timonv

Why don't we create a rosetta stone variant ourselves? Put up the same text in the world's current major languages, I'd be curious to see if it would be really undecryptable. Plus, we might be doing future historians a big favour.

Our startup:

--Metrics:

Mixpanel (http://www.mixpanel.com)

--Issue tracking

Back to post it wall

--SVM

Github (http://www.github.com)

--Deployment

Heroku (http://www.heroku.com)

Custom stuff

--Sales

Close.io (http://close.io)

--Payments

Braintree (http://www.braintreepayments.com)

--Errortracking

Appsignal (http://www.appsignal.com)

Sentry (for non Ruby stuff, self hosted) (http://getsentry.com)

--Performance metrics

Appsignal (http://www.appsignal.com)

New Relic (http://www.newrelic.com)

And some specific stuff in mixpanel

--Logs

Papertrail (http://www.papertrailapp.com)

--Databases and such

Elasticsearch (http://www.elasticsearch.org)

Postgresql

Redis

Memcache

--Frameworks and stacks

Golang (bare, high performance/reliability stuff)

Rails/ruby (Main -crud application)

Backbone (frontend)

Node.js (high performance low reliabillity stuff)

Clojure (Wrapping a language detection api)

--Support

Zendesk

As a freelancer/developer:

--Editor:

Vim

--Todos/Research/Planning/Notes/Calendar:

Orgmode

--Invoicing:

Moneybird (dutch, http://www.moneybird.com)

--Email:

Sup (https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup)

--Backups:

Git + Dropbox + Timemachine (to Nas) + Amazon Glacier

Or, turn it the other way around, don't let bad schooling take years of the best period of your life.

I dropped out after 3-4'ish years of AI, and now I'm working on AI projects year round.

I think it's slightly patronising and playing it safe to say people should consider staying just because they might not ever get the chance to learn these things later in life. For one, that's their responsibility. The knowledge you pick up at a university can deprecate just as much (if its not already). If you don't continue to pick things up later in life, that's your own fault. Secondly, grades and bureaucracy, in my opinion, instil competition and stress in the areas where it doesn't matter. Universities should be concerned with obtaining knowledge.

Hah. Great article!

Also:

* https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup for decentralised and lightning fast email. Written in Ruby, very hackable.

* http://orgmode.org/ Although I'm a vim user, I use orgmode for: All my todos, clocking hours for clients, spreadsheets for my training, research notes, calendar, anything else that needs organising and planning.

Well, that's just gay[1].

[1] Disclaimer: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Gay

Tolq - http://www.tolq.com - The Hague, Netherlands

Javascript powered professional crowd-sourced web translations. We are rolling in clients right now and we're looking for strong programmers to help us out, we're looking for more software engineers to back us up. INTERN, REMOTE welcome.

* Web / Backend developer - Our backend is mainly in Rails with some Node.js and possibly a bit of Golang pending. We're looking for a polyglot. :-)

If your interested you can apply by sending me a direct email at timon@tolq.com

STACK:

* Rails

* Node.js

* Selenium/Phantomjs for various testing/indexing stuff

* ElasticSearch

* ... and lots more

No, that's not better than Orgmode.

Smoking costs billions? Productivity? An 'even higher' increase in risk of lungcancer? And there are no other factors at play at all? So now it's going to be a war on smokers again, is it? What a terrible causation-correlation fuck up.

ftr, I quit smoking a year ago. And happy I did.

I agree it's great, but the summary serves just as well! http://sameffect.com/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people...

In no particular order:

Politics and philosophy:

Ishmael - Daniel Quinn (even though in the end, it's just a cute, in essence a softies introduction to anarchist communism)

On property - Proudhon (Meta, ye oldist anarchy) Das Kapital (If you read Marx, also read on Marx, can't stress this enough)

Beyond good and evil (but in his thought in general) - Nietzsche (Mainly for showing there are no absolutes, moral is what we make of it, and in that moral we can excel)

And so, so many others, philosophy really adds up, just keep on reading, there's fundamental books for sure, but every publication adds up in some respect.

