midnightmonster

Arrogance which bothers me in my children and of which I am ashamed when I display it is a strident confidence in one's judgement about some matter that's out of proportion to one's actual knowledge and experience. (It's quite distinct from charming childish optimism that one can take on any challenge.)

I believe you can become arrogant by getting used to being the smartest person in the room (or believing you are), noticing the times you readily had insights that others lack, etc.. Confirmation bias plays in, too, since as soon as you start to conceive of yourself as knowing, unless you try very hard not to, you'll take more note of events that confirm your self-assessment than that disconfirm it.

As others have noted, arrogance as described here is closely akin to the vice of pride (which is opposed to the virtue of humility). The main distinction I would draw is that arrogance to me has a stronger social aspect--a particular way of presenting oneself, born from pride. Pride itself is a spiritual state and could (at least hypothetically) pass unnoticed if you were also good at hiding it.

I referred to confidence-out-of-proportion, and I think I stick with that. To my mind, a person who exhibits rational confidence in their judgement is not arrogant by definition, even if that confidence is (correctly) very high. But arrogance isn't the only way to go wrong. E.g., a software BDFL may be a jerk even if he's not arrogant, and someone who confidently makes a decision they had authority to make without consulting someone who would rather have been consulted isn't arrogant either, but may none the less have committed a faux pas. Both may be incorrectly perceived as or called arrogant.

So, no, developers on windows are not stumbling in the night. But also, no, your skills and familiarity are not transferable from OS X to Windows.

In contrast, I was a desktop (laptop) Linux user until a year or so ago, and found my skills almost entirely transferable to OS X.

That's really not so weird. In taste decisions (order a drink for me, decide what movie we're going to watch) I'm often glad to get outside my own head and try whatever you're into. In practical but short term or roughly equivalent consumer matters (which hotel are we booking, which rental car) I'm often happy not to have had to expend any executive function in choosing.

Frost's duplicity (sometimes triplicity, maybe more) is part of his charm. Yet if there were not also insight and beauty, I think the charm--the mere pleasure in being as clever as the speaker (if not as clever as the poet)--would wear thin.

I truly love Frost, but I love even more Gerard M Hopkins. One gets the feeling Hopkins resorts to dense layers of images not to share a joke with the sufficiently-clever reader, but in desperate earnestness to show what can't be said in prose. "Look--look! See this beautiful/terrible/mysterious thing!"

The title and description don't match the code there. As you say, the code sample is actually to prevent XSS, not SQL injection.

stripslashes is used to undo the effects of PHP's old, terrible magic quotes misfeature, b/c the original author (probably not the blog post author) is assuming that $input is coming from the user via GET or POST.

I implied a slightly scrambled chronology. To clarify, we kept the expensive COBRA coverage from my wife's old job in MD, because prior to ACA there were no good individual insurance options for her and the kids. Now, with ACA, we have an individual plan purchased from Florida Blue. It is very expensive, but not much more so than the two separate plans we had, and the better coverage, less confusion from the insurance being out of state, and having everyone on the same deductible and OOP max make it worthwhile.

uBlock killed subscribe for me, too. Didn't occur to me until I saw others mention it.

I am male, early thirties, married with children. We have a high-end ACA-compliant plan purchased directly from Florida Blue. At almost $1600/month, it's really freakin' expensive. But we have various health issues between us that make us uninsurable for any reasonable amount via individual plans, and that also mean we use a lot of health care.

Prior to ACA, we had my wife and kids on a COBRA plan out of Maryland from when we lived there (God bless Maryland for making COBRA last as long as you want, and making it last even when you leave the state) and me on a separate individual policy. Together they were about as expensive as our current plan, and they had higher deductibles/OOP max and poorer coverage.

Still grateful for the Maryland coverage, though, as I would have had to have a normal job once we moved to FL otherwise.

I'm very curious to know what your ethical dilemma is. I've read the man who was Thursday a couple times, and I'm having a hard time thinking what you might find objectionable about it that isn't giving away pretty early in the story or "spoiled" by a passing familiarity with Chesterton.

I don't see suitable contact info in your profile, but if you have a minute I'd be glad to receive an email via the address in mine.

The father brown mysteries are (afaik) all short stories, now available in collections. Blue Cross is excellent and also introduces two characters besides father brown who have arcs over some of the other stories.

Try also The Trees of Pride, which isn't a fr brown mystery but is quite a good mystery.

If you're in the position of being able to refund any money you have received for which you didn't already clearly deliver whatever you promised, you can walk away with reputation in a pretty good place.

E.g., I got in way, way over my head on a project for a startup once a few years ago. They didn't know what they needed, and I had no true idea how much work was involved. When I couldn't deliver I returned the money (which hurt, but I could do it). The client later came back to me (!) with a much smaller, better-defined project which I executed on well. They became a regular client and have been worth six figures to me over the years. (It did help that they tried another developer in the meantime who also didn't deliver but kept the money and stopped returning calls.)

Suppose I call a plumber over to fix my sink, and I say, "Hey, I've also started building a guest house out back--I'd like the interior plumbing run and the whole building connected to the city water. Can you get started on that, too?"

