thetabyte

Given everything I've read from Notch in the last year or two, I would be highly unsurprised if he wasn't pushing this as a way to dump his hands of anything to do with business and/or notoriety (as much as he ever will be able to). His recent sentiments have expressed a lot of regret that he is no longer able to spend his time doing simple game programming & experimentation with a decent level of obscurity -- and I can't blame him for it. This is wild speculation, of course.

I'm really interested in this project, but wish they had left polyphasic sleep entirely out of it. The sleep data they provide (REM and NREM monitoring, etc) seems fantastically useful, and the lucid dream induction is intriguing, if dubious; however, the inclusion of polyphasic sleep makes me suspicious of the scientific rigor of the project on a whole. It's making it hard to decide whether to go ahead and back - on the one hand, I sleep with a mask anyway, definitely want the sleep monitoring capabilities the device offers, but on the other, can I trust it?

Ahh, that makes sense. Can there be a sliding scale of delay for the ability to comment, or depth of thread allowed (before commenting is disabled for that thread), based on the output of the flamewar detector?

This may also have the side effect of allowing for some opinions to be shared, without being mired in flame-y back and forth. (And, importantly, still allows the story to stay more visible)

Especially after pg's response to the blog post about sexual assault at CodeMash, I wonder—why can't the flamewar detector just disable comments?

I tend to have a lot of respect for pg, and found his apology for what happened in that thread to be admirable. Whether or not preventing discussion of the issue on HN is positive or negative...I have very complex feelings on the issue, and see valid arguments on both sides.

What I do not have mixed feelings about, however, is that these issues need to be put front and center, so that people in our industry a) know they exist b) know how common they are c) are inspired to make personal effort to fix it. I would hope that pg agrees.

If he does, why not make such stories, when they set off the flamewar detector, maintain their ranking, but disable comments? That way, the issue is still raised, and people are still alerted to it, but it prevents the (some believe) "unproductive" discussion.

Hm? Was that meant to be an insult to me? I'd appreciate hearing your full reasoning for the disparagement. From my perspective, I was only sharing a classic piece of literature that had a theme relevant to the parent's comment, with a message we all could learn from, that happens to be one of my favorite poems. I didn't claim to be out there, throwing myself on the line—though I did attend a protest on the matter, and have previously actively participated in a political campaign to support my views. Anyways, you were saying?

"First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the socialists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me."

-- Martin Niemöller, 1946

I agree. That's a problem for which he deserves more than a little criticism. But that's not what I was discussing, at all.

Are you under the impression that you can review the entire federal government, decide which programs to get rid of, and shut down every one of those programs, during your first year on office?

Because if so, please, run, I'd like to see it happen.

By pitiful, I meant that this shutdown seems minuscule among the variety of other privacy violations—but that hardly justifies the Guardian using this specific reveal as an attack piece.

I find it amusing the the Guardian seems to position this article in such a way that it is meant to disparage the Obama administration. While the administration is far from above criticism, and a variety of other Guardian reveals do justifiably criticize the President, my personal takeaway from this is a sign that the administration did at least attempt to curb some Bush era privacy invasions—though perhaps to a pitiful extent. Funny how the article doesn't seem to put it that way.

First, advice:

Like many people here, I agree that there is nothing more important than building things that you can show people. However, the process of getting to that level of capability can often be somewhat mystifying. There are a few tools I recommend for that. First of all, interactive tutorials, like those at Code School, are fantastic introductions to web frameworks, if you're just getting started. I first learned Ruby on Rails with Rails for Zombies. However, these tutorials will not give you the skills to actually build anything—rather, they are a good primer. From there, find a good book, preferably one that focuses on actually building something, like Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial. Finally, I really love to use screencasts (a la Railscasts) for picking up domain specific information for particular tasks. Hope that helps!

Second, a relevant question:

I've just recently started freelancing myself, and I see a variety of advice. "No Rails developer should make under $75/hour!", "Take what you can get, work your way up slowly!" "You probably charge too little!", etc. How do you actually evaluate how much your skills are worth as a freelancer? How do you match with clients who need and are willing to pay for your particular skill level? If anyone has any links to relevant advice, those would be great to.

This is one of the most important points in the wake of this scandal. Be pragmatic, and look at the incentive system. The truth is, not only will most citizens never find out mass spying programs like this, but a great number won't even care, because they have "nothing to hide". However, there is a massive negative reaction to acts of terrorism.

