Tarks

"Cyrus explained softly to Adam the nature of a soldier ... He told his son of the sad dignity that can belong to a soldier, that he is necessary in the light of all the failures of man - the penalty of our frailties"

They exist because humans and our current behaviour are flawed, we haven't found better conflict resolution techniques.

The sad truth of this world is nothing is yours unless you can protect it. I know the reply button is right there but please stop spouting rubbish.

Hehe wow it's funny to see my words written by someone else, I've come out of the other end of this, for three months I'd be surprised to be alive in the morning after nights of wakin up to chest pains (when I was 22 and relatively healthy). Like everything it can change you, it gave me a different way of seeing the world and I can slip back into that cold mindset to consider things when I need a bit of distance. It also gave me even more appetite for doing fun things and staying true to my natural, childish disposition :)

I'll never forget the ceiling of the apartment I spent so many nights waking up in pain seeing, or the sun shining on the wall in the mornings as I thought "oh, I'm alive!"

Best of luck to you too friend.

Oh I can actually help with this, same age range too I just hit 26, no kids etc

I think if you go travelling you'll end up repeating bad habits in each new place because you haven't changed anything about yourself.

I don't like giving advice so I'll just talk about what's worked for me :)

In the last 3 months I got to contract for Microsoft, which meant leaving my apartment and GF in London and having a place rented in Reading.

I'd intended to play a ton of games in the evenings but the internet connection there was terrible, dropped every 3 mins. I took this as an opportunity to do something else and learn a game in real life :p Plus I was a little out of shape and wanted to fix that and make some non-work friends. For me I picked Squash because it's a really demanding game of a competitive nature but it's also easy to practice on your own so I wouldn't be as embarrassed when I played with others.

I did research etc and spent just under a month in the evenings training on my own, then I joined the social squash sessions and later on the league. It's a ton of fun and when you're in friendly competition you naturally gel with peeps. You meet lots of different people too, I ended up building a site for a chem engineer who was setting up his own company.

The funny thing is not only did I make more friends through squash, but because you have something (non-nerdy, I could talk anyone's ear off about dev stuff or DOTA/Street Fighter etc but not everyone is open-minded enough to appreciate my nerdier facets :P) that you can chat about with other people you meet you find they're just generally more interested in you because passion is attractive, even in a platonic sense.

I did other things too but they aren't as pertinent to your situation, like starting to go to the gym with people I liked on my team, learning to ride a motorbike etc, all of which have made me a much more fulfilled person, all of which I wouldn't of even started doing if I hadn't of picked up that first activity.

This may sound a bit touchy feely but looking back, I think what was making me unhappy was that I didn't love myself. That sounds strange but as soon as I started improving and finding my groove everything else was a heck of a lot easier. You sound the same, you're trying to reach for something to change your circumstances and travel is an obvious first manifestation for that, but I'd suggest changing yourself first and seeing if that makes you happy.

You're lucky, you're looking for what to do next and you have few things to stop you going in any direction. You're standing on the precipice of you becoming a more awesome person :)

For the benefit of people that haven't had the dis/pleasure of working in a really big company, the large banks / govy places often have a ton of dependencies and at (least) one place I worked at had a custom tailored build of Windows with features they need.

They're also heavily regulated and if they can't show evidence that they've done all the required audit checks to ensure they're in line then the repercussions make millions look like chump change (think an investment bank being banned from trading on certain desks).

Depending on their priorities and at that size this might be the most economical move.

You sound like you've actually done this and yes we're in the UK (London), my email is in my profile so if you're interested I'd like to chat with you

Is such a well reasoned + researched post deserving of a knee-jerk response?

It's Intellisense. I might have a chip on my shoulder but if you were competent and really were hiring .net programmers you should know that? Especially if you're going to take the mickey.

You get those types no matter what role they hide in. Today I spent an hour with a candidate that looked really promising on paper dodge every question and switch from being "mainly backend" to "mainly frontend" when they couldn't tell me the difference between an interface and an abstract class....

