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treetroubleon The Bomb That Changed My Life

But you see what I'm saying? "quality of life" is an illusion because danger exists in those situations. my point is not hypervigilance, as you say. my point is... enjoy your life because it could be very, very short

treetroubleon The Bomb That Changed My Life

Some cultures (US, in my personal experience) spend quite a bit of time convincing themselves that terrible things can't happen to them. For instance, I could be hit by a bus tomorrow in a freak accident and suffer a more painful end than a soldier in Iraq. That's not to say that Iraq isn't much more dangerous, but danger exists for everyone.

I feel for the soldier you're replying to because he is at odds with society in this regard. However, he's not at odds with reality because bad shit really does happen and I admire his not being so quick to label it some kind of illness.

treetroubleon 'sudo make me a sandwich' has become a reality

xkcd reference aside, hristov's question is totally legitimate. sudo is intended to run administrative commands. normally you would use a "physical" group to grant access like you're describing

treetroubleon If you want to get rich, stop being a fucking joker

The term is slacker, not joker.

treetroubleon At Google X, a Top-Secret Lab Dreaming Up the Future

OR profitable but not as profitable as the things the companies with those resources were working on during those years.

treetroubleon At Google X, a Top-Secret Lab Dreaming Up the Future

It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating.

The stuff that could have been invented 5-10 years ago but was not interesting enough to warrant the effort

treetroubleon Why Lisp Will Never Win (2003)

Unfortunately I don't have a source to cite but I believe the LISP/AI connection started in the 1960s and peaked in the 1980s.

treetroubleon Skeuomorphism: The Opiate of the People

Isn't the purpose of a Rolodex to "find my friends" ? I believe that's what they were going for. It's weak, sure...

treetroubleon Skeuomorphism: The Opiate of the People

The physical counterpart is a "Rolodex" or leather address book

treetroubleon Steve Jobs talks technology and Apple in this video from 1995

Social curiosity is valuable too

treetroubleon I'm a serial over committer

I'd like to read a post about the optimal granularity of git commits in different situations. I don't think I'm experienced enough particularly when it comes to intense collaboration to write it myself

treetroubleon Idolize Bill Gates, Not Steve Jobs

This post will not be well received on HN because the taste leaders here are people who have deeply internalized the Jobs mindset for better or worse

treetroubleon Ruby is beautiful (but I'm moving to Python)

With Ruby, the flexibility of being able to do things in more than one way makes it necessary to learn conventions rather than just the language spec. Sometimes breaking those conventions can have a tremendous upside. Some people find that upside worthwhile and others don't.

treetroubleon Ruby is beautiful (but I'm moving to Python)

You make good points, they're not blunt. I've just read the same basic blog post many times complaining that there's no SciPy in Ruby. Again, I'm not in the sciences so I'm out of my element talking about it. I'm just trying to make the simple point that there does seem to be people out there wanting science libraries for Ruby

treetroubleon Ruby is beautiful (but I'm moving to Python)

Characterizing the Ruby philosophy as "you are a special snowflake" is, well, starting a flamewar

treetroubleon Ruby is beautiful (but I'm moving to Python)

These kinds of projects can take years to take hold; you can't expect people to just all switch right away. Blog posts like this just need to be commented on with a link to those libraries. Eventually some big lecture, class or project will use one of those libraries and a whole new group of people will supplement the community. This doesn't just go for Ruby, it applies to any language

Ruby performance in general is getting much better and when C extensions are necessary (as they often are in any high level language) libraries like ruby-ffi have taken a lot of the pain out of that process.

treetroubleon Ruby is beautiful (but I'm moving to Python)

Seems like it would be a huge opportunity for people to start creating these science Ruby gems.

Not my field, personally...

treetroubleon NYC isn't catching the Valley anytime soon: Reflections on Startup School

Walk into a coffee shop in Palo Alto (say…Coupa). Pull out your computer, open your gmail or git or twitter. Now leave and try another shop. And another. Go try that in NYC before researching exactly which shop has WiFi.

This is easier to do in Williamsburg, Brooklyn than Palo Alto

edit: to prove the point, here's the free wifi list from yelp for wburg and greenpoint just to show how common it is

http://bit.ly/uAEJhd

treetroubleon How much do Apple's factories cost?

I accidentally linked to the wrong article. Although that same report talked about there did actually pertain to workers' rights, it's not highlighted in that article.

Here are a couple others that come up in a quick search:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/technology/23apple.html?pa...

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/01/chinese-environmen...

and this (which is a little bit older)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/business/global/07suicide....

Whether or not Dell is guilty of the same thing is a different issue altogether and no less surprising or upsetting

treetroubleon How much do Apple's factories cost?

You're right about apple's PR response but they do have a well documented history of enabling worker abuse that suggests that this policy is either ineffective at best or total bs at worst

http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/31/environmental-watchdog-repo...

treetroubleon Hyperpolyglot: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby

There is a lot of non-idiomatic Ruby as well

treetroubleon A lack of sleep can kill you

They also never address whether he had a congenital heart problem

treetroubleon How to Level Up as a Developer

Lists like this are designed to discourage developers, not help them "level up".

treetroubleon John Mayer: "Manage the Temptation to Publish Yourself"

Mayer shared that he found himself asking himself questions like “Is this a good blog? Is this a good tweet? Which used to be is this a good song title? Is this a good bridge?

As much as I disdain this guy's style sometimes, he makes some excellent points. I take issue with this particular quote though. Perhaps his true calling is to be both a musician and commentator. There's nothing inherently wrong with letting oneself evolve and change focus. It's not like music is a dying art form or something

treetroubleon The Mother of All Interview Questions

Yeah, the language is a little pretentious but I believe that's the sort of invention they're looking for

treetroubleon The Mother of All Interview Questions

This is a great question that requires an answer that is both philosophically and technologically deep

Most articles I've read with a headline like this, the question posed involves an impractical show of technical prowess

treetroubleon Why I love Smalltalk

Thank you, I wasn't familiar with Io before

treetroubleon All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)

Do you have a link where you read that? Not implying it's not true-- just want to know more and searches are coming up empty