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zzzmarcus

1,063 karma

Seattle, WA

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marcusvorwaller.com 4y ago

The Tough Problem for the Glass Photo Sharing App

zzzmarcus
1pts0
us1.campaign-archive1.com 9y ago

The Unreasonable power of a thousand small optimizations

zzzmarcus
1pts0
substance.io 10y ago

Substance.io – web based content editing in JavaScript

zzzmarcus
5pts0
marcusvorwaller.com 10y ago

The Slow Death of Digital Books

zzzmarcus
1pts0
marcusvorwaller.com 10y ago

The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

zzzmarcus
115pts106
googleblog.blogspot.com 13y ago

Cubeslam - WebGL, CSS 3d, WebRTC, Web Audio Chrome demo game

zzzmarcus
1pts0
alphadesigner.com 14y ago

Mapping stereotypes

zzzmarcus
1pts0
readablediff.com 15y ago

Make Diffs Readable - free, fast git diff viewer

zzzmarcus
1pts0
unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com 15y ago

The Lightworker wants to touch your junk

zzzmarcus
1pts0
aro.com 15y ago

Aro, a Paul Allen mobile startup, comes out after 2+ years in stealth mode

zzzmarcus
1pts0
teambox.com 15y ago

Teambox - open source project management and collab tool

zzzmarcus
2pts0
support.scribd.com 15y ago

Scribd begins charging to download documents uploaded by users

zzzmarcus
1pts0
github.com 15y ago

Style faster: Chrome/Safari extension to reload JS/CSS without hitting refresh.

zzzmarcus
1pts0
www.ommwriter.com 16y ago

Ommwriter: Free focused-writing app with ambient sounds [mac]

zzzmarcus
5pts1
www.docstoc.com 16y ago

Reverse anthropogenic global warming without reversing the global economy

zzzmarcus
1pts0
books.google.com 16y ago

Gaussian vs. Mandelbrotian: The Great Intellectual Fraud

zzzmarcus
34pts23
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Ask YC: Review my project: meta.li News for Startup Hackers

zzzmarcus
2pts4
www.10gen.com 17y ago

Open source object store database for Java/Ruby/Python

zzzmarcus
1pts1
web.archive.org 17y ago

Voting systems that produce wildly varying results

zzzmarcus
1pts0
tenderlovemaking.com 17y ago

Faster, more flexible web scraping with Nokigiri

zzzmarcus
10pts1

I sent them all to ChatGPT 4o one by one and had it guess the books, this is how it did:

1. Anthony Trollope – I didn’t get this one. 2. Evelyn Waugh – Correct! 3. Henry James – Correct! 4. Graham Greene – I missed this, was thinking of the wrong tone. 5. W. Shakespeare (i) – Correct! 6. Samuel Richardson – Correct! 7. David Foster Wallace – I guessed Gaddis, but this makes perfect sense. Partial credit. 8. Marcel Proust – Correct! 9. Mrs. Gaskell – Correct! 10. Ian McEwan – Partial credit; I guessed Atonement after Henry James. 11. E. M. Forster – Correct! 12. Cormac McCarthy – Correct! 13. P. G. Wodehouse – Correct! 14. Alan Bennett – I guessed Chekhov/Osborne, so I missed this. 15. Jane Austen – Correct! 16. Dan Brown – Correct! 17. Agatha Christie – Correct! 18. Zadie Smith – Missed this one. 19. W. Shakespeare (ii) – Correct! 20. Iris Murdoch – Correct! 21. Ernest Hemingway – Correct! 22. John Banville – Correct! 23. Harold Pinter – Correct! 24. F. Scott Fitzgerald – Correct! 25. Tennessee Williams – Correct! 26. Oscar Wilde – Correct! 27. D. H. Lawrence – Correct! 28. Thomas Hardy – Correct! 29. Virginia Woolf – Missed this one, was thinking of Galsworthy. 30. Tom Stoppard – Correct!

Final score: 25/30 with a couple of partial credits. Not bad!

This may not be a popular answer, but the truth is, this is a self-confirming story that gets stronger each time you tell it to yourself.

You can prove this to yourself.

Tomorrow, when you go to work, check in at regular intervals and ask yourself, “What’s wrong with what’s happening?”

Usually, the answer will be something like “It’s pointless,” “It’s tedious,” “I’d rather be doing X than Y,” or “I’m tired.” Short of your work causing you physical harm, it doesn’t matter what the answer is.

Look into why you answered that with as much detachment as possible. Ask yourself questions like, “Is the thing I’m doing inherently unpleasant? Is it hated by everyone who does it? Is it possible that if I dropped the contextual story around what I’m doing, it’s actually about the same as doing anything else?”

You will find that the misery comes from comparing what you’re doing to some ideal that is just that—an imaginary idea that does not actually exist. It’s pretend. Stop comparing reality to pretend things. Take what you’re doing for what it is. Your mind is not going to love doing this because it thrives on resistance to what is. That’s fine; just recognize that and keep investigating what’s happening.

Keep doing this until you realize that you’re creating your own hell and that you can also escape it with just a few creative adjustments to the story you’re telling yourself.

Moving places or changing jobs won’t fix it. Working less or more won’t fix it. Having a more meaningful job won’t fix it. Having no job won’t fix it.

This is not complacency—change can and will happen, but it’s not going to happen until you’re content with what you’re doing now. Good change comes as a result of accepting what’s real now. Good change doesn’t come from escaping what you’re doing now for some pretend ideal.

I've been using TheBrain (https://www.thebrain.com) for ~10 years now and haven't found anything that comes close to it in terms of flexibility. If you haven't looked at it in awhile, it's worth checking out again. They have a new desktop app, much better mobile apps, and even after all these years, development continues steadily.

I've got 16,399 thoughts in mine and add more just about every day. Anything I think I may want to know later goes there. More ephemeral notes go in Apple Notes (I used Evernote for a long time but became annoyed with their business model and haven't missed it). Everything else goes in The Brain.

Search great, the ability to link notes as parent/children/siblings is extremely powerful once you get the hang of it.

It's not free, but it is, in my opinion, easily worth the cost.

The new Dropbox 7 years ago

I've also been in the process of moving off both Dropbox and Google Backup & Sync because they are such resource hogs on the Mac. iCloud drive isn't perfect, especially when it comes to sharing, but I'll accept that if it means my fans aren't going to be on full blast when it's running.

I can't remember a time when I've had Dropbox open and not found it at the top of the CPU tab of Activity Monitor. This may be because I have a couple symlinks (not many, just some dotfiles) or because I have a large number of files (nothing ridiculous, ~100k photos backed up) but the fact is, it's been long enough for Dropbox to have figured this out and fixed it.

It's bad enough to where I now leave Dropbox off all the time, then only turn it on when I need to sync something. With iCloud sync I don't even think about it, which is the way it should be.

I opened Dropbox before starting this comment to see the new UI and even after giving it enough time to catch up, it' still using between 48 and 127% CPU. It makes even Outlook feel breezy.

This mentality can be a little dangerous. You're training yourself to cater to your moods. This can result in important but not urgent tasks that you're never really in the mood to do never getting done. Or, if it's a task that has to be done, a lot of resistance because you're used to waiting for motivation to kick in.

For me, a better approach has been to consciously force myself to do things I don't feel like doing. I push through low energy, distractions, or boredom and just get it done.

You might expect this to lead to sub-optimal performance or suffering through unenjoyable tasks. Sometimes it does, but in my experience, a more common result is the good feeling of having pushed through a barrier and found a second, or third wind.

You should at least be familiar with the major front-end libraries and frameworks - React, Angular and Ember. You don't necessarily need to "know" them, but at least know about them.

You should be familiar with what ES6 is and what Babel does. These technologies probably won't be specific questions per se but if they come up and you can't speak about them, it'd be a red flag.

Even for a front-end developer you should have a basic knowledge of data structures like linked lists, binary trees, min/max heaps, depth/breadth first search, tries, recursion, hash tables, etc. These often come up in whiteboarding questions.

Practice whiteboarding on an actual whiteboard so you get used to writing code then practice on hackerrank so you get used to quickly writing code that actually compiles. Some companies only use whiteboards, others want your code to run.

Make sure you think of test cases for your problems. TDD in an interview is usually a good sign.

Usually knowing this stuff and having some sample code will usually get you through most of the interview. Knowing the specific things mentioned in other comments is useful, but I can't imagine not hiring someone because they didn't know some specific CSS selector or how to use flexbox.

Other tips - don't get visibly flustered, talk your way through problems. Stay postive about past employers. Good luck!

I've been using Qbserve for a couple weeks and I'm really happy with it. For me the best feature is just having that little number in the menu bar that shows what percentage of my time has been focused. This, more than any other timer or tracker, has been a simple and effective motivator for me to keep creating.

There are a lot of features I can imagine that would let me slice and dice tracked data better, but for a V1, this is something special.

I love the ideas behind this app. I haven't tried it since it's iPad only and the last update was in 2014, but looking at the video, it has so much promise. It's the first app that I've seen that looks like it has the potential to replace The Brain. Hopefully you can find a way to make some money off it and keep it going!

Just spent a few minutes playing around with your site. Very nice. I really like how your discovery lists show the last time the podcast was updated, the number of episodes, and the average length. Filtering on those attributes would be an awesome feature.

Nicely done.

I agree. Search results seem to be limited to 6 and even more problematics is that I find myself at a loss for exactly what to search for. Lots of promise here, but as it is, it's pretty hard to discover new content. Keep it up!

Interesting. Did you learn cursive in elementary school? I find the sample really easy and pleasant to read. I wonder if it's a difference in experience or just personal preference.

There are no Postgres or Mysql add-ons for Meteor that are actively maintained or even close to production ready. Hopefully you can prove me wrong on this, but I've looked and have only found preview releases and alpha quality packages.

OP here. I mostly agree with you. If the filesystem was better at a few things then it'd be the ideal PK. Right now though it isn't enough.

It's too slow or too inconvenient for most things you'd want in a PK. Creating files isn't fast or easy. Usually you need to open some other app to do it, even if it's just a terminal. Linking one file to another and showing the connection with metadata like the direction of the link is possible, but not easy, especially if you want multiple links to and from a file. You can sync with things like Dropbox, but search is painfully slow and viewing/editing files means opening a different app. It's just cumbersome.

The reason I like TheBrain is actually because it's good for much more than todos and project data. I have one "file" that has over 10 thousand notes in it. It's organized arbitrarily by my preference, but definitely structured, searchable and "infinitely" expandable. The best part though is that it's really easy to visualize related data in TheBrain. In fact, as I've read comments today, I've come to realize that that is the one crucial thing most PK's are missing. There aren't good visualizations for Evernote, OneNote, most filesystems, org mode, etc.

I"m with you, there's no reason the filesystem can't become the best PK, but it's far from that now.