this is the crux -> we think the true foundations of react are simply ideas of components and elements: being able to describe what you want to render in a declarative way. these are the pieces shared by all of these different packages (react-native, react-art, react-canvas, react-three). the parts of react specific to certain rendering targets aren't usually what we think of when we think of react.i've not played with react-native yet (waiting for android) but i feel this is a positive step towards their vision of "learn once, write anywhere". from the twitter updates it seems, sebestian markbage, gave a pretty cool talk on the same topic at reacteurope yesterday. can't wait to check that out. <link>; to make this more clear and to make it easier to build more environments that react can render to, we're splitting the main react package into two: react and react-dom.great to see the react team responding positively to the developments in community and not being afraid to take hard decisions (like this one)lastly, if you're a web developer and deciding between going the 'web components' route or the react route, this announcement gives you, imho, an even more impetus to pick up react.
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react v0.14 beta 1 released
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i think this is the crux -> we think the true foundations of react are simply ideas of components and elements: being able to describe what you want to render in a declarative way. these are the pieces shared by all of these different packages (react-native, react-art, react-canvas, react-three). the parts of react specific to certain rendering targets aren't usually what we think of when we think of react.i've not played with react-native yet (waiting for android) but i feel this is a positive step towards their vision of "learn once, write anywhere". from the twitter updates it seems, sebestian markbage, gave a pretty cool talk on the same topic at reacteurope yesterday. can't wait to check that out. <link>; to make this more clear and to make it easier to build more environments that react can render to, we're splitting the main react package into two: react and react-dom.great to see the react team responding positively to the developments in community and not being afraid to take hard decisions (like this one)lastly, if you're a web developer and deciding between going the 'web components' route or the react route, this announcement gives you, imho, an even more impetus to pick up react.
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i am using/loving react a lot and is already in several production apps i am working on (thanks for awesome work facebook!) but i don't fully get this release.i feel it's a bit premature to separate `react` and `react-dom`. react has proven itself for the web but still has to prove itself as `react-native` and i don't get the friction/complexity being added by break it down into two components for the web. i feel react is more the rendering engine `react-dom` than the class/component system now `react`. what makes react beautiful is to be able to freely mix html into js and not being limited to the render() call, so i feel the cut is a bit non-organic.finally, i love the approach `learn once, write anywhere` but having `react` as a thing by itself points (or at least confuses) to a workflow where you can write components by themselves then plug a rendering engine dom or native, i don't think that's the initial intent and i don't think that's the intent now of this release as well but it's unnecessary confusing.[edit] don't fully get why i've been downvoted.
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react v0.14 beta 1 released
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i am using/loving react a lot and is already in several production apps i am working on (thanks for awesome work facebook!) but i don't fully get this release.i feel it's a bit premature to separate `react` and `react-dom`. react has proven itself for the web but still has to prove itself as `react-native` and i don't get the friction/complexity being added by break it down into two components for the web. i feel react is more the rendering engine `react-dom` than the class/component system now `react`. what makes react beautiful is to be able to freely mix html into js and not being limited to the render() call, so i feel the cut is a bit non-organic.finally, i love the approach `learn once, write anywhere` but having `react` as a thing by itself points (or at least confuses) to a workflow where you can write components by themselves then plug a rendering engine dom or native, i don't think that's the initial intent and i don't think that's the intent now of this release as well but it's unnecessary confusing.[edit] don't fully get why i've been downvoted.
