jaymon

I'll second someone else's recommendation for The Martian, that was just a really fun read you can just burn through because it is so enjoyable.

If you want another really fun read, Ready Player One was fantastic.

I've also enjoyed the Old Man's War saga, there are 6 books but you can skip book 4 since it is a retelling of book 3 from the POV of another character. This is a space saga and I really like the universe he created.

In the hard sci-fi genre, I really enjoyed The Forever War.

And for just pure world building fantasy, the Game of Thrones books (The song of Ice and Fire series) are some of the best written books I've ever read.

You could try a plugin I wrote to quickly comment/uncomment blocks of code:

https://github.com/Jaymon/vim-commentify

It's a no frills plugin that only does one thing, but it does it pretty well.

I've added it to my list of books to inspire my kids. So if they ever come to me and say, "Dad, what is chemistry good for?" I can just give them The Martian and say, "read this and you'll know"

Did you like The Atlantis Gene? I've almost pulled the trigger at Amazon a couple times but the reviews seem hit or miss and my reading list is already so long.

I started The Martian by Andy Weir about 3 days ago and I'm really enjoying it. It's a really entertaining book that I highly recommend!

Last week I finished The Paradox of Choice and Zero Day. I enjoyed both of them, although I don't think I'll be reading any of the sequels to Zero Day.

Before that I went through The Maze Runner trilogy, those were entertaining reads.

Some other books I've read recently that I can remember off the top of my head are the Divergent series of books (eh), How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen (great read), Ready Player One (loved, loved, loved this book), Starters (didn't bother reading any more in the series) and Moon walking With Einstein (I enjoyed it).

Just a note so people don't get confused, while specifying packages with >=1.1,<1.2 seems to be similar to the tilde in npm, in practice it isn't.

Basically, when you use >=1.1,<1.2 it will install the best version that matches at the time of first install, and then that version will never be upgraded because it will always satisfy the requirements. So you don't actually get 1.1.x release updates unless you install them manually.

We do, however, use this syntax in development when testing new versions to make sure any subsequent runnings of pip doesn't obliterate the new versions of modules we are testing.

I'd love official pip support for ~1.1 type declarations.

Medicare and medicaid have traditionally underpaid regular commercial insurance with the result that more and more doctors have dropped it over the years.

So it makes sense that payments would concentrate around certain doctors that are still accepting it because more people on medicare will go to them simply because they don't have any other choice, especially in areas that have high concentrations of the elderly, like Florida.

I've got a semi-similar python library that I've been adding to for a few years called testdata: https://github.com/Jaymon/testdata

testdata has a lot of unicode and file system stuff I've found really useful, it looks like between this and testdata I'll be in generated data heaven :)

I'm pretty sure milesskorpen was just referencing this post by Matthew Yglesias:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/29/amazon_q4_pro...

The quote, while probably not wholly accurate, is funny. I think milesskorpen was going for funny, so don't take it too literally.

The problem I have with analysis like this is it doesn't take into account what Yahoo actually needs to do to grow. For the most part, the companies on the list are innovative companies, led by talented CEOs/entrepreneurs and are leaders in there sphere.

But Yahoo's revenue is about $1.2 billion a quarter, and I would say that they would need to grow that by 5-10% to even approach any sort of potential turnaround territory. That means they need roughly $50 to $150 million in new revenue a quarter, I bet you all those companies together don't make that amount of money in a year.

I think it would be awesome for Yahoo to buy innovative companies and give creative people free reign, but the reality is Yahoo buying these companies is like putting a band aid on a bullet wound. Yahoo's just too big and those companies are just too small to turn Yahoo around.

Reminds me of a story about Larry Ellison:

"He told me a story of how Larry Ellison actually got efficiencies from teams. If a team wasn’t productive, he’d come every couple of weeks and say, let me help you out. What did he do? He took away another person until the team started shipping and stopped having unproductive meetings."

I love that quote, via: http://scobleizer.com/2010/11/12/why-google-cant-build-insta...

I wrote this a few years ago to archive my Gmail emails to text files (and the attachments to whatever they are).

I haven't ran it in awhile but when I did it worked and was able to download my emails from the very beginning without crashing. Anyway, you might find it useful...

http://github.com/Jaymon/Popbak

This reminds of the Evan Williams quote from "Founders at Work" pg 124:

"luck comes in many forms -- and often looks bad at first. I always look back on the deals that we didn't do and the things that didn't work out, and realize what seemed like a bummer at the time was really lucky [...] if you have some plan and it doesn't go that way, roll with it. There's no way to know if it's good or bad until later, if ever."

A lot of what is "best" has to do with how specific you want to be. Appending "every" to a date is great if you want something to occur every N. But what if you want it to occur every other N? Or the first N of every M? There's a reason why things like Crontab or iCalendar's RRULE are so specific and verbose.

In order to decide what is "best" I would first decide how specific I needed to be and then start to narrow my input options based on my defined need.

If anyone wants to know more about how the Penguin logo was designed, Alex (the designer) has a great blog post here:

http://blog.iso50.com/2010/03/10/plancast-penguin-developmen...

