p333347

The task of verification looks like a nice AI problem to solve.

tvtropes.org.

plato.stanford.edu, which is a philosophy encyclopedia by Stanford university.

Nice content but had forgotten what the site looked like. It literally kills the eyes and gives a headache when the green on black index page suddenly changes to black on white text file page.

Indie movie maker (with story, screenplay, editing, cinematography, directing and money all being mine so that I am in total control of creativity). Making movies has been a long time dream for me. I will do that when I am older and have enough time and finances to experiment, more than what I have been able to so far. And when I do that successfully, I would be simply swapping software & moviemaking for what is profession and what is hobby.

c++ 03. (This works well for me and never felt a need to switch to newer versions beyond using a few things here and there like auto, with new meaning. I have been using latest Visual Studio Express versions since 2010 so this 'mix' has no problem. I don't write code to be backward compatible compiler wise so on that count also its not a problem.)

Two things stood out right away (on Firefox 42) and point 2 particularly dissuaded me from checking it out any further. 1. It doesn't check for empty content and produces a pdf with just 'memo' and horizontal line. 2. Can't paste, ctrl+v won't work and there is no paste in context menu.

Notice how much of the countries and people living near the equator fail to have built great civilizations, humans just aren't as productive in the heat.

I think Iraq, Egypt, Iran and India were all as hot as they are now and they all had some of the greatest civilizations. Historically these "countries" spread beyond current political borders which more or less encompasses a continuous stretch of land and I am talking in that sense.

Perhaps the best advice is from Michelle Obama: "When they go low, we go high"

Brilliant appropriation.

The usage "big omega" and "little omega" always makes me chuckle, as they translate to "big big oh" and "little big oh".

Printed copies stored in libraries of UN and each of the Security Council permanent member countries, and whoever volunteers to make it "technology proof". Further, the paper and ink could be engineered to last for many centuries.

OK. Going by what you said, the best way is to actually build something that works, and if possible non trivial (you can even try to clone an existing popular app as you can focus on actually implementing it than brainstorming ideas), and showing it at places like HN, CodeProject etc with your profile clearly mentioning you are looking for a job (and a career change). Action beats words. If the app you have already built is in good enough working condition, you could use that itself. Being in between jobs is even better for this adventure as you can dedicate full time to this with no distraction. Good luck.

I am in a similar boat as you, except I am trying to move from C++ desktop to web domain, and this is what I am doing - building apps (actually porting my private desktop apps to web platform). Once I am happy with the quality, I will leverage on them. Of course, I am looking for a position comparable to my current one (lead dev or more) so I am being a bit more thorough etc.

I was starting to once again decide if I wanted to found something or look for a job, then I realized I actually wanted to be a developer. So it is a mature decision.

You mean you want to work as an employee for someone as a developer and not be a developer entrepreneur? Just want to know.

Stick to your specialty and scratch the programming itch as a hobby. If you get good at that hobby, see if you really want to be a professional dev and look for a job. If you get nothing you like start your own thing (your experience with startups might be handy here). I would wait at least a year to see if this is just an infatuation or deeper love. And while you are learning, pay special focus to algo and design, a bit more than knowing nifty things with popular frameworks in the language of your choice.

I am constantly seeking to remind her that it is a lack of lightheartedness that is at the rock of extremism....I know the likelihood that I'll ever succeed is small, but it's important to me to wake people from what I consider to be a way of thinking that impairs sound judgement (say, when voting or choosing how to react to world politics). I'm not against religion or the right to practice religion, just its ability to cause hysteria.

Have you considered what is trivial and lighthearted to you might be deeply offensive to her? You might say "that is exactly what I am trying to change" but to that I would say "why". Unless a person is explicitly causing harm either by doing anti social things or inciting people with speeches to do anti social things, or forces their belief system on you, what someone believes in or finds funny is no one's business. I guess your mother isn't any of that - she's just a law abiding woman with a certain religious faith that makes her life feel meaningful - so leave her alone.

It also seems that you are to quick to relate religious people with religious extremists, which is flawed. The whole idea of atheists having to "wake up" religious people is quite cocky and indecent. Also the assumption that religious people have "impaired judgement" is deeply offensive. If anything, its the atheists who are extremists with impaired judgement because they think they are better then the religious people.

I used to be one of these cocky atheists in my early 20s and used to constantly bother my deeply religious mother until one day she told me off. She basically said why do I bother her when she doesn't force me to follow the religion (she did like any parent till I was a teen and rebelled and then left me alone). That was a wake up call to me. Of course, my cockiness will come right out whenever a religious relative or colleague tries to mock my lack of faith or give me unsolicited advice with religion based arguments. But in general, I don't try to be holier than thou and look down upon religious people or interfere with their faith.

