phirschybar

my strategy for getting rid of these (earworms? had never heard that term until now) is to just play the song in full, _let it finish_ and go to another song (any song). congrats it's now out of your head. you're welcome!

yeah and:

By contrast, core features in Dia, like chatting with tabs and personalization features, are used by 40% and 37% of DAUs respectively

well of course. these are likely some of the few major features of Dia which is still in private beta.

this sums up the situation eloquently and perfectly

this is awesome news. I loved the original pebble but moved to the apple watch after pebble's demise.

I am curious what people here use their smart watches for on a daily basis and couldn't live without, other than to check the day/time. for me it's just message alerts, timer, and media controls. just those 3 features on a e-ink screen would make me super happy.

agreed. at my company we ended up rolling our own system. but this area is absolutely ripe for some configurable saas or OS tool with advanced reporting and alerting mechanisms. Datadog has a decent offering, but it's pretty $$$$.

love this.

I love this. but, why?

ha. this just reminded me that some old touchtone phones had a pulse button in case you needed it.

wow - this was a great walk down memory lane. I remember using all of them, particularly tables for creating complicated layouts. it worked beautifully but was an unbelievable pain to maintain when making layout changes. what's wild though is that this technique eventually went way beyond the category of "hack". slicing tables into layout became officially supported by major software such as dreamweaver (big at the time) and photoshop! yes, you could open a static design in photoshop and use the "slice tool" to cut it up into an HTML table. good times...

I agree with this approach. the other added benefit is that when they decided to optimize the app by eliminating or tuning queries and utilizing replicas for reads, they ultimately made the app much more performant while possibly reducing complexity. the "squeeze" mindset pays off in the long-run here. the continued optimization over time is infinitely better than adding the complexity of microservices or expanded infrastructure because the latter will simply bury and compound the potential optimizations which could AND SHOULD have been made. squeeze squeeze squeeze until you just can't squeeze any more!

Greatest live album of all time IMHO

incredible and so inspiring. thank you!!

this is great. I have actually met 3 developers in the course of my career who went from standup to programming. Those are also the only 3 standups I have ever met!! Never understood the connection until now!

Same thing happened to me recently! :)

This is completely on point ^. I remember those times, and I also long for a weirder, more creative and more frontier-like internet! The combination of a strong reaction to Flash, which had begun to dominate the web around 2001, and the well-intended, but simultaneous push for web standards created an insurmountable course over-correction. Then the iPhone's non-support for Flash in 2007 was the final nail in the coffin. The web was never the same. We got standards (yay), but we made it unfashionable to be really CREATIVE with code. It was no longer cool to do something totally different and unique with code. There was no longer any point in putting information on the web if it wasn't cross-browser, cross-device, and future-proof. While standards have been a boon to our profession, they completely zapped the old internet. I am hopeful the pendulum will swing the other way.

I was just looking for the G1 too. That was my first digital camera. I loved it!

I think it's more like a productive time of year for hackers to get things done :). The week between xmas and new years is always super productive and creative for me... it's quiet and there is a subconscious urge to wrap things up before year end.

awesome! can't tell you the number of times I have slammed into this when copy/pasting.

maybe intolerable is a better word.

Our experience with the Google cost increase was similar. We were paying around $550/mo for the GMaps Platform pre-price-change. Over 80% of this cost was for dynamic maps usage. The rest was for use of the Google Places API.

When I got the notification in May that the rates were increasing, I didn't take it that seriously. We have a profitable company and I would have been more than happy to pay Google twice their rate for the premium services they offer. Nobody ever expects a sudden rate increase to be more than 20%, 30% or 40%, right???!

It was in July that the gravity of the situation hit me. I was seeing tweets and articles lamenting the rate increase. I thought to myself "huh, I better check this out". I did some quick math using the new rate card and nearly had a heart attack! Our bill was estimated to be ~$14,500 and the CLOCK WAS TICKING. We were facing a 2600% rate increase and had only 2 months to figure out a game plan. Our business was on the line!

I immediately determined that we were eligible for bulk pricing. However, Google will not sell you the bulk rates directly. You have to contract with an authorized 3rd party (re-seller, basically) to get the rates. So, we found a reseller and locked in the bulk rates. That brought our estimate down to around $12,000/mo. Better, but still a huge shock.

The next step was optimization. There was no way for us to reduce dynamic maps usage because it is such a core part of our products. So, we cut off almost all of our Places API usage and started using other services. Our estimated bill was now down to $9,000.

That's where we are today. We just got our first full month bill. It was a huge hit to our business, wiping out a significant portion of our profitability.

To be frank, I am pissed about this. I was more than happy to pay Google far more than they were charging us. We were always under the impression that rates would increase one day. But, to force an increase of this magnitude with such a short amount of lead time is pretty f&^%ing sh*&$tty coming from a billion dollar giant.

We're starting to test other mapping services. I met with a team member from Mapbox last week and am planning on testing their platform in December. Their quote for our usage needs? $550/mo.

How does this interact with the Gmail "Snooze" feature? Are snoozed items actually sent back to the inbox? Or are they muted in some way?

"Sometimes when you return to a problem after a rest, you find your unconscious mind has left an answer waiting for you."

I love when this happens. For me it's usually after a good sleep.

Not sure about the science here, but I have found the opposite to be true for me. I love natural light and crave it while I work. However, I have found that if the room is just a little too bright I will end up with severe eye strain and headaches after a day of work. Ambient light is the unfortunate cause.

I used jrnl.sh for about a year. I was able to extend it to parse the output so I could do some analysis on what I had written (I was using it partially to track time spent on certain tasks). However, I came to find that write long-form on the command line is just awkward. Lately I have been using checkvist.com which has been working out great.

cheers. this was the first appealing thing that came to mind. I am constantly stripping off those query string parameters just to share stuff.

The clipboard manager in Alfred

I used Workflowy for a couple years and loved it. But I craved something a _little_ more robust and found https://checkvist.com. It is similar to WF in terms of concept and UI but it has a lot of handy extras.

I agree that Apple is the wrong target. So is social media.

I am not a doctor, but I am a parent. I think the problem is that kids cannot learn to cope with their problems and anxieties when they have zero idle time. Kids need time in the day to face and mentally process the social and hormonal challenges that they experience in everyday life. They simply cannot do this when all of their "boring" down-time is consumed with the distraction of devices. Youtube, chat, news, games, you name it.

Kids fill their idle time with all of this interactivity which keeps them entirely distracted from life's challenges, blocking them from achieving critical mental skills.

I also think this is why we are seeing the rise of so many "fidget" toys. Take away the phones and kids are desperate for some other form of distraction. Sure, some kids are natural fidgeters. But most are simply looking for another distraction from life's challenges.

And Spotify has zero negotiation power here

really? with their endless amount of listener history and preference data. IMHO Spotify has gained the upper hand.

I suffered from insomnia as a child and it peaked when I hit 12-14 yo. My pediatrician told me to do EXACTLY as you suggest, namely "If you’re in bed for more than 20 minutes and haven’t fallen asleep yet, get out and do something else.". Basically, don't use your bed as the place to TRY to sleep. Only sleep there. This worked like a charm for me and I haven't had sleep issues since.