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I can appreciate that things cannot stay static and that we must keep evolving and changing. But what the NSA does now and Bush, Gitmo, etc - these are not progression, but regression. I think what Assange and Snowden have done are highly respectable since a real democracy can only function at its highest level with a true open society and a government for people, not corporations or oligarchs. All these secrets and spying just serve to keep the boot of those with power tight against the neck of those who have less or none. Sad.

A few years back I worked for a prominent design company. Our small group (of 4) had a nice little corner of 1/4 of an entire floor. "Oooh, nice, brick walls and people that look busy" I thought when I first joined. Not even a week later, reality started to set it. It was so ridiculously noisy.

And there were, of course, a few people that contributed to everything. I would sometimes get in around 8, it would be quiet and the usual offenders were actually working. From 10-6, it was like, forget it, noise non-stop. After 6, back to quiet.

This became really frustrating and after asking the offenders to chill, I made a trip to HR to ask wtf? HR was basically like, meh, nothing we can do. I ended up wishing those offenders would quit or worse. It was so bad and they were so loud.

After that I was like, never again an open floor plan. It was the worst thing ever and a total sham for those that want to focus and just get things done. Requiring the people whole want quiet to put headphones on only adds insult to injury.

Too bad quiet just isn't valued anymore..

When I didn't have a family, I worked 10-12 hours a day, no problem. Mostly because I wanted to and not because it was required. I feel like no job (unless it's your own making) is worth the crap that dhh talks about in his post. Sadly with tech, it is definitely headed in that direction.

Ultimately, being FT is not a good thing in tech. You rarely work only 40 hours, there's always pressure to work on vacation (such bs that one is), weekends, etc - basically the MS posters. The only way to avoid this is to be the boss (altho that has certain requirements as well) or be a contractor with very fixed boundaries (I simply say "I have 9-5 M-F available only. I"m not available for emergencies or weekend work."). And for the stock; unless you're a higher level employee in the company that can negotiate a great stock and benefits package, you get nothing compared to those at the top.

So the ultimate question is: are you willing to be a wage slave that makes someone else's dreams come true?

That said, tech is _the_ platform to make any dream happen as long as you're creative and persistent.

I think what he's taking aim at more is that he did this for free of charge and did not require any fundraising campaign to get it off the ground (or continue it). And it's the other freedom (in his case, libre) that allowed him to do whatever he wanted, on whatever whim he wanted. There was no hard deadline (except those he made) imposed because of funding constraints. And from that perspective, he's absolutely right: not beholden to anyone else's money or rules is the ultimate freedom to be as creative as you want to make whatever you want.

Because it's possible now to get a project funded on something like Kickstarter, there's less freedom when that happens because money becomes the ultimate driver. If it wasn't, then there'd be no need for it and work on the project could take any form over any timeframe.

I know emacs can do everything including make me breakfast, and I think the happiest/productive I've been with a editor was when I could do all my java builds in emacs and run all my tests from a TM 1 window. I know emacs can do the latter - I'm sure someone has written this functionality, probably years ago.

One of the things I always missed with the current editors is split panels - I used it all the time with emacs. I never really cared for folder icons or a lot of gui chrome and I prefer never to have to use an ide. Maybe now is the time to check in again. :)

*side note: if you are building from brew, be prepared for a big compile. The emacs source is ginormous.

We are contemplating the exodus in a few years but not so much because of prices, but schools. Before I had kids, I was in step with SF politics / justifications of how things are done here. But, of course, after kids you're like "hey, wait a minute". The school lottery is a family bug spray here. It's not just the fact that you're kid could be:

a) bused to a different area of the city away from the possible school right across the street from you b) bused to a crappy school across the city

but also that this destroys neighborhoods. When I grew up (in southern california), I went to school with all the kids in my neighborhood. Not here, that would be too simple. So what this does is forces you to east bay or north bay if you don't want to partake in this social experiment and can't afford private school (I won't even mention the fact that even if you can afford private school, there's massive competition to then get into one).

