begriffs

Data science perhaps, since it is more math-heavy.

Yeah, it's mostly just open source software inside. Grafana for the charting which gets its data from InfluxDB. The happiness bot is broken into three haskell programs, a scheduler, a soliciter, and a server which listens for slack responses.

The services are wired together with https://github.com/begriffs/microservice-template

Send me an email if you want help setting things up. joe@begriffs.com

That's a good point, but we're going for that old-school mathematical charm. The rest of the lounge is has a warm antique feeling, with a patterned rug and roman blinds, curved wooden chairs etc.

or skip both and use http://ramdajs.com

(I'm not affiliated with the project, I just think it's really good.)

I'd say chill out, the project is probably not that big of a deal in the scheme of your life. I've been in a situation like that and most of the problem is your own thoughts reinforcing themselves. In reality you can pause work at any time. You can drop out of the project entirely. All it takes is saying "sorry, I'm not going to work on this any more."

So talk with your marketing partner and tell them you're working too hard and need others to help you more, and that you're going to take a week off from stress. Then try to think about other things. Go see people you haven't seen for a while. Come back after a week and see how your partner can address the work imbalance and see if you want to keep going with them. Seriously, just do it.

Yeah, not sure why geeks seem to have this thing about sleep optimization. Whether it's a wristband to monitor your REM cycles, or a little app to track your sleep habits, or polyphasic weirdness, or now this thing to regulate sleeping parameters. It all points to some kind of psychological issue that many programmers seem to have.

For people who tinker with the maddeningly complex systems of software how can the "engineering problem" of sleep be that hard? Just get your ass into bed at a decent time, and then give yourself eight hours. In fact given the flexible schedules of many tech jobs it should be easier for us as a profession to be rested than, say, a baker who has to get up at 3:30am.

But like I said it may be a psychological thing, a mental association between sleep and giving up. "You'll have plenty of time to sleep in the grave" or whatever the saying is. So we want to feel we have control over this aspect of ourselves. Hence the gadgetry smothering a simple idea of just laying down, turning off the phone, and covering up with some comfortable blankets. In fact I think I'm going to go do that right now. Goodnight, HN. :)

Oh man...this retreat. I tried it, and it was somehow way more traumatizing than it sounds. I prepared for the retreat with a month of hour-a-day practice and felt really prepared. In reality nothing could have prepared me for this claustrophobic silencefest.

Went to the center in rural Illinois around Thanksgiving. The air was cold with a jagged wind. An occasional crow croaked ominously in the damp brown grounds. Surrounded by old decommissioned farm machinery and a jet-black manmade pond, I entered with unexpected foreboding, crossing the opening of a rickety wrought-iron fence.

I signed some forms in what felt the relinquishing of my human rights, and the leaders demanded to take away my car keys and cell phone. It was an odd request since I was earnest about doing a good job at the retreat and going deep into it. I felt immediately like they didn't trust me and wanted to control me. I handed the phone over, and prepared for the gong which marks the boundary into silence.

Silence. Sounds relaxing, doesn't it? Finally at peace accepting our inner thoughts and rhythms. Wrong, this was no natural silence. it was an enforced interpersonal death, with not so much as a meaningful glance allowed between participants. Although we were all merely obeying orders I felt like the lack of eye contact or human sympathy as an omnipresent hostility. I realized that everyone who cared for me was miles away and could not possibly contact me, nor me them. These cult leaders could do anything to us really...

Time to start the first evening meditation. The well-worn paths between meditation hall, dorms, and cafeteria had become bare dirt and were at this point a boggy muddy slough. We wore clogs in between buildings. They gave us beat up metal water bottles. As a last sound of the human voice they softly called us one by one to join the meditation hall.

We found a place on the mats and got quiet. Then the tape-recorded chanting began. In this expectant calm the halting burbling throatwreck of a song was unstoppably funny. I tried with all my might not to laugh. "Ohmmmm... ...Hngghgh!" Far from being a sacred experience it sounded, well, mentally challenged.

Then back through the misty darkness, holding my bobbing flashlight and watching its feeble beam dance over the impenetrable horror of the black pond. I fumble removing the muddy clogs in the dorm entrance then off to my divided cell. My contented roommate falls asleep nearly immediately and rips into my ears with full chested snores. How am I going to sleep? What if this place makes me actually go insane from the weird treatment and sleep deprivation? They will be waking us soon, at 4am. I toss on the narrow cot.

Next day it's back to the main hall. Time is going impossibly slowly, I get out of a two hour session and go back to my dorm. There is no living thing outside. All plants are dead, there is no sound but the unrelenting wind. Once I catch sight of a squirrel far away but it scurries leaving me alone.

In the distance, but entirely surrounding the retreat center, I hear actual gunfire. Am I hallucinating in here? No, it's hunting season. There's no way I can escape. They'll mistake me for a deer and shoot me if I step outside the iron fence. All these paths just loop back, inward inward. At the ends of the paths are signs telling you to turn back. Back to the chanting, back to the hall. No talking, no looking, no feeling. They'll shoot you if you leave, you know.