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if you haven't already, you should be betting on react. it's the future:> more importantly, this paves the way to writing components that can be shared between the web version of react and react native. this isn't yet easily possible, but we intend to make this easy in a future version so you can share react code between your website and native apps.isn't this what we have all been waiting for? writing components that are composable, that are "isomorphic or universal", that can run on native or dom without any downsides of it's predecessors.aside, the article also mentions a migration tool [1] to help you port your code from 0.13 to 0.14. while others may have done so before, it's pretty cool that this is streamlined as part of the beta release.[1]: <link>
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react v0.14 beta 1 released
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if you haven't already, you should be betting on react. it's the future:> more importantly, this paves the way to writing components that can be shared between the web version of react and react native. this isn't yet easily possible, but we intend to make this easy in a future version so you can share react code between your website and native apps.isn't this what we have all been waiting for? writing components that are composable, that are "isomorphic or universal", that can run on native or dom without any downsides of it's predecessors.aside, the article also mentions a migration tool [1] to help you port your code from 0.13 to 0.14. while others may have done so before, it's pretty cool that this is streamlined as part of the beta release.[1]: <link>
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we're considering trying react for a new project, and just read about the adoption of babel [1] instead of the internal transpiler previously used for jsx. one question: does this mean that jsx will be able to use es6 syntax supported by babel out of the box? if so, will this be the default for this new version of react?i ask the questions also because we would really like to be able to use react with coffeescript, but, even if there are many solutions to do so, no one is supported by facebook and we're worried about future compatibility. is adopting babel going to influence the ability to use react with cs?[1] <link>
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ask hn: best language for micro services for a startup
i'm in a startup and we're looking for the right language to build our micro services. our android/ios mobile apps and our website are accessing our database using their own respective php backends. we're working on building a set of services which'll serve as a common backend for all these. our team has 15 odd developers ranging from newbies to people with 7 years of experience. look at the linked google spreadsheet where i've jotted down certain options that i could. what's your suggestion?<p><link>
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why not keep using php and experiment with new languages on smaller and less critical services?
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every single thing in your spreadsheet is impossible to objectively measure (i'd argue your java row is laughably incorrect for instance).from a business perspective picking a language just isn't that important, it will not be the thing that makes you (un)successful.so i'd go the other way, what language do the most people want to work on and has the least "i'll quit if we pick that" factor? just use that.
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ask hn: best language for micro services for a startup
i'm in a startup and we're looking for the right language to build our micro services. our android/ios mobile apps and our website are accessing our database using their own respective php backends. we're working on building a set of services which'll serve as a common backend for all these. our team has 15 odd developers ranging from newbies to people with 7 years of experience. look at the linked google spreadsheet where i've jotted down certain options that i could. what's your suggestion?<p><link>
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every single thing in your spreadsheet is impossible to objectively measure (i'd argue your java row is laughably incorrect for instance).from a business perspective picking a language just isn't that important, it will not be the thing that makes you (un)successful.so i'd go the other way, what language do the most people want to work on and has the least "i'll quit if we pick that" factor? just use that.
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elixir (or plain erlang) by far. <link> few more reasons:- elixir/phoenix outperforms quite everything for some usecases <link> elixir code is well suited for longer maintenance modes <link> elixir unions the advantages of monolithic apps and microservices and is very easy to scale <link>
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ask hn: best language for micro services for a startup
i'm in a startup and we're looking for the right language to build our micro services. our android/ios mobile apps and our website are accessing our database using their own respective php backends. we're working on building a set of services which'll serve as a common backend for all these. our team has 15 odd developers ranging from newbies to people with 7 years of experience. look at the linked google spreadsheet where i've jotted down certain options that i could. what's your suggestion?<p><link>
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elixir (or plain erlang) by far. <link> few more reasons:- elixir/phoenix outperforms quite everything for some usecases <link> elixir code is well suited for longer maintenance modes <link> elixir unions the advantages of monolithic apps and microservices and is very easy to scale <link>
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one of the big advantages of "micro-services" is that for each individual service, you can pick the best language suited for that service. if you're going to pick a single language (and i agree with kasey_junk on which to pick), then just make a single service, in one language, and split it when you need the isolation or differences in scaling each piece.
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ask hn: best language for micro services for a startup
i'm in a startup and we're looking for the right language to build our micro services. our android/ios mobile apps and our website are accessing our database using their own respective php backends. we're working on building a set of services which'll serve as a common backend for all these. our team has 15 odd developers ranging from newbies to people with 7 years of experience. look at the linked google spreadsheet where i've jotted down certain options that i could. what's your suggestion?<p><link>
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one of the big advantages of "micro-services" is that for each individual service, you can pick the best language suited for that service. if you're going to pick a single language (and i agree with kasey_junk on which to pick), then just make a single service, in one language, and split it when you need the isolation or differences in scaling each piece.
