gregn

this. Vimeo is great, but we've seen hardly any continued development in the last 10 years. It looks exactly the same now as it did 10+ years ago. In order to pursue the market you need to keep coding, adding things, trying things. Discovery, yes! W/o discovery you're sunk. But there are 20 other things you could do to defrictionize the platform. And 20 more you could do to improve its reach. Scale will come with the audience graph justifies the expenditure. I would argue that YouTube's recent machine-learning suggestions actually totally ffing suck. The way they were 8 years ago was incredibly better. This is one area you could challenge them in. Be a YouTube of 2014 and you could beat them in suggestion.

ditto. Books. Right now it's: Who Killed Homer, and Sophocles plays.

Agree here. I don't think many sites have either. You have to dig a little, open the code-behind, but they're there.

This article is completely wrong. Slashdot, Digg and Reddit were already at 100% of full-power way before Google Reader ever shut down. And him citing that the causes are unknown is so completely naive. It's obvious. And it was obvious at the time to many who used RSS in 2012. Google is in the ad business, and RSS doesn't do adds. Not really, and not then. They realized they were competing with themselves and closed it; it's that simple. God, I feel like I got baited to reading that post because there was no new or insightful information whatsoever other than the title line. We should bring back RSS, and make the web more about conversations and communicating, than listicles and click-bait. 5-10MB of Javascript per page load, 1px tracking images, endless stupid ads, and now every single site that I go to has a pop-over that I should sign up for something, which gets in the way of the content that I am only going to spend 30 seconds reading anyway and then never return to that site ever again. The web has very quickly become a cesspool of non-information. It's like a bad shopping mall.

what took you so long? Oh, and add quantum computing to the list.

Am in the same boat. Have 15 years programming experience, and can literally code circles around many or most of the people I am interviewing with, but because I don't have a degree, or interview poorly, I am getting rejection after rejection. It's funny. I always think about the Frank Zappa sketch: "What's in a diploma? A: Absolutely nothing." It's a piece of paper, but I guess it is a symbol of your subservience to a system, which in kind shows you are good at deferring to authority or something. If I were hiring, I would explicitly go after non-degreed programmers who show they can code. Dogmatic college kids often write terrible code, but they proceed with unchecked hubris because everyone tells them they're great, even though they never paid any dues or done real systems programming.

There goes another great product, killed by Microsoft. M$ doesn't understand open source. They infuse their products with too much politicking and marketing, trying to lead clients when open source is functionally the inversion of this. It is product defined by user needs, not top-down high-priests deigning what we should have. They always get it wrong. Oh well.

Location: New Mexico (southern)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C, C++, MySql, Python, Javascript, Php, Nodejs, Qt, Win32, Gtk+, gcc, clang, Visual Studio, Perforce, git, tcp/udp sockets

Resume: http://naughton.org/resume.pdf

email: greg AT naughton DOT org

Previous Experience: AAA video game engine development at well-known firm; Stealth mode startup writing DSP code; multiple web-dev gigs

What bothers me is that nowhere in both articles I read do they once mention: "what if it wasn't what we are postulating it is." That tact of reasoning is never explored. The entirety of their position is foregone conclusion. I'm not saying they are wrong or right, but first of all, it seems entirely unlikely due to everything we already know. Second of all there are no human remains, just some rocks that _kind_of_ resemble tools and some broken bones that they can date. It is closer to flight of fantasy that proven fact. I wish they would approach it as such while chasing their hypothesis. I would feel much easier about it. But I suppose people who don't brandish brazen egos are much less likely to get the front-page stories.....

I agree with your criticisms. It doesn't seem clear that these rocks were used for what they claim. I recently found what I believed was an arrowhead. It is symmetrical and sharp on both edges, but it is not an arrowhead. It is a rock that looks like an arrowhead and my wishful thinking pushed it the rest of the way. If I were that researcher I would have claimed that I found the real thing.