All in all, this puts huge pressure on parents and they have to ask the question "do I want to be part of a social experiment where my kids won't even go to school with other neighborhood kids or do I just want them to go to a good school so they can grow up and then have some sort of normal life"?

So, the reality I see consists of 2 groups (of which we have friends in both): those that can't afford to buy or our outbid on everything and those parents that can't afford or are out-competed on private schools.

That said, I love SF. I've live here for 20+ years. I'll always love it here. Do I hold a grudge towards the city? Nope. I see it mostly as just the way things are and even if some people did have a short time where they were able to stall growth, it won't last forever. The city has to expand and it will. If it doesn't it will die and I just can't see that happening.

I lived in Manhattan and in SF now and I would say, yah, I can see that. Already though, the 'boroughs' are being pushed further out. Buying in SF is an all cash over asking price deal (I've heard over 25%). My wife and I have been looking around the east bay and north bay and while those prices are a little more down to earth, the same thing is going on there as well - cash. Maybe it's not so over the asking price, but those that can't buy here in the city, don't want to ruin their chances buying elsewhere, so cash is still king.

It's pretty crazy; I saw a house by us in the Upper Market around - a 2br 1ba, 900 sqft - go for over $1.2m (I pass this place as I walk to muni every day). That was a month or so ago. Last week walked by it, there was a for rent sign. Looked the place up, $5800/mo rent. Ridic. Yesterday, the rent sign was gone. I was like, wow.. Ok..

I felt like our trade up in our building from a $1500 1br apt to a $2200 2br apt was a little crazy. But I'm sure our place now would rent for $3k easy. Needless to say, we're staying put for a bit, still continuing to save.

I think the big thing on the psychology here is the fact that so many people can swoop in with a lot of cash over ask. You really do realize it's a rich people's city - to own. My wife and I have a small toddler with another kid on the way and couple the current climate with how crappy the public schools are here and it's only a matter of time before we hit the eject button. Add to that the homeless problem that never seems to get any better (I've lived here on and off for 20 years and it seems like its only gotten worse) and you have the makings of a city where families don't live (more dogs than kids here).

We still love the city and we'd never ever thought we'd say we're lookin to the suburbs. But now, we are. Who knows if this will change over the next few years.

Mmmm, not sure this is a good analogy.

While cryonics isn't proven science yet, we have frozen dogs, pigs, and other animals and revived them after a few days. Granted, this isn't a human, but if I am ever in a situation where the end is there in front of me with a little bit of time to contemplate it, I'd rather take the frozen brain/body route.

The op is absolutely right - we are constrained by our physical bodies and they require the proper fuel and rest in order to operate at peak efficiency. Just because you're using your brain instead of certain muscles, doesn't mean you can consume garbage. This isn't a bad on your comment as much as is it a comment on society as a whole. The whole Zuck bs legend has really damaged programming on multiple levels and it completely reject that ethos.

I've worked with devs that ate garbage all day, couldn't sleep, always came in late (they were non-drinkers too) and their job performance sucked. Their attention sucked. Their attitude sucked. Their code sucked. Needless to say they were all fired. But alas, this is a tale not about the voices of reason, but of bs movies and news headlines and even tho the op is critical (realistic?) of this, that opinion I'm sure is in the minority.

The god delusion, awesome. Being a student of philosophy for a long time, and avid cyclist for longer, and someone who's shed the childish notion of the vengeful god, I can say for certain there is no god and therefore, there's no reason to worry about 'him' being 'real'.

However, if you round a corner on your bike and slam into an oncoming car, THAT is real. God will not magically make your molecules pass through that car and leave you unharmed. God will not fill up your energy when your climbing those hills nor will he fill up your stomach whenever you want. You have to do that, because THAT is real.

Yes, we live mostly by the ego. So it is and we continue forward finding happiness here and there (sometimes all over - the universe to me is far more beautiful than the notion of a vengeful, side-taking god), just 'living' the human experience. People let 'god' ruin that, always have, (sadly) always will.

