New O'Reilly book: Stateful JavaScript Applications - <AUTHOR> http://jswebapps.heroku.com/

<comment><USER2> Thanks. How long until release? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> It'll be on O'Reilly rough cuts in the next week or so.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to Parse "Requirements" in a Job Listing? - <AUTHOR>

Because I'm curious:<p>When you see a list of "requirements" in a job ad, and fail to adequately meet even just one of the list items, do you apply anyway? If not, at what point do you, personally, draw the line? <comment><USER2> From the point of view of someone who writes job requirements then receives resumes: no matter what you write in job requirements, you will receive a stack of resumes which don't even remotely match the job requirements. So many resumes that it is impossible to sift through them in any depth. In an attempt to get a stack of hundred (or more) resumes down to a pile you can read in any depth, you are forced to look at each one very briefly and put it in the "no" pile for missing, or even not clearly fulfilling, any requirements listed.

It ends up as a sort of "tragedy of the commons" situation. There might be a person in that stack, who does not literally meet the listed requirements, but who nonetheless would be a great hire. Their opportunity to be "discovered" is taken away by the large number of respondents polluting the resume stack for a job they clearly are not qualified for.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see. It has been my tendency to go "Hmm, I match 8/9 of the ones listed, but not #7 on their list. Oh well, moving on." I had been wondering if this was foolish of me.

<comment><USER3> _I had been wondering if this was foolish of me._

Keep in mind that all of the other applicants might have matched at most 7/9 requirements, and you could have been the top candidate.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's the rub: What if the requirements are _actually_ requirements? What if they're not, and only the first 1 or 2 list items are essential? I tend to play it safe so I don't waste companies' time.

<comment><USER4> > There's the rub: What if the requirements are actually requirements?

Then they won't call you back if you don't meet them.

> I tend to play it safe so I don't waste companies' time.

If the requirements are actually hard requirements and you don't meet them, the company isn't even a potential employer. If they aren't hard requirements, you aren't wasting their time. It seems to me the only real consideration should be whether you are wasting _your_ time.

<comment><AUTHOR> > It seems to me the only real consideration should be whether you are wasting > _your_ time.

If my time were valuable, I'd probably be getting paid better for it. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > When you see a list of "requirements" in a job ad, and fail to adequately > meet even just one of the list items, do you apply anyway? If not, at what > point do you, personally, draw the line?

Unless there's a context in which I know the requirements are non-negotiable (class admission requirements for a civil service position, for instnace), I look at the duties first, and if I feel I can do the duties, I look at the "requirements" as what the hiring entity _assumes_ are necessary to do the job, but also assume that the hiring entity can be convinced that those are not really minimums on a case-by-case basis -- but that they are things that the application should _address_ in some way if they are missing.

IME, it's true often enough that its worth taking that approach.

<comment><AUTHOR> > ... I look at the duties first, and if I feel I can do the duties, I look at > the "requirements" ... > ... they are things that the application should > _address_ in some way if they are missing.

That's actually a pretty reasonable way to handle the uncertainty. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found that besides skills, people focus on "years of experience" . I would love to see more of "flow" parameters in job requirements, and I blogged about this idea a while back: [http://thinkingonthinking.com/skill- bars/](http://thinkingonthinking.com/skill-bars/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I've seen this a lot. The years of experience thing can be taken to ridiculous extremes, as well: I was turned down in the middle of an interview for a PHP position (I have 12 years of experience) recently because, and I'm not making this up, the interviewer claimed, "Well, I have guys with 18 years of experience, I'll call you back if we have an opening for a junior PHP devleoper role. _click_ "

I like the flow concept. :)

<comment><USER3> Wow...18 years of experience in PHP! I would imagine the last 10 years would be the most relevant (post PHP5 and OOP) for most modern applications.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes indeed, and the language itself is only 19 years old. I personally view this claim as suspicious, but I didn't argue the point. Anyone who decides that 12 years isn't enough to qualify for a senior position without further examination is probably not the sort of person I'd enjoy working for. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Steve Huffman on Lessons Learned at Reddit - <AUTHOR> http://thinkvitamin.com/code/steve-huffman-on-lessons-learned-at-reddit/

<comment><USER2> I'm always reluctant about going completely schemaless. Reminds me of the blog post by FriendFeed about how they use MySQL, highly recommended: <http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql>

I feel like like there needs to be a better middleground for having some schema but being able to augment it easily with metadata that you're not querying against (yet). Then later extracting the metadata into queryable columns.

I wrote a post outlining some ideas of how to do this: [https://github.com/shazow/everything/blob/master/idea/arbitr...](https://github.com/shazow/everything/blob/master/idea/arbitrarily- structured-data-in-rdbms.md)

I've only implemented bits and pieces of this in practice, huge convenience so far.

<comment><USER3> I think this is exactly right. Have a document store and a (separate?) index store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand the fetish with caching every variation for every user.

Here's a thought: dynamic apps should render a page exactly one way in html, and rely on javascript and cookies to post-process the site so it APPEARS to be customized for that particular user. That includes admin widgets.

That particularly applies for displaying how many minutes ago something was generated. Serve it with a date-time format, use javascript to post-process into "x seconds ago" or "x minutes ago".

If someone isn't logged in, or isn't an admin, and they hack their javascript to display user or admin stuff, who cares? The user/admin requests sent to the webserver won't succeed anyway, because they rely on having an admin session cookie.

If there's meaningful rather than just UI stuff that users or admins get to see, then you have to cache that separately, but you can even do stuff like loading it dynamically with js so the publicly visible (cached) content can still be used, and you cut down the amount of stuff your server has to auto- generate. It can cache the separate pages (xml, json, whatever) that serve the logged-in user content, as well.

</comment><comment><USER5> Note: the talk is from May 2010.

I wonder if Steve (or rather, jedberg or someone else at reddit) were to give the talk today, if 'memcache' and 'memcachedb' would both be replaced by Redis?

<comment><USER6> We replaced memcachedb with Cassandra a while ago, because memcachedb pretty much hit a wall at some point.

As for replacing memcached, I'm certainly open to it, but from what I've read, the performance of memcache for what we use it for is better than redis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> another lesson could be: "don't make a site that appeals to people who use ad- block. revenue won't keep up with demand."

<comment><USER8> many users (myself included) add an exception to adblock for reddit. I don't mind helping their ad revenue when the ads aren't that intrusive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's a good basic overview on what it takes to keep a site the size of Reddit (a year ago) afloat. I need to think more about caching, personally.

Reddit has done a great job of serving a massive amount of traffic, given the size of their staff especially.

</comment><comment><USER10> Watching the video made me feel a little uncomfortable. I come away with the impression that they _almost_ , but not quite, really understood the important lessons.

Still, it was well worth watching and I'm glad Huffman decided to go there.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Why did they use Python in the first place? Reddit is still kind of unstable.

<comment><USER11> Are you trolling? Site stability issues very rarely have anything to do with the underlying programming language, unless you're using some experimental language that no one else is using for web development (and even then, Arc seems to be working pretty well for HN).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you over come pessimism after failing too much? - <AUTHOR> Yes I know if A has been true in past doesn't mean A will be true in future. But what if being logical isn't enough.
something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAp4wmb6dpY
I thought if i go do something else, like other hobbies then once I come back I'll have fresh drive. It helped, but i still dont see any road leading to 'success', advantage, hope, etc.
maybe i've become more realistic? Huh? lol.. <comment><USER2> What is the alternative?

Seriously, unless you are thinking about taking the ultimate exit (In which case go and see a medical professional), what is there to be done but to try something else?

Have you tried getting a (I don't want to use this phrase) menial job, data entry, courier, cleaning? That can help you recalibrate what 'sucess' really means.

<comment><AUTHOR> wait can you expand on how doing menial job helps? I actually have thought about doing that. Just to start doing things again.

<comment><USER2> 1) It makes your body tired instead of your mind. Give yourself a break, get proper sleep. There is no worry or decision making required

2) It resets your calibration for what success is. After a month typing data into a spreadsheet maybe supervising the team doing that looks like a nice step up? Maybe you would not have seen it as success before? Maybe after a few months you are running the next level up. Maybe then you see an opportunity for automation...

3) These kind of jobs are usually fixed hours. Everyone expects you to clock out and go home

4) Maybe you will find some parts of the job demeaning. Maybe that is the motivation you need.

Best of luck with it, whatever you decide to do</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Image generator in Go with no external dependencies - <AUTHOR> https://imagen-go.br0p0p.now.sh/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

I'm in the process of improving my Go knowledge by making some stuff. This is just a simple image generator (running as a lambda on Now) that can be controlled with query params. Can be used for placeholders or in Markdown files.

Idk how useful this is for anyone else but I needed to display some colors in a Markdown file and couldn't find much out there to do what I needed – so I wrote my own. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

View the code here: [https://github.com/br0p0p/imagen- go](https://github.com/br0p0p/imagen-go)</comment>


Flagstaff, Arizona, switched to LEDs without giving astronomers a headache - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/how-flagstaff-arizona-switched-to-leds-without-giving-astronomers-a-headache/ <comment><USER2> > The bulbs Flagstaff relied on for most of its streetlights were low-pressure > sodium—a variant that only emits light at a single wavelength (589 > nanometers) near that yellow color, producing something resembling > candlelight.

Even 10 years after college I distinctly remember the look of Flagstaff at night. Namely because the city was effectively grayscale and it was beautiful.

By the way, if you don't know, Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff is where Pluto was discovered.