The plumber could say:

A) Let me schedule a time to come back and look at that and give you an estimate.

B) We just do repairs, not new construction. [Let me give you the card of my friend who does that kind of work.]

C) We're completely booked for new construction right now. I don't expect to have availability for that sort of thing until September.

What no plumber will ever say, though, is (D) "Uh, sure...I'll get started on that as soon as I finish this sink, and I guess the $150 for the sink should pretty much cover that."

If you said (D), what you are doing is simply a terrible idea that will not serve you or your client well. But you don't have to keep doing it! You just need to have a conversation where you say, "I gave you an estimate for X. We are now doing YZA. I apologize for not having this conversation earlier--when we switched from X to Y, or when we added Z. But now that we've also added A, I realize belatedly that we need to restructure this project."

Apologize politely and sincerely but not excessively for your actual mistakes--you didn't manage the project and client expectations well. Don't apologize for doing your job well, or for insisting--even belatedly--on the project conditions necessary to do your job well.

If you haven't said something ridiculous like (D), and your compensation and timeline (and compensation timeline) have adjusted appropriately with the project scope, then...well, you may have just bitten off more than you can chew on this project.

That's ok. It happens. Same kind of conversation: "This project has become too big for me to manage while moonlighting. <polite apologies> Can we break the project into phases, or can I help you find someone able to complete a project of this size in a timely fashion?" The client may be disappointed. They may be angry. But the longer you try to be superman and just somehow get it all done because it HAS to be done, the worse the situation gets for you and them. And odds are the client will actually value clear communication and plausible plan-making, even belatedly.

I agree that the youtube video you linked is not at all convincing as an example of genuine communication.

I don't know anything about Philip's path to get where he is now, but there are a number of videos of Philip using his current method of communication, which appears to be typing on a bluetooth keyboard to an ipad app that repeats his letters and words back to him.

The mom holds the keyboard, but Philip moves his own hand. Mom seems to use a lot of cues to help him keep on track--shaking the keyboard to bring him back to it, repeating his words back to him--but I really don't see her writing it for him, moving the keyboard under his finger to spell things, or "interpreting" vague gestures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK_Q60LhgzA

This one has several minutes of typing where you can see the keyboard and his hand. It's slow, slow going, but it really looks like he's the one doing the writing.

Thanks. Maybe I'll try it again. I've read it once, and my memory of what I read is a major contributor to the entire enterprise seeming beyond exhausting.

If you received or find good ways to actually make these changes, please write about it.

Author's 'before' picture is me very often. I'm nearly ego-less in pursuit of the truth--more than ready to be shown wrong myself--but that doesn't mean that coworkers and loved ones end up feeling good about the conversation.

I hope he will write a "how to" follow up, because I would like to change, but I don't see how to do it in a way that doesn't sound impossibly exhausting.

I'm hopeful that it actually is possible, though, because for 30+ years I had never been able to keep any space well-ordered for more than a few weeks, nor had any reason to think I ever would be able to. I read "the life changing magic of tidying up" and it turns out I can do it--I just needed to be taught how. This may not seem relevant, but it's been life-changing not so much to have a tidy office, but to learn that what I assumed was a fixed personal trait was changeable after all.

I've been a daily timely user since August 1 2014. At the moment, they're still recovering from a major update that shipped with tons of bugs, and core functionality is still missing. (Most of all, there's no visual planning anymore.)

Timely has been one of my most important tools for managing time and tasks as a freelancer, but right now it's barely functional.

I hope to someday use it on my wrist, but I need the core app features working.

The CEO also owns the company. "Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?"

I find it unreasonable that the author is getting flack for promoting his cycle.js. If he had just criticized react.js and offered no solution, everyone would be saying, "well, what am I supposed to do if I'm not supposed to use react?"

Not arguing with fit2rule--he/she can buy what he/she chooses--but I think a subscription model is Just Fine.

If I'm making money or even pursuing a hobby, $300/yr is completely worth it.

But FWIW, I'd be happier about having $40/month-billed-monthly and $300/yr options.

Suppositions: * You can't keep this up. You'll either quit or be fired sooner or later. * You really do have a lot to learn from your coworkers.

If you believe those are true, a radical change of strategy is in order, and you should keep in mind that you have very little to lose. Your worst plausible professional outcome is that you get fired soon, and you cannot use this employer or coworkers as a reference. That definitely sucks, but it's already a pretty likely outcome, so don't worry about making things worse.

Sucking hard at the beginning of something is normal. Lacking the support that would help you not-suck faster is sad but common. Having a hard time relating to people further along in the process is sad but common. What will you make of these things?

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Tips:

1. Remember what several have said here, that those with superior attitudes are often themselves insecure.

2. Memorize and internalize swampangel's guidance on taking feedback.

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Strategy:

Do not worry about your dignity or your image. Why did your self-esteem plunge? Were you impressed with yourself because you thought you were smarter/more skilled than other people? You were then and you still are. It's just that now you know a lot more people you are not more skilled than. Unless and until you become one of the tiny minority at the true peak of your profession, this will happen to you over and over. (Even if you reach the peak, many of those who came before you produced work more profound and seminal than yours, and many of those after you will build on your work to do even more awesome things.)