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imho: scala by far- you can use pretty much any jvm library- you can execute scala applications in a jvm which is a pretty common platform for other tools. think ci, deployment on servers, etc.- akka cluster out of the box. on other systems you have to build your custom communication pipelines for messaging between your multiple instances of the services
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really well-designed parallax(?) scrolling
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for the lazy, the source reveals these jquery dependencies:<link>
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they could at least have run it through pngquant...original image is 1mb:
<link> version is 250kb:
<link>
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really well-designed parallax(?) scrolling
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they could at least have run it through pngquant...original image is 1mb:
<link> version is 250kb:
<link>
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nice trick, aesthetically, but horrible for anything else.
drawing stutters on both ff 39 and chrome on an i5 system. breaks the scroll wheel (i had to use page up/down or the scroll bar). basically impossible to navigate accurately to anything.a gimmick, of the same kind i hate flash for.
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really well-designed parallax(?) scrolling
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nice trick, aesthetically, but horrible for anything else.
drawing stutters on both ff 39 and chrome on an i5 system. breaks the scroll wheel (i had to use page up/down or the scroll bar). basically impossible to navigate accurately to anything.a gimmick, of the same kind i hate flash for.
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shaft is a well known anime studio, famous for several series including <link> and <link> shown here.
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really well-designed parallax(?) scrolling
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shaft is a well known anime studio, famous for several series including <link> and <link> shown here.
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what is the real advantage of this over clicking on the page ?as i see it, usual scrolljacking implementations give the illusion of a more immersive experience with the following tradeoffs over clicking navigation:- interferes with the inherent perception of what the scroll does (moving a page up/down)- harder to navigate (you have to scroll a lot to trigger a section change)- harder to understand how much more is left to see- harder to implement and to debug potential bugs- needs a menu to mitigate all of the above (defeating the purpose of scrolling)and probably more stuff that i can't think of right now
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ask hn: share your best personal productivity tips and tricks
productivity, staying on focus, fighting distraction and procrastination and so on are often addressed in "ask hn" threads, but it is difficult to find and keep track of the nuggets and best tips and tools mentioned in the responses.<p>so, let's use this thread to collect and share your best tips, tools and ressources for personal productivity.
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here's what works for achieving extreme levels of hyper-creativity and hyper-productivity for me. will it work for you? yes. will you do it? no, you will find endless excuses to call the below "impossible". still, for anyone who dares, here it is:1. get as much sleep as you can. consistently. yes, it's counter-intuitive. yes, you'll have fewer waking hours. but those few hours will be many times more productive and joyful.2. drink more water and eat fresh food. eat less than you normally do.3. get plenty of fresh air and sunlight.4. get a good amount of physical activity throughout the day (exercise, walks, whatever works for you)5. get plenty of vacation time during the year. do not do any work during your vacation time - focus on enjoying yourself. (ideally, 1/3 of the year should be spent on vacation time)6. make a list of the 20 most important things you want to accomplish (near-term). sort the list so that at the top you have the things that you feel most passionate about. keep the top 2 items and scratch everything else (i don't mean de-prioritize - i mean scratch it / drop it / burn it / forget it / it ain't happening.)7. focus all of your time and attention on doing those things that are most exciting to you personally. whether those things have any utility to anyone other than you is irrelevant. you come first.8. if there is anything else that still absolutely needs to be done - find a way to delegate it to someone who's good at that stuff.9. you will be unstoppable.
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avoid multitasking as hell. very few people can really afford it without going mad in the long run. at first it's very demotivating because you feel like stalling but then you'll naturally learn what (and how) you can micro-improve in your daily life to make the whole pipeline of todos more productive. i might not look very productive in the eyes of multitaskers, but at least i'm happy and totally not burned out.
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ask hn: share your best personal productivity tips and tricks
productivity, staying on focus, fighting distraction and procrastination and so on are often addressed in "ask hn" threads, but it is difficult to find and keep track of the nuggets and best tips and tools mentioned in the responses.<p>so, let's use this thread to collect and share your best tips, tools and ressources for personal productivity.
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avoid multitasking as hell. very few people can really afford it without going mad in the long run. at first it's very demotivating because you feel like stalling but then you'll naturally learn what (and how) you can micro-improve in your daily life to make the whole pipeline of todos more productive. i might not look very productive in the eyes of multitaskers, but at least i'm happy and totally not burned out.