<comment><USER3> > Even 10 years after college I distinctly remember the look of Flagstaff at > night. Namely because the city was effectively grayscale and it was > beautiful.

San Jose used to look that way too. There are still pockets of LPS lights here and there, but since most makes are not commercially available anymore as of this year you can expect they'll vanish fairly quickly.

Such a loss, LPS streelighting was very good. I hope the narrowband amber LEDs are a commercial success.

Anyone know where there are fixtures with them available in small quantity? ... I stocked up on LPS bulbs before they went unavailble, but they won't last forever.

<comment><USER4> I found that the LPS lighting in San Jose was very close in color to yellow traffic signals, which made it sometimes confusing (and therefore more dangerous) to drive there after dark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Aside from the sky glow aspects, I really dislike cool blue lighting. I've just had my office upgraded to warm white LEDs and it's really noticeable every time I walk into a colleague's office with "cool daylight" coloured lighting.

<comment><USER6> I very much prefer working in cold white and whee I relax and rest there I prefer warm white. I think cold white helps me stay awake and more alert. It all might be s placebo of course.

<comment><USER7> No that's actually proven science; white or blueish lights help you wake up / stay awake, whereas orange / red lights will help you relax / sleep / produce melatonin. It's why F.lux and the native solutions shift screens to red at night. It's really quite stark a difference if you turn that off at night.

<comment><USER8> It's far from proven science.

<comment><USER9> There are lots of studies and articles discussing the affects of blue light on melatonin and sleep

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30311830](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30311830)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2717723/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2717723/)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831986/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831986/)

[https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light- ha...](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-has-a-dark- side)

[https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/how-blue-light- affe...](https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/how-blue-light-affects-kids- sleep)

[https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/block-blue-light-to- sle...](https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/block-blue-light-to-sleep-better)

[https://brighamhealthhub.org/prevention/using-light- emitting...](https://brighamhealthhub.org/prevention/using-light-emitting- devices-before-bed-may-impact-sleep)

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/q-a-why-is- blue-l...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/q-a-why-is-blue-light- before-bedtime-bad-for-sleep/)

<comment><USER8> [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30311830](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30311830) No real conclusions. It's appears to be a study aimed at making future studies better "The review enables further development of an evaluation method of light pollution in LCA regarding the light-induced impacts on human circadian system."

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2717723/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2717723/) No definitive conclusions: "Additional laboratory-based and field studies are still necessary to better understand some features of the human circadian response to light. We are only beginning to understand how prior exposure to light affects the subsequent response to a light stimulus, and our understanding of how light exposure can affect the period of the human circadian system is also limited (135)."

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831986/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831986/) Seems to be a review of other research by a journalist

[https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light- ha...](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-has-a-dark- side) news article, not science

[https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/how-blue-light- affe...](https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/how-blue-light-affects-kids- sleep) News article, not science

I'd go through the rest but it's time for lunch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > "What's left is green," Hall said. "And so you stand under this and it's > like the zombie apocalypse, because everybody's green. They've gone to these > in Hilo, Hawaii, and we were standing in a parking lot trying to talk to > each other, and it's just like straight out of Night of the Living Dead."

This is not my experience. In The Netherlands green LED's are applied more and more often for streetlighting in rural areas and surveillance of building construction sites (light pole + camera).

First time encounter takes some getting used to, because we are so familiar with orange Sodium hue. But I find they make the night landscape more peaceful and serene looking.

Green spectrum is perfect for the human eye. You see more detail and sharper focus, seems to me (compared to orange). Apparently its also good for nature. Not only to insects, but also birds not getting distracted.

<comment><USER11> Orange is a lot better if you want to keep your night vision and be able to see into the shadows (or e.g. look at the stars with your unassisted eyes).

<comment><USER12> Contrary to popular belief, cyan is better for night vision. Your rods are most sensitive to cyan, so you can use much dimmer cyan light than you can use red/orange light.

[http://stlplaces.com/night_vision_red_myth/](http://stlplaces.com/night_vision_red_myth/)

<comment><USER11> The question is not what you can see best with the least energy, but what kind of glare in your peripheral vision will cause bright-adaptation.

Your page there seems to be based on its author looking at the sentitivity curves for rods and cones and then speculating, but not as far as I can tell based on experimental evidence about how well the eyes stay dark-adapted.

Edit:

Moreover, the type of lamps appropriate for medium-bright street lighting and the type of lamps appropriate for briefly turning on to dimly see your camera gear while you fiddle with it when you are out taking night-sky photographs are quite different.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert on triggers for brightness adaptation. I should try to hunt up some research papers sometime.)

Looks like [https://www.osapublishing.org/josa/abstract.cfm?uri=josa-41-...](https://www.osapublishing.org/josa/abstract.cfm?uri=josa-41-6-402) is a reasonable place to start looking into the citation graph. [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4424978361272323417](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4424978361272323417)

Or maybe [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004269897...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698977800011) [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1469411636090158094...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=14694116360901580947)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This year we (our family) have the expressed goal of renting a cabin far off from major cities (partly) so our daughter will get to see a night sky full of stars.

We live close to an airport, so atm she gets excited by seeing more than 10-ish stars, so I'm looking forward to seeing her reaction :). Also, once seeing and pointing out a satellite was a highlight :).

<comment><USER14> One thing I'm thankful of when living and growing up in Australia, you could clearly see the night sky and all the stars there if you went to the beach or the hills. Far less ambient light pollution, such a beautiful night sky.

I just hope it doesn't get spoiled by all those constellations of Internet Satellites.

<comment><USER15> Australia has far less _air_ pollution, too, given the low population and relatively tiny strip of populated areas along the coast.

The skies in Freycinet National Park in Tasmania were the most stunning I've ever seen in my life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Older streetlights are high-pressure sodium bulbs, which produce a warm > yellow glow around a color temperature of 2,000 K... Many of the LED > streetlights on the market have much cooler color temperatures of 3,000 or > even 4,000 K.

I feel like referring to 2,000 K bulbs as "warm" and 5,000 K bulbs as "cool" has got to be one of the worst screw-ups between scientific terms and common terms in English. And probably a missed opportunity to embed some latent understanding of thermodynamics in the broader culture.

<comment><USER17> Warm/cool color theory predates the kelvin scale, so it might be more accurate to say you feel Celsius' flipping his original scale was the screwup? But as how it is now makes that much more sense, and since you couldn't really have a kelvin version of such a thing anyways, maybe chalk it down as just one of those things.

In any case no one could convince me to call the color of fire and the sun anything but warm, and that of snow and sea cold.

<comment><USER18> > _In any case no one could convince me to call the color of ... snow and sea > cold._

How about the color of a gas stove flame?

Maybe we should have called them "warm white" and "hot white" instead.

<comment><USER17> Yeah warm to hot is good but again runs into clashing with things established before much had been said about black-body radiation.

Just because it might not be conductive to a neat 1:1 mapping with scientific common sense doesn't have to mean either should change. Quirks are fun!

<comment><USER18> I'm used to it myself, but I work in architectural lighting and I can't count how many times I've had to explain that "warm white" is the low temperatures and "cool white" is the high temperatures. It's a frequent nuisance for me, but not a huge deal and we're stuck with it.

If we were going to make people put in some effort and redefine fix stupid quirks that exist out of historical convention, I'd put that effort toward adopting metric instead of switching words for shades of white :P

It's not like switching cool and hot would make sense either, 2700K (orangeish) is 4400°F and 5000K (blueish) is 8540°F. Neither of those is anything near a "cool" temperature. "Blazing white" and "inferno white"?

<comment><USER17> Exactly what I mean, it's never going to make perfect sense, so trying to adapt two separate meanings to gel slightly better seems futile.

I would argue the US still not being on SI is a bit more than a quirk. I wonder whether you'll have completed metrification by the end of the century.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Are there no orange/yellow LEDs? Seems odd, since LEDs were red long before other colors were available.

Years ago, Pickett slide rules were a greenish yellow, which, according to their advertising, was the color that provided the sharpest visual acuity and comfort for the user. Maybe that would provide the best vision for the least lumens as well.

<comment><USER20> >...was the color that provided the sharpest visual acuity

I think it changes considerably based on the environment and the user. I do some 10 meter air rifle competition, and the sighs have filters in them to let you choose different colors. I can notice a big difference based on the lighting, and at a competition different people will have settled on different colors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> That's not only dark-sky- but also insect-friendly! Insects are attracted by blueish lights which, for example, the old sodium pressure lamps did not emit. (The orange light you might remember from those were the 589nm double spectral lines of sodium.) LEDs can/do emit blueish lights and should be picked carefully for outdoor lighting.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's a real shame that Phoenix metro is going to ruin everything for Flagstaff and Tucson in the not-too-distant future by refusing to implement any light limits at all.

<comment><USER23> How is that going to ruin things for Flagstaff? Phoenix is far away from Flagstaff.

<comment><USER24> Dark skies require a pretty high radius of dark landmass. For an estimate of the extent of this, try seeing the areas around major cities here: [https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/](https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I can't stand the orange glow of old street lights. You can see so much better with 4300k vs 2000k [http://i.imgur.com/JsSCfFp.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/JsSCfFp.jpg)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1dMlVwUsrA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1dMlVwUsrA)

<comment><USER26> There are places where I would strongly disagree with you, like my home town Assisi, in Italy [0].

But for everything else, you are quite right.

