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cmaheron Ask HN: How have you achieved financial independence?

That's assuming all people want to live like that. I wouldn't know what do do with that much space, and I hate having to drive anywhere. Give me decent public transportation and access to world-class restaurants over a house and a yard and a car any day.

cmaheron A 54-year-old custodian just graduated from the college he cleaned at night

> > Are you suggesting that it's reasonable for people from less-affluent backgrounds to have to spend their entire twenties working their way through school while the more affluent finish at 22?

> Yes.

Why? What positive economic impact does this have? How can you justify 4+ years of lost positive contribution by these individuals to the economy? How is that economically efficient? What metrics are you basing your reasoning on?

cmaheron Mono Relicensed as MIT

The difference being that large bureaucratic organizations need an army of lawyers to approve the use of open source libraries, and using a common license that is already understood (e.g. CC0) will result in a far smoother experience when the developers in that organization try to use anything to make their miserable lives a touch nicer.

source: I have formerly lead one of the described miserable lives.

cmaheron The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

> Cause you've got a web browser that was designed to view pages of linked information that has now been pressed into service as a ad-hoc run-time for building applications

At this point, this is argument is 100% false. Browsers of today aren't the browsers of the 90s. Chrome came out in 2008 and has ALWAYS been designed to run applications, and an entire operating (ChromeOS) is based on the idea that the browser isn't just a system built for viewing linked documents, but a valid application platform.

cmaheron Show HN: Hasp – A minimal CSS preprocessor using the M4 macro language

> "Tired of all the slow and bloated preprocessors..."

libsass is amazingly fast. I generally see it churn through ~20k lines of CSS (don't ask) in 6ms.

cmaheron Developing with the Particle Photon

That's actually where I want to take this, I'm thinking a wind speed sensor to recognize if it's on/off and a temperature sensor to turn it on/off automatically.

cmaheron Developing with the Particle Photon

Thanks! It was supposed to link to https://www.particle.io/

(how embarrassing)

cmaheron From Backbone to React: Our Experience Scaling a Web Application

While I appreciate another look at React, I have to disagree with the article's conclusion that React is "objectively better" than other frameworks. The summary article of the story is basically "we completely re-architected our application and things are better now". There's nothing in Backbone that makes you construct the initial architecture on display, and you can use Backbone to build the final architecture as well. So, moral of the story: re-architecting an application you know more about than you did at the beginning is probably a good thing.

cmaheron Why SICP Matters

At the website: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

Or as a pdf: https://github.com/sarabander/sicp-pdf

cmaheron Limiting Antibiotics in Animals

Small daily doses of antibiotics act as a growth stimulant for animals. Bigger animals = more money, and there aren't any incentives in place to prevent farmers from killing the effectiveness of antibiotics.

cmaheron What is the best way to learn programming?

First, this post: http://blog.zackshapiro.com/want-to-learn-to-code-start-here gives a good foundation of troubles you should expect, although point #1 is more than a little impractical for most people.

You should also be aware that the only way to learn to code is to actually do it.

Try going with a book tutorial, such as http://eloquentjavascript.net/

You can click on the buttons next to code entries to try stuff out.

Learn how to develop code outside of a browser. Pick a text editor and learn it. Sublime text (http://www.sublimetext.com/) is a great choice for beginners. Learn how to use the command line.

After you have an OK foundation, check out the problems at http://projecteuler.net/ working your way through them sequentially (apparently, most people don't go beyond ten problems)

Create a GitHub account. Learn basic git, and start putting your code out there.

Come up with something you want to make and start a project to actually do it. Be sure to start small, since a lot of software development skills only come with practice.

cmaheron Ask HN: Open source gamification for developers

Sorry, I misinterpreted you. I thought you wanted gamification for developers themselves.

cmaheron Ask HN: Open source gamification for developers

coderwall.com has achievements for github activity, so you might want to check that out first

cmaheron Petition for the right to return games broken by DRM

And the president can help to influence policy. For 100,000 online signatures, the White House gives an official response. It also tells the government what people everywhere want That seems a lot more effective than calling your congressman in Montana.

Maybe you'll recall this petition: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/make-unlocking-cel... and how a bill was announced soon after. Sure, the petition didn't cause the bill to come about, but it helped to show the will of the people and open up government a bit. Is that ineffective?

The government is far more complex than the Constitution would have you believe.

cmaheron Russian Satellite Hit by Debris from Chinese Anti-Satellite Test

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mis...

http://celestrak.com/events/asat.asp

The mentioned Chinese test is single-handedly responsible for the vast majority of space debris.

cmaheron B- environment merits B- effort

Fair enough. But my experience tells me that large corporations + many policies = many missed targets.

cmaheron B- environment merits B- effort

Corporate policies can miss their targets. If a policy targeting the slackers existed, than part of it's job would be to target said slackers, which it would only be able to successfully do with some probability. However, if there isn't a statistically significant number of slackers, the policy could end up falsely targeting more hardworking employees than slackers. It's a classic probability/confusion matrix problem and goes to show that you have to be damn sure that your policy is only targeting the right people.

A company willing to risk harming its honest employees for minimal benefit is not one I would like to work for.

cmaheron Why you should starve yourself a little bit each day

I'd be interested in seeing a follow-up study on how this affects things like BMI, muscle gain/loss, vitamin/mineral retention, etc. From what I learned in bio/nutrition, I would assume that the body isn't able to effectively make use of the food consumed in this limited window. Some problems I see with this are:

Gluconeogenesis converts proteins to glucose to fat resulting, in reduced effective amino acid intake.

The digestive tract doesn't have enough enzymes, reception sites, etc. to actually store/make use all of the vitamins/minerals consumed.

It's hard to eat a proper amount of food and nutrients in a small window of time. Depending on fiber intake (which decreases appetite), it can be even harder.