Saying "iTunes will never work well" is like saying the sky is blue. Why would anyone need a kitchen sink to copy an audio file to their device? Oh, wait, unless there is manufacturer locks, and controls put in place to steer consumers' capital flow. Oh yeah, that's why. From that perspective I would say iTunes is a smashing success. And this negative social virus has spread like gang-busters spawning countless imitators.

Last year I had a revelation while reading Gore Vidal that all my favorite books almost without exception had been written on typewriters. I immediately went to Ebay and bought two: an Olivetti and a Olympia.

I think Mr. Hanks missed one salient point of why bothering to type on an old machine still may play a valuable role to the writer in the modern age----------Silence.

I found there is a vast difference sitting in front of any computer compared to a typewriter. Mechanical typewriters are not alive. They do not have an internal CPU constantly cycling and doing things, constantly prodding you for attention with little indicators and wifi meters and clocks and things. Computers are needy. They are constantly trying to distract you, even when they are doing absolutely nothing. Typewriters on the other hand, are doing absolutely nothing. They are merely empty mechanical contraptions with no life in them whatsoever. What you find when typing is -- well, at least what I found -- is that you are left alone with your thoughts and the workings of your mind and nothing else but the silence of the room. This might be the first time in fifteen years you have experienced this sensation. It was odd at first and slightly uncomfortable. But I found that when writing narrative fiction, the words are totally uninhibited. They are not forced. You are not churning away as if you are a member of a large electronic industrial machine: society, but instead are left in quiet solace with nothing but you and the table, the stillness of the dust floating in the air and this solid bit of metal under your palms, and they are utterly quiet, and you can think, as if for the first time. It is a miraculous sensation.

I urge anyone to try it who has been steeped in tech for the last decade or two.

Pretty sad this got flagged. Honestly, I would flag the Bible before it. I think I understand your reasoning. While I don't agree with it, it's no worse than Ayn Rand or Timothy Ferris.

I would say the answer is to read profound books, and then move. I was in a situation where I drank continuously for several years because I was stuck in a dead-end job in a dead-end town. The real thing to do is 2-fold:

1) figure out what the big story is, not the piddly immediate stuff; watch Michael Wood histories, read Carl Sagan, read Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything". Get interested in hobbies that will link you with NATURE and the universe at large. Examples might be SURFING, HIKING, ASTRONOMY, GEOLOGY, FIELD_BIOLOGY. These are important because it snaps you out of the anthropocentrism that the myth of culture forces on us. You MUST snap out of the delusional narrative society forces upon you in order to _really_ make sense of your life. This means that you must read enough and collect enough data to weave your own narrative to replace the off-the-shelf one most people use. There are no easy versions of this. You must do it yourself for it to work, and so that you can attain true mental and spiritual freedom. I am not suggesting that you should become some out of touch hippy, but instead gain a broader perspective. You can still go into business. Your widened perspective will actually aid you instead of making things more difficult for you. Steve Jobs for instance, went to India in the late 1970s seeking audience with a famed Guru. It's a good strategy. Better than being a drone.

2) Move!! Firstly, plan your move; consider your options carefully. While you are researching, save up your money. There are a few places left in the U.S. (I refuse to say which. It should be pretty obvious once you look) and in the world where people are not totally congested in against one-another, where people do not abuse consumerism and become flatulated and obese, where soulless corporatism does not rule the minds and hearts of the local residents. I won't tell you where they are, because frankly, I don't want anyone to move there and ruin the tiny enclaves of peacefulness that are left. Besides, you have to find them for yourself for it to work. Some people are mountain people; some people are ocean people. You decide which one is for you.

The thing is, I think the thing we want and the thing we get are two different things now. Its not a question of tech, such as Javascript, its a question of: I want to read, write and communicate. What I want basically, is an RSS feed reader and writer that actually works. I dont want adds, for the most part I dont want images, unless I specifically seek them out. What we want is the web experience that something like Instapaper provides, which is to isolate the content of the blog post or news article and eschew all the rest, and present it in a readable form in the font I like. This makes the act of information intake painless and flow easily. It sounds ridiculous in a sort of post-RSS environment, but what we need is RSS, to be implemented by someone in a way that makes it work, so it will be used by everyone.

haha. double points for funny and true.