[0]: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/126687494@N08/15010177954/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/126687494@N08/15010177954/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Flagstaff is the only city so far I've actually been able to see the milky way. We just got lucky one night while visiting as the sky was clear at the Lowell observatory.

</comment><comment><USER28> > Another way to do it is with phosphor coatings on the LED that absorb light > of one wavelength and emit it at another wavelength. Lights known as > phosphor-converted amber (PCA) shift all the light out of the blue and into > the yellow part of the spectrum at the cost of some efficiency.

Is this essentially an LED filament bulb? I've replaced all lights in my house now with LED filaments because they look more natural and are omnidirectional.

<comment><USER29> It has nothing to do with filaments and is all with the phosphor coating. Standard white LEDs intentionally bleed the base blue LED through, whereas PCA LEDs do not.

Lumileds is the primary innovator for PCA (and other offshoots). [https://www.lumileds.com/uploads/571/DS144-luxeon-c-color- li...](https://www.lumileds.com/uploads/571/DS144-luxeon-c-color-line- datasheet-pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Seattle replaced all streetlights with LEDs a few years back. It too bad that they are the blue lighting that the article mentions, which absolutely makes viewing anything in the sky a lot harder than it already was. I'd love to go back to Flagstaff some day to see the lighting in person.

</comment><comment><USER31> They also have a dark sky ordinance where various rules, to point lights downward, covers over the tops of them, etc.

More cities should do this, it makes for lovely night skies where you can actually see the stars.

</comment><comment><USER32> Do the new street lights only have LED's, or do they also have cameras and microphones like the ones installed in San Diego and a few other cities for machine learning?

</comment><comment><USER33> [https://imgur.com/oYYRmHl.png](https://imgur.com/oYYRmHl.png)

</comment><comment><USER34> 5k possy represent</comment>


The New York Times Told Me to Take This Down - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/meta/503b9c22080b <comment><USER2> Previously submitted with much discussion.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5747418></comment>


Ask HN: Why don't more companies just email me sign-in links? - <AUTHOR> For logging into slack, they just email me a link, then I click on it to sign in. This is very convenient as I don't have to remember another password. Why don't more websites/apps do this? Is it due to some security issue I'm not aware of? <comment><USER2> It's _not_ convenient in many cases, such as if you're using an incognito/private window, or on a friend's computer, school PCs, don't have access to email, etc.

I much prefer the traditional username+password system. You shouldn't be memorising passwords anyway, use a password manager.

Password managers are quicker than clicking on links in emails, and if you're on a stranger's PC that doesn't have the browser extension, you can just look the password up in the phone app and type it in.</comment>


Protest SOPA with stopcensorship.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dougmartin/Stop-Censorship

<comment><AUTHOR> I built this to protest SOPA. Here is a test page:

<http://dougmart.in/stopcensorship/test.html>

</comment><comment><USER2> Doug, this is awesome.

As a WordPress plugin: [https://github.com/chrisguitarguy/Stop- Censorship/tree/wordp...](https://github.com/chrisguitarguy/Stop- Censorship/tree/wordpress_plugin)

<comment><AUTHOR> I accepted your pull request and added some text about the plugin in the readme (and fixed a minor typo in the plugin header). Thanks!

<comment><USER2> Awesome! Glad I could help!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Awesome idea, might be nice to include a ajax pop over or some type of modal so they dont have to leave the page to find out what SOPA is ... and maybe a link with that website that gets you contact with your senator/congressmen(/women)

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.unscatter.com> I went ahead and added it there. Here's a search engine showing what the future may be like.

note: I haven't had time to support unscatter.com the past couple months. It's a side project and I've had a lot going on so some things may be kinda broken. For example, right now you only get one page of /twitter results. So please don't take this as advertising a polished project, it's far from not. Just trying to do my part.

<comment><USER4> The header the script has makes it harder to do a search because it covers the search bar, here's a link with search results - <http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=sopa>

* part of a redesign I am planning includes a more traditional search bar in the middle of the page for the home page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love it, thanks for sharing this. Added to my personal site: <http://www.hecanjog.com>

</comment><comment><USER6> Greg Leuch of FFFFFAT has a similar project:

<http://fffff.at/stop-sopa-blackout/> <https://github.com/gleuch/STOP-SOPA- Blackout>

</comment><comment><USER7> Showing some support on my site: <http://www.mja.lv/>

</comment><comment><USER8> <http://www.fffuu.com/> Put it on there for now.

</comment><comment><USER9> Added it to: <http://guavi.com/troubleshooting.html>

</comment><comment><USER10> This is great. Adding it to my sites now.

<comment><USER10> <http://www.turdhead.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My blog <http://sigusr2.net> has it now.

</comment><comment><USER12> How about putting a link to the repo on the banner as well?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It you use this on a site please add the url as a comment.

</comment><comment><USER13> Showing our support from <http://cdnjs.com> by uploading the script, will share the link in a few minutes when it's finished.

<comment><AUTHOR> I accepted your pull request - the link to the cdn is now in the readme. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The bar probably needs to be fixed</comment>


In a Sign of Broader Ambitions, Facebook Opens Hardware Lab - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/08/03/technology/ap-us-tec-facebooks-hardware-ambitions.html <comment><USER2> FB's hardware strategy is confusing.

Oculus was their first, real consumer hardware release and effort.

The rollout was amateur hour between delays, customer service, etc, but that's forgivable and understandable at some level for a first major release.

But then Vive showed up to the party, shipped nearly on the same time frame, and delivered a product that's in striking distance of headset quality and WINS in interactivity.

This underscores how commoditized hardware is and will continue to be.

But then FB doubles down on protecting their "hardware play" and fucks everybody over with their bizarre Oculus "store" experience which launched with a ridiculous walled garden approach and an experience that's far secondary to Steam.

Meanwhile FB and Zuck keep making noises about wanting to support VR in general to bring about critical mass on VR as a platform so they can take the obvious step and execute THE killer-app for VR, - a truly connected social metaverse.

I get that having a hardware lab provides an incentive to new VR devs to come on board, and lets them press the medium forward.

But if owning that "metaverse" is the end game why bother dickering around with consumer hardware and pissing off / breaking trust with devs & consumers?

<comment><USER3> Hardware is commoditized but brands are not. Anyone can make handbags but only some can sell them for $5000. Oculus has potential to be as profitable as Apple if they absolutely nail the execution and the experience. But it remains to the be seen if the Rift is an iphone or a newton.

Being tethered to a high end gaming pc "dooms" it to be a niche product. How soon can Oculus either ally with a console or make a console?

<comment><USER4> > Oculus has potential to be as profitable as Apple if they absolutely nail > the execution and the experience.

No. VR won't be that popular. I know that's hard for people on HN to hear, but it's true. Sure it'll make money selling to geeks and nerds, but that's all.

<comment><USER5> Why?

<comment><USER4> Similar reason to why 3D TV failed; nobody likes stuff on their face.

<comment><USER6> Not too long ago people assumed that nobody likes to wander around with huge battery packs attached to their smartphones. If the perceived value is great people are willing to put up with a lot of crazy stuff.

Also I know plenty of people who wear glasses to reap the value of better sight. Why isn't it conceptually possible for people to wear other stuff to reap other benefits?

<comment><USER4> I worked my way through college in the optical industry. People hate wearing glasses. Sure there are a few that do it for fashion, but most would rather never have to put them on.

<comment><USER7> I see what you mean. Just to give a different perspective, I'm wearing glasses all the time for the majority of my lifetime (24 y/o now and since I'm 8). For me, it's not that I hate them or something, I just can't imagine life without them. They just became like a body part. Don't love them, don't hate them, they simply exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Less breathless reporting: Facebook builds 20000-square-foot machine shop and bench lab, invites press to grand opening.

<comment><USER9> Dubs it "Area 404". Yikes.

<comment><USER8> Had been known as "Building 8" quite recently.

<comment><USER10> Building 8 != Area 404. One is a team and the other is a place.

<comment><USER11> Which is the team and which is the place? Those are both place names to me.

<comment><USER12> Building 8 is the group.

> (Zuck) announced the formation of a mysterious research-and-development > group known as "Building 8."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wouldn't 'Area 201' be a more confidence inspiring name, if we're sticking to HTTP status codes?

<comment><USER14> Let's hope it doesn't turn out to be a 417.

<comment><USER15> Or 418 :)

Edit: For reference, 418 is real. It is the "I am a teapot" error code, from an April fools RFC about teapots being internet connected, which I thought was at least marginally relevant to hardware hacking.

<comment><USER16> I love the fact that I work in an industry where "from an April fools joke" and "is a real thing" are not mutually exclusive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well they definitely have the resources to create something amazing, but only time will tell if those resources actually mean anything. From the basis of what they are currently building, the lab is overkill. They must have something secret/bigger hardware projects going on.

<comment><USER18> I guess it's a pretty cheap way to get an article in the NYTimes and most other news sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Isn't Snapchat also working on a secret hardware lab?

</comment><comment><USER20> Zuck have recently said that their 1 billion VR users are going to come from mobile phone and not PC so the real reason behind this hardware lab could be that fb is going to develop a real phone (sw + hw) and not like earlier.

</comment><comment><USER21> Techcrunch has some photos of the lab.

[https://techcrunch.com/gallery/facebook-hardware- lab/](https://techcrunch.com/gallery/facebook-hardware-lab/)

<comment><USER22> Good press for Haas and DMG Mori. Wonder what they're using for CAM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> They are nowhere near even being close to Google in terms of revenue, technology, innovation, invention etc. After all, they started off just copying myspace and calling their users dumb f*cks. Facebook is the next AOL.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't trust facebook with the data I give it now, and they want me to trust locked hardware they made?

