HN user
Would be awesome to hear from a Rails developer how Cake compares to what we have in Ruby land.
I still have to build and maintain the odd PHP app now and again. Is cake worth my while to learn? Or would I be better off with something like Zend Framework if I had to choose?
You know, this whole episode could turn out to be a positive thing if he keeps pointing toward the Patriot Act as the real culprit. Which it is.
Better than email on a mobile device?
The Shangri-La diet is the lifehack of the century (not a diet in the traditional sense):
Seriously. You simply won't want to eat, and if you think you want to eat, you'll be surprised at how untasty that delicious looking candy bar or pasta is once it hits your lips. It's almost as if your body conspires against your best efforts to gain weight, which is a nice reversal for once.
In conjunction, take a high-quality multivitamin like SuperNutrition or Alive and you'll also find yourself with enough energy that you'll go crazy if you don't exercise. Yeah, it helps you want to exercise. That is key for me.
It's so much easier to take your daily olive oil and find yourself automatically disgusted at the sight of heavy food than to rely on sheer discipline, which is probably why you're overweight to begin with. And besides, olive oil is good for preventing disease.
It also helps that you'll feel the effects working on the same day you start, and you should see an encouraging difference on the scale a week later (I lost 5 pounds on the first week with no exercise - almost scary).
You win, like, 3 times on Shangri-La + high-quality multivitamin, and you don't have to have much discipline to get started.
Alternatively, get your hands on a free IRC client and hang around #ruby and #rubyonrails on irc.freenode.net.
Hit or miss, at times, but being able to chat live with real Ruby and Rails programmers is pretty helpful.
These are terribly unstable on OS X... and I don't know why.
For Apple users, how does this compare to MobileMe/iDisk (Apple provides a free iDisk app for iPhone)?
I'd like to second this. Obsessive self-analysis can be a real problem. Over the years, I've learned to take myself less seriously, and my life has definitely improved because of that. People are still tedious, but my tolerance has improved.
Is your personality type 'INTP', perchance?
INTPs have these constant internal battles. We're good at concentrating and love working in the realm of ideas. However, we're often an impractical lot and procrastination is pretty rampant among the other INTPs I know. The biggest problem, I think, is that we just really suck at perceiving the passage of time, and the daydreaming, writing, or discussion of ideas is often rewarding enough just to stop there.
INTJs are supposed to have many of the same qualities of INTPs but tend to be more sure of themselves, and therefore, more productive (or more capable of delivering 'products' within 'deadlines'). They seem to live in the moment a bit more, and I would venture to guess that they make better entrepreneurs.
As an INTP, I feel I can relate to your situation. I too often wonder if my problem relates to a personality temperament, and truly can be changed. It really bothers me that I have little to show for all the work I do in my head, and this frustration has helped motivate me, but I still don't feel like I've been truly 'unlocked'.
To compound the problem, INTPs make up about 1% to 3% of the population, which means not many people can relate to the INTP mindset and are more likely just to call you a whiner without attempting to appreciate where you are strong, and why that strength makes you weaker in other areas.
Any INTPs out there who feel they've overcome their temperament's negative traits? How did you do it?
Anti-aging/life-extension stuff is all very interesting, but I fail to see how such technology would ever become accessible to the public at large. For that to happen, I'd think that there would have to be a significant economic benefit.
As it stands now, we have an overpopulation problem. We also live in a world where, whether we like it or not, segments of the population can be considered either a drag on society or a benefit. Who decides?
I have little doubt that someone will crack the code to indefinite lifespans within my lifetime, whether or not this breakthrough is publicized. But do we have any reason to believe that life-extension technology, even adding 10-15 years to the average lifespan, would be accessible to anyone but the super rich?
I just don't see how regular joes would be allowed to have this, but I'd like to be convinced otherwise.
ALSO: If you're going to downmod me, can you please explain why? This is a serious question, and people seem to want to shy away from it whenever it is brought up.
