upstill

I'm gravitating more and more to using Walmart.com as a first stop. They seem to be ramping inventory way up, their site--especially search--is a pleasure to use compared to Amazon, and shipping is a minor differentiator, if any.

For books, I always check bookfinder before ordering from Amazon.

But if you get a funky product on Amazon, I would think that returning it would be a fine way of registering disapproval. It can't be that good for Amazon, and you can bet they're noticing both the product and the vendor when it happens.

Ditto.

Your opinion about where you lie on the spectrum of capability has everything to do with your own perspective-building and very little to do with "reality", whatever that is. You're comparing where you are with where you can imagine being, and both of those valuations are fraught with error. One of the harsh realities of acquiring skill and sophistication is that those enable a vision of where you <could> be, which is inherently frustrating.

Perhaps the real problem is finding a sense of satisfaction in your work. The algorithm for acquiring that is fairly straightforward: work your edges, i.e., focus on tasks that challenge your current capabilities, but not too much.

Not just the app but the whole user experience: Amazon. Specifically, they should have figured out search by now, but no: the mapping from search terms to results is just a stab in the dark.

It's not just niche users. I hated with a burning righteous rage every single release of iTunes. The overhead of all kinds that it imposed on access to my collection of music never made any sense.

Find your edges: read at the edge of what you're familiar with. When you have holes that need filling, you inhale the new information like a dry sponge slurps up water. Reading something just because you think you "should know" that area, regardless of how far afield it is from your existing knowledge base, makes it more foreign, hence more difficult to absorb. I've gotten enormous benefit from re-reading the manuals of systems I already use but have mastered haphazardly.

It's a challenge to find material at the frontiers of your knowledge, but the effort pays off in efficacy.

An old one, but I might as well be the first:

There are three hard problems in programming: naming, cache expiration and off-by-one errors.

Count another vote for Sophie's World as a breezy introduction. Call it the root node of your tree search.

As a man gets older, he seems more harmless, even neutered. At 66, I can now have much more substantive conversations with (for example) young women.

Advice: some lessons come only with age. People often don't learn not to care what other people think (because they're not thinking of them at all) until their 30's. It was only recently that I really learned that if you don't have expectations, you can't be disappointed.

"one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories"? That can't be true. I weigh 70Kg, and I'm pretty sure I don't expend 10,000 calories riding a bike for a Km.

Did anyone deliberately create the situation we see out there? Then the assumption that rolling back requires censorship is, well, just an assumption.

We've created an ecosystem of "engagement" rife with perverse incentives for incivility. Does reconfiguring that ecosystem require censorship? I think not.

Count me in. I've been coding for years and years from just my 15" screen. Tabbing amongst windows (and tabs) that each occupy the whole screen feels far more transparent than hunting for windows that may be hidden anyway. I have some sympathy for the laptop-posture argument, but that's the only argument that makes sense to me.

I can't read anything and have it stick unless I use it. But the hazard of doing a project is that you'll just recycle skills and strategies from earlier languages, which inhibits your openness to what's distinctive about the new environment.

The only approach that works for me is dialectic: go back and forth between absorbing raw information, then using it hands-on on a genuine problem. Learning moves you forward, and using it locks you in and makes you a dry sponge for absorbing further material. The trick is to notice when you're trying to fit your old ways into the new box, and stay alert for opportunities to change your way of thinking.

...or maybe I'm just saying this because I'm working on learning Clojure after decades of procedural programming.

I would do Computer Science again because background (defined as a toolbox you can dig into opportunistically) is so important. But I never had anyone to teach me how to program: how to structure a problem and break it down into manageable units. I would work far harder to get intimate technical contact with peers and mentors.

Well, that's one opinion--unique, judging by the other responses. Someone asking for help and insight is "fake", "self-promotional", "nauseating" and manipulative? And downvotes on such a judgement are somehow out of bounds?

Dude. Take a pill. Get over yourself.

While this is more tactical than strategic, I've saved untold thousands of reading hours by firmly avoiding three kinds of stories: 1) predictions of the future (which are almost always wrong, especially when proffered by experts), 2) opinionated evaluations (especially by experts), which only rarely offer any insight, and 3) anything else that will expire in a week or a month. Almost everything about an upcoming election will be worthless very soon; this is a surprisingly broad category.

Notice that these three categories are all interesting, but with very low information value. You can train yourself to detect a high interest/information ratio and turn away when it goes off.

It's a seller's market for developers on FounderDating, i.e., far more people with a startup idea than developers to implement it.