<comment><USER25> > I don't trust facebook with the data I give it now

Nice contradiction there. If you don't trust them, don't give them that data. If you do you implicitly will have to trust them.

<comment><USER26> Not necessarily. I block FB at my router at home and via DNS on my phone, reject mail from them at my server and use a browser blocker for their web bugs at work. And still "my" data leaks to them via other people who apparently upload address books, tag me in photos and whatever other mechanisms for soliciting data on nonmembers they've ginned up.

I know this because before I started bouncing their mail I'd get an endless stream of spam from them about how many friends desperately wished I'd sign up.

<comment><USER27> but you're not the one giving them that data - your friends/others are. Not sure how that can be avoided in any social networking type of application. Those applications are pretty much 'public' space in today's world. People who really need to keep their real identities private today (ie some law enforcement personnel) are in a tough place these days.

<comment><USER26> Correct. And one of my biggest gripes with F*%#book. Perhaps it can't be entirely avoided in a social networking app, but there's a difference between unwanted leakage and active encouragement. Providing incentives to people to rat out my data is scummy.

Unfortunately, scummy is what I've come to expect from them.

<comment><USER25> Educate your surroundings. No pictures by default, if they do make pictures and you're in them no facebook. Tag me on facebook and you're off my IRL friends list and if you're family then you can strike me off the birthday invite list.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


US Army wants to equip all soldiers with an Apple iPhone or Android phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/12/14/us_army_wants_to_give_soldiers_a_choice_of_apple_iphone_or_android_phone.html <comment><USER2> Good idea. Wrong target. What we really need to do is equip all non-combatants with smart phones and provide them with free service. Secularize them overnight and end the war.

<comment><USER3> Make 'em come with Angry Birds and hire a few hundred programmers to put out new levels every day and you'd be set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The linked article ([http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/12/army-smart-phones- for-...](http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/12/army-smart-phones-for- soldiers-121210w/)) is a great read, Well researched, well written, and chock- full of information.

It's also a pleasure to see the level of 'thinking through' that's being reported (for e.g. they're even considering setting up their own equivalent of the App Store!)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd imagine that in the field you'd be wearing gloves a lot. That might be problematic with most touch screens.

<comment><USER6> That's a solved problem, it just requires the fingertips of gloves to have some conductive material.

<comment><USER7> It's mighty cold in Chicago right now and my girlfriend noticed recently for the first time that her brand new Android phone's touchscreen doesn't work while wearing gloves... Is there a potential market for this or is someone already doing it?

Edit: Found one <http://www.gloves-online.com/proddetail.php?prod=FH-1120B>

And a DIY guide: [http://www.instructables.com/id/Making-A-Glove-Work-With- A-T...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Making-A-Glove-Work-With-A-Touch- Screen/)

<comment><USER6> You can also use sausage, which I always find amusing:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv02XeCMQFs>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Doesn't the Army have the ability to make its own, more pertinent, more secure mobile device for the troops? I figure some of the strengths of Android iOS on the consumer side may wind up being weaknesses or just plan extraneous on the defense military side.. (security, why would you need to install "apps", etc).

Also, I thought those kinds of devices needed more verified software than is available on consumer-grade devices. I'm not sure about that one, though.

EDIT: Maybe it would make some sense if they forked Android and used it for their own in house purposes.

<comment><USER9> _Doesn't the Army have the ability to make its own, more pertinent, more secure mobile device for the troops?_

Which would then be so expensive that most soldiers would not be issued them and thus would buy civilian devices with their own money.

<comment><USER8> Maybe my edit went in too late. It really could be a modded platform, which isn't THAT much more expensive. Figure in cost of tweaking the software and providing infrastructure along with installing custom software on the phone and you've got something that at most probably wouldn't be much more than twice as expensive as a normal smartphone. Exclude infrastructure costs that would probably be there whether you used civilian stock phones or not.

I don't see how what you said fully relates. If the soldiers bought their own devices, they wouldn't get to put secret information on them...which was the point I was trying to make. I should have emphasized "more secure" more than I did.

The soldiers can freely buy whatever phone they want for their own private use. Why should the taxpayer be buying personal smartphones, anyway?

<comment><USER9> My impression is that anything mil-spec becomes really expensive, but I could be wrong. I was also making an analogy to soldiers buying their own gear when the military won't buy it for them, which AFAIK is happening in Iraq.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder what they would do to ensure a network would be available in remote or combat situations. Perhaps the investment in technology and research would benefit the private sector as well.

<comment><USER11> They mention that in the linked article. They have balloons that can provide cellular service in a 40 mile radius. Also, places like Afghanistan actually have workable cellular service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yes, just the job to help them clamp down on leaks. :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Not going to happen. The administration at West Point wanted to give every student a cell phone back in 2007 but that never happened. Do you know how hard it is for the military to accept new technology? We are still using Vista!

<comment><USER14> I expect this to fizzle. Back in 2002 (and a little bit on either side), the Navy was issuing brand-new Palm Pilots (yes, they were still "Palm Pilots" back then) to every newly commissioned ensign. The original plan was that, as the PDAs became obsolete every few years, the officers would turn them in for upgrades. Nobody ever really used them and it became obvious that the whole program was a huge waste of money so they just stopped issuing them.

<comment><USER15> Wow. I totally used the hell out of my Palm Pilot when I was in the Army. It was great for keeping track of all the minutiae you have to know about every one of your soldiers (as a squad leader). Totally replaced my zip up nylon filo-fax, and I always knew when Private Snuffy's Birthday was coming up and when it was time to remind PFC JimBob to buy his wife something for their anniversary.

Crap like that along with an insane op-tempo is why I left the Army though. Haven't had a use for a PalmPilot like device since then.

<comment><USER14> Interesting to hear from someone who actually made his Palm Pilot work well. I tried using one, but I've always found that a simple notepad and pocket calendar work better for me. YMMV, but based on what happened with the Navy's Palm Pilot program, most naval officers preferred the good old fashioned wheelbook or government-issue green logbook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Imagine if they decide they need to make some custom apps and Apple doesn't allow them in the app store or kicks them out of it. Very funny.

</comment><comment><USER17> That's not so great, since they're basically un-securable.

<comment><USER18> It's not like everyone in the military has ultrasecure data on their mobile device. There are 2 people on each aircraft carrier whose full-time job is to stock vending machines.

<comment><USER19> That sounds like a bit of an urban myth. How many staff are there on an aircraft carrier?

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure what you mean by "staff." There are about 6,000 people on an aircraft carrier when the full airwing is embarked. A handfull of them are civilians, but they usually fill senior administrative positions or provide technical expertise in support of maintenance; they're not there to perform menial tasks like loading vending machines.

There are a relatively small number of enlisted personnel who specialize in "domestic" tasks: cooking, cleaning, etc. They are augmented by larger numbers of very junior enlisted personnel (E-3 and below) who are trained for other jobs but each serve a short stint working in service jobs. For example, a brand new seaman apprentice (E-2) electrician's mate finishes all of his training and reports to a carrier. For his first six months, he doesn't work as an electrician--instead, he gets sent to work in the ship's laundry; in the mess or wardroom; at the post office; cleaning and taking out trash; cutting hair; or serviung as a clerk in one of the convenience stores. When his time is up, he gets to go join his division and do the job he actually trained for.

The job of restocknig the vending machines probably would reduce to about one or two people if that was all they did. In reality the job is spread out among quite a few more people, who also do other things. Typically it's the convenience store staff who do this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yes, but who's idea was it?</comment>


Canada: Government to ban single-use plastics as early as 2021 - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/government-to-ban-single-use-plastics-by-2021-1.5168386 <comment><USER2> So, if I want to buy a bottle of water in this bold new future, it will have to be a glass bottle?

<comment> 52-6F-62 Or these companies will have to put R&D money into safe, single-use decompose- able plastic bottles. There will be a huge market incentive to do so.

The benefit being we don't end up with oceans and landfills filled with the bloody things.

Thankfully our public spaces are rapidly adopting water bottle refill stations.

Plastic is brilliant, but it's meant to last a _long_ time. Dirt-cheap single- use water bottles was never the design. It's an abuse.</comment></comment>


How gun buffs took over Wikipedia's AR-15 page - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/6/17086794/ar-15-wikipedia-gun-control-parkland-mass-shooting <comment><USER2> If you want the article summed up, read no further than this line;

>But those users didn't find much information about mass shootings or political efforts. In fact, the Colt AR-15 page made no mention of gun control at all, instead spending over a thousand words describing the technical details of the gun's various parts.

The Wikipedia userbase is anal across the board when it comes to information being in the relevant location. There are entire pages dedicated to the politics of gun control, and the author of this article seems to think that an article that has always been a technical description of an influential design would be the perfect political soapbox. Although the author's complaints about the NRA article on Wikipedia have a lot more weight, I am still under the impression that he may be misinterpreting what was being said or done, because he obviously seems to have some trouble understanding Wikipedia's (sometimes absurdly) strict scope policies.

It's also worth noting that the author seems to claim that Wikipedia and its user groups are a fairly neutral source in important political conversations. Powerful (in the sense of editorship) far-left user groups have publicly and genuinely suggested withholding information out of concern for the political stance of articles shifting out of their favor. Wikipedia is _not_ "balanced, but only when I agree with it." It is human, and not infallible.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. In the same way that a user coming to read the page on hamburgers should not see a discussion of McDonalds' production policies, if a user views the Wikipedia article on AR-15s, he should see information about the gun, not the politics of gun control. That topic has its own dedicated page, and it should stay there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why exactly should an encyclopedia article about a specific gun model include "gun control, mass shootings, or political efforts"? I can see that sort of content being applicable for the "Gun" or "Firearm" article, but not for a specific model's article.