I just want to live long enough to live forever:
Wouldn't it be nice not to have robots replace us, but instead make us better at what we do?
When will PostgreSQL hit the tipping point? Sucker has been ripe for the pickin' for years.
If Leo pressed on, wouldn't that have been a case of feeding the troll? Arrington even eggs him on with "Whatcha gonna do about it?" What a prick.
It's funny. As a Rubyist, I still recommend Python for getting started in programming.
The docs are better, the code is probably easier to read for someone new to programming (there isn't a requirement to understand OOP to be productive), the community isn't alarmingly dysfunctional, and the conventions are more traditional. You can port a lot of Python concepts over to other languages easier than you could Ruby, I would think.
Python is classical music. Ruby is jazz. Choose the least subjective/nuanced approach first and build from there. But that's just me.
Heisenberg's Uncertaintly principle incentivizes zero transparency when studying human behavior, does it not?
That is rather frightening.
Good for Aaron!
I don't understand the more critical comments here. He's obviously doing what he feels he needs to do to stay sane. Why so many judgmental statements? I think some of this may come from folks feeling a little guilty about their own technology addiction. Or maybe they're just feeling a little superior now that they've 'outlasted' Aaron Swartz. I donno. It's just weird that people would suddenly become so concerned with someone else's techno-fast, as if he's mentally off because he wants a break from it all.
Not all of us can be moderate about everything all the time. Some of us need to take extreme and immediate action to break out of a downward spiral or perform some other life-affirming action. Sometimes we need friends to push us to do this. Seems perfectly healthy to me. And I don't understand the comparison people are making to crash diets here, as if living off the grid is somehow equivalent to cutting off the flow of essential nutrients. Come on.
I use mibbit all the time when I'm behind a firewall that blocks IRC traffic. I don't consider myself an idiot. It's probably also a great option for thin clients.
I do use Colloquy or irssi when at home, though.
It was weird for me at first, but I find it comfortable now. The eyes don't have to move as much while scanning code; small thing, I guess.
Of course, if I didn't have a proper text editor that took care of the tab stops for me, it'd probably make me crazy to have to hit the space bar twice for indents.
Still, it was never as off-putting as the significant whitespace in Python, which any pythonista can tell you becomes very easy to live with after an easy and brief acclimation period.
Phuckin' sweet. I love these guys!
Can someone tell me if this is a good idea?
You put this fast-booting live distro on a thumbdrive or disc, and it boots straight into a kiosk mode where you have just a full-screen browser that is restricted to your web-based sales portal. Perhaps it is simply an online store catalog with shopping cart and checkout.
Let's say you sell products at various fairs or conventions - maybe you travel a lot - wouldn't it be nice to be able to turn any cheap, old computer with a network connection (maybe you have many of them) into a fully-functioning on-site store in under 10 seconds without having to mess with anything? Just plug in that USB drive, boot, remove the USB drive, and you're done (or you do the same for a set of machines). If someone kicks out a power plug, just reboot like you did the first time and relax, knowing that the same exact functionality will be available on every computer you run this on, every time, with nothing to configure, nothing to install, and leaves no footprint on any of the machines you touch (runs completely in memory).
If needed, this fast-booting kiosk distro could download config settings from your web service (maybe you want to change your prices or catalog depending on the computer's location).
Could something like this reduce the cost and hassle of running profitable vendor kiosks at fairs/festivals/shows/conventions/malls/lobbies? Enough to be worth paying for such software?
What are the implications of instantly deployable, domain-specific thin-clients along these lines? What are the risks? Or is this just backward thinking?
I would pay dollars for something that could hide my OS X menu bar in the same way that I can hide the dock. An added benefit would be to hide all my desktop icons (which I right-align) until I move my mouse to the edge of the screen.
Having tried a few isolation apps, I now wish more of that stuff was built into the OS itself.
Not bad, but I think it would be more useful if I could submit an image and have the engine give me all the facts it could dig up about it, based on its context in other pages, geo tags and camera type (if available), etc.