The site looks great. It's very clean, which I love.

One of the things I would do is split the main page into left and right and move the "Recent Artwork" to the right of bullet point list on the left. This will let prospective users see artwork right away and you don't really lose anything since there isn't much content in the bullet points anyway.

Also, I would lose the captcha for the signup until you have a spam user signup problem. No point in giving people another obstacle to signup if you don't have to. I would lose the "password again" field also as I've never really liked it.

Good luck.

You are not alone in your desire for better privacy controls. Here's kind of what our roadmap has been/will be:

The last few weeks have been focused on the iPhone app and API. I'm guessing the next few weeks will be focused on keeping the site up (it's already gone down once today because of traffic) and working on the overall speed of the site (that's what I'm working on right now).

But after that, Privacy is the next major item on our todo list.

I know right? I wanted to be manly about it but that little Penguin just melted my heart.

Touche.

We have been going back and forth on how to do this, the problem is we really don't want to clutter the simpleness of "what, when, where" with lots of other dialog boxes, so we are trying to find the best way to integrate advanced functionality like privacy and still remain simple.

Funny story, turns out I forgot to commit our latest date_parser before Thanksgiving break and then accidentally over-wrote it with the one from the repository because I thought it would be the most up to date.

So, the current date parser has some bugs that were caught and fixed and then lost. The good news is I have re-fixed most of all those bugs and I just tested "11th Dec to 13th Dec" and it parsed it correctly. The new parser should be pushed live in a day or so.

Of course not everyone is going to want to broadcast every move they are going to make, but that isn't half of what Plancast can offer you.

For example, a couple weeks ago I learned that Marcy Playground had released a new CD and was touring. I was bumbed I missed their show simply because I didn't know about it.

Now, if Marcy Playground was on Plancast I could've just subscribed to their upcoming feed and easily have seen where they were going to be and when they were going to be there.

Now, how awesome would it be if all your favorite bands were on Plancast? You could create a feed of just bands you liked and have their tour schedules come to you.

But let's not stop at bands, what about your favorite clubs or restaurants? You could create a custom upcoming feed of only the places you want to go.

Give Plancast a chance and you might just grow to love it.

While we don't have full integration yet, every page does offer an iCal feed so you can at least subscribe to your Plancast feed in Gcal to get a one-way stream going.

We're working on it, judging by the amount of emails we're getting about an API, I'm thinking we're going to drop all our other upcoming features to get the API up and running for everyone.

The only thing that stands in our way are all the bug reports we've gotten also.

I was going to mention this but I decided it wasn't really necessary to make my point. I was just trying to show that no matter how hard certain people push real-time it usually still comes down to polling in a desktop situation. I think people have gotten it into their minds that 15-60 minutes delayed isn't real-time while 1-15 minutes is.

But I agree that most places will throttle you if you request their feed too often, so how are they going to feel when every one of their subscribers requests their feed within the same minute every time they make an update? I guess that's the big question.

The thing that really gets me with all this real-time hype is people attribute the rise of Twitter to all the awesome desktop clients built for it so you can receive your tweets in real-time, the problem is they aren't actually real-time, all those desktop clients use polling, just with a really short interval.

If you really wanted your desktop RSS reader to be just as awesome and real-time as Twhirl then just set all the feed refresh intervals to 5 minutes, no RSSCloud needed.

Since it's a design patent you would have to be really, really, close to the design laid forth in the patent to infringe it.

Will this invalidate all search type pages with a logo on top, an input box, and a search button? No. Will this stop a company named go0g13 having a home page with a search box, and two search buttons under the box? Most likely.

Honestly though, there is no need for internet outrage about a design patent, taking off the "feeling lucky" button and not having a multi-colored logo similar to Google's should be enough to skate around it.

My favorite part of this article was a part in another article linked in the "Related stories" section:

Indeed, exercise was more strongly associated with weight loss than any other factor, including diet. Overall, the more the women exercised, the more weight they lost.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1827342,00.ht...

So yeah, diet is more important than exercise, and exercise is more important than diet. Glad we solved that, thanks Time.

I had a professor that was instrumental in creating the IEEE floating point standard (or something like that, I don't quite remember) and was heavily recruited by Apple back in the day, so heavily in fact that Steve Jobs personally took him and his wife out to dinner.

His wife disliked Steve so bad that after the dinner she refused to let him even consider the job with Apple.

Just a little anecdote about Steve Jobs that I always found funny and remembered.

in a word, yes.

I carry around this Moleskine pretty much everywhere I go: http://www.moleskine.com/catalogue/classic/cahier/cardboard_...

They costs about $8 for a set of three which last me 2-3 years usually. The thing I like about this Moleskine is it easily bends to the shape of my leg in my front pocket so I don't even notice that I am carrying it.

Now, when I'm at the computer I use Noopsi http://noopsi.com (I'm the main developer) which I created primarily to scratch my own itch of having an easy to add/edit/search/share database of my thoughts and ideas.