Have you talked to this person in order to understand his "serious personality problems" or just basing these on what you hear or observe? You said you brought all the team members, so I assume all of you think alike, which seems obviously different from this person, so the difference in perspective is magnified that much more. I say have an honest discussion. If you have already discussed, share the gist of it with HN so that people can assess things in a fair way to provide useful solution. You also haven't told us how and why he has the most equity. Who knows, he might be an eccentric that not many can understand!

Be it web application development in specific, or software engineering in general, or even in life itself, I'd say its much better to be good at many things than great at one thing. For one, it makes a person self sufficient and independent. Assuming one is a curious autodidact, one can always improve or learn things that they aren't good at yet. Next, it sort of gives you a perspective from various points that makes you appreciate things better. Finally, it is a humbling experience (which is good in life) as it makes you realize how much there is to learn - the more you know things the more you know you know nothing effect. Of course, one must not get perturbed when derided as "jack of all master of none". On the flip side, one must also not go around town calling oneself a polymath or a renaissance man - those days are over, at least with established fields of knowledge - as it would be equally ridiculous.

I have been a C++ dev for all my career (about 14 years), so JavaScript was pretty cool relatively speaking. For various reasons I had been a Luddite of sorts and late to the webapp party. But when I finally got in, (more like circumstances left me no choice, technically not financially or socially) mid 2015, I was amazed at the influx of ideas I had. I mean, not only am I porting my desktop apps to web, I am also tinkering with ideas that never made sense desktopically so had never occurred to me. I have to admit that JS was a PITA, albeit of a different kind from C++, but it has certainly made me more confident and viable in starting my own thing. (For those who care, the front end is in Vanilla JS and for back end I am planning ASP.NET and WebAPI.)

I have never been involved with one, directly or indirectly, so I can't comment on the culture. I am planning to start one though.

However, as a strict outsider looking at things, I find it amusing that every startup claims to disrupt something or the other, many times things that have already been claimed to be disrupted by others, and there is hardly anything to separate one from its competitors in terms of technology. I find it no different than every bigco claiming they are leader in something or the other (which could be arguably true in some cases) but often simply recreating the same technology the competitors have for any number of reasons. In both cases there is tremendous amount of cliche in the way they talk or present their ideas while overselling themselves, which sometimes amuses and sometimes annoys.

Search and Replace for Windows (that nifty little tool with blue binoculars icon), HxD - Hexeditor, Sublime Text, Visual Studio Express (web and desktop), Beyond Compare, MS Paint, GIMP, sometimes Inkscape, Calculator, Glary Utilities (This was a lifesaver when I accidentally deleted source copy instead of last modified backup copy of code I had written all day. I learnt a lesson - never do file delete at 2 AM when tired and sleepy). All these are pinned to the task bar, except calc which I can just start->run.

YMMV, but you should take some time to examine yourself and discover what genuinely refreshes you.

I hope by 'you' you mean 'one'.

By going beyond frameworks and languages and investing in more abstract things like design and algorithms.

When this sort of thing happens to me it is usually because either I didn't have a concrete plan on what I was going to do beyond describing it as "useful" (or the project wasn't really interesting), or I had been deprived of relaxation due to being very busy for more than a week and the mind is "reclaiming" its time.

If the reason is latter, I wouldn't worry too much. But in order to make my weekends or off days productive, I try to sneak in a small share of web browsing on working days - it basically works like rest/sleep. As for former, I let the interest or necessity generate naturally and not force myself to do something useful and think its a crime to relax.

The connotation of the word 'union' is of a group of poor laborers, often working in harsh environment, coming together for fight against arbitrariness of their rich employers with regards to matters such as salary, job security, accident compensation etc. I think it is fair to assume that even the lowest paid programmer is still paid at least above the average national pay in (most) developed/developing countries. Even those programmers that sulk at not being paid "enough" know that they are actually quite well off compared to most others in their society. Any grievance is highly individualized and will be negotiated directly by that person, with their lawyer if necessary. So union doesn't seem necessary.

Further, programmers actively look to change jobs whereas typical people needing union look to holding on to their jobs till retirement as much as possible. A programmer could also go freelance and charge whatever he likes. Exploiting loopholes in the current job contract, programmers could even do consultation or host a revenue earning webapp as a side business. A union like setup seems to be a hindrance to such activities more than being useful.

