> I personally feel that no amount of money is worth spending the best part of your youth doing mostly meaningless things
It depends on why you’re doing it. Supporting a family, and contributing money and spare time to your community, are very meaningful. I’m building <yet another API> for <Company> in order to do my real job which is being a parent and citizen.
CREATE TABLE test (path ltree);
INSERT INTO test VALUES ('Top');
INSERT INTO test VALUES ('Top.Science');
INSERT INTO test VALUES ('Top.Science.Astronomy');
And then a simple search with:
ltreetest=> SELECT path FROM test WHERE path <@ 'Top.Science';
path
------------------------------------
Top.Science
Top.Science.Astronomy
> I'd rather get to value now by making something that just works(and is adequately tested) than engineer something thats future proof but takes longer to get out.
If you haven't read it, I highly recommend A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout. His talk is a great teaser for the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSAYlu0NcY
Here's the thing: a program properly written for the future does not take longer to get out. Not much, at least. What we instinctively think of as "future proof" is generally anything but: by anticipating some particular kind of change that may happen some time in the future, but in practice almost never does, we end up with more complex programs that are harder to modify when an actual (typically unforeseen) change comes our way.
The best way to future proof your program is to make it simpler, according to the requirement you are currently aware of. If you expect a particular change, sure, plan for it. But for the unexpected, just keep it simple. Because simple is easier to adapt, add to, or rewrite.
That said, the simplest solution is rarely the most obvious. Making thing simple does take a bit more time than rushing through the first thing that comes to mind. But it also pays off in a matter of weeks, so it's quite worth it.
And if you have a hard time assessing what "simple" means, SLoC is a surprisingly good metric (we have research that shows this). And mostly your modules should be deep: small APIs that hide significant implementations. I think of it as encapsulation on steroids.
I believe that any programmer should at least know a little about Forth. It's like Lisp. Just knowing about them is extremely enlightening, even if you don't use them in your daily life.
This well-written tutorial will have you implement a Forth in 500 lines of assembly and another 500 lines of Forth.
You will feel like a different person after having done this. People will like you more. Food will taste better. You'll never be alone again, always knowing that you can re-create a fully-functional programming language from assembly within half an hour, if you needed to. It is said that people who know Forth die happy.
I'd strongly recommend the Inherent Vice movie; a neo noir detective movie featuring a hippie detective nearly too stoned to keep track of a particularly LA conspiracy.
“The Department’s most consequential strategic competitor and the pacing challenge for the Department, the People’s Republic of China,3 as well as other state-sponsored adversaries and individual malicious actors often breach the Department’s defensive perimeter and roam freely within our information systems.”
This statement from the actual PDF really is telling for how far the DoD has dropped the ball on protection- maybe spend less time fleshing out offensive capabilities and more time on defense of your citizens?
When traveling, I carry a dumb phone, specifically a Nokia feature phone that doesn't even connect to The Internet. The only distraction on it is the Tetris app which kills time waiting for the bus, or waiting to be seen by a doctor, etc
I dedicate a small window of time (1 hour at most) to social media, and trained all my feeds to be high signal, so I come out of scrolling educated and informed.
I don't engage in phubbing[0] which is a portmanteau of 'phone snubbing'.
I'm a software engineer, but these have been instrumental in my success in a way no coding book can compare to(though John Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" would have, if it came out earlier in my life).
Personal time/task management- The classic, Getting Things Done(https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produ...). The power this has on people cannot be understated. Turns out that most of how life is conducted is rife with forgetfulness, decision paralysis, prioritization mistakes, and massive motivation issues. This book gives you specific workflows to cut through these in a magical way.
Personal Knowledge Management- The equally classic, How to Take Smart Notes(https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Technique/dp/398...). Where GTD(above) does this for well-defined tasks/work, this book does it for open-ended work, giving you an amazing workflow for introducing "Thinking by Writing", which is frankly a superpower. This lets you see things your friends/colleagues simply won't, lets you deconstruct your feelings better, learn new/deeper subjects faster, and connect thoughts in a way to produce real insight.
For Product/Business Management, Gojko Adzic's "Impact Mapping"(https://www.amazon.com/Impact-Mapping-software-products-proj...) feels like it could make nearly every software team/business 10x better by just reading this book. I've personally watched as enormous portions of my life were spent on things that barely moved the needle for companies, or merely didn't keep the metric from rising. So many projects taken on faith that if you work on X, X will improve, without ever measuring, or asking if you could have accomplished that with less. The world looks insane afterward.