<comment><USER5> Including general information about gun control and mass shootings would be out of place in the article, yes.

Excluding a controversy whereby that particular product model has been a major subject of discourse on US politics across the globe, with major news publications writing pieces with a primary focus on the AR-15, seems... remiss.

The attention given to this model by the public and media is a testament to the product's notability, a metric that's a tenet of Wikipedia editorial policy.

<comment><USER2> That's why this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AR-15_style_rifle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AR-15_style_rifle) page specifically lists all shootings involving AR-15 clones. There were no Colt rifles used in any recent shooting. Should every shooting using an AK-47 pattern rifle be listed on the FB Tantal article, regardless of whether or not an FB Tantal was used?

<comment><USER5> The only hint of something that might constitute a reference to the current media discourse is the following grossly defensively toned paragraph:

> _Although, according to CBS News, "the AR plays an oversized role in many of > the most high-profile shootings",[41] most killings by guns in the USA > involve handguns rather than rifles.[42][43]_

The statistic on handgun shootings is irrelevant as the paragraph is quoting CBS on "high-profile shootings". Only a single CBS article is referenced (there's tonnes out there), with two counter-references accompanying the irrelevant handgun mention.

Even ignoring all that, the very fact that the paragraph starts with the word "Although" belies its intent.

Funnily enough, the mentioning of the school shootings in which ARs were used actually seems superfluous. A balanced, unbiased article might exclude that section completely, but instead have a _Controversy_ heading with something like:

 _" In 2018, following a, b, c events, this model became the subject of widespread pubic controversy in the US and worldwide due to x, y, z. {insert arguments espoused on both sides of media discourse}"_

<comment><USER2> I agree with you on every point. My guess is that the idea was to link to more complete information by having direct links to the "mass shootings" article, the Australian legislature, and the shootings involving AR-15 clones, but the cultural relevance isn't mentioned and it all seems underdeveloped, especially with the dismissive handgun paragraph and bizarrely specific/niche Religion mention under it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > In fact, the Colt AR-15 page made no mention of gun control at all, instead > spending over a thousand words describing the technical details of the gun's > various parts.

As it should be. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The whole point is to provide information about the particular thing at hand.

<comment><USER7> For curiosity sake, I looked at Brittanica: [https://www.britannica.com/technology/M16-rifle](https://www.britannica.com/technology/M16-rifle)

No reference to gun control, just a decent description of the rifle and its variants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think that it's particularly honest to use the term "took over" to describe the actions of a group of people who essentially built the page to begin with.</comment>


Plataformatec Acqui-Hired by Nubank - <AUTHOR> http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2020/01/important-information-about-our-elixir-and-ruby-open-source-projects/ <comment><USER2> Just to get to the point on what will happen to their open source projects:

> So what will happen with these projects from now on?

> For the Elixir programming language in particular, José Valim and the Elixir > Core Team will continue developing and maintaining the programming language > in the same capacity as they have been doing over the last few years, > independently from Plataformatec and Nubank. We are in touch with the Elixir > Core Team to transfer all assets, including the existing trademarks and the > Elixir website, to their control.

That's all folks.</comment>


California Dems eye Internet tax in budget plan - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110615/wr_nm/us_economy_california_budget

<comment><USER2> Terrible title. Should read "eye sales tax for online vendors" or similar.</comment>


Applying to Ph.D. Programs in Computer Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf

<comment><USER2> Anyone know if there is anything recent that's worth knowing about this topic now? (Like an updated version of this document?)</comment>


Scientists think they've solved the mystery of Devil's Kettle Falls - <AUTHOR> http://www.startribune.com/scientists-think-they-ve-solved-the-mystery-of-devil-s-kettle-falls/414996694/ <comment><USER2> The ping pong balls are still a bit of a mystery then aren't they - is there any chance you could toss some kind of tracking device in there?

GPS could be helpful on a large scale if it did go underground for a distance, but I'm wondering about either setting up some kind of a local high-resolution tracking system that can track objects in the water, or some kind of a gyroscopically-aware tracking device that could be placed into the water and transmit telemetry from inside the kettle itself!

Could you model the current of the water while it's out of sight?

<comment><USER3> GPS signals also penetrate maybe a few centimeter water before they're unusable. Water is astoundingly good at blocking GPS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why not put some color and see if it showed up instead of ping pong balls?

<comment><USER5> read the article

<comment><USER4> The comment was not meant for researchers but instead for those DIY people who were trying to figure out by pouring ping pong balls.</comment></comment></comment>


Malware found buried in NetBeans releases since August 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/github-warns-java-developers-of-new-malware-poisoning-netbeans-projects/ <comment><USER2> > _GitHub did not publish the name of the 26 poisoned projects, but has > published details about Octopus Scanner 's infection process, so NetBeans > users and Java developers can look for signs if their projects have been > altered._

Why aren't they publishing the list of affected projects? Even if these projects all got cleaned up, aren't people who previously cloned the projects still potentially infected?</comment>


The Impact of Multitasking: A Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://youtu.be/UH-i1t8eZ8o

<comment><USER2> I think the reasoning in the experiment is a little flawed. Given that each task is so small, the cost of a context switch in the example is significant.

Most people multi-task because they are waiting for the first task to finish/ get rid of the monotony of doing the same thing over and over again etc. in which case multi-tasking can significantly improve output. Its kind of like the OS running multiple processes on a single core. If you are waiting for something, you don't need to hold up everything else..

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the biggest issue is the set-up when jumping from task to task. I find if I leave a project for too long, it takes me several minutes to figure out where I am so in the process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Set-up (SU) and set-down (SD) is the issue - breaking concentration. SU(Task#1)SD; SU(Task#2)SD; back to SU(Task #1)SD; SU(Task #3); SU(Task#1). Too many SU and Too many SD per task easily doubles the total time for all three tasks.</comment></comment>


Tymshare's Tymnet: The Prehistory of Cloud Computing - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/someone-elses-computer-the-prehistory-of-cloud-computing <comment><USER2> "There is no cloud. It is just someone else's computer."</comment>


Ask HN: How mark an thoughtful entry from the Oatmeal as spam? - why-el

I am talking about his last response to a Forbes article criticizing his Telsa/Edison comic. It was a genuine, thought provoking response to an article that was discussed here on hn. <comment><AUTHOR> I agree. I came back after reading to upvote it, because I really enjoy the ongoing discussion, but found it removed.</comment>


Ask HN: I bootstrapped a business, and I'm now looking for a job - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I graduated from an engineering school a year ago, and I've been bootstrapping a small online B2C business for about 6 months. I did everything on my own for this project: ideas, code, marketing, optimization, etc. And I managed to make a decent amount of money (low 4 figures).
Now I need to have a stable income, so I plan to start looking for a "real job" soon. The only problem is that I don't know what I want. I'm a versatile guy, so I think I could be a developer, a product manager, a growth hacker, a consultant, etc.
Any advice on what are the best options available for me? What skills are in bigger demand? Where could I leverage my small business experience?
Thanks for your help! <comment><USER2> Believe it or not there are companies out there looking for people exactly like you: individuals that can come in, question the status quo, and push things forward. Many big organizations are realizing that in order to compete they actually have to operate like much more nimble enterprises. You'd be the only one who knows how to do that :-)

I draw a lot of parallels between this and the movie Moneyball. You will have lots of fun with your work - because you bring entrepreneurial passion, creativity, and grit. But there will be many that don't like you coming in, asking obvious questions, and then delivering better stuff. Find someone in executive management that has your back politically and you'll be fine. :-)

Shoot me a note at @thegrif if you want to talk more. Depending on where you are in the world I might be able to facilitate some introductions.

</comment><comment><USER3> You were getting income, why did you stop?</comment>


Netflix Shuts Down Final Bits of Own Data Center Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/02/11/netflix-shuts-down-final-bits-of-own-data-center-infrastructure/ <comment><USER2> Is it just me, or is it a massive risk to have your entire infrastructure hosted by a company who is also one of your chief competitors?

<comment><USER3> You'd be surprised at what a good job the individual pieces of Amazon's empire do at operating as individual units as far as competition is concerned. It would be VERY bad business to "screw" an AWS customer because they competed with some other part of the organization as a whole. Given that Amazon operates in so many spaces and could potentially expand to any space, this behavior would effectively make AWS unappealing for a significant portion of customers.

<comment><USER4> I'd like to believe this, but then I can't buy an Apple TV through Amazon because of some petty dispute over Prime Video (which I really don't care about). So if Amazon the store can pull products to try to protect prime video, then how can I be sure that other units won't?

<comment><USER5> Yeah, same thing with Chromecast. Booted off Amazon in a lame attempt to boost Prime Video and Fire TV Stick sales.

<comment><USER6> Well, they claimed they removed non-Amazon devices because they didn't support Prime Video. However, for stuff like Chromecast, the burden lies on the app developer (which would be Amazon) to implement Google's Cast SDKs to provide support.