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- buy a cheap android tablet to do all the time-wasting activities on(hn/reddit/tv-shows), that way it is pretty easy to avoid doing any of it on your laptop, which turns it into a pure-productivity device that you use only for creating things.- try to find one most important activity to do and focus on doing that. switching your focus between several tasks, or having to constantly decide what is the most important thing to do takes an enormous toll on your focus and productivity.- start to value being lean. aside from adding things to your life(buying physical objects, taking on projects, developing skills, engaging in activities), realize that removing unimportant things is also very valuable. i love making my life lean, it is surprisingly liberating to remove unnecessary noise and be able to focus on what really matters.- instead of just relying on your will power, try to align your incentives, and make the things you do fun and engaging. will power is important, but i'm 1000 times more productive when i find an activity my brain can "buy in" into, and be completely engaged in.- read about the "flow" state, understanding how it works is very important to improve your engagement.- read about the "pomodoro" technique. i don't always use it, at some points in my life it works very well, sometimes it doesn't. but it's cool to know about.- track&share is an awesome ipad app for tracking habits.
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ask hn: share your best personal productivity tips and tricks
productivity, staying on focus, fighting distraction and procrastination and so on are often addressed in "ask hn" threads, but it is difficult to find and keep track of the nuggets and best tips and tools mentioned in the responses.<p>so, let's use this thread to collect and share your best tips, tools and ressources for personal productivity.
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- buy a cheap android tablet to do all the time-wasting activities on(hn/reddit/tv-shows), that way it is pretty easy to avoid doing any of it on your laptop, which turns it into a pure-productivity device that you use only for creating things.- try to find one most important activity to do and focus on doing that. switching your focus between several tasks, or having to constantly decide what is the most important thing to do takes an enormous toll on your focus and productivity.- start to value being lean. aside from adding things to your life(buying physical objects, taking on projects, developing skills, engaging in activities), realize that removing unimportant things is also very valuable. i love making my life lean, it is surprisingly liberating to remove unnecessary noise and be able to focus on what really matters.- instead of just relying on your will power, try to align your incentives, and make the things you do fun and engaging. will power is important, but i'm 1000 times more productive when i find an activity my brain can "buy in" into, and be completely engaged in.- read about the "flow" state, understanding how it works is very important to improve your engagement.- read about the "pomodoro" technique. i don't always use it, at some points in my life it works very well, sometimes it doesn't. but it's cool to know about.- track&share is an awesome ipad app for tracking habits.
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given a set of tasks t, that have to be done, and the tasks are interdependent.sort t by difficulty to complete.
complete one task after the other starting with the hardest.this approach goes against the often spread advice that you should start with the easiest tasks, which are probably fast to complete, in order to get quickly a feeling of accomplishment which keeps you motivated.
i think this approach is wrong and here is why:imo our brains always weigh risk multiplied with investment against reward, and as long as the reward outweighs (risk * investment), we are motivated: risk meaning here, that you invest time and effort but eventually you miss the deadline and are not paid the full reward. the more time we let pass, without completing anything, then the risk of not getting the rewards becomes bigger and eventually it is not worth our effort anymore, and our brain finds more rewarding things to do (procrastinates). so why should we start with the hard tasks first?because, given that we start with the easy ones first, we reduce the available time to complete the hard tasks, and by the time that we start with the hard ones, the risk of failing becomes too big in order to be still motivated. in contrary, when we start with the hard ones, of course it takes longer to finish them, and the time left for the easy ones is less, but our brain can easily estimate the risk of easy tasks, and it will find that it's quite possible to get the final rewards, because we already finished the hard ones.the realisation changed my life. i completed my cs master studies within 15 months.
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ask hn: share your best personal productivity tips and tricks
productivity, staying on focus, fighting distraction and procrastination and so on are often addressed in "ask hn" threads, but it is difficult to find and keep track of the nuggets and best tips and tools mentioned in the responses.<p>so, let's use this thread to collect and share your best tips, tools and ressources for personal productivity.
|
given a set of tasks t, that have to be done, and the tasks are interdependent.sort t by difficulty to complete.
complete one task after the other starting with the hardest.this approach goes against the often spread advice that you should start with the easiest tasks, which are probably fast to complete, in order to get quickly a feeling of accomplishment which keeps you motivated.