The VList paper - which I archived at http://trout.me.uk/lisp/vlist.pdf to avoid having to google the bloody thing every time - is an interesting hybrid.
PSA: enable CORS[1] so people can make cross-origin requests without having to run a proxy.
PSA #2: set things up so the author field of your feed includes your email address (e.g. "Alice <alice@example.org>") and not just your bare name, so people can more easily get in touch with you without having to click through to the original post and then hunt around for your contact page; otherwise, you might never find out it's broken[2].
- Q4 wearables of $9.6B, beats est byu close to $1B
- Q4 Services Rev fo $19.2B short of Est by $800M
- Q4 iphone Rev of $42.6B meets Est
- Q4 ipad Rev of $7.2B, short of Est by $600M
- Q4 Rev of $90.2B beats Est by $2B, that also means its up 8ish% YoY
- Q4 Mac Revenue of $11.5B, beats by $2B, nice, forgot they make computers;)
- China Rev of $15.5B, this is interesting, AAPL clearly has alot of China exposure in a time when that can go away in an instant.
- declared a cash div of $0.23/share
Interesting:
- AAPL hiking prices on Apple One, up $2, Music up $1/month, TV up $2,
- they generated over $24B in cash
- they returned $29B to investors this quarter, wow, them and MSFT and cash flow machines, maybe the only two tech companies you want to hodl right now
- they have only spent $300M on acquisitions this year, that doesn't seem like alot.
Watch for:
- lots of currency exposure in this company, does the USD strength help or hurt them, or are they really good at hedging currency risk?
- AAPLE has $23B in cash, down 1/3 from this time last year. Mostly given back to investors. Probably nothing to worry about here:)
- $3 trillion in market cap has been lost in the past year among 7 of the biggest stocks. $GOOG $MSFT $META $AMZN $TSLA $NFLX $AAPL( from twitter)
- from bloomberg, Maestri said Apple will likely see 10 percentage points of currency impact in the first quarter.
That is alot, and a significant headwind.
That could be an entire paypal worth of currency drag
I've never been able to get a good grip on what people find bad about Finder. Once View > Show Path Bar and View > Show Status Bar have been selected and current folder searching has been enabled in Preferences I don't find it any worse than Windows Explorer, GNOME Files, or any of the numerous derivations of GNOME Files (Nemo, Thunar, etc).
Try infrared light therapy. (sun, infrared heater or specialized light)
We recently found out that all of our mitochondria in our cells need infrared light to get rid of oxidative stress. Our modern environment is devoid of infrared light: create all sort of inflammation and autoimmune diseases.
I had similar symptoms(peripheral neuropathy, headache), heal myself and my eczema that I had every winter in the last 23 years with a few minutes per day in front of a infrared space heater.e
I also know someone who was dying of IBS in the hospital, at some point he say f*ck it if I am going to die it will be under the sun. He checked out of the hospital, whent to mexico (from Canada) and healed himself without medication.
I think a lot of our modern problems are caused by our environment (vit-d, infrared, and other things.)
I hope people try it out and that it help someone.
Check out the videos of Medcram, many research papers have been done on this.
This setup will automatically accept or reject, whichever works, the cookie nonsense and get rid of them once you're done with your tab. CAD comes with a friendly interface to white/greylist cookies you want to keep.
One of the default blocklist for uBlock Origin aims to remove cookie banners too, but a lot of them cannot be simply nuked that way, hence the above method.
One of the best programming books (for any language) ever written IMO. Seibel has a knack for clear, readable but still technical prose that's all too rare unfortunately.
It is my understanding (from reading Kiss Your Dentist Goodbye) that bacteria is seeded from primary caregivers in the first year of life, and it can be difficult to modify them after this, but it’s possible.
My sister has impeccable dental hygiene and many cavities. Her children have had anesthesia because they needed so much dental work. I’m the kind of person who would floss once a year and never had a cavity until I was 28 and drinking many acidic diet sodas. I started the book’s regimen using xylitol, eating basic foods like chocolate and cheese after acidic foods and drinks, took Florassist dental probiotic and stayed on top of cleanings and have had less problems since. My child is okay so far despite some not so great habits. I get extra cleanings that first year and make sure other caregivers do too.