<comment><USER7> First read: [http://www.androidauthority.com/amazon-new-app-forced- google...](http://www.androidauthority.com/amazon-new-app-forced- google-574104/) to understand that Google won't allow competing app stores. ([https://play.google.com/about/developer-distribution- agreeme...](https://play.google.com/about/developer-distribution- agreement.html) for more details section 4.5)

As per this document: [https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/android_sender](https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/android_sender) You need Google Play Services (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Play_Services#Concerns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Play_Services#Concerns)) to write an Android app with the Cast API.

Because of this, Amazon cannot distribute Google Play Services on their own Android devices and therefor cannot use their own Android devices to cast to a Chromecast. They could enable Prime Video on other Android devices but not their own. They feel this will cause confusion and therefor have decided not to write a Prime Video app for Chromecast. Saying "oh, Amazon just doesn't want to write a Prime Video app for Chromecast", while true, doesn't truly explain the complexities of the situation.

The business decision to remove Chromecasts from the network steps from the above desire to prevent confusion. I personally don't agree with it but I understand it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Actual blog post on the Netflix site - [https://media.netflix.com/en/company- blog/completing-the-net...](https://media.netflix.com/en/company- blog/completing-the-netflix-cloud-migration)

</comment><comment><USER9> Great story, brah. Except for the CDN.

[https://openconnect.netflix.com/peeringLocations/](https://openconnect.netflix.com/peeringLocations/)

<comment><USER10> Wasn't familiar with OpenConnect. It is the program where Netflix puts a caching server in an ISP's datacenter so that the traffic is more "local" and cheaper for all involved.

<comment><USER11> OpenConnect is the CDN that serves the actual Netflix video, it's Based on FreeBSD 10 and Nginx. Netflix puts them in ISP's and internet peering locations across the internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is Netflix at the top end of some curve? My understanding of moving from cloud -> datacenter is, you know, there is some line where it's cheaper to just lease your hardware than pay for cloud infrastructure. At that size you tend to have DBAs, dedicated infrastructure people, etc., to make scaling up go.

But now has Netflix come through that line where the cost savings is outweighed by the uptime/availability etc.?

<comment><USER13> It would be beneficial for amazon to sell their services at 50% off to take netflix out of the game of running the DC themselves for the next 15 years

<comment><USER14> Much, much less. If you spend more than a couple of millions a year on AWS you're being robbed if you haven't negotiated a much steeper discount than 50%. I happen to know of companies paying ~25% of published AWS prices. Especially on bandwidth, the published AWS prices are almost criminal - I'd be surprised if Netflix pays even 10% of published prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well they still own ( I think ) their CDN hardware. Which is essentially the Core and most heavy part of Global Video Delivery.

<comment><USER16> Ah. So 99% of the traffic doesn't flow through AWS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Netflix is in the video distribution business. Their usage is hugely variable over the course of a day. AWS is in the cloud computing business. They are good at selling unused server time. If netflix ran their own datacenters, they would have to pay for infrastructure to sit unused for most of the day to meet their peak demand. With AWS someone else is using and paying for that infrastructure in off hours. The cost-savings for netflix and synergy for AWS make the deal make sense.

</comment><comment><USER18> Keep in mind that all but the business rules actually run in their own custom CDN nodes around the world, not in these cloud setups.

<comment><USER19> You have that backwards. Everything runs in AWS except serving raw video bits from very stripped down boxes in data centers around the world. Those boxes in the CDN do literally nothing but serve video files via https very quickly.

<comment><USER11> Openconnect does not serve https it's http, although they are evaluating using https.

<comment><USER19> I'm 100% sure it is https (I worked there). But if you don't believe me you can sniff your network traffic the next time you play a movie on Netflix. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting bits about the microsrvices approach. Other companies like Microsoft still need to wake up and understand the value of small teams, microservices deployed in isolation, real devops etc.

<comment><USER21> check out MS Orleans, it's similar to Erlang. [https://github.com/dotnet/orleans](https://github.com/dotnet/orleans)

<comment><USER20> I heard about Orleans but how much is it in use internally at MS? Lot of services are not even on Azure, yet? Ever? It's well known that new fancy modern approaches take years to be understood and absorbed int the company strategy, think Git, Agile, elastic services, REST, mobile... Don't get me wrong I'd love to see MS going back to be an innovator, and Orleans might be an oppotunity. How long has it been cooking, 2 3 years? Where's the disruptive plan to make it the new paradigm?

<comment><USER22> >I heard about Orleans but how much is it in use internally at MS

They have a small game called Halo which uses it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What did it cost to transfer Netflix to AWS and what are the running costs charged to Netflix. I recall reading somewhere that the first attempt was less than successful, and Amazon had to virtually rebuild the service from scratch.

<comment><USER23> Answering me own question ..

"NETFLIX OpenConnect Appliance deployment guide:"

[http://oc.nflxvideo.net/docs/OpenConnect-Deployment- Guide.pd...](http://oc.nflxvideo.net/docs/OpenConnect-Deployment-Guide.pdf)</comment></comment>


6 Reasons Google Did Not Need To Acquire Feedburner - <AUTHOR> http://www.daviddalka.com/createvalue/2007/06/01/6-reasons-google-did-not-need-to-acquire-feedburner/ <comment><USER2> Article to be filed under sarcasm. ;)

With Google's beta of analytics looking more and more bubbly it's not too hard to fuzz the lines and see a more complete picture with integration. If they could speed the process by aquiring Clicky's instant gratification it'd be a dangerous total package.</comment>


The Exemplary Narcissism of Snoopy - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/the-exemplary-narcissism-of-snoopy/407827/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email&single_page=true <comment><USER2> If you like Peanuts, you should check out Mafalda, which is a sort of Argentine counterpart. Cynical but idealistic kids trying to make sense of the adult world. I believe there are good English translations nowadays, and she has enjoyed popularity in Europe for a good while now.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you keep a developer diary? - <AUTHOR> I recently was struggling with an design/architecture issue all day, and when I was finished I thought about writing down some thoughts about the what/how/why aspects of my solution for future reference. I then stumbled on the term 'developer diary' for this kind of thing (for ex. https://www.smartics.eu/confluence/display/PDAC1/Developer+Diaries), that apparently some software developers hold in high regard.
I will be trying to keep my own (though a bit more light/free form than that in the link) in order to bring a bit more structure to my day-to-day.
Do you have any experience with developer diaries? Have they helped you become a better developer, and if so, what kind of effects did you notice? <comment><USER4> I researched basically all the solutions (wikis, tiddlywiki, evernote etc etc), but they all had some limitation either in offline access, shareability, portability, openness or something else.

What finally made it into a working solution is writing plain markdown files, one per day, automatically synced to bitbucket via tiny bash scripts that initiate a new file for the day (aliased to 'j' for minimal hurdle to start writing), opens them in an editor, and committs to the repo after closing the editor.

It is available here: [https://github.com/samuell/mdnote](https://github.com/samuell/mdnote)

The nice thing with markdown, if you make a level-1 header for each new file, is that you can concatenate the file into a long file, and run pandoc -i allnotes.md -o allnotes.epub, and get a formatted and searchable notebook for offline use, when you want to read it, with the Level-1 headings denoting chapters - so, one chapter per day!

(I have a script for this too of course: [https://github.com/samuell/mdnote/blob/master/as_epub.sh](https://github.com/samuell/mdnote/blob/master/as_epub.sh)).

<comment><USER5> The latest TiddlyWiki is actually pretty good for this. I remember using it about a decade ago -- and I've recently started using it for various dev- related stuff, e.g. documenting how to configure this or that; it's surprisingly nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Keeping a diary is pivotal to how I work. I used to write things down in notebooks, but you can't grep dead trees, especially handwritten ones. So I keep a simple flat text file with a new timestamp every day, and nearly everything I do makes it into this file, at some level. I can answer all kinds of questions, from when someone joined or left a team, to how I installed that driver last year, to which servers I installed three years ago and the problems I encountered configuring them. Pretty much anything unusual, or middlin' difficult, or just thoughts on engineering problems. It's candid, I swear and call things as I see them. These notes are an extension of my brain.

I start the day with:

        % note (which just runs Emacs on my notesfile)

and

        M-x new-day

which just appends the current date to the file and positions the cursor, all ready for typing. Dirt simple.

I used to have macros and whatnot for carrying forward lists of TODO items and important tasks, but that was overkill and keeping things simple seems to be the key to success. Likewise, apps like OneNote and so forth just got in the way and wanted to own a piece of me.

<comment><USER7> Just one file?

I have a man page repository that is just a simple folder that gets tab completion (basically ls fed into the complete function). aliased to `mm` as in myman(pages). that gets opened up into emacs though so it's basically a repository of files that you can grep through.

Care to share your emacs/shell setup for what you are doing?

<comment><USER8> I have a similar setup to GP: Emacs + one file + an "new-day" command.

Everything goes in one big "scratch.txt" file, with headers like:

        ###### Saturday, May 20 2017

...at the start of each day. These are generated by a function I run every day:

        (defun new-day ()
          (interactive)
          (insert (format-time-string "###### %A, %B %d %Y\n")))

"scratch.txt" is always an open buffer in Emacs. You can search through the file with isearch, helm, or whatever you use. I use the "desktop" library to save and restore all open files when I close Emacs.

That's really it, just one big unstructured text file.

I don't put a lot of _prose_ in this diary. Only todo items, code snippets, and errors / log output.

Our setups have slightly different goals: yours is to create daily nuggets of documentation, while mine is to archive whatever thoughts and code were running through my head each day.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for that... I have an ideas file in my man pages that is an org file. I might do something similar to this as well for just daily thoughts. The man pages have been invaluable for long running notes that are infrequently accessed or thought about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I use Evernote for this - every time I figure out how to do something I drop it in a note. I create 4-5 notes a day. It's incredibly useful - I find myself referring back to some notes months after the fact.