If we want this to change, we will first have to, as a people, seriously disincentives these actions from politicians—which is hard to do, considering neither major party has been the "better" one on this issue—but perhaps more importantly, we must understand that there is only so much government can do to keep you safe, if you want to keep your liberty. The sense of entitlement to both has to go.

I think this was a good write up on the issue: http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/06/06/the-security-state-...;

And I'm going to go one step further:

Critical thinking is not prioritized because it is hard to evaluate.

Due to the demand for teacher accountability, the insane level of competition for college entry, and the political games surrounding education policy, modern public education is entirely centered around examination and evaluation.

Not only is critical thinking challenging to evaluate, but, more importantly, people—read, parents—do not accept evaluations that report bad critical thinking skills. If a child can't answer 2 + 2 or who President Washington was, then they clearly didn't know. But if you ask a question that truly challenges critical thinking skills, and the child receives a bad score, the parents will be marching into an administrator's office with complaints of "trick questions" and "unfair grading". And fear of parent backlash drives American public school administration's decision making.

Well, no tips, but I do have a question:

I'm a web dev who's been looking to start trying game development, particularly with canvas. However, I've hit a huge wall with any type of graphics programming. Have you found any particularly good resources while trying to learn canvas, or graphics programming in general? Or anyone else here? If you have something feel free to email it to mrjordangoldstein at gmail.com if it doesn't seem strictly relevant to this thread—and thanks!

As part of the team behind the now-defunct http://mentor.im AngelHack project, I wish you luck, and would love to hear how it goes! I love the concept.

Check out this post he wrote:

http://zachholman.com/posts/slide-design-for-developers/

The good news is, if you're doing Ruby in order to do Rails, there is such a thing.

http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book (Include every section labeled optional)

For general Ruby though, less so. I've heard good things about http://tryruby.org/, and I liked the Pickaxe book (though I didn't love it).

Yet, different, and sometimes more complex words can have entirely unlike connotations, that much more effectively describe the message the author is trying to convey. Sometimes, simpler words are just that—too simple to properly describe the concept the author would like to capture, and the emotions he would like to encode within it.

That's not to say complicated is always better. Like it programming, the best set of tools are those suited for the job.

In the end, you consider your audience. Can I add more to this sentence to better capture the feeling I'm trying to convey, without detracting from it's ability to be understood? The parent most likely decided that on a forum like HN, the answer was yes.

You can say that again. It was definitely disheartening for peers of mine I knew to be frequent cheaters get accepted into a college I was rejected from.

This is made worse by how absolutely rampant it is—to the point the reporting it seemed futile. I actually had high ranking peers inform me that they didn't believe I had never cheated in high school. They actually could not understad the concept. The social risk for reporting any time of cheating is quickly amplified when you realize:

* It's more common in high school to cheat than not to cheat

* Administration has no time to pursue cheaters except in the most widespread and obvious circumstances

* It's very hard to prove cheating outside of an anecdotal "This is what I saw" story, and there is no court system for high school students

Honestly, it sucked.

P.S. Based on an American public high school experience. And, for what's it's worth, ~300 in the College Board Top 1000 Challenge Index schools.

I have to agree with you there. That comes back to the biggest problem when dealing with any group of people:

No two people are alike, despite whatever label you give them. There will always be exceptions, and no list of simple statements will cover all of them.

However, that doesn't mean that an effort to compile a reasonable set of standards based on inputs from a large number of that group can't make significant strides in improving their situation, which is what really should be the focus.

The list is practically innumerable, but a particularly relevant pair: Trace Wax and Obie Fernandez. They took on a 17 year old intern with no web development experience outside of HTML/CSS, who could only work remotely, from out of state, for about 8 hours a week, trained him in Ruby on Rails through hours of pairing and paid for his trip to NYC to try working on site.

That experience has equipped me with what I've needed to land another internship, start freelance consulting work, win a major hackathon, and get accepted into a brilliant program. All because they took a chance on me.

I'm watching a brilliant, college age friend struggle through that initial "getting started" process in web development, and all I can think is: Thanks Trace, thanks Obie!

Edit: Also, thanks HN, for being the forum by which I found them! Though I'm still not sure that was the correct use of an AskHN thread (and I'm afraid to recommend the tactic to friends) it definitely helped me!