I think this does not work well for mobile devices. Spacing and the font size is too large. Hence, a lot of screen space is wasted and the user has to scroll more. Larger font sizes on mobile are usually not a good idea as the device tends to be closer to your eyes anyway.
A snippet that could work better in my opinion is the following:
html {
max-width: 70ch;
/* larger spacing on larger screens, very small spacing on tiny screens */
padding: calc(1vmin + .5rem);
/* shorthand for margin-left/margin-right */
margin-inline: auto;
/* fluid sizing: https://frontaid.io/blog/fluid-typography-2d-css-locks-clamp/ */
font-size: clamp(1em, 0.909em + 0.45vmin, 1.25em);
/* use system font stack: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-family */
font-family: system-ui
}
/* increase line-height for everything except headings */
body :not(:is(h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)) {
line-height: 1.75;
}
Reminds me of Cory Doctorow's last story in Radicalized: "Masque of the Red Death". summary from Wikipedia: A wealthy financier builds and manages a doomsday vault, designed to withstand societal collapse.
Interesting story, as are the others in that collection.
Probably relevant for the HN crowd: there's a bunch of very geeky next gen fitness guys that keep up with the cutting edge of fitness research, and occasionally expand it themselves. If you're reading them, this kind of thing is being discussed for years, with new studies just moving the odds a bit in favor of the current hypothesis. Yes, they're very Bayesian, explicitly so.
A few names/links, pick and mix as you will - they're all good:
I use Firefox and on Firefox this can be done by typing "about:config" (without the quotes) in the address bar, then searching for "dom.event.contextmenu.enabled" (without the quotes) and then double-clicking on the result to toggle its value from "true" to "false".
I basically do this too, though I just put in some random gibberish (or "admin" or "info" or something) before the domain. I figure they probably have some catchall email address, and if not, nothing wasted
On the other hand, if you do want a one-time piece of email, but don't want to be subscribed to a mailing list, check out sharklasers.com. It's a free temporary email service that works pretty well
Every employee they add also takes potential talent away from adding value to a start-up or competitor trying to catch-up.
It's one way to protect your monopoly when there is a shortage of skilled labor.
I’m a neuroscientist and have struggled with my (mental) health for 30 years. With the pandemic I realized how much foods affect how I feel every day. Going more than 6 months without eating out I became attuned to the differences of meals I prep and what goes into them.
The best explanation I’ve heard is food is like explicit instructions for how our bodies and brains perform through our DNA. Gut health is the engine of the biological machine humming or sputtering accordingly. The research is out there on the differences between food types and impacts of processed foods. The Pollan mantra still still sticks with me: Eat (whole) foods. Not too much. Mostly plants. I’ve added: Sleep better. Move more. Stress less. (To eat well.)
I have to wonder if 10 years down the line, everyone will be able to run models like this on their own computers. Have to wonder what the knock-on effects of that will be, especially if the models improve drastically. With so much of our social lives being moved online, if we have the easy ability to create fake lives of fake people one has to wonder what's real and what isn't.
Dependencies (coupling) is an important concern to address, but it's only 1 of 4 criteria that I consider and it's not the most important one. I try to optimize my code around reducing state, coupling, complexity and code, in that order. I'm willing to add increased coupling if it makes my code more stateless. I'm willing to make it more complex if it reduces coupling. And I'm willing to duplicate code if it makes the code less complex. Only if it doesn't increase state, coupling or complexity do I dedup code.
The reason I put stateless code as the highest priority is it's the easiest to reason about. Stateless logic functions the same whether run normally, in parallel or distributed. It's the easiest to test, since it requires very little setup code. And it's the easiest to scale up, since you just run another copy of it. Once you introduce state, your life gets significantly harder.
I think the reason that novice programmers optimize around code reduction is that it's the easiest of the 4 to spot. The other 3 are much more subtle and subjective and so will require greater experience to spot. But learning those priorities, in that order, has made me a significantly better developer.
It depends on why you’re doing it. Supporting a family, and contributing money and spare time to your community, are very meaningful. I’m building <yet another API> for <Company> in order to do my real job which is being a parent and citizen.