My team also do standups on Slack, and I've got into the habit of writing detailed Slack stand up bullet points with links to commits, documents I've created and so on - almost a semi-public developer diary. I don't check back to these very often myself, but they do spark some useful conversations.

I've also gotten into the habit of writing extremely details commit messages - often multiple paragraphs for a few lines of code change - that record the background and reasoning that lead me to the change. I do most of my code reading through the GitHub web interface, frequently referring to blame and history, so the more context I can find for historical commits the better.

<comment><USER10> I hope Evernote is better now. I lost data when it was synchronizing once. It was 5 years ago though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I started keeping a comprehensive developer diary (I actually refer to it as lab notes) back in December, and it's made a considerable difference to how I think about what I'm coding.

The way I write it is similar to test-driven development — I write down each step in what I'm doing before I do it. When I run a command, I copy the command itself into my notes, then once it's run I copy the important parts of the output (e.g. any error messages).

It really comes into its own when I want to pick up on a task that I had put to one side a few days previously, or when I run into a problem that I think I'd encountered before. It also makes it much easier to avoid the trap of trying the same thing several times before you realise that you're going round and round in circles.

It's also useful for writing documentation. You can just copy and paste what you've written in your lab notes into your commit summaries, Jira tickets, e-mails, spec, help files, whatever, then tidy up as appropriate.

<comment><USER12> Is there a reason why you made the structure of the notes depend on time? Aren't notes that are about the same topic getting very far apart from each other?

I think searching works well when you are as month or maybe three into the project. How does this work like after five years?

<comment><USER8> Also not GP, but I also have notes per-day.

If you organize by topic, you have to decide which topic to put information in. This means you have to pause and think for 10 seconds about your organization system before writing anything. 10 seconds is enough to lose your train of thought.

If you organize by time, you don't have to decide where to put it. It always goes in "today". You have to pause for 0 seconds.

<comment><USER12> Yeah makes sense

Maybe an extra advantage is that you are not tempted to rewrite everything all the time, as I am doing with my attempt of topicaly organized notes.

Append-only might really be helpful. Experiment starts now :)

<comment><USER13> I can confirm, I do this also and posted so elsewhere. But the key is ruthless simplicity. Just a blob of plain text every day and any searchable codes, resist all urges to add formatting, drawings, tables, categories, etc. It's more important to put as few mental obstacles in the way of writing in it as you can, and even if you write a lot every day, it still isn't all that much text, and is pretty easy to manage and search conventionally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I use org-mode in Emacs to keep daily notes, with the majority in one big file with an entry per day. The content is quite diverse - a mix of TODOs for the day (especially when I need to get through multiple smaller things that day), things to do or think about later, small notes to self about the code I'm working on, and sometimes quite extensive notes when thinking through the design/architecture of something new.

The last technique especially helps me a lot. When thinking through a hard problem, type out your thoughts in a semi-structured way, never deleting anything. Makes it easier to deal with problems that can be too large to hold in your head at once, to think about the aspects of something step by step, or to retrace your thought process and see why you made certain decisions earlier and maybe explore a different route when you get stuck. When finished, it can be used as a foundation for a design doc I share with the rest of the team.

</comment><comment><USER15> I use the Bullet Journal [0] method (with ink on paper) for all my personal and professional journaling. One notebook per year is about perfect. The only thing missing is aggregation (across years) and search - but I'm working on those "features".

[0] [http://bulletjournal.com/](http://bulletjournal.com/)

<comment><USER16> I just browsed over their site, and I found it a very interesting concept. Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been thinking about a little app to keep "logs" about the sites I am working on. Something that lives in the menu bar, and pops up with a short key. A litle pull down to select the project, so I can quickly dump the changelog, and automatic time stamp to the entry. All this in markdown.

I can't believe nobody made this already!

</comment><comment><USER18> I keep a minimal form of journal for all life events. I briefly describe a thing I did or a thing that happened, and how much energy it took me to go through it on a 0 to 4 scale, where 0 is breathing and 4 is major life crisis. If I think there was a lesson I write the lesson too.

This creates a feedback loop for stress reduction where I aim to mitigate both the likelihood of having a crisis and train a calm response by learning how to deal with smaller stuff so that the day is full of 1's. I chuck it all in a text file once a day, and return to it because my todo is also in there so I always have a backlog. I don't distinguish between work and hone tasks although I might if I were going in to an office.

Long form diaries I don't really engage with because they'd sap relatively more time - I would get caught in trying to make it a storytelling experience.

</comment><comment><USER19> I keep daily status logs to remind myself of the work that I have done because that's the only way I can put a stop to the nagging anxiety that I haven't done enough.

A nice side effect is that weekly status meetings are easy.

A simple markdown formatted file is more than enough.

<comment><USER20> I keep something similar to a .plan file which I serve at /plan/ on my machine so others at work can take a look.

I have headings as: "Working on", "Will be soon working on", and "Worked on" to mark my ongoing, todo, and done tasks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hyperlink from this post: [https://www.smartics.eu/confluence/display/PDAC1/Developer+D...](https://www.smartics.eu/confluence/display/PDAC1/Developer+Diaries)

</comment><comment><USER21> I've always struggled with journaling in my personal life as well professionally. Recently I created a small messenger bot for myself that I can then use to send messages about what I did / learned, categorize them by hashtags, and then generate a list filtered by categories and sorted by timestamp. I don't think this solution is for everybody, but it works especially well for me because I use FB Messenger as my main chat app and I tend to want to be able to write anytime I have a thought, but generally read my notes infrequently.

</comment><comment><USER22> I keep a diary: with following info day : arriving : departure : time of lunch // travel time.

Why ?

I noticed after 43h in a moving window of 5 days my focus, irritability is up to the roof and I make way too much mistakes that can lead to a dramatic mistake.

My work contract is 37.5 so everytime I reach too much overhead I talk to my manager ask him if he will need me one day to make extra efforts in case of emergency?

He says yes, I say I will abide but if we are working under normal load, than he needs me to rest and give me my time back.

He then picks on me, saying it is my responsibility to not stay to long at work, I make him notice it is because of the company management I have to stay late and the deadline.

He grumbles says it is not the right time.

I go to see the CEO say the same thing

They give me my family time back. I stay quite rested (add 2h30m / day (when the rail company has exceptionally no problem) of commuting with the worsts train lanes of Europa (1M commuters/days)) so it actually feels like commuting is working. Teleworking is denied for lack of control.

Oh! and lunch time is not counted as worked hours except for the other managers. (so I stay away from my family 10hours per day, I see my wife 5 hours a day).

That is the only diary I am keeping.

If I get overworked/burntout, it costs nothing to the company, but I will certainly get fired sooner or later and have a hard time finding a job with a sort of depression running.

<comment><USER23> Sounds like you've mentally set up an adversarial relationship between yourself and 'them' (managers). This is only going to continue to drain you.

Ideally, look for a job with a smaller commute or better attitude to remote work, and get out now. If you can't do that and need to stay in this job for a while, think about changing your mindset to empathise with your managers, even if you dislike them. Be helpful, think about what they are 'actually trying to achieve', which might not necessarily be what they asked for. Remember this is only a stepping stone til your next, better job.

If you're never going to like working 8-10 hours a day you need to figure out the necessary stepping stones to move into working for yourself.

But whatever you do, don't spend years in a me-vs-them mental battle with management at your current role. I made this mistake and deeply regret the lost years (though I did teach myself JavaScript in that time so now I'm massively employable, fuck that employer, har).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sure do, I have at every job I've worked for several years.

I mostly used plain text files for it, and I never found a web solution that did what I wanted. So I wrote my own a few months ago during a time between jobs: [https://www.masongup.com/DailyNotes](https://www.masongup.com/DailyNotes)

Kinda similar to what some other people on this thread seem to do. I always used plain text files for simplicity. IMO, thinking about formatting and making things pretty just gets in the way. The point is to get all of the details of everything you did that day down for future reference. That's what my site does too, just plain text notes, no formatting codes supported, stuffed into a DB and searchable.

Works pretty good for what I need. I've been meaning to add some more features to make it easier for other people to use, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Feel free to use it if you want, it does have import from and export to text files.

</comment><comment><USER24> Nothing shared like this. But I have kept daily logs, first as text file. Currently I do this using quiver (a multi-noteobok editor). I create a notebook called worklog and each day I put in a short list of planned actvities and then I copy/paste a lot of details below as I move through the day. Code snippets, log snippets, bits of conversation. Along with my own notes of what I tried and observed.

Currently, I'm sort of split between three tools. Omnifocus (a GTD manager) for tracking all the tasks, quiver for notes through the day, and then I use [emergent task planner], a paper based task planner for the days tasks. As much as omnifocus/gtd helps me track things, I found using paper to block out each hour of the workday ahead of time really helps me focus. If I find myself losing focus, I can refer to that and (usually) get myself back on track.

</comment><comment><USER25> I used to keep a very active dev blog, with near-daily posts about what I did/learned each day in my game dev projects. However, that was when I was freelancing and had a lot of time to spend on personal projects daily. So there was a lot to talk about and so much new activity each day that the posts really helped organize my thoughts and hammer in what I had just learned - <USER2> was in practice a public developer diary.

