Skywing

If you host your jekyll blog on github, then creating a new blog post is as simple as logging into github and going straight to your blog repo. You can create a new file and edit straight from there. The blog is rebuilt on each commit.

But that allows for smarter optimizations.

I think that the over all sentiment of this post is correct - hard work can pay off, and sometimes not in how you originally expected.

I also recently applied to a company, Blizzard Entertainment in Austin, that I have wanted to work for since 1999. In 1999 I didn't program, but playing their games got me into programming (through reverse engineering the games) and I have wanted to work there ever since. I applied for internships through the years, and then after school I started applying for full time positions. I never once even got a response, other than the automated rejection emails that come 2-3 months later. A few months ago they actually called me though, and I had the opportunity to go through the interview process for a .NET position. I sailed through the technical phone interview and was given a take home project to work on, for a week. It had some requirements that involved some design patterns that I'd never used before, but I easily put in 60+ hours on the project after getting home from my current job. After seeing that submission though, they decided to not continue with the interview. It's hard being rejected by a company that you've dreamed of working for for so long, especially when the rejection was after they looking at my code. As a coder, that code is all I am evaluated by during that phase of the project, so it's rough. I couldn't let it end there though. I researched the design patterns requested and completely re-wrote the project. In retrospect, my 2nd attempt was much better than my first. I don't know if the developers I spoke with, from Austin, saw my 2nd attempt or not, because I was going through a recruiter of theirs from CA. The recruiter basically just cut off all communication, and I got no feedback as to what I could have improved on.

But, I didn't stop there! That was basically 2 rejections. I decided to go around the recruiter and drafted up an email to the developers here in Austin - all I asked for was feedback on my code so that I could improve and apply in the future. I didn't have any of their emails, but I had their names. I sent the email to various combinations of their name and magically one went through. The guy responded literally 10 minutes later. He seemed open to helping but was busy (this was happening during thanksgiving and blizzcon, so it was definitely busy for them). We emailed back and forth several times but each time he kept forgetting to respond, so I just let it go. I didn't want to come off as pushy or annoying and ruin any future chances at the job.

No real moral to this, other than I kept trying and ended up with a real developer's email here in Austin. Maybe next time around he'll remember me.

I used to pair the words simple and game in the same sentences, as well. Mostly when I would be brainstorming game ideas and then trying to pitch the ideas to my friends. That is, until I got into game dev and learned that even the simplest of game concepts are still very complex bits of code. I mostly write 3D games, but even 2D games are complex in relation to your average CRUD-based web app, or single form GUI app, etc. So, 10000 lines of code you think is a large amount of code for a game? It's really not.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million...

Well, DoPDF does look nice. Honestly, it has more features than PDF Everything. I'm not sure how to distinguish mine from theirs yet, or how to make mine worth $20 when theirs is free. Most of those features of DoPDF can be added to PDF Everything quite easily. I just have not added them, yet. Getting those in should help me make a case for PDF Everything.

PDF is just a common format used when sharing documents for viewing, like you said. No deeper meaning to it than that.

This tool can convert many file types to PDF without the need for acrobat, office, etc. Basically, this just costs $20 and those cost $200. It's just a small, one trick pony piece of software.

does anybody actually give a shit?

Working for me. Shows pictures, names and profile number. If you scroll to the top left you can browse all of the first users of Facebook. Pretty neat.

Browser can request cursor control

Yes, it's mentioned in the linked page.

Man, the distant future is going to be an interesting place.

Perhaps. Although, that is easier said than done.

Unfortunately, during a panic attack, that may not seem like an option at the time. And, if you force yourself to do whatever it is you're trying to do at the moment, a panic attack could result in fainting or something, which may not be desirable. Anxiety, and "the fear", are both normal, but an attack is something hard to describe and triggers the flight response usually, for me.

Have you tried things like wearing a rubber band around your wrist, and when you feel a panic attack coming on you can use it to slap your wrist and kind of derail your current train of thought? Like the parent poster, I often would have panic attacks while worrying about whether or not I was about to have a panic attack. Like, if I could make it to to wherever I was trying to go I knew I'd be fine, but getting there was hard because my mind would race while driving there and I'd have an anxiety attack usually. My dad told me to try the rubber band thing and it actually kind of worked. Sort of a placebo effect maybe, but anything is good if it gets you past that moment. I also got into the habit of telling myself that I was going to be alright. I knew panic attacks only lasted a few minutes and I knew I always got through them, so I had to tell myself that I'd get through the current one and be fine in a few minutes - even though it'd feel like hours. It really took me about a full year of giving it 100% effort to get over my anxiety, to a point where I could at least sense an attack coming on and I could kind of prepare myself to calm down. A lot of mine was proper breathing. It sounds really weird, but I think I realized that I would basically slow my breathing down to almost not breathing when I got nervous, and that would make me light headed or something which would trigger a panic attack.

Some other things that helped me a lot were to just tell my friends up front that I felt like I was having a panic attack. You'd be surprised how little amount of other people will judge you for saying it. Most people offer up advice and feel sympathetic, so telling them usually helped me calm down. I also went out and bought a bicycle and a basketball hoop. When I was feeling like I might have an anxiety attack, I'd just go outside and shoot a few hoops (I suck at sports, it was just something to do), or I'd go ride my bike around.

I did try herbs. I never took prescriptions. I don't think herbs every actually did anything, but sometimes it felt good to just be "taking action" and they had a placebo effect in that sense, I guess. That's just me, though.