Cycling helps us produce endorphins. If our body holds out and we don't feel like puking after that one or many hills, we can feel elated. That's brain chemistry. There's no magic switches and god has nothing to do with any of that. He saves no one from accidents, stops no wars, does not magically wave his hand/wand and turn that homeless guy into a 'cured' millionaire. Just like he will not magically lift me up so I can fly thru the air to the top of a nasty hill.

No, he's definitely not real, nor does he need to be. When I was young and realized organized religion was a sham, a veil was lifted over my eyes. Human existence has so much beauty (and sure, plenty of pain and suffering, just ask the Buddha) and I'm just happy being a part of that. I only have one shot to experience all of it. So, for me, cycling is a part of that beauty, just like the OP said. Stop robbing everyone of their experiences with beauty just because you believe in a hypothetical, invisible, vengeful, biased, super being. Leave us mortals who have to deal with reality every day to enjoy our postings in peace.

Thank you.

(edited for typos)

Huh?? How about this instead: as fellow app developers, shouldn't we stop producing shitty ad and 'free' apps and start monetizing them from the start? And how about we actually care about our customers and growing our business instead of the 'strike it rich' corporate acquisition? How about we actually have a solid business model in mind and not sucking on the angel/vc teets and doing the hard thing - self funding?

We all have choices. In an ever increasing world where you are the product, it's up to all of us to make something better. Ads and 'free' are a waste of fucking time. But everyone seems to want their 'free' investment money to launch the next Instagram.

Jesus, I feel like I just recruited for a Stallman seminar. :) Maybe he has a point after all..

In Rails world, the topic of fat models (lots of impl methods, code, etc) comes up all the time. This isn't trolling. It's called being creative vs. "Use different code to remove more code from your models".

Gimmie a break..

And yes, like another poster said, I doubt DHH uses any thought or loses sleep over how HN will pick up the post and tear it down. He created a great framework, has built up an inspiring company, and wanted to share some thoughts. Doesn't go any further than that in my mind.

At some point if the need arises, I'd love to look into getting a thunderbolt nas for the db storage. That would be fun.

I feel like the mobile first is a ruse in some ways that investors love to hype. I had a startup a few years back (mid 2007- late 2010) that got some pretty good angel money. A pretty decent amount to get everything launched and keep us going and keep us running over the years. We rolled out a web site first and slowly built our paying user base up.

But as soon as the iPhone came out, my partner decided that we had to be a mobile company. He told me to remove the website, truncate our db, and start from a 'clean slate'. I was totally against it and years later, we never made anywhere near the money we had before we went mobile (company 'IP' was chopped up and sold off last year). But the thing is, our app really was location based, so from one point of view, it definitely made sense to have a very strong mobile presence. But we killed off our main revenue source to be a 'mobile company' - the stupidest thing ever and I'm a total business 101 fail.

Sure, mobile (as per Mary Meeker and others) has not reached its full potential. But if I were starting a new project, I would definitely consider if mobile first makes sense. I am primarily an iOS developer, but have built on many languages/platforms on the server side for years. I love making mobile products and I believe that there's pretty much always a place for it. But the whole 'mobile first' argument only makes sense for products that rely on the unique traits mobile offers.

Companies/apps like Uber, Wikipedia, News, Music stores, ticketing, Foursquare, etc, make most sense to go mobile first (even tho some may not have). They can be used away from the desktop easily and usually have a benefit in the real world. But unless you product fits into something like that, I would agree more with Vibhu and do mobile later.

And whatever you do, don't kill your main source of revenue to be a 'mobile company'!

Two people's opinions, in my mind, not to heed.. So, somewhere in the middle should be about right.

When my wife and I met we were like, "kids? no f-ing way". But then we decided we wanted one. We could have gone thru life as the two person 'family'. We could have kept building our income, buying more things, striving for that next 'personal goal'. Don't get me wrong, we still do that to a point, but having a kid - from two no kids people - is the best thing we've ever done.