i think this approach is wrong and here is why:imo our brains always weigh risk multiplied with investment against reward, and as long as the reward outweighs (risk * investment), we are motivated: risk meaning here, that you invest time and effort but eventually you miss the deadline and are not paid the full reward. the more time we let pass, without completing anything, then the risk of not getting the rewards becomes bigger and eventually it is not worth our effort anymore, and our brain finds more rewarding things to do (procrastinates). so why should we start with the hard tasks first?because, given that we start with the easy ones first, we reduce the available time to complete the hard tasks, and by the time that we start with the hard ones, the risk of failing becomes too big in order to be still motivated. in contrary, when we start with the hard ones, of course it takes longer to finish them, and the time left for the easy ones is less, but our brain can easily estimate the risk of easy tasks, and it will find that it's quite possible to get the final rewards, because we already finished the hard ones.the realisation changed my life. i completed my cs master studies within 15 months.
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i have a lot of productivity programs, calendar apps, todo lists, mind mapping software etc. etc... but the greatest tool in my arsenal is a notebook and a pen.every morning, before i start working, i browse my calendar, omnifocus, notes from yesterday, and with my notebook, i write down the three things i absolutely want to get done today.i don't always get those three things done, but i sure do make a lot of progress on them and feel good about my productivity at the end of the day.something about the ritual and physical act of writing stuff down with a pen really does it for me. when i forget to do this or start working without it, i feel directionless and will mostly just answer email and get inconsequential stuff done all day.
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safari isn’t the problem, but the lack of browser choice in ios is
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the problem is all in this fragment: "as a vendor of dominant mobile operating system". we all know apple makes more money than any other mobile manufacturer, and we all know they are culturally dominant, but in terms of actual market penetration, they own 20% of the global market. samsung gets 27%, just to mention one competitor.this makes it extremely hard to get any sort of antitrust leverage against apple. we can keep screaming at them until we're blue in the face and nothing will change.
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without being jailbroken it is nearly impossible to properly utilize alternative browsers. i particularly enjoy being able to choose my default browser (and mapping choice) for links. if when i click a link it always opens in safari, i end up using that browser a lot more than i would given a choice. apple also hamstrings alternative browsers by not allowing them the ability to utilize the nitro javascript engine. the tweak nitrous allows chrome and other apps with in-app browsers the ability to do so, but it shouldn't have to be this way!
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safari isn’t the problem, but the lack of browser choice in ios is
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without being jailbroken it is nearly impossible to properly utilize alternative browsers. i particularly enjoy being able to choose my default browser (and mapping choice) for links. if when i click a link it always opens in safari, i end up using that browser a lot more than i would given a choice. apple also hamstrings alternative browsers by not allowing them the ability to utilize the nitro javascript engine. the tweak nitrous allows chrome and other apps with in-app browsers the ability to do so, but it shouldn't have to be this way!
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no, the way to get apple's attention over safari is to pull a page out of apple's own playbook and that page should be "ios strategy for flash." these days apple doesn't negotiate with developers. when they have to negotiate it's hardball time. given that apple mostly ignores requests from the community of ios developers, the odds apple will mea culpa to people even less relevant to its strategy than "the help" are probably zero.a concerted campaign of browser sniffing and delivering a "we don't serve your kind here" to mobile safari users is going to stand a much better chance of apple's attention than a petition. there's nothing wrong with treating the current situation as just business, but if it really needs to change then that change has to be driven by market changes. a hallmark card to tim cooke ain't gonna do it.
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safari isn’t the problem, but the lack of browser choice in ios is
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no, the way to get apple's attention over safari is to pull a page out of apple's own playbook and that page should be "ios strategy for flash." these days apple doesn't negotiate with developers. when they have to negotiate it's hardball time. given that apple mostly ignores requests from the community of ios developers, the odds apple will mea culpa to people even less relevant to its strategy than "the help" are probably zero.a concerted campaign of browser sniffing and delivering a "we don't serve your kind here" to mobile safari users is going to stand a much better chance of apple's attention than a petition. there's nothing wrong with treating the current situation as just business, but if it really needs to change then that change has to be driven by market changes. a hallmark card to tim cooke ain't gonna do it.
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what made ie6 ie6 wasn't the technical choices it made, but the fact that whatever were its views, those were forced on the world by its market dominance.the browser that is closer to that position now is chrome, not safari. the sad fact that apple does not allow other browsers in their platform in fact may be overall a good thing if it keeps google from owning the web alone.apple may need to do something or risk losing some of the appeal of ios. but calling safari the new ie is barking at the wrong tree.
