Albright

For those unaware, it looks like this is "Dear Future HomeJoy Engineer:" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794956

Commentary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8795197

I'd like to, but the link just sends me to Forbes' paywall. =/

The first step is to wad up your self-doubt and chunk it in the nearest incinerator. If you've been tinkering with code for eight years and have won competitions, odds are pretty certain you can do good enough work to justify a junior dev's salary.

Anyway, the topic of actually finding work is broad, but this might help you get in the right direction; pick some things you'd like to work with, and look for specific job boards for them. For example, I'm pretty proficient with the Drupal framework/CMS, so I'll usually watch the official Drupal jobs board when I'm on the lookout for a new gig. There's also LinkedIn; you should at the least have a profile there, even if you aren't actively searching for jobs there. It also helps to have a personal site and do a little SEO on it so that it comes up if someone searches for "Lua developers in [your city]."

That's a basic answer, but it might be enough to get your foot in the door at a few places.

Huh. My (mainland Chinese) wife told me about this story after reading about it in the Chinese press. I thought it was sensationalized a bit, but this article lines up with what she told me pretty well (though maybe that just means the AP is sourcing the Chinese press in its article).

Apparently a lot of better-off Chinese women travel to the US to have their children, though they don't stay there, so they're not technically "anchor babies." Still, given the prevalence that it happens, I'm surprised I've heard so little about it in the US press, especially given how the citizenship-at-birth issue has been debated recently. And apparently this particular woman's other children were also born in the US in the same manner…

Thanks for explaining it, I guess, because your web site sure doesn't. The about page is worse than useless.

NetSurf seems to support SSL to the extent that it connected to my site, which scores an A+ on the Qualsys SSL Labs test, without any issues.

On the other hand, I agree that not being able to hit Command-L to jump to the address bar as with every other graphical browser (as well as many other browser-like applications) just… doesn't feel right.

Do you mean Vasalgel? The article is nearly an advertisement for it. Has a diagram of how it works and everything.

Maybe they wouldn't lose their impetus, but they might lose their ability to sell the idea of e-books to publishers.

The major stores sell DRM-free music now, but do you think that Apple would have been able to get music publishers on board if the iTMS had no copy protection on day one?

> Amazon can remotely delete the e-book using a back door. It used this back door in 2009 to delete thousands of copies of George Orwell's 1984.

Tell the whole story, guys. Framing it just this way is dishonest.

Once you achieve a certain degree of success, you no longer have the same challenges, concerns, or mindset of the typical "indie dev," yes.

This is a guy whose tech podcast I stopped listening to partly because he and some other dweeb wouldn't shut up about their brand new BMWs.

Indeed, thinking of Marco Arment as an "indie dev" is sort of like thinking of Minecraft as an "indie game." Regardless of roots, at some point, they both crossed a money line. That being said, assuming he is somewhat financially prudent, Arment probably has enough money to just drop into mutual funds and live off the interest, so I guess it says something about his passion as a developer that he's still coding and trying to make an honest buck off of it.

I think the patronage model is interesting, and I'm curious how he or other developers will make it work within the confines of the App Store.

I'm 4/5, meaning that of the five projects I've backed, four delivered what they promised and one turned out to be, if not a total scam, at least a project where the creators lied about how far along they were in prototyping and currently haven't posted a project update in almost three months -- I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that their intentions were good, but they quickly got over their heads so they took the money and ran. (Here's that project: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wicoz/milk-nanny-the-wo... )

I was very frustrated by the degree to which Kickstarter would take any responsibility after the project clearly started going south. Even though this project was a "Staff Pick!!", implying, to me at least, a higher quality project than normal, they didn't seem to have any interest in holding the creators to account. After they wouldn't refund my money, I did a chargeback through my bank. I then got a message from "Kickstarter Integrity" scolding me and telling me they were blocking my account from pledging for 30 days and telling me to tell my bank to cancel the chargeback! These guys take the money and run, and my integrity is challenged! It was pretty friggin' insulting.

The experience might not have turned me off of Kickstarter forever, but I will definitely be more cautious before throwing my money at any other project on the site. It would be great to see a KS alternative which is willing to hold vendors more responsible.

Are you seriously just selling your collection of conference swag T-shirts? For twelve bucks apiece?

Use maybe half of that $20k to hire a front-end dev and/or designer to finish the front end.

The recently-released, Mac OS X 10.11, El Capitan, will run on systems up to eight years old [1]. Maybe it won't run well, particularly if the RAM is skimpy, but for any machine made in the current decade, it shouldn't be much of a problem.

If your Macs are "stuck on ancient OS releases," it's likely because you have ancient Macs, or you just aren't upgrading for some reason.

I don't really understand your Ubuntu comment, but if you really find OS X to be too much of a dog, you can install Linux variants on Apple hardware as well.

