pivotal

When Reader shut down I migrated to newsblur, vowing to pay for things I really use, so RSS never died for me :)

I switched to Newsblur after the shutdown of Google Reader. It's paid, but after what happened with Reader I realized how important a good RSS feed was to me and that it was worth paying for. The cost is also reasonable.

What is your reasoning for not using query params for the login request? I know it's probably more RESTful to use POST, but otherwise if you're using HTTPS for everything, query params are just as encrypted as the POST body. Or is there another reason?

I feel the same way. Headspace's guided take 10 course was a solid introduction for me, but once I got used to regular practice, headspace's "extras" weren't needed anymore. Now all I really want is a timer and tracking of when I meditated, so I use Insight Timer.

Banning smartphones doesn't preclude having dumb cell phones. My smartphone died last week and I thought long and hard about getting another one. Ultimately I don't have the willpower to totally resist, but these last few days without one have been enlightening.

I used last year to learn Elm really well and plan on using this year for F#. Go for it!

Elm served as a gentle intro to Haskell for me personally since it has easier to read errors and less overall complexity to grok at first go, but it sort of depends on your experience.

I don't disagree that if you can get away with just a local development environment that it is likely easier to get up and running. However, it requires good documentation of project dependencies and discipline by the team to not accidentally upgrade their version of PHP without telling anyone, both things that are easier said than done. Vagrant lets you codify that through "code". In the case of my employer, it's a necessity, but obviously everyone is different.

I've had quite the opposite experience. Vagrant has saved my team lots of time fighting environmental issues. The approach of running apache locally falls apart pretty quickly as you add more components to your application. Elastic search, mongo, one person happens to have php 7 instead of 5.2 and wrote everything with short array syntax, etc.

We also work on many different projects, often getting dropped into something new without much of a primer. Being able to "vagrant up" and not having to know all the dependencies to get up and running is very handy.

Do we spend time troubleshooting vagrant weirdness? For sure, but compared to the time saved it's a no-brainer.

I've been running Nightly and experienced the same thing with inbox. If I attempt to interact with it before fully loaded, inbox will freeze up for minutes at a time. Love everything else about nightly, this is my biggest issue.

Same experience here! I had never seen them, but when we had our daughter my aunt wisely gave us barnyard dance. I was skeptical at first, but the collection of boynton has grown and is still very popular at 18 months.

Doggies is a fun read for onlookers, since it's basically dad or mom making dog noises for 15 minutes straight.

IMO you don't need a reason for something like this, it's just fun. We all spend a lot of time solving problems with software and I believe most of us neglect that you can make stuff just to make stuff. I wrote an angular directive that prints out ascii butts: https://www.npmjs.com/package/pw-butts, I doubt anyone will use it for anything, but I enjoyed making it and it's fun that it exists. If it helps, think of it as "Art".

This is an interesting thought. The nicest communities on reddit I've encountered tended to be small or to have a small "core" group that all knew each other and were highly visible in the community. /r/running for example, when I regularly read it, had daily threads where the main people chatted about all sorts of things. It felt very homey, reminded me of when I read obscure usenet groups as a kid.

I wonder if there's space for forums with purposefully limited membership where people could get to know each other on that more intimate level. I know you could always set up your own private forum for your friends, but maybe as a service.

The Hyperion books also have some interesting (and prescient) things to say about humans relying on a vast network of information instead of their own memories. They are some of my favorites.

I spent some time working through various Haskell books with varying success, then decided to do a code challenge (adventofcode.com) using Elm. I didn't finish, but after writing Elm for many days on end, suddenly Haskell clicked a lot more. The Elm compiler is far more friendly than Haskell's and will walk you through a lot of rookie mistakes and oversights.

I find Elm exciting, and with the prevalence of React/Redux these days, a lot of front end developers would be wise to familiarize themselves with the origin of many of the concepts borrowed from Elm.

I learned the unidirectional data flow pattern with flux before redux and redux makes flux look like war & peace! :P

The no frills way I like to think about redux is your rendered page is the result of a function operating on a state object. Changes to the state object trigger re-renders. There's obviously some subtleties in there and complex use cases, but that's the basic gist.

