typicalrunt

    But most doctors and physical therapists recommend
    that kids carry no more than 10% to 15% of their 
    body weight in their packs. [1]

Another tip is to try out various types of backpacks. There are padding ones, like you mention, or ones with a hip belt (which offloads the weight from your back onto your hips) [4], or even side-satchel (messenger) bags. My preference has always been for messenger bags.

My favourite bags (over 8 years old and still in use) are:

* Mountain Equipment Co-op (Canadian company) Kilobyte Computer Backpack [2]

* Waterfield Designs Cargo Laptop Messenger Bag [3]. At $230, it's expensive, but the build quality is so high that the amortized cost less than $30/year and it's still going strong (no frays, zippers still work, etc).

[1] http://kidshealth.org/parent/firstaid_safe/outdoor/backpack....

[2] This model is no longer sold, but it looks like this: http://shopping.canoe.ca/images/detail/40578000/40578375.jpg

[3] http://www.sfbags.com/collections/shoulder-messenger-bags/pr...

[4] Although hip-belt backpacks are quite large, they are amazing things. I went backpacking with one (i.e. lots of weight, lots of walking) and the hip belt saved my belt, and even spread out my vertebrae enough to get rid of old back injuries. Of course, I'm no doctor, but that was my experience with them. For everyday use, a hip-belt on a small backpack may be either hard to find or overkill for your needs.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5394

[1] http://www.ledger-cli.org

If you ever have the chance, try some raw sugars from places like Mauritius. There are many kinds, but they all come from sugar cane and their taste profile is wildly different. The "kind" of sugar depends on what stage of process it was taken. My personal favourite is molasses sugar [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molasses_sugar

What I'd like to see first is a responsive design so I don't have to zoom 1000% to upvote.

Who cares if the person speaking is famous or not. Does notoriety somehow make words more true?

Some of the most important things people have said to me were never famous. I hardly remember their names or faces, but what they've said has resonated and stuck with me. That's the important part.

Keep an open mind.

Where I disagree is whether one has put themselves in a situation where they are desperate for a position at a company where they have to lie to pass the fit interview stage. I'd rather be honest and lose than lie, win and ultimately impugn my integrity.

It is very refreshing when you already have a job and are looking for something new, then you can sit back and take a relaxed approach to finding a good company. Once one is found and you are interviewing with them (and interviewing them, as a previous commenter mentioned), then you can ask all the tough questions. If you don't like what you hear, vote with your feet and walk away.

Now, this isn't always the situation people are in, so YMMV but I throw it out there as a piece of advice for anyone interviewing companies.

But isn't this supply meeting demand? If there were too many taxis, wouldn't the supply eventually cull itself when nobody can make enough money?

What I find more amazing is that, as humans, we have all chosen "5+ years" as the experience level in our jokes.

To answer this correctly we'd have to get philosophical, which means we'd both end up correct.

Suffice to say that I believe everyone is capable of learning to become a learner. You'd be surprised at what little knowledge we're born with and what our society has created for us (so-called "constructs" in philosophy parlance). Don't discount the ability for the human mind to be taught.

I was always curious and hungry for knowledge as a kid, but what I lacked was the knowledge of where I can find more knowledge (the libraries in my childhood were crap; the most complex computer book was how to use Office). It wasn't until university that I realized how to research things and find the best resources to learn that I truly was able to teach myself. That happened at the end of my 3rd year of university, and my 4th year was spent barely attending class and instead teaching myself the required material on my own time, while I was also learning about things not taught in class.

edit: Argh, clicked submit too soon. added second paragraph.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism

And yet, non-devs are the people that talk about going to these Agile conferences. They're also the people targeted for Certified Scrum Master certifications. The movement of Agile away from developers has been happening for awhile. It's just another management philosophy now.

Does it matter that the people creating the software are no longer at the table.

Yes. Full stop.

All in all, I feel that the author is simply answering his own questions.

I always tell people to travel outside their comfort zones purely for this insight. One you experience how another culture lives it is hard to be close minded again.

What you write is so true. So many large companies use text files to shuttle around data. I worked at one place that used pipe-delimited 10+GB files. It's not sexy, and using awk/sed/cut seems like a hack at first, then you realize that it works and it is the simplest solution to the problem.

With tmux, no HUP happens on the server side so the process keeps running. Once your internet connection comes back online you ssh back into the machine and ``tmux attach`` to the previous session. And voilà, it is like nothing happened. All of your output from before is still there too.

A lot of detached homes in Vancouver at the $900k price range look like they are in bad condition and reflect the land value. So while it is expensive to purchase at $900k+, consider the renovations that will be needed to bring the house up to a livable condition.

http://www.costofliving.welcomebc.ca/

[1] Median family income in BC is $69,150 as of 2011. Source: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/f...

See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7272429 for the data.

It includes the report from RBC that provides data on Canadian housing. Unfortunately it does not include US housing affordability numbers.