1: http://osxdaily.com/2015/06/09/os-x-el-capitan-system-requir...

"A Two Hundred Million Dollar Dollar Shell Game"

Yep. Slack is a pretty poor re-implementation of IRC, and I'm pretty bummed both my previous and my current company forced me to use it.

If we're going to go this route, let's at least use something not so patronizing and infantile, like HipChat.

And I'm pretty sick of all these "Slack is going to change/has changed THE WORLD!!!" articles in general.

> But with Starbucks in 65 countries now, the world is flatter than ever, and it didn’t feel like I would learn that much.

This is such a jaw-droppingly ignorant and unaware comment that I can't even imagine how--

> Instead I decided to stay in San Francisco

…And suddenly it all makes sense.

Assuming you really do get a 1 gigabit connection, your wireless router will be a major bottleneck. See the table on Wikipedia's article on IEEE 802.11 (commonly known as wi-fi): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11#Protocol

The column labeled "Stream data rate" is the theoretical top speed of each connection type (in reality you will never achieve these speeds in a standard home installation where you have signal that's passing through and bouncing off things). You'll see that there's some protocols which approach or go over 1000 megabits (1 gigabit) per second, but those protocols are not yet widely supported by available hardware, and may never be.

If you want to truly take advantage of your connection's speed, you'll want to use a wired connection which uses Gigabit Ethernet or 10 Gigabit Ethernet hardware from end to end, as well as Category 6 or Category 7 Ethernet cabling, respectively (though your precise needs may vary depending on the hardware you get - do some research before buying).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabit_Ethernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Gigabit_Ethernet

This is really great. I've been waiting for the right project to come along with which to experiment with PostgreSQL over MySQL/MariaDB, but haven't had that chance yet. These sorts of articles make me really excited about the possibilities, though.

We're probably near a point where everyone who wants to own an e-ink reader already has one. At that point, these folks are buying at least some of their books for and through the device (I wonder if this retailer gets a cut of that), but they're not buying new devices very often. So it makes sense that sales of the devices would plateau after a while.

> 'clippings' looks really excellent. I would go so far as to say this is a game-changer for me as it currently stands.

Midori, my personal favorite iOS J/E dictionary, has had a feature like this since I started using it, so for at least five years or so. =/ See the "Text Translation" section: http://www.midoriapp.com/features/

> I fail to see how copying my data to more companies reduces my attack surface.

I'm talking about your privacy and mine-ability, not your attack surface. (Though it does help with that too, in a way - a bigger chance someone will get some of your data, perhaps, but a smaller chance they'll get all of it.)

Ah, cool. I was looking for a way to contact you, but couldn't find a way on your web site or on the GitHub page, short of opening an issue.

Not that I have anything really interesting to say - just that I really enjoyed reading your write-up. Really interesting and, as mediocre dev myself trying to make a little money here and there, inspirational as well. Thanks for sharing it. (I also used to do development in Tokyo too, and hope to be able to do it again some day, should the stars realign.)

At least by using a non-Google "free" mail service, file storage service, etc, you're distributing your mineable information among competing companies instead of handing it all over to a single entity. Or, you can do as I do and just find a reputable service you can just pay and not worry about it. (I pay Zoho $24 a year to host my mail.)

> What, the Apple computer, Apple router, Apple browser, Apple Mail, and Siri?

The difference between Apple's services and Google's equivalents is that Apple makes its money by selling you the boxes that the services run on - it doesn't directly profit on the services themselves. For Google, the service is the product, so if they can't make you pay for the service, then it has all incentive to data mine it for profit.

I'm with you here - I also find OS X's Mail plenty "good enough," including for search. And it works great for connecting to Google Mail accounts via IMAP…

Oh, come on. Just connect your Google router to your Google fiber connection and connect to it with your smartphone or laptop running a Google operating system and Google browser. Visit your Google home page (using Google's DNS servers, of course) to read your Google Mail, or perhaps catch up on the news with Google News, or use Google+ to see what your friends are up to, or get a little work done on Google Docs. Should you do some Google searches and end up on some non-Google sites, don't worry - you're still safe under the watchful eye of Google AdSense and Google Analytics. What have you got to be so paranoid about?

You call yourself the Rebel Alliance, but you helped the government on a massive, expensive, intrusive, extra-legal project which almost nobody wants and has benefitted very few outside of the government and its cronies?

You ain't part of no Rebel Alliance, man. You're full Empire, and you helped build a Death Star.

Yeah, I was just gonna ask - what does this have to do with GitHub beyond being hosted there?

But now I guess my question shifts to - what does it mean to be a "member" of this group? Is using any of the services provided by member companies binding me to that CoC somehow?

EDIT: Ah, looks like there's answers in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027561

I'm even more shocked OP got a job hacking a language they haven't touched in over eight years.