After I moved to a full time role in my chosen industry, I had less time to focus on personal projects and less motivation to keep blogging regularly. I try to keep up with it but blog posts are few and far between now so I would no longer call it a diary.

</comment><comment><USER26> Yes and no. I tend to write long, rambling details along the same lines in my commit descriptions and JIRA tasks (after the shorter summary that people will actually bother to read). I've even got tools to pull all my commits from multiple projects for easier review of the previous week/month.

The only standalone artifact I keep, though, is an excel spreadsheet tracking rough office hours, project, caffeine consumption, and choice of lunch. This helps me reassure myself that I'm not slacking off (especially when I'm considering a short day), a top level rough timeline, keep my caffeine intake in check, etc.

</comment><comment><USER27> I do keep a dev diary. It helps me a lot in organizing and coding. I encourage it. For me writing down my current affairs and coding endeavours, keep me in sync with my plans. My journal is a simple md file that I edit with Atom.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't keep a diary or journal but I do keep a public repo of little things I discover that I won't need everyday, but will definitely need again someday.

[https://github.com/wishinghand/Today-I- Learned](https://github.com/wishinghand/Today-I-Learned)

They're not deep or very in depth, but I leave them public in case someone needs what I discovered.

I got the idea from someone who posted their version on Hacker News years three or four years ago. Theirs was more journal like in its disclipline- the author added one a day.

</comment><comment><USER29> Relevant: [https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki](https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki) (I highly recommend; does have journal support as well)

</comment><comment><USER30> I keep a private blog for my side-project, with key links and resources in pages specifically set for them. For example, I might have a page on market research with links to posts on specific topics. But probably I should be more systematic about it, since a lot of my documentation related to the project is also in miscellaneous text files (committed in the /doc folder of the project), and also a few Google docs (for sharing with others).

I find it really handy to figure out how your thought process about the project has grown over time.

</comment><comment><USER31> I do so on medium. I am sharing the link for the sake of it - [https://medium.com/online-learning-ideas](https://medium.com/online-learning- ideas) . Though I very recently started keeping one and hardly has anything.

Earlier I have used google docs for the purpose. Though those documents were often more structured than the link I shared above.

</comment><comment><USER32> It can also be useful to keep a diary of your work experience. Not the proprietary information, but the assignments, personal interactions, politics.

Something that is yours and walks out the door with you, every day.

When the system or someone starts to screw you, such a record can be useful and actually viewed with some validity. Better yet, can be meeting minutes and internal communications that document the situation.

There's a reason Comey is known for writing memos about problematic situations.

</comment><comment><USER33> I do not keep a developer diary.

What I do keep is a large file of projects or snippets of projects, sometimes with extensive notes.

I refer back to these frequently to see how I did something or look at code samples.

But, as time goes on this has become a bit of maze to wade through. I spend time trying to remember what project it was etc. etc. Grep helps a bit :). It would be better to organize this somehow. Not sure I'm interested in a full blown diary though. DRY.

</comment><comment><USER34> I don't have any such experience but, shouldn't the VCS log serve that purpose? Maybe in conjunction with a NOTES file?

<comment><USER12> There are different targets for notes in VCS and personal notes. In VerySpecificBug759 you do not want to read about how to get the code to build at all. The context of discovery has a lot of (necessary!) detours, cul-de- sacs, and mis-interpretations.

The context of discovery is often not relevant for the context of fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> If the main purpose is to document decisions on a project, not your journey as an engineer, consider using Architecture Decision Records — ADRs. Simple, to the point, live-with-the-code. [https://github.com/npryce/adr- tools](https://github.com/npryce/adr-tools)

</comment><comment><USER36> Simplenote is turning out to be an excellent resource. Light enough to be a pleasure to use and with great search functionality, automatic archiving, etc. A lot of thought put into it. [https://simplenote.com/](https://simplenote.com/)

It's available for every platform.

</comment><comment><USER37> I use Trello Yes I know it's not for diaries. I have one column/month. And specific columns for special projects/issues. When a note doesn't fit in a project it goes to the current month column.

You can create checklists. You can share anything from your mobile with trello so I keep track of everything I read.

</comment><comment><USER38> I do, though I guess I arrived at the idea more informally. I use it chiefly as a checklist, where at the top of each "page" I list the things I want to grapple with that day. Then the rest of the document is where I commit my thoughts and questions about the subject.

</comment><comment><USER39> Using a developer diary is essential to my work. It's very similar to keeping a laboratory notebook.

Initially I kept notes in Evernote, but eventually switched to Quiver ([http://happenapps.com/](http://happenapps.com/)).

</comment><comment><USER40> i've taken notes for a while, but in the end considered it to be a waste of time (other than that it helped me remember thing more easy at first).

like any other diary, you won't re-read it and if you run into an issue of which you know you've faced it before, chances are that your written down thoughts are that unstructured that solving the issue for a second time probably takes less time than trying to find the solution in your notes.

so if writing down the issues you're facing and their solutions makes it easier for you to remember, go for it, other than that such a diary is of no use to my opinion

</comment><comment><USER41> I have a paper scratchpad which I just use for swap space, a bullet journal i use to keep track of what I'm doing, and a dropbox papr doc that I use for reflection and recording the problems I'm working througg.

</comment><comment><USER42> I take notes in text files as I'm learning stuff. I've published a couple of books from these notes (and also using the example code I write.)

</comment><comment><USER43> I write notes in markdown, one file per day, and use Pandoc to create HTML , PDF and mobi versions monthly for reading back later on the train.

</comment><comment><USER44> I do this with my blog. Not with every decision, but often enough that I have referred back to it occasionally.

Share the wealth! :)

</comment><comment><USER45> No. Have used in the past, didn't really help me and didn't really see the point in continuing it.

</comment><comment><USER46> Just a markdown file with emojis and special characters is enough for me.

</comment><comment><USER47> We all need to document our knowledge, I keep forgetting stuff.

I use tiddlywiki.

</comment><comment><USER48> Yes, I keep diaries for all my projects. I use Workflowy.

</comment><comment><USER49> I use my developer diary (or journal) on a daily basis. It helps me to track what I have done, what I deem important at this time, and what I want to do next. It is also a tool to get my thoughts in shape through writing.

What is important to me:

1\. Page per Day and Event I have a page in a wiki per day and one for each event that happend on that day. A event may be an idea, an issue to solve later, a link to an information, etc. By having each event as a single page with an URL, this piece of information is easy to share via messenger or email or can be mentioned from other places. Within the wiki I create a new page for the day in the morning and add child pages for each event I assume may be of interest in the future.

2\. Document vs. Record Since our wiki stores information more reliably than my brain, I need to write it down. When I discovered the difference between a document (needs to be updated) and a record (needs not to be updated), the organization of information in our wiki got much easier. Records come in form of events and are part of the journal. Information that is central and important on the long run (most is not), is part of the wiki in form of a topic space.

3\. Multiple Views with Tags I also tag most of the events. Since each tag also has its own page where all pages are listed where this tag occurs, I get multiple views on the journal. One form of tag is the "subject" that maps the event to a project/product I'm working on. Others (and there are only a few) simply categorize an event as an "issue" or an "idea". Some also have a tag related to a subject I'm currently working on. When I come back to the - <USER3> instance - "issue page", I can see, what I wanted to have fixed not today, but by "the end of the week". If I think to remember to have had a great idea last week - but fail to remember what it was - I head to the "idea page" (to see that it was usually not that spectacular as I thought in first place). The tagging may cost some seconds, but it makes it easier for me to track fields of interest (by text search) and find related information (by browsing).

4\. Structure for Speed As others have mentioned, it is also important for me to get the information into the journal quickly. Therefore too much given structure may be an enemy. None the less I use a template/form to put information (such as the description or links to related resources) in separate, always the same (name and location on a page) sections. For me this is actually much easier than to start with a blank page.

5\. Copy-Paste for Speed I also need to paste screenshots, files, and URLs quickly to a page. Therefore I choose a wiki that supports this over markup files in a repository (which are great for other use cases with other requirements as others already have mentioned on this page).

Not everything runs as smoothly as I want it to be. So there is always room for improvements ...

BTW: I'm one of the authors of the mentioned article about developer diaries ([https://www.smartics.eu/confluence/display/PDAC1/Developer+D...](https://www.smartics.eu/confluence/display/PDAC1/Developer+Diaries)).</comment>


Microsoft at 40: Read Bill Gates' anniversary email to employees - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-at-40-read-bill-gates-anniversary-email-to-employees/ <comment><USER2> tldr: Bill will be technical advisor and microsoft is great.</comment>


Big Astronaut – Quick Wins with Backbone.js - <AUTHOR> http://www.bigastronaut.com/blog/2014/quick-wins-with-backbone-js <comment><USER2> This is a smart agile use of Backbone.js over more complex feature-rich frameworks, such as Angular.js and Ember.js</comment>


Ryanair's head of technology thinks Big Data is 'wank' - <AUTHOR> https://fora.ie/ryanair-technology-customers-2797664-Jun2016/ <comment><USER2> If only American business leaders spoke like Micheal, it'd be great, a new dawn for the empire. Even great men like Elon Musk are muzzled into measuring every sentence. Imagine Ryanair running rockets. Aerosexuality diatribes would be the norm. He'd slam his shoe on the table at the UN with wild staring eyes "They're just fucking sky buses! We'll make me a Moon Hotel. With optional discount travel insurance by Hertz! Why aren't we launched from Mount Kilimanjaro? Get me the president of Africa on the phone!" And it would be done, just like that.</comment>