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bootloadon The Curse of Smart People (2014)

"What I have learned, working here, is that smart, successful people are cursed. The curse is confidence."

Things to remember when smart people appear confident:

- the correlation between confidence and ability to actually "do" something can be low

- smart people can live in their heads

- smart people can overestimate their expertise in areas they may be familiar or ignorant of, equally

- street smarts can kick smart, smarts arse

A quick question I ask is, "Have you done this before?". I use this question to determine perceived verses actual smartness.

Here's an example of why you need to do this. Back in '10 I went on a 220km hike from 200 meters above sea level to 2,228 (about 7300ft). [0] I was with a mixed group of people, fit, smart and motivated. On the last day, mid point to the final destination, we took a photo at the summit of the highest point in Australia. Lots of smart people in that photo, PhDs, Masters students etc. By the end of the day, one suffered frost bite, three got lost and of the finishers who covered the entire distance, maybe 20% came away without some sort of injury. Why?

  "Have you done this before?"

A lot of smart people ^thought^ running and riding then walking 30+Km/day was easy. A lot didn't think going into an alpine area in early autumn would be cold. The PhD with blue lips who I marched off the coldest place in Australia wore jeans and jumper, had taken a 600ml container of water and no food. [1] The three who sparked a search, decided to take break in a hut, but not inform anybody. [2] Now nobody really got hurt or lost. But they could have, had luck not been on their side. Smartness breeds a certain type of arrogance that left unchecked, can get you into trouble quickly.

Time and time again I remind myself, depending on the circumstances, "street smarts" whip "smart smarts'" arse.

Reference

[0] @samh, "Australian Economist who lost bet will walk from Parliament to Mount Kosciousko" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126054 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126078

[1] At the top the wind was 50km/hr and in fog. https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/4603144874/in/album-72157...

[2] Tail-end charlie (me) also missed checking inside the hut. https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/4797709801/in/album-72157...

[3] https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157624081287855

[4] https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157624081287855

bootloadon Monitor web page changes with Go

"wouldn't this be a bit more useful if it printed a diff of the old-vs-new?"

I like the idea. If I had to do this quickly, I'd be tempted to use cron, diff and wget as a script. I can't see any handling of HTTP response codes [0] so lots of things could happen that need handling. Does Go have equivalent to the fabulous python ^Requests^ by Kenneth Reitz? [1] Page diffs is a nice feature I might add to a page size tool I hacked up. [2]

Reference

[0] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-6

[1] https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests

[2] https://github.com/peterrenshaw/pageglut

bootloadon What programming languages are used most on weekends?

"Well the beauty of one-liners is that they're quick and dirty. They don't need to be portable, you don't usually maintain a one-liner for years."

Given that description, I'd agree. Now I understand the crux of the problem, problem solved using disposable code in terse language or script.

bootloadon US Visitors May Have to Reveal Social Media Passwords to Enter Country

@gukov really? I purposely avoid electronics going overseas to stop this kind of abuse.

bootloadon Rackspace lays off 200 locals in company-wide cuts

yes it is obvious, "cloud computers with great support".

bootloadon What programming languages are used most on weekends?

True, defeats the idea of a one liner in bash/awk/sed.

bootloadon US Visitors May Have to Reveal Social Media Passwords to Enter Country

"John Kelly has informed Congress that the DHS is considering requiring refugees and visa applicants from seven Muslim-majority nations to hand over their social media credentials from Facebook and other sites as part of a security check. "We want to get on their social media, with passwords: What do you do, what do you say?""

Given the current US climate, if this is the case, skip the US and go to Canada. How much US business will shift to Canada?

bootloadon Introducing Keybase Chat

"it's possible with Keybase chat to have a program posting encrypted messages for another person or program, without cluttering up the visual chat interface."

Nice. I'll be looking at what source of tools that use this style of communication on github.

bootloadon What programming languages are used most on weekends?

Candidates ask no questions?

bootloadon What programming languages are used most on weekends?

"OS X is not Linux. It's a BSD-derivative, and doesn't use the GNU toolchain."

True, but I was thinking awk/sed was a good multi OS tool with minimal code effect.

bootloadon What programming languages are used most on weekends?

"Then again, sed works differently on different platforms"

Well that kills my idea why to use awk/sed. What would you use @freehunter?

bootloadon What programming languages are used most on weekends?

"for side-projects developers can get to an MVP with haste."

That's the caveat you want to hear. Also Facebook with php and HHVM [0] not wanting to break things too much.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_Virtual_Machine

bootloadon What programming languages are used most on weekends?

"I don't know awk and sed and I'm honestly not very interested in learning them. But bash I definitely agree with."

Awk/Sed are optimised for text/data processing.[0] While Bash might work, will the script work on all systems (and version)? [1] awk & predecessor sed are good for one liner programs and suitable for problems that need fast, reliable solutions.

reference

[0] Opening, closing files; reading, breaking and counting record fields.

[1] OS use Bash or Bourne? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)#Portability

bootloadon Rackspace lays off 200 locals in company-wide cuts

"I've had issues with GCP where site is down and it's taken 1+ days to hear back from someone. Maybe there was a way to escalate it, but it wasn't readily evident."

In the end someone has a pager, a machine and an editor. In ye-old-days this problem was in-house with a COLO machine. That's the reasoning behind uptime. 99%/year is 361 and just over half a day. Can you loose two and a half days at christmas? (web commerce) or the same time on a new product release? (SaaS) or 2.5 days development time at a critical bug fix with your customers?

The bad stuff always happens at the worst time. The market is saying, ^cloud^ but the tradeoff is ^service^. I don't know the answer(s).

bootloadon What programming languages are used most on weekends?

"Picking up the basics of a language is easy, but it's knowing the nuisance that separates the professional from the amateur."

From learning perspective correct. I don't think developers chase new languages, I think it's more, play 'catch up to latest language' to be more employable. You would hope companies, CTOs, lead techs choose languages to solve the unique business problems. Language choice looks more, to me, like taste. Like choosing something ^nice^ from a menu at a restaurant depending on what is palatable.

bootloadon Rackspace lays off 200 locals in company-wide cuts

@devopsproject I don't think users/companies value colo & support ^until^ bad things happen and the costs of not running critical business are evident.

bootloadon State of Clojure 2016 – Results and Analysis

"I think some of your frustrations might stem from your workflow. You really have to use the REPL to get the most out of Clojure development."

Are there any good HOWTO, tutorial or documents that explain how? (ahh "clojure repl" on youtube) what about text? Looks like I'll search. One hint as to the maturity of a language ecosystem, is official docs that show these kinds of things.

bootloadon Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

"The rise of platforms like Bandcamp and Patreon, and the abundance of high quality free/inexpensive tools and guides is raising the bar for quality in independent music"

No easy solution here, what is the ^Bandcamp of concert venues^? [0] Is there a venue problem of, "Where do you play?"

[0] I know the solution is a political one due to land usage, sound restrictions and venue size.

bootloadon Federated microblogging engine Mastodon 1.0 released

The best thing I notice, the code is being supported buy cash. The source is here: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon and more details about the authour, here: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=619786

Dave Winer has been all over this idea for a long time: https://www.google.com/#q=scripting.com+federated+blogs and one idea that I don't see here (correct me if this is wrong) is the idea of static pages and ^light storage^ (e.g. S3) of text.

bootloadon [flagged] Animation Workers Get $100M in Wage-Fixing Suit

@masonic, I missed this. I'll stop posting Pando links.

- https://pando.com/2016/05/09/sony-settle-techtopus/

bootloadon Highest radiation reading since March 2011 detected at Fukushima No. 1 reactor

“Confirming the conditions inside the reactor is a first step toward decommissioning,”

Going to be a very long time before this happens. How long will this take? 30-50 years? Longer? Another recent post (no new facts): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13564303

bootloadon Fukushima Nuclear Reactor Radiation at Highest Level Since 2011 Meltdown

"A single dose of one sievert is enough to cause radiation sickness and nausea; 5 sieverts would kill half those exposed to it within a month, and a single dose of 10 sieverts would prove fatal within weeks."

Highest recorded level inside containment vessel, "530 sieverts an hour".

bootloadon How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

"During the baby boom, there was a lot of intermittent surveillance. Fewer mothers worked, and every ten or fifteen minutes one might give a look out the back window to see what was going on."

@cafard sort of applies to suburban areas. In semi-rural hilly country on bikes and foot, there is no houses for miles. My folks and others wouldn't have been able to see me or my friends, though we'd tell them where we'd been.

bootloadon The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest (2016)

"The House of Windsor only formally dates back to 1910."

House of Wetten (1030) -> House of Hanover (1710) -> House of House of Saxe-Coburg and Goth (1826) -> House of Windsor.

There is a long lineage for the Windsors. Note the name change in 1918 from Saxe-Coburg to Windor to avoid diplomatic incidents by association. To get an idea of the breakdown of English aristocracy and estates, read this insightful article by Charles Spencer, "Enemy of the Estate" ~ http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/01/english-aristocracy-2...

"I am thinking that Florencian plutocratic houses simply never rename themselves."

Yes, that's what it looks like.

bootloadon [dead]

"The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way."

During WW2, Fletcher Prowty [0] told a story of surplus arms shipments making their way Vietnam in '45. Why? because of a coming war in Vietnam. The US supported the French in SEA I suspect under the "Truman Doctrine" [1] The French influence stopped in '54 when "Dien Bien Phu" fell. This is the pre-history of the US involvement in Vietnam.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Fletcher_Prouty#World_War_I...

[1] https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/truman-doctri...

[2] https://history.state.gov/milestones/1953-1960/dien-bien-phu

bootloadon [dead]

"On the day Trump was inaugurated, China’s military warned that war between the two countries was a real possibility."

The tone of the article and the quotes make this sound like this is a new scenario. It isn't. It stretches before Threat Vector (Tom Clancy novel) [0], before the 90's pull out by USN in the Phillipines. [1] There is a long history of rivalry in this region where cultures bump into each other. [2]

Reference

[0] http://www.tomclancy.com/book_display.php?isbn13=97804252623...

[1] https://www.sofmag.com/the-south-china-sea-standoff/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracel_Islands#Historical_per...

bootloadon How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

"Congratulations on describing a small town pretty much anywhere in the western world."

Except, do you think they'd chase Wallabies on their bikes, catch Blue-Tongues, Magpies and Gang-Gangs?

bootloadon How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

common in outer fringes of Melbourne, 50 to 70km. This ones in Kinglike (https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/30900586330) another, down the mountain in Strathewen (https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/28426890045)

bootloadon How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

"When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere. It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision."

Thought about this a lot. In kinder it was 400m for me. PS, 20km and by the age of 16 my range was more than 200 SqrKm. This was alone, on foot, by bike, train or bus.

bootloadon One Percent Stake

"does not automatically mean one is more privileged than those who choose to work for startups,"

It does in a way. Founders eating ramen, working long, odd hours, for an idea that may not pay off at all; Who can walk away from a startup and brush it off as experience. An employee doesn't get that opportunity. An employee also doesn't take the risk. They may never have the opportunity to take these kinds of risks.