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safari isn’t the problem, but the lack of browser choice in ios is
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what made ie6 ie6 wasn't the technical choices it made, but the fact that whatever were its views, those were forced on the world by its market dominance.the browser that is closer to that position now is chrome, not safari. the sad fact that apple does not allow other browsers in their platform in fact may be overall a good thing if it keeps google from owning the web alone.apple may need to do something or risk losing some of the appeal of ios. but calling safari the new ie is barking at the wrong tree.
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personally mandating a single webview on ios ends up being a good thing for ios users: a fast, responsive, quality rendering engine that has the same experience everywhere and gets updated with each major ios release - dramatically reducing the permutations of rendering engine versions that needs to be tested against and supported.one of the liberating things when first developing a web app for ios was only having to support a single modern browser, allowing usage of advanced features which weren't crippled by having to gracefully support old ie versions. only having to target a single platform with limited resolutions is also one of the few benefits i see with native ios development.apple have always put the end users experience before developers, so it's primarily focused on maintaining a fast, fluid browsing experience on ios which is the most used browser for tablets and smart phones and imo still continues to provide the best browsing experience on any mobile device.so it doesn't follow the feature-mill factory pushed by other browser vendors, i still prefer ios's performance focus, yearly upgrade cycle which thanks to ios's fast upgrade adoption, ios web developers get to enjoy adopting new features long before android web developers who have to support the old browsers shipped on jellybean.
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most exclusive website
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<link>
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i've been in line for 24 hours and still have tens of thousands of people in front of me...
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most exclusive website
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i've been in line for 24 hours and still have tens of thousands of people in front of me...
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surprising to see such a contrived marketing gimmick working on so many people. actually, maybe it's not that surprising...for those who want to see what's behind the curtain, here's your spoiler: <link>;v=j0ff5geww_e
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most exclusive website
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surprising to see such a contrived marketing gimmick working on so many people. actually, maybe it's not that surprising...for those who want to see what's behind the curtain, here's your spoiler: <link>;v=j0ff5geww_e
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they should add bitcoin bidding in the queue. if it starts from zero, maybe somebody for some reason wants to skip thousands of people for 0.1mbtc (e.g. to advertise something i guess)
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most exclusive website
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they should add bitcoin bidding in the queue. if it starts from zero, maybe somebody for some reason wants to skip thousands of people for 0.1mbtc (e.g. to advertise something i guess)
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> 'granting permission simply confirms if you are a verified user and how many followers you have.'does it even make sense?
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react performance
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this smells like a shill piece by a google developer advocate [1] with a horse in the race [2].the key benefit of react is an extremely low cognitive load. there are only three simple concepts to grok (props, state and lifecycle) to get productive. the code is very easy to reason about (components are essentially pure functions of props and state) and debugging is much simpler than with vanilla js or jquery on a project of any meaningful size.with respect to performance, react shines when it comes to dom mutations (e.g. removing a div from dom, creating a new div, inserting new div into the dom) which is what you generally encounter with the real-world load. here is a demo illustrating such load [3]. benchmark offered by op is amazingly contrived (actually it feels designed to show react in a bad light and lack of full source code is very telling). i struggle to think of a real-world scenario of append-only page with 1000+ images in the dom, there is simply no valid reason to do that. react in turn makes it really easy and fast to implement infinite scrolling (similar to uitableview) and there are a couple of good open source components that address that.[1] see the bottom of <link>[2] <link>[3] <link>
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posting benchmarking without full source code is bad. and you should feel bad.i remember seeing people bashing angular 1.2/3 for its speed and then looking at their source and they weren't using some of the most powerful features cough cough react conf (<link> this ended up corrected at some point by some one who looked at the source code, forked it and made it perform on par with the react version.i don't doubt the vanilla js is faster (in this case) but really, you need to make your source available before posting to your blog. benchmarking in a fair way is hard, and you are damaging the public perception of a (from what i hear) a great framework. maybe this is justified, but at least give the fanboys a chance to call you out - maybe everyone will learn something new.