While I agree with you completely, I think what you are saying isn't at odds with what she is saying.

While most pieces of writing about getting more women in tech seem to propose the problem as "How to Add Women to Tech", the real issue they're addressing is "How to Remove the Unnoticed Barriers to Women in Tech".

Like any other majority, the male majority of the tech industry often take for granted a number of things as "normal", "everyone does them".

People should absolutely "just hire the people who can do the work", but they should assure that their company and process are not set up in a way that, unbeknownst to them, turns off a certain minority whose needs they fail to recognize. These posts are trying to highlight those needs or differences so that it's easier to break that "normal" barrier.

Sadly, as long as our education system is incredibly test-focused in the push for "teacher accountability", no "soft" curriculum like this will ever be a reality—despite how much better it would be for learning.

Yeah, I have to give you that, the Finder UX isn't fantastic for moving files around, and I often use the terminal like you. However, I never found Windows Explorer any better. Even on Windows, I wished I had a UNIX terminal to move things with—on Mac, I do.

Out of interest, what do the good file managers have?

My biggest annoyance with Finder is lack of tabs/split panes.

I myself am rarely in Finder (or Spotlight, for that matter). Alfred (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/alfred/id405843582?mt=12) has been an absolute dream. I find every program, file, and everything else through Alfred, with just a few keystrokes and fuzzy search. My OS wouldn't be the same without it.

When I switched to Macs, I abandoned the concept of toggling maximization state altogether. Each window gets a workspace, and four fingers in a direction takes me back and forth, or shows me all windows. No toggling, no alt-tabbing, etc. I find this excessively more convenient, but as usual, YMMV.

P.S. I do agree the + button has absolutely inane behavior. I just like the workspace method more than I ever liked toggling maximization state, moving windows, and alt-tabbing.

The prevalence of #1 on your list (among other reasons) are why I always have and always will believe that improvements to education yield by far the most return on investment vs any other allocation of resources. Improving education throughout the world is the single best way to increase economic output.

Now, things I did not say:

* "Put more money into our education system as it is."

We are in need of vast improvement, and we should be investing time and money towards innovation and improvement.

* "Stop funding and/or stop using our existing educational system."

Yes, there are many, many flaws, but our educational systems have improved our society a great deal, and are fantastic avenues and methods of distribution for educational innovation.

* "Edtech is the best industry!"

I'm still unsold on the edtech space as a way of improving education. Particularly, I fear that our existing models for business, when applied to education, will exclude the vital underpriveleged demographic who have some of the most potential for growth. Aditionally, much of the edtech I see used in schools does little to actually aid student learning—but it certainly does look good on a quarterly newsletter where administrators list what fantastic things they're doing for their school. Whoever figures out how to make equitable, effective educational technology that turns a profit will be one of the preeminent innovators of our time.

(Note: If you believe you or your company are doing this, I have Ruby on Rails skills, am willing to learn any technology you work with, and I want to work for you.)

In sum: The act of improving the effectiveness of the systems which themselves improve the effectiveness of human capital yields exponential and undervalued economic gains. I hope in the future it receives more focus.

I'm genuinely interested—is this the consensus opinion of most of the developed world outside of the US?

I'm a US citizen, and generally consider myself liberal and progressive. I favor much stricter gun control laws. But I'm not sure I do favor complete disarmament of the citizenship. I do believe that the knowledge—not the use—of citizen's arms does provide a reminder to the government in times of crisis.

But am I simply experiencing large cultural bias? Is there any research on this? Any evidence I can look to? I'm very curious.

I find community proliferation like this very entertaining. People learn to identify so well with one community or its content, that they replicate it inside other communities. For example, I was bemused recently to learn that Reddit has an r/4chan. I asked, "Wouldn't you just go to 4chan?" But they found it more moderate, more suited to a Reddit user's taste.

To each their own, eh?

So, am I the only one who finds Facebook ads...actually kind of good? Sure, they're horrifying in that they have the necessary information to target me that well, but I'll get advertisements for a local comic shop, or for a game that at least sounds interesting—although the product on the other end isn't always fantastic, I find Facebook ads to be the few that actually show me something I might be interested in.

I understand that. But not everything the government funds fails. I am instead disproving the case presented to me—the failure of Solyndra is not evidence of a failing government effort.