I think we're going to see some very interesting developments along these lines very soon. Scary stuff too. Imagine submitting a picture of yourself and finding out what the internet knows about you based on your physical appearance. Better keep those Facebook profiles private, folks! More than that, you'll have to convince your friends to keep their profiles private if they have pics of you as well!
<tangent> This is what is rather frightening about the next web; even if you want to remain anonymous, you're going to have to do battle with all the other folks who are more than happy to post and tag pictures of you for the world to see (with good -natured intentions, I might add). Remember that embarrassing moment at that party where you had a little too much to drink? Oh, you were too drunk to recall? Well, it's on somebody's public Facebook profile now. With your name on it. And if I am your employer, what's to stop me from taking your badge photo and plugging it into a service to pull down other pictures of you from the cloud? :O </tangent>
Anyway, back to the matter at hand! I do see your service as being particularly valuable to IP holders who want to know who is displaying their copyrighted images or logos without authorization. If your site were comprehensive enough, you could probably go freemium and become a paid tattle-tale. Take that a step further and "For a nominal fee, you can click here to have our partners at LegalZoom.com send a takedown notice."
:)
I personally feel that it is better to err on the side of caution in regards to global warming. I say "feel" because I'm just not smart enough to navigate fact from fiction on this issue anymore. There's going to be extremes on both sides, but I don't see what we have to gain by not taking better care of our planet.
Even if global warming is only partially manmade, shouldn't we do what we can to minimize the effect? And plain old pollution is a visible problem regardless of warming effects; it's now in our food and water supply.
That is how I see this issue. Hope that is a reasonable approach considering all the FUD out there. I don't see how society is harmed by erring on the side of caution on this one.
I think most tech nerds can understand and appreciate the place this person is in. I know I do. If you're an INTP, I can almost guarantee that you have this problem.
Although I haven't conquered my own demons here, life becomes much easier when you know know that this is actually very common amongst intelligent people. In other words, this is only natural.
Accepting that the anxiety and depression are natural side effects of being a rabid thinker has actually helped me deal with it better. The anxiety and depression is still there, and I have my moments, but knowing that it is a natural phenomenon gives me a peace I would not have had otherwise.
It's not surprising to me that many programmers and deep thinkers end up practicing some form of Buddhism; getting away from the now is what our egos are trying to do constantly. Feeding your head with information is the geek's way of hiding from the present moment.
It seems as if I am always there; never here. And that is the origin of my depression/anxiety problems.
If only I had the discipline to keep myself going to the gym. I am always glad that I did, but with that in mind, I don't know why I can't seem to keep it consistent.
What is it that fuels fitness freaks? And where can I get some? Not talking about roids or HGH, here. :)
Just try it. At least once. Don't like the smoke? Have a cookie. Within 15-20 minutes, you'll be wondering why you can't get marijuana from a liquor store, taxed and regulated in a similar manner to the rest of the products they sell there (which happen to be far more harmful to you and society anyway).
Side effects from over-doing it are basically mental slowness and a lack of motivation (even this will go away if you just stop for a while). If you start sucking at your job, your suckiness should show up on your performance review and HR should handle you accordingly. Maybe you get fired. This is how an alcoholic would be handled, anyway.
There is way too much fear and over-analysis surrounding this topic. The tools to manage it are already here. Marijuana is already here, and will continue on just fine regardless of whether it is legal or not. Overachievers like Michael Phelps and Barack Obama will smoke marijuana and go on to do great things, just as they always have.
Just legalize it already so we can finally benefit from California's number one cash crop, out in the open, rather than letting the majority of the profits go into the pockets of people who very often do pose a credible threat to society and require insane amounts of tax dollars to manage.
Is it possible to create pretty graphs with gnuplot?
Us Rubyists are used to using curl for testing our REST apps. What additional help/insight can netcat provide when building REST apps? Or Rails apps in general? Is there any?
Wait... what?
Looks like InnoDB supports transactions, no? http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/innodb-transaction-mo...