Nobody would grasp at straws enough to suggest to another man that the pain with a lesson is directly proportional to it's usefulness, that would be terrible, like the fate of the idiot in your analogy that decides the lesson learned is to look left.

So you burn yourself taking a casserole out, do you stop cooking? I'd hope not, you just now have the good sense to pay attention when dealing with hot, dangerous objects. We cherish this feedback, both as people and as entrepreneurs, that's one of the reasons we build MVPs

We could go a bit abstract and talk about pain/discomfort (including emotional) as devices, and I could give you anecdotes of when a former boss took me aside and plainly laid out why I could never hope to get where I wanted if I followed my current vector, but as we're anecdueling where's the fun in that :p

Talk to any gymnast and they'll usually be able to tell, if not show you physical remnants of, all the painful lessons they've learnt along the path of self-improvement. Ask them if they'd be half as good if they hadn't made those painful mistakes. Better yet ask them what makes an awesome gymnast, they'll usually tell you it's more about having "no fear" when going for stuff. Of course that's an oversimplification and discounts the years of training and talent, but there's a realist perspective in there.

Yes there will be painful lessons along the way, such is life. Not to go all ad populum on you but it's a fairly standard cliche that the people who can take the experiences, learn from the setbacks and not let the fear of another fall stop them trying will learn an awful lot faster and deeper than if they shy away from anything potentially upsetting. That fear of being upset by something is a personal issue and may limit what someone can achieve.

First paragraph : Note that he didn't say that. Revealing a previous passive observation versus giving advice is different. He was basically just trying to say "I think I've had the wrong impression of you", but perhaps wanted to let him know just how strong of a negative impression he had. To me it read more like a sort-of public apology for holding a mistaken belief about Zed's character and possibly nudging others to reconsider any similar viewpoints.

Second point: Yup, optional just like most tools, and just like most tools there's always a set specific challenges where it can work wonders compared to the rest of the shed.

Your mileage may vary but I'd be very surprised if you can't think of a single lesson you've remembered better because there was some pain involved, we're supposedly hardwired to better remember those lessons, for obvious life-prolonging reasons.

Terrible, terrible advice.

Every interaction with someone carries the chance of impact, the closer you get to talking about things related to or stemming from their core values the higher the chance you'll provoke a strong reaction (positive or negative). If you're not willing to potentially (perhaps not intentionally) express a viewpoint that could hurt the other person, then you'll be forever only talking about unimportant gumf or giving half-stated opinions that might not get the gravitas of a situation across.

Looking someone dead in the eye and without ego telling them "You're fucking up right now. Here's why" is a loving thing to do, and I'm thankful that someone cared enough to "hurt me"

Possibly give Typescript a go, or javascript, but you have to accept that you'll be going through the 5 stages after knowing and loving C#, I recommend "Secrets of the Javascript ninja" has a very good pace and it shows you a lot of the good of javascript, and how some of the bad can be used for good ;)

I think this is even more important for Javascript files. So many times I'll look at something to learn and find it's minified, which makes it a lot harder, there are tools to deminify but obviously a lot of semantic information is lost and then I can't step through etc.

This is awesome, sure most of the solutions have extra hurdles to overcome but that's not the point, it reminds me to keep my eyes open and remember things that I accept as unchanging might not be as rigid as I assume.

Very inspiring.

Hey, thanks for reading + replying, my stuff is crap while I'm learning how to write properly ^_^

I haven't yet spent any money on the events, I've gotten tickets given to me by my ex boss and go to free ones.

I've got a couple of domains + some hosted space, but recently I couldn't justify the cost, I think you're right though I need to start hosting and showing some of my projects, I have one in particular but I have no idea how to progress it. I think I'll get it hosted today/this week.

Thanks !

Hi, it's long and rambly but I'd like to know what parts (if any) were interesting, I could talk more about working at an investment bank, about my experience consulting in general etc, or something completely different.