Sports and nutrition:

Starting Strength (for making me bad ass strong in the last couple years)

'Paleo' diet (for showing an extreme solution for a more simple problem, that actually worked and made me not fat anymore)

Some random books that made a huge impression the last years:

The Alchemist, for showing how humble you can experience the wonders of life

Siddhartha, same really.

A short summer of anarchy (biography of Durrutti, rise of anarchism in 30s Spain, out of print)

Crime and Punishment and Karamazov (There's beauty in the darkest corners of the human spirit, and so much more)

The Prince

Butler (For using Nietzsche's deconstruction to argue against 'genetic' discrimination, controversial, but very good)

Metamorphosis - Kafka (I don't have a one liner to summarize this. Just read it, it's < 100 pages)

Funny enough, as far as Tech and Business goes, I skim books to get some details, but at the end of the day most value comes from hacking around. For both.

To be clear here, I'm in no way involved with the documentary. I am however, an avid reader of books, and Chomsky is a major author in that collection.

Personally, I think the trailer is a bit of a glorification of Chomsky's social political criticism. And in that respect, this would fit perfectly. I just hope they leave out the melodrama in the documentary.

That makes me curious, what do you think it was? Chomsky talking about kickstarter?

Tolq - http://www.tolq.com - The Hague, Netherlands

Javascript powered professional crowd-sourced web translations. We are just on top of our first alpha launch, we're looking for more software engineers to back us up. INTERN, REMOTE welcome.

* Web / Backend developer - Our backend is mainly in Rails. We're looking for people who enjoy challenging software and get involved with linguistics.

* Senior Javascript Developer - Our javascript client side script that does the translations is our main cannon.

If interested, you can email me directly at timon at tolq.com.

An interesting development, the Dutch minister of security refuses to expand on the details of the AIVD and NSA relationship, stating that it has to be discussed on an European level first.

http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/06/11/aivd-heeft-ook-toegang-t...

Ubiquitous does not imply concise across. Which is not the case.

And that's exactly the problem. The promise has been there for _years_, it just never has been made up to. Sure, cross-platform development is cool, you can do that in Java. I can also do it in Ruby, Go, Rust, Clojure, Erlang or Haskell. And those solutions don't feel like a duct tape on a drainpipe.

It's still the same as it was 10 years ago, we can't wrap our head around a solution that works for all browsers, hence, we can't just make the language concise, let alone change it fundamentally to solve the more actual problems of front end development. And then, if frameworks don't have to fix a language in their own way, we can get something real going. In any case, I just can't wrap my head around the discrepancy as to why-the-fuck-still.

Web Development is fine, it's the Javascript, and especially the frontend world that's the problem.

Why do we bother with a language that's inconcise, lacks so many common, useful functions (enumerals, strings, etc), and general doesn't do what we want it to do? In spite of fundamental problems, people try to address them with custom solutions. Those are inherently very PERSONAL solutions - because everyone wants to do it well and better - bound to raise discussion and competition at some point. That's what's happening. People are trying to fix something broken with their own, idealistic ideas.

There's nothing wrong with that, don't get me wrong, but I think we all know that we can do better on a more fundamental level.

Obesity isn't a problem, it's an effect. People eat crap and don't work out and the media doesn't help.

Whether problems are 'real' is a point of perception. Obesity and the high rate of diabetes are only a problem in ignorance of the cause. That's yours to fill in. The same goes for the banking crisis, political scams and the facade we call democracy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/democracy/).

I totally agree we should be addressing real issues in our society, however, addressing effects is like duct taping a drain - temporary.

Failing happens and is a good thing. Don't forget to look at the bright side. Learning rocks.

Great post! I noticed that presentations which give actionable, discussable points can give a but load of positive feedback and fun talks in the after track. For instance, not just showing that x is cooler than y, but actually showing how to use x more effectively than y. The difference is small, but I think it's pretty major in its effect.

So I'm curious, what would you define a job? True, running a startup requires you to make some concessions with your private time. But when you have what you describe as a job, assuming there is no need to excel (i.e., prioritising, pushing), seems a bit judging. Aiming to be good at what you do, doesn't that hold for anything?

So with that argument turned around again on startups, if you need time off, vacations, private me time or whatever to get better at what you do, you should take it. Excessive stress does not make a better person, nor a better life.