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react performance
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posting benchmarking without full source code is bad. and you should feel bad.i remember seeing people bashing angular 1.2/3 for its speed and then looking at their source and they weren't using some of the most powerful features cough cough react conf (<link> this ended up corrected at some point by some one who looked at the source code, forked it and made it perform on par with the react version.i don't doubt the vanilla js is faster (in this case) but really, you need to make your source available before posting to your blog. benchmarking in a fair way is hard, and you are damaging the public perception of a (from what i hear) a great framework. maybe this is justified, but at least give the fanboys a chance to call you out - maybe everyone will learn something new.
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frustratingly, we can't actually look at the react code he used, because it is google proprietary code(?). but there are definitely slow and fast ways to take an array of elements and render it. ideally, each element would be wrapped in a component with a "key" property to speed up diffing.also, the standard way to do infinite scrolling when you care about performance, especially on mobile, is to reuse a small number of elements, just enough to cover the screen and then some. you don't actually create 1500 elements.
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react performance
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frustratingly, we can't actually look at the react code he used, because it is google proprietary code(?). but there are definitely slow and fast ways to take an array of elements and render it. ideally, each element would be wrapped in a component with a "key" property to speed up diffing.also, the standard way to do infinite scrolling when you care about performance, especially on mobile, is to reuse a small number of elements, just enough to cover the screen and then some. you don't actually create 1500 elements.
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i think this is a contrived, or over-simplified, example.the dom manipulation is fast in this case because it's a simple appendchild every time. in other cases like where elements in the middle of a table are updated, you would get into a mess writing vanilla code, either complexity or performance wise, because you'd have to traverse the dom to get to where you need to do updates and do each update individually. react batches such things together, and does one single update.show me a benchmark of an actual real app written in vanilla js and react. i suspect the dom manipulation time would be way higher.
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react performance
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i think this is a contrived, or over-simplified, example.the dom manipulation is fast in this case because it's a simple appendchild every time. in other cases like where elements in the middle of a table are updated, you would get into a mess writing vanilla code, either complexity or performance wise, because you'd have to traverse the dom to get to where you need to do updates and do each update individually. react batches such things together, and does one single update.show me a benchmark of an actual real app written in vanilla js and react. i suspect the dom manipulation time would be way higher.
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obviously diffing is going to have some overhead.but this overhead is minimal in most use-cases. the benchmark in this article is not a real use-case.if you wanna show 1200 images in a web page, or 1200 elements of any kind in one web page, then you should only create dom elements for those of them that should actually be visible by the user. you read the scroll position and calculate which ones would be visible in the viewport, create dom elements for those, and disregard the rest.in most real-world applications, this technique would suffice. your dom and vdom would be small, and you'd only be diffing maybe 5-10 elements at a time.although, i can think of use-cases where this technique, and react's style of coding may not be sufficient. one example is ios's photos app. sometimes it animates hundreds of elements at a time (where you're viewing photos by year or location). i guess diffing might not be a fast enough solution for this use-case.
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bitcoin: a flawed currency with a useful application for the eurozone (2014)
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along with,
<link>'d ask him one question: how is the idea of regulated, political and centralized money working out for you?
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this proposal has nothing to do with bitcoin, though. this ft-coin is a currency (parallel to the euro) issued by a central authority, just as any other fiat currency.this is completely different from bitcoin, whose value arises from the cost of mining (hardware purchase, power, maintenance, and time spent), and people's willingness to exchange that for other currencies and/or goods.
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bitcoin: a flawed currency with a useful application for the eurozone (2014)
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this proposal has nothing to do with bitcoin, though. this ft-coin is a currency (parallel to the euro) issued by a central authority, just as any other fiat currency.this is completely different from bitcoin, whose value arises from the cost of mining (hardware purchase, power, maintenance, and time spent), and people's willingness to exchange that for other currencies and/or goods.
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for those who don't know, the author is now greece's finance minister.
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bitcoin: a flawed currency with a useful application for the eurozone (2014)
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for those who don't know, the author is now greece's finance minister.