This is correct. Boiling water scalds the tea giving it a burnt-out taste. Of course this depends on the tea. I find it less true for black tea such as Darjeeling (my personal favorite), but for green tea it is absolutely imperative or lest the liquid produced be undrinkable.

All this talk about boiling water must have to do with the pathetic quality of the tea being used, like hotness masks the flavor of inferior saki.

From 10 years of working as a sysadmin in a Psych department, one constant in life I've learned is that Psychologists are the most incompetent, fanciful egoists in all the sciences. They have no idea what is going on basically. Or, put as a friend of mine said, "People who go into Psychology are precisely those that do not intuitively understand it already." Implying that most of us have a decent, commonsense appraisal of how things work, but psych people are the most clueless of the clueless, that's why they go into a field (first falling for its false promises) that professes to explain life's mysteries to them. None of this is surprising, except perhaps that they scored so far away from the median.

check out abebooks.com. They have the best search engine for books when it comes to facts about the specific book, such as: is it a first edition? If its a hard cover, does it come with a dust jacket, and if so what condition are both in? Cheers

Go to abebooks.com. Often the same sellers sell the exact same books there but with 2.50 shipping instead of 3.99. I almost never shop at amazon anymore for the simple reason that their used book base shipping rate is too high. But that's me; I'm addicted to used books.

I hacked up my own in March. I didn't even know Google Reader was closing. I just got tired of the features that other readers didn't have. It's a console application, which I realize has limited utility for most people, but it is very powerful and provides many multi-tool functions that could be useful to someone.

http://github.com/gmn/rsstool

There are screen shots and some instructions on the wiki.

I struggle with getting started on a project. I tend to spend days, sometimes weeks, thinking about the problems I am going to have to face when I start coding, and researching them. Then it happens. I sink into some sort of trance from which I am unwilling to wake from. People ask me to social events, I decline. I can stay in this frame of mind for well over a month if the project is important to me. I had a professor who said that it takes three days to get into the coding state of mind but once you're there you are in a higher productive mode of thinking. The only problem with this, as everyone knows, is that it is very easy to get shaken out of the state. Then you must spend another three days to get back into it, which is why programmers are often reluctant to break their focus - it wastes time.

It has gotten easier to enter high focus mode with age and experience.

I second techno music. Aphex Twin. Prodigy and NiN have been boons for me in the past.

I am 40

Orwell's Big Brother was much worse than Google. There is a difference between knowing everything about somebody, and forcing society to inhabit an ill-fitting economic model pre-ordained by an omniscient force, by taking away their free will.

they just keep on coming.

You notice how Half Life development slowed to a virtual crawl after the launch of Steam? I'm sure it was obvious to them that they had just invented the most awesome source of revenue since WoW, and everything else shrank in comparison. If not for Steam we would have seen HL3 w/ a much improved source engine by now for sure.

I just want to point out quick that what's so awesome about Steam is it's apparent longevity. They provide the convenience of the App Store: you see something, 2-or-3 clicks and it's yours, but the greatest value that Steam offers is the fact that THE GAMES YOU BUY ARE ALWAYS THERE. 5 years down the road, you will still be able to download and play the games you have bought, onto a different computer with possibly a completely different OS, all patched up. It's in Steam's best business interest to continue and grow and maintain a presence, possibly forever, so they will always be there, and the game you have bought and paid for the one time, you will always have, always. Try and say that about a physical copy or the stupid App store.

yeah. what they were saying is that AT&T's suggested method to calculate bars is better, but that they went ahead and displayed more bars in week areas to give the illusion of signal strength.

I think what's obviously going on is that Apple was deliberately displaying more bars in areas where there was week signal in an act of deception to try and make up for AT&T's crappy network.

The boundary of time to work on it doesn't have to be so set in stone. Most decent startups would take more than just 1 clear-cut month of coding. Just keep working at it, and working at it. It's the tenacity that's important in the long run.

thanks, I will.