Finally, most programmers are highly opinionated and always seem to disagree on everything, not just programming things. It would be a miracle for a thing like a programmer union to even exist. :P

But all candidates get demonized, and then you choose between the least of both evils. In practice, it results in a similar outcome. Media could paint all candidates as the greatest hero, and you'd pick the bigger Saint of them all.

One style is the complement of the other, so I don't think you make a good point.

I am not a psychology student or a professional and I am unaware if studies have been done on the topic. Also, I am speaking in general, not just with respect to the US elections.

I disagree. Demonizing and providing the option to select the lesser evil is much more effective psychologically than saintifying and providing the option to choose the better saint. It is reasonable to expect people to be extra cautions in choosing the lesser evil as it troubles their morality if they wrongly choose the bigger evil. In the latter case however, people could afford to be more complacent, and could even fail to perceive any difference at all. And we can all see that demonizing is never done equally, some parties get targeted more than others, for whatever reasons, So it seems one could steer the result by choosing to demonize. I don't think or know that this is intentionally used as a strategy (by whom?) but if it were its clever.

Not sure of the (technical) feasibility of this, but I have some social observations.

It seems the motivating factor, ostensibly, is to protect children. However, the primary concern of those who don't like this seems to be with leaks and possible ensuing shaming. So, if the stigma attached to watching (non illegal) porn is done away with, the fear of leak becomes irrelevant. If protecting children is paramount then society must do away with silly witch hunts and being so anal (no pun intended).

While we are at it, why restrict to porn and why not extend to all things abusive to kids, including violence, racism, stupid stunts and pranks etc referenced by many other posters? Seems porn gets targeted almost always! imagine if porn were a person in the west, they would have sued the heck out of everyone.

I just don't think that you provided a well-justified reason

I was implying something like why reading something from a textbook is better than a random answer on reddit or yahoo answers. Mind you, I am talking about posters talking about specific things, not giving opinions on a variety of things, which is why I mentioned "topics in which they are known for".

Why is reassurance a good thing?

I prefaced my post with "personally" specifically to avoid this line of discussion. It is a personal perception, and as I said elsewhere it is futile to argue about perceptions. The answer is, it just is.

That seems like it'd imply that you're relaxing your guard when considering their opinion.

That's reaching.

How have the downstream job prospects gone after taking a demotion?

I haven't done anything like that first hand, and this response might not be useful, but FWIW I have browsed many profile on LinkedIn (mostly stackexchange users and HN folks who make it public, and the related ones) and I was quite surprised to see many have done something similar - taken a demotion to join startups. I was further surprised that their next job was at a more established megacorp at a level comparable to the original one. By this observation it seems not to be a problem. However, I don't quite know if they had it easy or had to negotiate a bit, both for the position and the salary.

You quoted me "it reassures me that I am not reading comments by newly minted young adult or a 20+ years experienced person doing mostly rote work." and said "What does that matter, if the comment is good? Nothing is inherently bad about those comments, just like nothing is inherently good about others."

I can't believe you were so eager to respond to me that you didn't continue reading my post. I answer your query like in the very next sentence.

It seems we have quite different ways of looking at things, so it would be futile, and honestly unnecessary, to debate on that.

If it's important to the conversation, the commenter can point out their own past experience (which Animats did by saying "As one of the early workers on network congestion").

This is basically what I was trying to convey. By making it known via some mechanism, HN would help posters from repeatedly posting their credentials before saying something deep and insightful or unpopular. A mechanism that isn't obvious, as in a button that makes something else visible that shows something about a distinguished poster, would benefit both parties I think.

I wonder how you deal with remarks made by known people in real life where there isn't this obscuring mechanism. If you have a plan to deal with that, the same can be applied here.

Personally, having a "blue tick" like thing for distinguished posters is helpful psychologically as it reassures me that I am not reading comments by newly minted young adult or a 20+ years experienced person doing mostly rote work. Now, there is nothing inherently bad about comments made by such posters, just that it would be far more reassuring to know that a poster is, hopefully, bringing in his publicly acknowledged experience into what he is saying, especially on topics in which that person is known for. To make it clear, they could even be a 20 something distinguished person! The point is not about age but about accomplishment.

For me it is the sharp spikes in sound curve that is annoying and distracting, like honking of vehicles, screaming kids etc in an otherwise quieter environment. Any uniform/sustained sound, for that matter even constant blaring of horns on busy roads or bunch of noisy kids playing, will quickly melt into the background. I suppose this is what happens to most people too. So I just have to tolerate a bit for the easing up to happen. Earplug like contraptions make me claustrophobic of sorts. Also, I like to do things "naturally" and condition myself in general, so this approach might be due to that as well.