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NinetyNine

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Mason Blier

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Webshell.io 14 years ago

Interacting and exploring APIs is either the newest fad or a gold rush for new business, but one of the biggest things stopping me from using them is integration into my existing stable tools. webshell.io is another service which is hosting your code on an external service, leaving you vulnerable to fluctuations in their uptime or stability as a company. There may be new opportunities in turning this into a desktop application.

There's no automated service, but you can have the post office hold any package for you for a week or so. These guys look like they're going after the online retailer distribution market though, similar to Amazon's upcoming "lockers" platform.

Give A Damn 14 years ago

That's a pretty interesting situation. I certainly don't think there's any "something" blocking you, I'd guess it's more of a vague feeling of caution that you're clinging to because you can't quite understand it. It's easy to get into these traps when it's something very important (like your job).

There are a few things you can try. You can create a personal project to explore the depths of "not refactoring", in hopes that you'll get used to it. You could also just try getting faster at your newer technique: writing code and refactoring in an hour instead of 3 (learning your tools like a master helps with this).

Your "sudden change" probably wasn't so sudden, but rather your experience with hitting the limitations of writing shitty code. Now you want to avoid those pitfalls in the future, but your boss doesn't seem to understand.

There's also plenty of places for you to go still, if none of the above works for you.

Edit: Creating a checklist of "the smallest chunk of work" can help you keep moving rather than getting stuck in tweakfinity.

Pair that with a slightly stronger form of data hiding by using TrueCrypt's hidden partition feature to encrypt the second OS partition. Just make sure not to ever boot into the honeypot os afterwards, or it could overwrite parts of the hidden partition. You can safely load the honeypot os by typing in the hidden password as well so that true crypt can load the proper partition boundaries.

In my current project we do actually stand up, although only due to the pleasure of the team leader. The main reason it's called a "stand up" is to serve as a reminder that it should be very short, 5 minutes max, or otherwise the time most people would feel comfortable standing for a meeting.

I'm not really sure how you're implementing scrum. Our scrum standups are always just the programmers, once a day in the mornings, and are used to keep all the programmers on the same page and talk to each other to find out if features might have a codependency, or if other blockers can be solved by something else another dev is working on. There's no "watching" of people or "intimidation".

You might want to speak to your manager next time something like that is happening, because there's no way it can be good for your productivity or the other people on your team. It's certainly not a normal practice. At the very worst, if someone isn't pulling their weight they should be dealt with in private.

The exchange doesn't have much of an effect when most goods are priced relative to the exchange rate (many sites even automate this). The only thing the currency price represents is the relative change in market size where these coins are used.

The sampling frequency doesn't directly effect the audio frequencies it can encode. Telephones do PCM encoding (meaning it has data representing the graph of the sound wave) at 8 kh/z. Following the nyquist sampling theorem (cut your rate by 2), this can allow frequencies up to 4 kh/z (as you said). It's not a hard cutoff though, you can still get most of the sounds above that pitch, they'll just sound pretty weird (as if you were talking on the telephone!)

There's a certain allure to saying code should be a certain way because of natural properties of computing, or our own feelings on what things are different and similar from what other things.

The reason OO shines is because it allows you to make that distinction at the domain level rather than the code level. You organize your software into business objects, or components, and have these interact with each other. They allow you to separate it out in a way that a new developer can come to the project, understand what the code should be doing, and look for the classes which seem the like objects involved, including the types of data it has and the things it can do.

There are all sorts of nasty things we've invented in OO over the past few years (mixing up inheritance and composition, using way too much state), but it gives us a lot of advantages from an engineering point of view.

Evernote Hello 14 years ago

The idea of bump was consensual near-field communication, I think that it applies quite well in this case.

Whether this drug does damage your health in the long run is no where near determined.

I think, more interestingly, I'd ask if it were to become known that modafinil (or adderall) were harmful long term, would people still use it to gain competitive advantage. If we gain a nootropic with significant effects, at what point does it become disadvantageous not to jump on the mystery train? The 'line' that can be crossed is different for everyone.

Another possibility is that a drug comes along and enhances cognitive function with minimal side effects, and while the long term effects are virtually unknown, users of these drugs outcompete those who don't. What do you think any appropriate response to such a situation might be?

I don't think anyone is incapable of learning. I'd say the reasons more people don't do it are (it's not easy) and (there's no hard evidence, therefore it's easy to dismiss).

At the end of the day, there's one solid evidence of advice that I've ignored one too many times.

"Just try it."

also exercise.

In my experience, pleasantness and unpleasantness are day to day feelings that sometimes work in my favor and sometimes don't. Many times I have a responsibility which requires unpleasant things, and it makes it more difficult to do, and might make me unhappy if my happiness is based on daily frustrations and successes. That type of happiness tends to have very little to do with our goals. Since it's also very unpredictable, seeking this form of happiness is elusive and error prone.

Maybe there's a different emotion I could seek in my life. Potentially that feeling of accomplishment. Accomplishing something feels great. A lot of people have realized this, single player video games were based on the idea. It is, however, not hapiness. Happiness comes and goes.

If I allow my happiness to flow and fluctuate and act as it always does, and rather focus on getting that feeling of accomplishment, my attitudes change. When I approach a challenge, I don't focus on whether it will make me happy. When I do that, I think about the immediate perks, but also about all the potential frustrations that accompaygne the task.

So I think about it as accomplishment. If I do this task, I will accomplish something. Taking out the trash, 10 points. I don't care about the actual points I have, as the points aren't what I seek. So I don't even keep track. But as games are goals and games have points, it might be easier to connect in your mind with some points.

Go out running. Don't think about how long you have to run for, or how fast you have to run. Don't even worry about the clothes you're in. Just get on your street, and run in a direction. Any speed. Any pace. Now that you've started, and you've jogged enough to get warmed up, pick an object a short distance away and race to it as fast as you can. When you get there you'll be winded, and tired, and you might even vomit. Vomiting is just some random frustration though, it has nothing to do with the accomplishment that you just ran faster than you have in the past x years.

If you do decide you like accomplishing things, then this pattern of setting goals and reaching them can be done with tasks lists and check boxes. Build a momentum of doing it.

The next step is to align your goals to your dreams. Then take that momentum and checklists, and you'll feel more energy than ever to getting what you want done.

I'm not specifically referring to you keeptrying, I was simply writing some ideas down and ended up switching to second person since it was more natural for me to write that way.

I disagree that anyone is "naturally-inclined" to be better at algorithms, or coding, or abstract thinking. Rather, approach it as if we've been a blank slate that has picked up techniques and patterns of thinking, as throughout our lives we've been confronted with problems that required a new way of thinking. I'd reckon that someone you see as "naturally inclined" has simply encountered problems before that lend themselves to abstract in a similar way as these new problems they face (algorithms, architecture, speaking Japanese).

If you believe my paradigm, then you start to realize that not only is your mind extremely flexible, but that by focusing on a varied set of similar problems, you can start developing a framework to pick up more skills faster, and thus develop that "natural inclination" in the field you practice.

I think you have a very good point, and a great technique. In general, it works great when reacting to things.

In this case though, you have a third party journalist complaining that a racy joke is a cultural set back to an entire group of people ("startup guys"). It's pretty far out there. The commenters are mostly agreeing with a generalization of the headline, something along the lines of "there is too much sexism in tech", which is probably true.