I'd also really appreciate anything that helps structure thinking about a business/passive income generators such as this http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas as I think thais will be the focus for the next few months.

I work as a consultant for CS, it's weird when your workplace pops up on HN.

We have one of these on the 18th floor in London too, it's so out of place with the rest of the building but it's super awesome, we sneak up there for lunches etc.

I don't think any devs would be able to use this as just getting permissions + your box in order would be a nightmare here, unless you were logging into a vm or your usual machine.

Most devs have pretty good setups here, here's mine http://i.imgur.com/QoK8F.jpg (I am aware of KVMs, I just think this looks cooler ^_^)

I spent all that time learning to program because I loved that it let me make things all on my own. I got to play as much as I liked. I remember first learning c++ (after visual basic), every new chapter gave me an awesome new power, Vectors ! Pointers, Classes ^_^

I knew I was in deep when in college I started bringing my c++ book to drama rehearsals. . .

Thanks for writing this, I hadn't yet seen the method caller stuff.

I'm all for more things like this, especially in the UK, heck I'm currently in London working for a consulting company in a bank and would love to jump into a startup but I have to say that what they're expecting compared to what they're willing to put in seems a little...lopsided.

"Once a year, we work with a group of very early stage companies and provide them with up to £15,000 of investment and a three month programme of support"

"If we’re going to tackle climate change, we need new products and services that will help people reduce their energy use by a factor of 10 not just by a few per cent."

I can't see £15,000 getting you anywhere with something of that scale, even if you're a seriously smart cookie basic operating costs still apply. . . especially considering London rent etc.

huh, interesting, if it's not too much trouble could you please provide some examples + explanation? I'm not doubting you, I'm a pleb when it comes to things like this and just get lost in the stories, I'd like to learn what people with some training in things like this notice.

If you enjoyed this article you might like to give "For the Win" by Cory Doctorow a read, it's a pretty fun book that asks questions with regards to game economies and how they might affect the real world.

Free Lumina for registered devs? I'm sure there's a few people here, myself included, that would appreciate more info on that.

Just go, seriously go and walk up to whoever is in charge of whatever event you're at and say that you have a huge interest in the field and you'd love to learn more, people that host those type of events usually really love enthusiastic people.

As a side note, don't mention just wanting a friend, people don't respond well to desperation, so don't act that way and you'll have an easier time making new friends.

I love stuff like this because the time it took him to fix it was probably worth more than the cost of the motherboard BUT the fact that he pulled it off is what makes him so valuable (and cool ^_^ ) and he learned a lot while doing it. Simply awesome.

It's not cool to call someone out, but it's even less cool to have to. What else was he supposed to do? Have a nice reasonable talk with a troll?

Better that he's making people aware rather then continuing a fight that was disrupting a service for others.

I play, can't even remember how I heard of it but my girlfriend and I learned together a few months ago, I've just got another friend hooked on it too. Having SmartGo Kifu on the iPad and the free go Client from Pandanet has made it easier to learn.

Funny thing is, a co-worker caught me playing it, then while he was slaughtering me in a lunchbreak another couple of guys came out of the woodwork too ^_^

I find it very cool that there's just one piece that can be used for everything.

Thankyou Zed, I'm going to give this a proper read-through before probably using it to help teach a friend how to learn to program.

I think you're missing that some of those small steps weren't obvious at the time everyone was writing software that the government leans heavily on that only works on IE6, the people that developed it are probably long gone by now and rewriting everything is hardly justifiable.

Large banks are having a hard enough time ditching it and they have a clear motivation to do so to aid competitive edges.

I thought that by definition being a perfectionist means being cognizant of your mistakes. . . At the moment not owning up is making that asset a little toxic: "Apple think they're perfectionists but that's just because they don't acknowledge their mistakes" seems to be floating around right now

Imagine what the average not-too-technical person sees when they hear about this, they see a man walking into stores and the computer systems shutting down/exploding because he has a 'virus', one of those magical,evil things that makes their computers slow. . . not the adware crap they install.