For Vancouver, it takes 84-88% of your pre-tax income to afford a detached house (page 7 of the report). "Afford" means mortgage (principal+interest), property taxes, utilities, etc.

Okay, so 88% is high right? Well "pre-tax" means before the government gets their cut. In Canada, a high income earner gets taxed roughly 40% of their income and we all pay our mortgages/rent/utilities with post-tax money, so the affordability figure goes up over 100%. That means your entire paycheque is going towards paying for detached housing [2].

IIRC, in the US, you are allowed to deduct your mortgage interest from your income, meaning you get to pay with pre-tax income. But in Canada that is not allowed and you must pay the piper first.

[1] http://www.rbc.com/newsroom/pdf/HA-1127-2013.pdf

[2] Condos are at 42% affordability in Vancouver, which is still disastrously high since it is also using pre-tax income.

edit: 42% for condos, not 47%.

edit 2: corrected to say mortgage interest is deductible from income, based on reply. Thx!

[1] http://www.bclaws.ca/Recon/document/ID/freeside/00_96113_01#...

It's no wonder so many Vancouverites are house poor, especially if you are single and have no dependents to list for tax benefits or exemptions.

I have to laugh a little at this. I 100% agree, but just wait until you have a family. The options for shelter are either sky-high rent or sky-high purchase prices if you want to stay in Vancouver or Burnaby (the city next-door). If you want to save some money you either live in 1/2 of a house, in the basement of a house, or live somewhere musty worrying about mold [1].

Is it just me or is BC not a really a friendly place at all for technically skilled people working in software/internet industry?

Vancouver isn't HQ for many large corporations, unlike Toronto so there are few big players in this area (TELUS, WorkSafe, BC Hydro, Best Buy). The other big players (Microsoft, Amazon, etc) are still relatively new. When a company like TELUS has a big project, they are a blackhole that sucks up EVERYONE. This happened 8 years ago with one of their projects. If you only stayed in the Gastown district of Vancouver, you'd think Vancouver was bustling with startups, but it's not. It's getting there, but IMHO the startup scene is still in its infancy [3].

An old joke amongst the IT consultants here is that we often see each other repeatedly circling the same big corps. It's a very very small world in Vancouver.

I don't know of what "network effect" there is here other than amateurish Meet-up groups where middle aged men who lived through y2k show up and talk about how they like their coffee.

I've seen this as well, which is why I don't attend too many meetups. Some of the meetups are very small (the Ruby one in particular) and I'd like to see a larger turnout. Saying that, I understand my lack of participation is what is causing part of the low turnout (in my case it is also an issue of travel distance).

real estate

As for the real estate situation in Vancouver (and Canada, in general), there is so many variables at play that there isn't one solid answer. There is the foreign menace buying up our real estate that is portrayed by realtors and the MSM, but the stats (there are few) show otherwise (<10%). Most of the cause is our (Canadians, I mean) own doing due to the low emergency interest rates. Instead of people using the low interest rates to get out of debt, they instead gorged on more real estate. Thus you see people attempting to carry their residential debts (mortgage, interest, taxes) by seeking ever higher rates. Add into that the realtor lie (carried by the MSM) that housing only goes up and you get people flipping houses to each other for ever higher prices (and thus, rents). If you want to know how it all ends, just read up on the US housing/credit crisis circa 2008. If you are a skeptic that thinks this can't happen in Canada, read up on what happened in 1980-1 or 1990-1, the same housing drop happened then [2].

[1] This isn't just a colloquial joke. Because Vancouver is technically classified as a temperate rainforest, we enjoy much much MUCH more rain than other places, with very nominal temperatures. If there is any defect in the building envelope, you will get mold.

[2] But without the low interest rates or credit crisis, so this will be a big new player.

[3] Part of the reason (from what I've heard) is the sky-high office rent in the area. It takes a huge chunk of the operating budget.

I also wanted to add that, due to the Y2K fiasco, BC lawmakers were able to push through an exemption to the overtime laws. Basically, if you are in IT, then you are not under most of the overtime protection laws that other workers have. See here:

http://www.labour.gov.bc.ca/esb/facshts/high_tech.htm

Ironically (and sadly) TFA says that the US cannot talk about the issue due to privacy laws. Ha! That takes balls to say.

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/canada/story/1.1034903

To people that know him personally, like myself, Zed is a great guy. My guess at the problem is that his Internet persona took on its own life outside of his control, and it grew to such a bad situation that it was better to not try to feed the trolls and simply put some distance from it.

In other words, let the haters hate and be ignored, stand up for yourself when appropriate, and the good people will eventually acknowledge good deeds and fight for you.

If you want to see masters of keeping up a conversation, watch some comedy improv. Their entire task is to take a topic which they don't know about (usually specified by an audience member) and convert it into a conversation that must be kept up by each person. Once you see enough of these improvs you will notice that each comedian is able to inject something interesting into each sentence that keeps the conversation going, but not too much (or too little) that it causes the topic to die on the vine.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis