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>It amazes me how some people who have really simple tax forms still pay accountants..

My W2 is "simple" (single, no kids, etc.) but I give it to an accountant anyway. Costs $30 or so but the accountant knows certain tricks to maximize my tax return. Not illegal, but she knows how broad exemptions can be. For example, I work from home some days. I built a new computer. Technically, it's exempt because it's a work expense.

I suppose I had trouble with recursion until I understood that each call should strive to be stateless - meaning, you don't try and remember previous results. Each new call should be just the same as the initial. You only act on the current set and try to reduce the problem further. Trying to remember previous iterations results in a lot of headaches.

There's a startup in NYC that does this called Placemeter. Buy a camera, point it out the window, collect data

I read a lot of scifi and have generally been impressed by the naming. I dislike Cratylic names when they're trite but authors like Phillip K. Dick and Gene Wolfe manage to pull them off. Neal Stephenson uses them humorously in Snowcrash (the protagonist's name is 'Hiro Protagonist'). I can't say I'm a fan of Asimov's names in the Foundation series - not Cratylic, just a bit off sounding. "Bayta Darrell" doesn't give the same brain-feeling as "Severian" or "Paul Atreides".

I wonder how a future dominated by Facebook/Google advertisements will affect the multitude of adtech startups. They all aim to solve problems that the two giants air aiming to accomplish by gaining control of the whole funnel. Combined with the rise of adblockers, will there be enough money left?

The "Internet of Things" is to M2M as "Data Science" is to Statistics. There are some differences but on the whole, it's a sexy rebranding of an unsexy industry. I'm a dev working at an industrial monitoring company making websites to our telemetry data. It's a real problem in a lucrative industry which has received a bit of a windfall with the rise of helium ISO shipping.

Exactly. For simple sites, I pretty much avoid all frameworks/libraries. However, I use babel/webpack though I really like webpack-dev-server and the full set of es6 features. I disagree with the React statement. I believe it's really simple on it's own. Flux/Redux add a lot of complexity, but confers significant gains. The new site I'm writing for work isn't just some stupid CRUD site - it's a complex UI used to monitor and manage industrial assets. Having the ability to organize long data flows and actions makes the code much easier to read and write, especially for other developers. If I had to manually manipulate the DOM (especially for making everything responsive) I'd go nuts. The thing about these tools are that once you learn them well, they save you a lot of time.

I'm guilty of this, but I can't stop. What I do now is focus more more on "micro-ideas" which I can finish start to end in a day/weekend/week. Consequentially, these ideas are much harder to come by

Very nice explanation, the selectAll bit is clever. So the key is that timer. I tried googling around for animations before but I guess I missed it.

These are awesome! I've been learning d3 and have been struggling a bit with animations. Does anyone mind breaking down one of these tweets and explaining how it works? I understand it's minifed but learning how to loop animations would be great.

I'd be interested in speculations on the impact of an off timeline. Surely it affects the "mundane" very little - most people likely do not care about anyone outside living memory (probably a couple hundred years, since a lot of time is reckoned from genealogy).

I pushed for a project at work for months. Practised JS/web dev for about a year before that - when the time came I was ready. I go to a lot of JS meetups and I'll be speaking at my first this month!

I'm just the opposite - I was going mad making microservices with C# and have jumped ship to being a full stack webdev guy. I love JS, it feels so freeing and easy after working with such a heavy compiled language (I still like C# though). I really enjoy doing front-end work and I feel that I can utilize my creativity in ways I couldn't working on the backend exclusively.

If you have an engineering degree from an accredited program, you're an engineer. If you don't you're not. The US is very lax with usage of the word but in other countries it's classed in the same way "Doctor" is.

"Why do some children find Math hard to learn? I suspect that this is often caused by starting with the practice and drill of a bunch of skills called Arithmetic—and instead of promoting inventiveness, we focus on preventing mistakes. I suspect that this negative emphasis leads many children not only to dislike Arithmetic, but also later to become averse to everything else that smells of technology. It might even lead to a long-term distaste for the use of symbolic representations."

Substitute "Arithmetic" for "Interview Problems"

Interesting. My algorithm is a bit optimistic as I tend to interrupt people (getting better at it!).

I'm a fan of practicing "stateless development", where years of "thats what we've always done" has no bearing on what I'm doing now. Writing HTML in JS is much more pleasing than cramming JS into HTML via Angular.

Whoa! Haven't seen Teevox in a long time. I'm also building a website using React that uses the Twitch API. How did you get access to their streams without violating TOS? I found their endpoints and proxy them to deal with CORS but I feel like I'm breaking some rules.

I'd gladly trade more boilerplate for stability and confidence of non-breaking updates. You can also write higher-order components to DRY things up.

What's wrong with vanilla React/Flux? I'm currently working on a greenfield project and I've more or less settled settled on that stack. I have immense respect for Abramov but I'm finding it hard to justify Redux when Flux works well.

As an aside, I've been screwed several times by Prime's "guaranteed two-day" shipping. I had package which was very late December last year. When I went to the USPS tracking page to check the location, it turns out Amazon had requested the 8 day shipping option. After several angry calls I finally had the item cancelled and a new one on the way with Saturday shipping (the lower-tier rep said that it wasn't possible, so I elevated to the manager). Lo and behold, about a month later my original item showed up and I had to return it immediately. This was my worst experience, but not my first with late shipping. I've never had so much as a prime extension offered for my trouble.

We don't program the boards in C#, just the services/Silverlight. The communication methods between the boards is well abstracted - most of our devices are reached via phone number. They have a SIM card with a carrier and services essentially make a phone call to get the data. There's a lot to do with communication protocols (i.e. bytes 0-8 are the configuration, 9-12 readings, etc.) but .NET has nice support for binary constructs. Some RTUs are difficult to work with because they have conversations with our server, and the lifetime of that call must be maintained while a million other things are going on.

I wasn't here when the C# decision was made, but it's worked out really well for us so far, Silverlight notwithstanding. Microservices work out really well for us too because there's a lot of code written for specific RTUs which will not (and should not) be shared, and having them explicitly separated keeps everything tidy. Microservices communicate via a centralized publisher using WCF, which uses MSMQ as the underlying transport method. Our #1 priority is to never loose data so these technologies are a pretty safe bet. Like I mentioned before, C# has good support for low-level stuff, but we don't do as much low-level as you think. Our greatest challenge is handling several distinct protocols with as much as the same code path as possible, and C# has really great generics support which makes our lives easy. We don't require the performance a C++ platform would bring.

To elaborate a bit more, our basic control flow goes something like:

Poll unit -> get data -> push data -> translate data -> assign data to business objects -> operate on data -> present data

Each step usually involves a save to the database of critical info at that stage.

I work for a company doing unsexy IoT and I've been dreaming about writing this article for months now. We're a tiny company in New Jersey whose been around in some form or another for the last 25 years, supplying remote telemetry units (RTUs) to the industrial assets industry. Helium, oxygen, nitrogen, whatever, on boats, trucks, and static sites. We also provide a monitoring platform which is where I come in. We're a very uncool Apple - vertically integrated, we design, build, manufacture, ship, and program all of our RTUs in-house. IoT has been around for a long long time now - a lot of our work comes from clients who can't maintain their old systems anymore.

The entire hype wave of IoT has more or less passed right over us. Nobody has heard our name, save for the gas industry itself. But that industry is about to (not literally) explode. Helium is an extremely lucrative industry and is growing by the minute, and there's really nobody in this space but us. Remote monitoring - IoT - has never been more critical to helium than it has now. Without going into too much detail, knowing the pressure levels of your tank 24/7 can save you a lot of money.

So where do I come in? Our platform is written in C#, with the front-end done in Silverlight. I'm the dude getting us off it with some really hip JS work in React. Before that I wrote a lot of microservices to handle various aspects of our system. We were in a pretty bad state when I got there so I spent a lot of time improving our development team. We didn't have PRs for a long time. For a first job out of college, it's not bad. I get to do a lot of cool work, and on my current project I've made every technical decision. But sometimes I wish that we could attract better talent. Oh well, I'm (hopefully) leaving soon.

What's productive to me isn't always considered productive to society, but I do "objectively productive" things like exercising and personal projects.

I'm (only) 23 and I've felt this for a while. I've been trying to leave my small no-name company for a higher calibre job in NYC for a few months now. I guess I'm lucky because I know what I want - but I need to wade through extreme amounts of bullshit to get there. I'm very efficient with my time but if I made every second worthwhile, I'd go nuts. Sometimes BS time (videogames, the pub, etc) are necessary.

The problem is one in the same with volume: identical frequencies in the same week result in constructive interference leading to a louder tone, which drowns out the others. I need to set the gain such that the max for any one frequency is 0.1 per week.

I agree it could use some randomness. To maintain harmony, however, I've made each note a perfect 5th of eachother. Maybe I could adjust the ratio to make perfect Nths instead.

Sorry! I set the gain to 1/10th of default but if several of the same tones are being played at once it's a bit loud. What I should do is reduce the gain on each subsequent oscillator of the same tone.

I love Atom and I've been using it for a long time now, but have they fixed the horrible stability issues in Windows yet? I run it on 3 distinct Windows machines and they all experience the same issues (most notably, I cannot have two editors open without the most recent crashing).

For me, feeling like an adult means feeling more like myself. It's like there's a core being of who I am, independent of all other factors, which becomes more prominent over time. I suppose it's tangential to the current top post - "when it comes down to it, you are the only person who is responsible for you".

>(a) use one (1) copy of the binary portions of the Programs and any Supplemental Programs for the sole purpose of internal non-production and non-commercial evaluation and testing of the Programs, including, developing no more than a single prototype of each of Your applications;

How could someone with any dev experience think this is reasonable, let alone enforceable?