Even as a former smoker, I never really thought too much about smoking sections until my wife was pregnant. Suddenly someone smoking in the wrong area was a threat to my unborn child and really rubbed me the wrong way. I'm all for personal freedom, but exercising this one around others is stomping on their freedom to breathe freely. I'm glad as a society we've moved on from this for the most part.

As a fellow "hipster programmer", I was also enticed by the Bellroy wallet ads...

They showed up when I was in the market for a wallet and were exactly what I needed. Love mine, but seeing your post was kind of eerie.

This was my reaction to the tabs as well - now I have three inboxes to keep clean instead of one! I disabled them as soon as I could figure out how to.

I think what makes this shutdown different from Reader is that 37signals did this as soon as they realized it wasn't a profitable venture.

I can't actually say how it went down at Google, but I suspect they knew they weren't going to be making money with Reader very quickly, yet still allowed it to become the dominant RSS player.

The 37signals shutdown seems practical, the Google one reeks of greed.

I think the main use case for untapped is enabling your beer drinking habits via badge rewards ;)

I think I may be starting to feel this as well. I'm 27 and have been feeling resistant to staying a programmer. My father in law has been showing me the ropes of being handy - woodworking, wiring electric, etc. I've been brewing my own beer occasionally baking bread and some days it just seems like doing anything with my hands instead of sitting at a desk all day would make me feel much more alive.

Then again, maybe not. I've gone through this with programming before and I usually swing back around to enjoying it.

It also helps that the pay is great for something that a lot of days I think I would do for free.

I could tell it was fake because the Elon Musk link wasn't in the top 3. ;)

It's funny, new graffiti is vandalism, but old graffiti becomes history in and of itself. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, they have an entire Egyptian temple that at some point was shipped across the ocean, and to me the most fascinating part of it was the graffiti left by occupying British soldiers long after it was built. Go figure.

I'm in your exact position. Aging Nexus One that I plan on replacing, using t-mobile. LTE isn't an issue for me for a while, as I don't plan on giving my money to either Verizon or AT&T in the near future. My storage concerns were cleared up when I realized I have ~5gb free on my current 16gb sd card. Would both of those things be nice? Sure, but I doubt I will actually miss them.

I've said it before elsewhere, but for me reading the slides to a presentation I haven't seen is sort of like watching tv in a different language. I mostly know what's going on, and I can follow, but I'm pretty sure I'm missing the main points.

That being said, seeing these presentation decks has often piqued my interest about some concept or other, and prompted me to learn it on my own. shrug

I was very frustrated by this. The feeling was only compounded when I couldn't easily find an "about us" link. Eventually I did, but that only made some vague hand waving about organizing life and syncing between devices. I'm still not sure what this is all about.

This is precisely why a blackout day of major web sites is necessary. If Google, Yahoo, Bing and Facebook are all down for the day, not only would the users be made more aware of the issue, but the media would be forced to cover the blackout and subsequently SOPA, lest they appear completely out of touch with the world.

I think an action similar to what BoingBoing did on internet censorship day might be good. On the a user's first visit of the day, a popup stops the visit, saying "This site has been blocked. Not really, but under SOPA it could be.", with an OK to continue. The same thing on google would really make a stir.

I don't think people really understand the ramifications of the law, and an example that affected them would do wonders for everyday internet users, with a side effect of drumming up needed media attention.

I think that most people aren't saying that they need the two monitors, laser mouse, etc. It is more of an issue of what helps them work the best. I spend most of my day using vim in a screen session on a remote server as well, but if I switched to this setup I think I would feel cramped. Sometimes I open four terminal windows at a time and have firefox behind them in order to get something done. Sure, I could accomplish the same thing with the iPad, but it would feel like a lot more work. Resistance has a tendency to suck away productivity.

Neat idea, although I think you need to make it a bit clearer what the product is on that page. I had to click a few times to get the executive summary. That being said, I'm a bit grumpy I didn't try to develop a similar idea I had a while ago.