What am I thinking? These thoughts aren't right, but I feel brave, I have to stand up to this. Who can I talk to? How much time is passing. (Steal a look at the watch I smuggled in.) It's been only three minutes since I entered my dorm? Ten days has become inconceivable, like a dark mountainous wave cresting over my flimsy dinghy. And nobody knows how oppressive it is here. No one will come help me.

I lined up a one-on-one talk with one of the teachers. You can't just go talk to them, you have to write your case on a clipboard and await a Kafka-esque review process which takes roughly one hundred years in dilated retreat time. They accept my plea later that day and I enter the teacher's chamber.

She is literally dressed in a robe and seated on a raised platform. Am I supposed to kneel before it? Is this really happening? I sit down and explain that I'm getting unusually paranoid and that the way their rules are formulated makes me uncomfortable. Is there a room where I can get a night's sleep and can I have my belongings back -- just for peace of mind? She looks at me beatifically and assures me that my mind simply doesn't want to relinquish its sense of self. She explained that my question about getting my stuff back is simply nonsense. (Notice she didn't refuse, she just brought out the mind-games and discounted my feelings.)

I agreed to give the retreat more time. Maybe this panic is normal like the teacher said. They said they would look into finding me another room. Fast forward to that night. The roommate change is a no-go. Fuck it, I'm going to break the rules and just talk to one of the volunteers running the course. I'm not petitioning on that weird form. The volunteer was really evasive.

Darkness was falling. The mud, the pond, my little flashlight. Nobody can look at me. Surrounded by guns. Where did the squirrel go? "No," I resolved, "I have to get out of here, this is not right." I snuck into a staff area to find a phone. Someone saw me and started questioning me. I lied and calmly told them the teacher wanted me to make a call. Then I swiftly took the cordless phone into the bathroom and locked myself in. Overjoyed I listened to the sweet note of a dial tone. It was an audible electric road to freedom. I dialed my family. Nobody answered the phone. Tried all the numbers I could remember. Then it occurred to me that it was Thanksgiving night. They were all away from the phone, living lives out there in "regular time," time that actually passes. I left messages and went sadly back out to the cold dark paths which only fold back onto themselves.

Word must have spread to the higher-ups that a student was cracking because they did come talk to me. I told them I simply had to go. After some deliberation they brought me my keys and went out with me to the parking lot. Then things got really weird.

They pointed to a car that wasn't mine and told me to open it with my key. In some disbelief I explained that my actual car was on the other side of the lot. They insisted I was wrong! It was like a dream where I sought to weigh my words and appease my captors with the subtle nuances of dreamthought.

"OK," I said affably, "I'll give this car a try. But just humor me and let me give that other one across the lot a try too. If it's not my car then the key won't open it, right? So there's really nothing to lose." Inwardly I was contemplating the likelihood of violence and keeping a watch on their movements in the deep gloom. A faraway crooked street lamp they had installed on the property glinted off the windshield.

The impostor car did not open. They started explaining it away, but I was already off to my actual car. Opened it right up, threw my blankets and stuff inside. It was actually my friend's car (we went to the retreat together) so I couldn't just drive away with it. Another camp volunteer joined us and offered to drive me to the city.

On the fairly long drive I had a mixture of emotions. At some level I knew I wasn't right in the head. I was grateful to this lady for rescuing me and embarrassed that I couldn't "handle it" like the other students. But most of all I was grateful to leave and never -- ever -- come back. I can't explain the overwhelming panic of this retreat, but somehow I knew I just wanted to be living a joyful life with human speech and companions and time and freedom.

This kind of distinctly academic writing is bewildering and nauseating. I felt that the author turns phrases just to hear how they sound, not because he believes what he is saying. Maybe spending the majority of his adult life in the confines of the college system instinctively makes him pander to what he believes the Chronicle wants to hear, as if this is one more test and by adding overbearing Greek allusions he just might make the grade.

If you really want to go back to first principles, try "Foundations of Analysis" by Edmund Landau. It builds the integers, fractions, Dedekind cuts, and the real and complex numbers from scratch.

It's totally rigorous and starts from, "the ability to read English and to think logically -- no high-school mathematics, and certainly no advanced mathematics."

It's currently unplayable. Instead imagine if it would make one move every half a minute. During the time between moves anyone could vote on the next move. Then the winning move would be played. It would be a slow game, but would be the aggregate HN wisdom.

A tower of you might say, biblical, proportions.

Maybe posting should be done with a richer client-side app than a vanilla form. The unaided browser is a pretty sad user agent.

How is this even a debate? Versioning is a form of content negotiation just like encoding, language, mimetype, and charset. Why treat this one extra property any differently?

http://blog.begriffs.com/2014/02/api-versioning-best-practic...