But it's lucky when this happens to you, when you suddenly find yourself in a bigger pond. A much better basis for self-esteem is your character and your progress. "I'm smarter than most of the people I know" is a win condition only sustainable by avoiding opportunities for growth. "I'm more skilled, more wise, more loving than I was a year ago" is a win condition you can hit every year without it ever getting old.

Ask for the help you need, but read <http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>. Do not flatter people or debase yourself, but ask directly, showing concisely whatever work you've already put into solving your problem. "Showing your work" has several good effects (1) it shows you are not intentionally wasting someone's time; (2) it helps your respondent understand what level to answer you at and (3) you may often come to the solution just by formulating your question and work so far carefully.

When you don't understand something, take notes and look it up. If you can't figure it out, just go ask the person who mentioned it--or someone more approachable who is likely to know. Don't worry about your dignity, don't worry about humility.

People understand (and need to understand) themselves in light of their actions. If they don't think much of you, but you get them to help you anyway, you've raised a small contradiction in the back of their mind: "I don't really care about him, but I helped him. Why did I do that?" They will often resolve this contradiction by beginning to think of you as a person they like pretty well after all, or by thinking of themselves as a mentor type. In the future, they will be more likely to act out of their newly-developing concept of you or themselves.

Whenever someone helps you, look for a genuine way to make them look good. E.g., in a status report or team meeting: "I was tasked with adding feature Y to the Frobulator. I was not familiar with the way we use Sporks in the Frobulator module, but Jones took a couple minutes to bring me up to speed on Frobulator Sporks, and I was able to complete feature Y."

If they think of you as their junior, so what? You'll be their junior. If you make good on their investment of time by giving credit and getting better, they will grow to see you as a good investment, and they won't want their investment to be wasted by losing you to another job.

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Maybe this doesn't work. All the stuff I said confidently above might miss the mark because of weird or unusually pathological quirks of you, the people, or workplace. There are a thousand factors we can't guess at from an Ask HN post. I'm just some guy on the Internet.

Learning how to build a product business alongside my consulting via [the latest version of] Amy Hoy's 30x500 course.

It's also a really naive calculation in that it assumes you will be able to fill nearly every working day out of the year with a full day's worth of paying work. When are you going to pursue leads, develop your sales funnel, learn new tech, and file your taxes?

For me on iPhone, the page would be fine if only the entire almost-full-screen-size navigation didn't switch to fixed positioning and block most of the page once I scroll past it.

Summary: If your goal is a software development position, I would move "Highlights" above "Experience", move "Professional Skills" to the bottom of "Highlights" (who doesn't say they have excellent communication and teamwork skills?), and use either a nice resume template or a more favorable creative presentation.

I had to look at it three or four times before I could get past the presentation to actually read the resume.

The codepen presentation shows me that you are able to write basic HTML and CSS. These are useful skills, but not enough to get you in any door that I might be operating. If the design was good, this method of presenting might work to your advantage, but it's neither pretty nor easy to read and it shows mainly that you have not yet developed valuable design sense or taste. There are lots of jobs (development and otherwise) you can have without those, but it hurts your resume to draw attention to your probably-irrelevant weak points.

Alternatively, if you'd written it all in JavaScript using some trendy framework, I would at least see you as a programmer. If the code was clever or elegant, I would be interested even if the output wasn't very pretty.

I had to look back yet again to get past the experience section. The experience section made me think of you only as a sysadmin/network admin. I've looked at this five or six times now before I got to anything that would make me think of you as a possible developer.

Clients generally don't care about or understand your technology choices. People and process management are at least as important to freelance success as programming or design skill. That much I definitely agree with.

I wouldn't describe my clients as hell, though--not by a long shot. But I've been freelancing full time for seven years, moonlighting five before that, and I've learned to avoid (and am able to do without) bad clients for the most part.

Way back in the beginning, when I didn't much know what I was doing and sold even that work way too cheap, there were some pretty bad times.

> seems like a bad idea to put the computer in a consumable device.

This was my first reaction, too, but I'm not sure it makes sense, at least not categorically. My current Logitech mouse is over two years old with no issues at all. And I don't know that I'd expect a tiny ARM computer with no expansion to be worth using on general purpose software more than a couple years. Still probably wouldn't trust a newcomer to produce a mouse able to go the distance and worth keeping for years, though.

Thanks for posting this.

:-) ... and fyi, two things I want to know all the time are how much unbilled already completed work do I have on a given project, and all the stats summed over all projects for a given client. I have to solve unbilled-completed by subtracting estimated from unbilled, and add the others up manually. If the relevant time span is over more than one month, this becomes extra painful.

FWIW, I think you've got a really neat presentation of the app ui in the video there. I have no idea if it's effective for new people as I've been a daily user for three months now. Your 60 sec front page video sold me immediately three months ago.