It's also the most difficult thing. We're sleep deprived, irritable, spaced out, and longing for free time. But through all this, we still say it's worth it. Worth it because we are part of life. We're all someone's child and while having children isn't for everyone, I feel like becoming the teacher is the most important thing I'll ever do.

My wife's step-father just had his dad pass away this Aug - both his parents live with him on the bottom floor of his building. Now it's just him and his mom and his girlfriend. He's definitely 'paying for them' as they're on their way out. But I'm sure if you asked him if this was a problem, he would tell you absolutely not.

I don't see raising our son as missing my life - I've had my share of studying philosophy, succeeding, failing, living, etc. I'm now ready to put that into practice and help someone else learn what life's about (sure, from my pov, absolutely), to guide them. This is the best thing I can do for my child; strive to provide a stable, nurturing environment.

There are so many amazing things in life and I think it's a gift to experience it. I think it's easy to just focus on the negative or the reasons of why not to. I really do wish everyone could have an awesome life. I think that's how it's meant to be lived - as awesome as possible.

So, kids aren't for everyone. I don't feel like it's an exclusive club. But I do feel like it's a natural part of life and I'm glad I'm getting to experience it.

Hmm, I have two reactions to this.

1. You're right, there's much to be done and little time to do it. 2. Chill, grab a <your favorite libation here>, and enjoy the sunset; there will never be another like it ever again.

I've been thinking the last few weeks about this sorta very thing - so much to do, so little time. I live in San Francisco. I've worked for 'stratups' (I hate that term now) the past few years and there's always that cloud of "hurry up!" hanging over one's head.

Hurry up before someone else launches before you! Hurry up or you'll loose first mover advantage! Hurry up because we have this deadline and if we don't make it, we'll loose customer opportunities!

I starting to be so over that crap. Maybe it's burn out. Maybe I really see through this ruse (maybe it's not a ruse at all). I feel like I'm a capitalist like the next guy, but constantly being focused on work and reading about 'startup' (shudder) founders and how they have to choose between work and family or work and life is bullshit.

I'm not sure if this pace of 'innovation' is making humans happier, cleaner, etc. I mean, I suppose on the scale of humanity it is, but I don't see certain small companies making any dent in humanity. Hence, what the OP is saying. Sure, some companies do make dents, but like everything, it's a numbers game and most won't. So I'm really starting to feel like I want to work much less and enjoy my time outside of work and with family much more. Being on someone else's clock and having all my (or most of my) mental energy focused on their dream or even my dream where I might be overtaken any moment from some competitor is total suck. I feel like we're all living in some state of paranoia - oh noes, I'll be overtaken any moment if I don't get this build out tonight..

This post probably won't matter much to anyone (maybe a few?) and definitely won't matter at all to the planet, solar system, galaxy, universe. I won't matter when it comes down to it and I'm probably the rule, definitely not the exception. Realizing this is ok and helps me re-focus my attention (because that's the most important thing we have) on what really matters - life, family, friends, vacations :). Balance.

Maybe getting to work helping people is good, but getting to work to just get rich, wear one's self ragged, make someone else rich - that seems like exercise in stupidity and totally unbalanced.

God, I cannot wait for either hyper loop or self driving cars (I'm sure we'll see the latter first). I live in Northern California and have family in Southern California. We're starting to flip the holidays this year (wife's family for thanksgiving, mine for Xmas). Just went down to LA for a friends wedding and the drive was horrendous.

A lot of factors come into play:

1, as much as I've hated them in the past, a big suv (especially with a kid) is the way to go. We have a VW Passat (wife's) and it was so crammed it was ridiculous. Very uncomfortable and it's not even a compact. 2, I'm over 40 now and it just physically hurts to drive for 7 hours. I was totally sore the next day. Frickin sucked. 3, Directions. I totally need navigation now. Even with the turn by turn on my phone, I still made wrong turns. 4, I hate driving. Hate it. I see it as such a waste of time. I can't imagine needing to drive to make a living. In my late teens and early 20's when I lived in Southern California, I hade to do just that. After I moved to the city I vowed I never would again. 5, Other drivers. I was pretty appalled by some of the drivers on the road. I kept thinking, I can't wait for computers to handle this so that guy driving down the emergency lane wouldn't be able to.