Also, I take stuff really personal usually, and I'd bottle stuff up. I used to get very frustrated when something I'd been programming on for awhile hits a snag or I can't figure out how to do something, despite weeks of Googling and stuff. It may sound lame, but sometimes it felt really good to just let it all out. Whether it was crying or yelling or whatever. I had one time driving home from work, having a panic attack, that I couldn't handle it and I just started crying for some reason. It felt great after. I had other times where I'd just yell in my car and that'd be enough to kind of derail an anxiety attack.

I don't know man, I don't think there's really a 1 size fits all solution to anxiety. It's just finding something that you can use as a tool to help yourself get through that 1 moment in time. Don't look at solving the whole thing, just look at solving each panic attack, and then use those tools to get you through 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, etc.

Why is this the top comment for this thread? It's office topic and kind of subjective.

That's a valid point, but isn't this a forum of mostly developers and tech-savvy people? While your point stands, I have a feeling that a lot of readers of HN will be looking at this from the OP's point of view.

I always wondered when they'd replace the website's black-white space background. Personally, I can't concentrate on the text long enough to know if I'd like using Meteor or not, because the background is too crazy. From the sound of these frequent HN updates, it sounds pretty neat, though. A little bit of sarcasm here, but not really.

I'm a male software engineer and I had the same experiences going through school, too. Nobody else seemed to care about programming outside of school-related assignments. Very boring few years in school, those were.

The drone-related ideas definitely sound awesome and would be fun to work on. I can imagine hundreds of complications that would stand in the way of those ideas working smoothly, though. Probably most common would be your copters losing their payloads, breaking, crashing, etc. Would be tough to recover from a fail scenario like that in an acceptable way, especially for important payloads like medicine ... or tacos. Maybe it'd be simpler to start with less critical tasks, like your weather monitoring idea. That'd be fun and productive.

The document editing one is just "meh" to me. I never was able to make Google Drive part of my work flow, with co-workers. I never found a way to benefit from the sharing in a way directly related to my job. The best examples of the document sharing and editing, for me, were for things like computer game theory crafting in Diablo, and stuff.

That galactic exploration game is like the holy grail of online games, to me. I know 0x10c is aiming to do something close to it. Maybe EVE online is kind of in the same category. But I do envision something where your own little planet starts off with no technology and it's up to you, somehow, to build space ships and things and go explore for other planets. Maybe make the whole game browser-based and allow people to run their own javascript to code stuff, in-game.

Looks great. That example on the front page might want to pick a different variable name, though. It sort of looks like you're using the number 1 as the variable.

Try a Lisp. You'll be humbled. In my opinion, anything resembling C is easy stuff. Pointers, threads ... it's all pretty easy, really. Truly breaking out of that C mold is the differentiator though, in my opinion. Anybody can learn C, Python or Javascript.

Doh. For some reason the orange tag on the android one made me expect to see one for the iOS so my eye didn't even read the text. It's right there, haha. My bad.

The android app version says it ships this fall. When does the iOS version ship?

dont think so. im pretty sure it says to save your own copy if you need it.

Even easier, you could just write a minecraft server plugin that puts its current server time somewhere for the app to read from. It could be anywhere, really - the plugin could run a webserver, the plugin could put it in a txt file visible online somewhere, etc. Now all the iOS app has to do is cat the time and sync automatically.

My Linode accounts on their Dallas data center have gone through quite a bit of downtime over the years. Their support is why I've stuck with them, though.

I would like to offer up some advice. Do not apply if you're simply applying because it's good practice, or you're gambling against the odds. You won't get selected. If you've applied 4 times before and did not even get an email response or invitation to interview, then you should probably evaluate why it is that you apply each go-around. The folks at YC have obviously tuned their process finely enough so that it avoids candidates like this. I have a good friend who made it into YC years ago, and for several years after I tried getting into it myself. I found friends to apply with so I'd have a group, and we came up with company ideas that we could apply with. I tried this probably 3 or 4 times. All times, I coded my ass off in hopes that it'd end up with a trip to YC for an interview - so, it wasn't all just empty applications. But, was I really applying because I had a startup in need of that extra push? Was I in a position to make use of YC's advice, had I even gotten in? Maybe, maybe not. All I know is that I felt like I was applying just for the sake of it. Sort of like it was some free contest that I could enter, and if I won it meant instant fame and fortune. Well, let me break it to you softly ... do not do this because it only ends in the same place that it begins.

I think he's suggesting that 113 should be interpreted as 1/13. I'm not sure how simple that logic would be to implement, though.

> These are incorrect assumptions. It's okay to have them, you don't have to be perfect, but don't redefine "assumption" because you're embarrassed.

What is there to be embarrassed about? Seriously.

How would you combat this scenario, though? If the person who is doing this has not been caught, then is it really a good idea to publicly state how much of an annoyance he or she is being? (I say she, because seriously, it could be another woman as well. Everybody is assuming it's probably a guy. We've all seen how mean women can be to other women, though. I grew up with 2 sisters and their friends ... I've seen a lot of that.) But, if this person is still anonymous then I'd think this would just fuel the fire and make them go even more full throttle, now. I don't think staying quiet helps either, but this is just that typical internet scenario where somebody is hiding behind anonymity and is enjoying the attention and drama that their actions are creating. I really don't know how I'd combat this, if it were happening to me.

This is nothing against the author of the article, this is just me some what brainstorming out loud about how to combat this scenario. Without trying to take action, and with the antagonist still unknown, what does the author want everybody to do, though? What is the call to action here?