You can deploy Snap apps to Heroku pretty easily.

https://github.com/begriffs/heroku-buildpack-ghc

"On the hills to our right, a short distance out from Randolph, was the spot where John Randolph of Roanoke had spent the greater part of his eccentric and unhappy existence. It would be hard to imagine contradictions more glaring than those that lurked in his environment. His home consisted of two rude structures, erected in the bosom of the primeval forest: one his summer residence; the other a mere log cabin, his winter residence. Yet the lonely occupant of these two dwellings was as haughty an aristocrat in his way as any who ever wore a coronet."

-- Below the James: A Plantation Sketch, by William Cabell Bruce, 1918

Yeah, it's most definitely a solution in search of a problem -- although in this case the solution is an RFC from 1999. I wish we could take HTTP at its word, but maybe that's too much to ask in this wild world of recalcitrant proxies and buggy browsers.

Like you pointed out, this header business doesn't let you do anything you theoretically couldn't do with query params, but the headers feel more in the spirit of HTTP. Like we already do this for downloading parts of big files, and why do we do things a different way for downloading parts of big lists? Parsimony and all that.

As far as violating HATEOAS, I feel like headers are a first class citizen of HTTP state. Because browsers have historically been such horrible user agents they have conditioned us to forget that headers are as much a part of requests as urls, ports, and protocols.The only janky thing is my introduction of the extension relation type "items." http://tools.ietf.org/search/rfc5988#section-4.2

As scarmig pointed it, the spec allows custom range units. Downloading pieces of a big file seems to be to be essentially the same problem as downloading parts of a long list of items.

Also, I'm imagining this header approach more for API calls than for bookmarkable user-facing pages. This way the data that comes back from the server can be a clean array of results without metadata. Feels like metadata is what HTTP headers are for.

Yeah I know, it's silly. But on HN the titles have to be over-the-top to get any votes. :)

Less wrong, more autistic.

It's true my article is hateful, and that makes it less interesting than something constructive. I do see your point there.

However I have studied category theory, I even started a meetup for it. Really tried to like it, and it just never lived up to my hopes. I feel like it has a mystique that might mislead people into a fruitless study. People for whom it's not a useful tool. Having made a serious study of other kinds of math, I see a much higher ratio of theorems to definitions elsewhere.

This site follows a pattern that I've seen before in programmer-driven startups: take a task that might intimidate someone, build some forms around it, and charge for it. In this case the task is to ask a client to prepay.

Maybe it's playing into programmers' belief that if some website asks the client for payment then it's more legit somehow and less scary. "Look at the website, client. See, prepayment is part of a normal, well-established workflow."

And maybe programmers will pay for this confidence booster. I guess that's what matters.

The best and dumbest phone

http://www.johnsphones.com/store/johns-phone-business/item45

Just a dial pad with a paper(!) phonebook that fits inside. Yum, it tickles my inner hipster.

I have used the F3 for a few years now and love it. Only issue I have is that it takes a while to access my phonebook after turning the phone on, but with two week battery life, why turn it off?

Actually to be totally honest it's dwindled down to like 3-day battery life. I should get a new battery. But the phone is tough. One of my friends dropped it on the sidewalk and it's fine. I keep the phone with my keys and it's all scratched up but still fine.

I've got it on a prepaid plan I can refill via a phone call. Seriously I feel free with this thing. Might be nice to have maps on it or Lyft, but whatever...I just call a cab for god's sake.

I think the guys at Github do want to help non-technical people learn to collaborate with git in areas like education, government, and literature.

Check out this interview where one of the Github trainers, Brent Beer, talks about these ideas. You might want to get in contact with him.

http://blog.begriffs.com/2013/08/an-interview-with-brent-bee...

This would be even smoother as a Yeoman generator. http://yeoman.io/generators.html

Good catch. I'll update the template.

I should really run the outputs through an HTML validator as part of continuous integration...

The original goal of the project was to examine elements of web sites and find a single style of markup that would be flexible enough to be styled like any of them. I started with menus because they vary so much.

While adjusting the markup to fit examples, I found it was easier to translate it from an intermediate description. Small changes in the JSON domain specific language can cause bulky changes in the markup. If you add a "description" attribute to a menu item it transforms into a definition list. If you remove the "url" attribute it erases the anchor and replaces it with raw text.

While the translation has proved to be useful, I think it's not as important as simply identifying a markup standard for menus and other page elements. If developers can stick to such a standard their job gets easier because it will be easy to reuse CSS.

It's kind of like an anti-twitter-bootstrap because the meaning and flexibility of the markup is treated as most important, and styles can be applied à la carte.

You make a good point that pages are often built from repeated server-side partials, and that the looped block needs most attention. I'm curious about the table scenario. Can you send me a link to a table which is populated by JSON?

Thanks for reporting. What does the error say?

Alternately you can try the "playground:" http://begriffs.github.io/showpiece/playground/

Looks like more cities could use a "thinkerspace" like what just opened in Madison, Wisconsin.

http://blog.begriffs.com/2013/06/madison-thinkerspace-now-op...

It seems like Stripe connect requires users to create accounts. I wanted to make the minimal app possible to pay me. No accounts, no nothing, just payment.

That said, there's not much to my app. Just some rails routes, a form, and Stripe Checkout on the client side. But it gets the job done.