andyhnj

For what it's worth, I haven't been able to get it to download my bookmarks, using either my username/password or API key. And I tried it on both my iPhone and iPad.

This looks promising. I've been looking for a new Pinboard iOS client, since Pushpin started flaking out on me recently. (I have over 17,000 bookmarks, so maybe I'm an edge case, but Pushpin has been timing out on me a lot. Maybe I should just clean up my bookmarks...)

Interesting. I just started reading this (the original version) last week. Since I'm already a pretty experienced programmer, I'm not getting that much out of it, but it's been fun to read.

I'm not sure if I should abandon it now, and wait for the new version, or just keep reading the old version and enjoying all the dated references to 56k modems and all that stuff.

I used to buy both print and ebook format books from O'Reilly from time to time. I now have a Safari subscription (via my ACM membership), so I've stopped buying computer books almost entirely. Safari isn't perfect, but it's got a lot of books, covering most of the computing-related subjects that I'm interested in. I'd rather have DRM-free PDFs, but Safari is good enough for now.

I use DDG everywhere except at work, where (for some reason) it's blocked.

The one silly thing I miss about not having DDG at work: in DDG, I can type "new guid" and it gives me a new random guid. If there's a way to do that in Google, I haven't figured it out. (And yes I know there are a million other ways to get random guids. It's just convenient for me to get them this way.)

I love f.lux, but it disappeared from my work computer recently, and the f.lux site is blocked on our network now. I'm not sure why we would have flagged the program and/or site as bad. It seems like a pretty harmless utility to me, and I don't recall there ever being any issues with it. Oh well. At least I can still use it on my home PCs.

There's a reason why MS Excel has keyboard shortcuts that make no sense - they match to menu entries from old versions, and they've kept them in so people who have been using it for decades don't have a reason to switch.

Yep. I've been typing "/edr" to delete a row in a spreadsheet for 25 years, and I'm not going to stop now. :-)

I drink Mount Hagen too, whenever the coffee machine at work is broken. It's not bad.

I canceled my WSJ sub years ago, because I could see it going downhill after Murdoch took over.

I've heard of Epsilon, but never used it.

Back in the days when I actually paid for text editors, my favorite was Multi-Edit (http://multieditsoftware.com/). I remember UltraEdit (http://www.ultraedit.com/) being pretty popular too.

Nowadays, whatever work I'm not doing in Visual Studio is being done in Notepad++.

I migrated my personal blog from Blogger to WordPress a couple of years ago. I'm pretty happy with it.

I had originally wanted to migrate it to Drupal, but I couldn't find a good solution for Blogger-to-Drupal import that worked for me. (At the time, I was doing a fair amount of Drupal work at my day job, so it seemed like a good idea, but in retrospect, I'm glad it didn't work out.)

I know there's a lot of stuff out there that's "cooler" than WordPress, but I like it. The ecosystem for plugins and themes is huge. You can find most anything you want, usually for free.

I'm hosting my blog on a plain vanilla shared Linux host, rather than on WordPress.com or another managed host. I like the flexibility of doing it that way. It's a little bit of work to keep up with plugin updates, but not much.

Oh, this must be why the company I work for is finally pushing out IE11. (I upgraded my own machine a long time ago, but many people here are still on IE8.)

I'm curious about the antenna you're using. I'm also approximately equidistant from NYC and Philly, but I tried a digital antenna once, and could only pick up one NJ station, and none of the NYC or Philly ones. I'd love to find an antenna that works!

Sedgewick's course on Algorithms, through Coursera, is pretty good, for anyone who wants to learn more about basic algorithms, or (like me) needs a refresher.

https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI

I'd love to be able to shift into this mode temporarily, assuming I could keep my health insurance. Maybe for a few months, just to give myself some breathing room, maybe make progress on some side projects, or do some volunteer work.

I need one of these in a Twin XL size.

(I can't be the only nerd who needs an 80" long bed, but doesn't have enough room for anything wider than a twin.)

I'm an RPI alum also, having graduated well before Jackson became president. The few people I know who are still actively involved with RPI don't like her much, and I think the inflated salary is a big part of the reason why. (Of course, most of the people I knew at RPI were malcontents to begin with, so maybe that's not a representative sample...)

Interesting. The guy who used to be my House rep (before some redistricting) has more records in this system than anyone else in my home state (NJ). Not sure if he's more actively investing, or if he's just doing a better job of submitting the right paperwork.

It's interesting to see what kind of stocks he's got, tech and otherwise. On the tech side, he's got some obvious choices (Apple, Google, and Cisco). For non-tech, I see some local NJ companies, and companies with a large presence in NJ.