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while i can't say with certainty whether mild and predictable deflation is bad for the economy, i don't think that these standard arguments that are used are sufficiently persuasive.1) it is clear that a deflationary spiral, defined as possessing the characteristics of being unexpected, not written into contracts or loans, and relatively severe (double digits) while accelerating is bad. the great depression makes this clear. we can also see it in the current greek situation. however, runaway inflation is equally bad, as we can see from post ww1 germany, and modern day venezuela and argentina. is it the fact that the change in the buying power of money is large and unexpected, or is it the sign of the inflation percentage that is bad?2) under the current debt based money system, the negative effects of inflation fall primarily on the poor. the wealthy purchase government bonds, which protect them inflation. they also have bank accounts, or finance debt either directly or indirectly. this means that instead of inflation falling on the populace evenly, it falls doubly on the poor.3) under a constant money supply system that eschews debt, the rich must seek out investment that actually increases productivity, rather than doing parasitic zero-sum investments (such as bond purchases and loan giving) that merely transfer value from one person to another. this would tend to grow the economy faster.4) under a constant money supply (like bitcoin in a few years), wages and prices would tend fall by however much the economy was growing (2% - 3% a year), but the raises that people give out for seniority would tend to overwhelm the wage issues.
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bitcoin: a flawed currency with a useful application for the eurozone (2014)
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while i can't say with certainty whether mild and predictable deflation is bad for the economy, i don't think that these standard arguments that are used are sufficiently persuasive.1) it is clear that a deflationary spiral, defined as possessing the characteristics of being unexpected, not written into contracts or loans, and relatively severe (double digits) while accelerating is bad. the great depression makes this clear. we can also see it in the current greek situation. however, runaway inflation is equally bad, as we can see from post ww1 germany, and modern day venezuela and argentina. is it the fact that the change in the buying power of money is large and unexpected, or is it the sign of the inflation percentage that is bad?2) under the current debt based money system, the negative effects of inflation fall primarily on the poor. the wealthy purchase government bonds, which protect them inflation. they also have bank accounts, or finance debt either directly or indirectly. this means that instead of inflation falling on the populace evenly, it falls doubly on the poor.3) under a constant money supply system that eschews debt, the rich must seek out investment that actually increases productivity, rather than doing parasitic zero-sum investments (such as bond purchases and loan giving) that merely transfer value from one person to another. this would tend to grow the economy faster.4) under a constant money supply (like bitcoin in a few years), wages and prices would tend fall by however much the economy was growing (2% - 3% a year), but the raises that people give out for seniority would tend to overwhelm the wage issues.
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this is actually nothing to do with bitcoin - it's about using blockchain technology to issue what is effectively government debt in crypto-currency form - i.e. what overstock have done.
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mastercard to start verifying transactions through selfies
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people are missing the point, like "chip and pin" this is not about protecting the consumer but about protecting mastercard and their duopoly"what you mean you did not pay for a hooker and rum in amsterdam, then who is this in a selfie you took" > shows a selfie some hacker stole from the poor eejits lifeinvader page.
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there's lots of easy avenues to attack this.1. look for user's youtube, facebook, and other social media for photos/video2. videochat and record them.3. find them irl and record them.4. print a mask of that person, and leave eye holes. now you blink instead.ridiculous.
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mastercard to start verifying transactions through selfies
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there's lots of easy avenues to attack this.1. look for user's youtube, facebook, and other social media for photos/video2. videochat and record them.3. find them irl and record them.4. print a mask of that person, and leave eye holes. now you blink instead.ridiculous.
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relevant link: "fingerprints are usernames, not password" (applies to all biometrics): <link> story short, it's a bad idea, and it's really not secure.
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mastercard to start verifying transactions through selfies
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relevant link: "fingerprints are usernames, not password" (applies to all biometrics): <link> story short, it's a bad idea, and it's really not secure.
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i'm starting to feel like a grey neckbeard. in my day, when i wanted to hang out with my friends, i called them, from a landline, known simply as "the phone". these days, i'm at or near a desktop/laptop computer almost 24/7 so don't see much need for a smartphone. i dread the day when a smartphone is required to be a part of society. it's shifting in that direction rapidly. if being on facebook/linkedin also becomes a necessity, hopefully i'm already retired and have a beautiful lawn.
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mastercard to start verifying transactions through selfies
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i'm starting to feel like a grey neckbeard. in my day, when i wanted to hang out with my friends, i called them, from a landline, known simply as "the phone". these days, i'm at or near a desktop/laptop computer almost 24/7 so don't see much need for a smartphone. i dread the day when a smartphone is required to be a part of society. it's shifting in that direction rapidly. if being on facebook/linkedin also becomes a necessity, hopefully i'm already retired and have a beautiful lawn.
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this reminds me of the hat from fifth element:<link>
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