If I could just hop in a driverless car for that drive, it would be great. I could nap, read, compute, converse, etc. Things I can't do now. I'm sure there's going to be some resistance at first by those with a 'god given right' to drive. But after a while, I see common sense prevailing.

I listened to a great talk at The Long Now Foundation by Tim O'Reilly. He was talking about driverless cars and how the DARPA car challenge when it started could only do around 7 miles. It wasn't the algorithms that got that much better (although I'm sure they did) for the Google cars, it was the data set. Google Maps was a huge advantage and the 'killer app' for the latest generation of their cars.

So a lot to look forward to in this arena. I think my kid will grow up with the internal combustion car for him being like the 8-track for me.

I just close my eyes for a minute and think (or try to), what would it be like for those people that are finally able to reach, say, Vega (I know it's not the closest). Sure, this is not a big deal in sci-fi, but for reality, it's pretty mind blowing. This is 100% why I seriously want to live for a few hundred years: to have an opportunity to see the first time we actually go to the nearest star.

In the meantime, I guess this will have to suffice.

I also love this image that is not interactive like this, but still mind blowing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earths_Location_in_the_Uni...

I don't particularly take offense at the Amazon ad. When it comes down to it, people will only care about the Kindle for the price. It's already shown to be slow and Amazon has some weird data collection/spying things that have popped up with Silk (although most people will not care about this). Apple will never beat anyone on price and they don't care about this.

If you care about how things are made, the quality of the OS, etc (the usual thing's Apple sells products on), then the extra $100+ for the market leader won't be an issue. Again, Apple knows this and they consistently state that they're not interested in the bottom of the barrel. And anyways, Apple can't win in the low price points, Android has that market wrapped up.

So, I think it's good that Amazon has this. They've taken a page outta Apple's play book. And if anything, all this pressure might force Apple to drop to $299. They've reduced prices before, but somehow, at this point in time with their dominance, I doubt they will. They have enough cash in the bank to allow the Mini to flop if it has to...

So, sorry folks u got screwed, but it's, literally a house of cards. Everyone early and vc that put their money in, I'd a happy camper..

Then when it was done, I decided to treat the family to a nice vacation (which had nothing to do with paypal). On this vacation, I read a book that made me sentimental for some tech I group up with as a kid, so I went on ebay and ordered a bunch of things. Transactions ranged from a few dollars up to $200; nothing gigantic.

After I got home (and vaca was sadly over), paypal sent me an email asking me to confirm my business buyer status. Of course, there's no way to easily contact customer service and replying to email wasn't very helpful. Buried in their help section was a way to submit a support request, which I did, explaining that I'm not a business, etc.

I got a response saying that they were closing my account. At first I was bummed, but then I was thinkin, screw it. Paypal's never been customer friendly and if this how they were gonna be, then I have no problems walking away from them. So, good riddance I guess.

I was never a person that stayed up all night coding, though. I'm a morning person and my body/mind were always like "no way". But, that being said, I have woken up many times at 3 or 4 and cranked all the way through until 7 or 8 that night. So I think it just depends on your natural biorhythms.

I'm not 50 yet, but already am finding it harder and harder to get a 'good day' of coding in with a wife and 8mo old son. Besides distractions galore, my next big loss is sleep. I definitely feel that side and I'm even having a hard time sometimes remembering things in conversation. I think of it as not having my ECC ram. :)

However, like many other postings, I will probably code until I die or until I just can't understand anything anymore. Then I'll probably just back to my 8-bit machines and assembly; the days when things were simpler. The quintessential old man out of step. Heh.