I'm not sure about this statement: "Of these platforms, Linux is clearly the most important. Today, Microsoft earns much of its (record) profits from enterprise software packages (SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange, etc.). By running .NET on Linux, it now has the ability to run those apps on a significant majority of server platforms."

Are significant portions of SQL Server, SharePoint, and Exchange written in .NET managed code? I would have thought most of the code base for that stuff would still be in non-managed C++. Will having .NET on Linux make it significantly easier for them to release SQL Server on Linux?

Speaking as a guy who (currently) only uses Visual Studio at home for recreational programming, and not at the office, I'm pretty happy about this. The Express editions are OK, but it's nice to have access to extensions, like VisualHG for Mercurial integration. (Yeah, I know I should switch to Git, but I really like Hg.)

We did a lot of Drupal work at my last job, and I sent my ex-boss a friendly warning about this when it was first announced, but I don't think he patched all of their Drupal sites. I could be wrong, but I just checked the CHANGELOG.txt on a couple of them, and they're still on 7.27.

I don't think it's available yet, but I'm curious about Carl Franklin's project "Music To Code By". He's specifically trying to craft an album that's "designed to induce a state of flow suitable for writing code."

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/311638984/music-to-code...

Nice write-up. My experience is quite similar to the author's. I've gone from 230 to 170 over the last year or so. (Oh, and I'm also from NJ!) I wasn't involved in any study or organized plan though; I just stumbled through it on my own. I tracked calories with an iPhone app. I stuck to a plan that, theoretically, would allow me to lose one pound per week. That actually worked out pretty well. I never bothered tracking anything other than calories. I just tried to be sensible about fat, carbs, and sugar, but I didn't explicitly track them or set goals related to them. And I'm curious about the National Weight Control Registry now. I'm going to have to follow up on that, after I've maintained the weight loss for a bit longer.

I got fed up with this fairly recently, and remapped it so I can use ctrl-F for find, using AutoHotKey:

  #IfWinActive, ahk_class rctrl_renwnd32
  ^f::Send, {F4}

I've been using Harvest: http://www.getharvest.com/ Works fine for me, though I don't do a lot of freelance work, so I'm not a heavy user.

KeePass on my PC, KeePassX on my Mac, and iKeePass on my iPhone & iPad, with a shared database on DropBox. I'm pretty happy with that setup, except for iKeePass, which is a little clunky. I'd really like to have a better KeePass client on iOS.

I'm in my late 40s, and have been working as a developer since I was a teenager. Here's a simplified account of the last 20 years or so:

I spend 10+ years working for a mid-size company, progressing from developer to a sort of combination senior developer / IT manager. My salary grew at a reasonable pace. I was wearing a lot of different hats, and gained experience in a lot of different areas. That company went out of business a few years ago.

I then spent a couple of years at a small (12 person) web dev company. We had one in-house product and worked on various sites for various clients. Mostly ASP.NET, some Drupal. I took a bit of a salary hit there, making maybe 85% of my previous salary.

I left that company about a year ago, and am now at a fairly large company, primarily working on Dynamics AX custom programming, with some random ASP.NET/C# stuff in there too. I'm still not back at my old salary, from the company that went under, but I'm closer.

With a little more Dynamics AX work under my belt, I could probably jump ship for an AX consulting job that would get me back to that old salary. Or I could stay here and make a pretty reasonable salary, with modest gains, over the next several years. (There doesn't seem to be much room to move into management here, though if I stay long enough, that may change.)

Or I could try to go back to another web dev position, ASP.NET and/or Drupal, maybe. (That probably wouldn't get me much of a salary bump though.)

I'm not entirely sure what I'll be doing ten years from now. The company I'm at now is stable enough that I might be able to stay here until retirement, but I wouldn't count on it. I'll probably need to change jobs 2 or 3 more times before retirement. I try to keep my skills up to date, so I can stay employable, and, at some point, I'll probably start using the standard 50+ tricks on my resume: dropping my college graduation date, dropping the oldest jobs from the resume entirely, etc. And dyeing my hair maybe, if I get too grey.

This being HN, other people have of course talked about starting their own company. I'm not sure I want to do that, but it may become an attractive option at some point, especially if the health care situation in the US gets straightened out enough that I can afford to pay for my own health insurance.

Am I the last guy still paying $7/month for a solo Backpack account? I've looked for good alternatives a few times, and never found anything I like as much as Backpack for basic note-taking. As long as they'll keep taking my $7, I guess I'll keep using it.