dullroar

Dunno - my thermostat is not a Nest. Works great without the internet.

This. I've even had an in-law say, "My brother works for the Defense Intelligence Agency, and he uses smart devices in his home, so they must be safe!", with no consideration that tech may not be his specialty, or he doesn't follow the daily IoT fiascos, or maybe he just thinks he won't get hacked. Dunno. Meanwhile, my year-old thermostat still wants me to connect it to wi-fi, and that will never happen.

Disclosure: I worked for various "startup" companies starting in 1991 through 2005. One got bought by a large company and made me some money, but not a life-changing amount. Some others variously went into "zombie" mode. One got bought by a company that simply milks the existing customer base for support revenue. One failed outright.

That said, when the first company was bought, there was a product that the buying company didn't want to continue to support. Some friends of mine made an agreement to take over that product, and started a company to do so. They never grew the customer base that much - it was a niche product. However, they were able to continue to work together as friends, have decent paychecks with 100% company-paid insurance, and after about 15 years, sold out to a company for enough to allow for comfortable (not rich) retirements. This was all on purpose and was discussed frequently by them - "Do we want to grow, or do we want to enjoy what we're doing, have some free time, less stress, and remain friends?"

I've always thought that was a FINE model for a company, if you can pull it off. I always wanted to work there (did some consulting for them), but they could never grow quite enough to hire me. Ah, well. :)

That's a classic, for sure!

Yup, I had the same reaction - a few seconds and I was out.

See also miki, a Makefile-based wiki, written by a friend of mine: https://github.com/a3n/miki

Exactly this. I have tons of weather bookmarks, all of them are from the gov't. No dancing ads. And their API is straightforward, as mentioned.

Seconded again. Fundamentally changed how I think about systems, and makes me smile every time someone says, "We need a new system for x!"

Hungarian pastries are phenomenal, too! Say what you will about the Austro-Hungarian empire, it must've been a great place to nosh. :)

I always think this quote has explained a related topic the most concisely:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair, "I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked" (1935)

I wrote one last year. It started out as notes for a series of "lunch and learns" I was going to give at work. The notes just kept growing and growing, until over the course of a weekend I ended up sitting down and pounding out 200 pages of content. That was the easy part! The hard part was then learning how to build an effective index (harder than it sounds), coming up with examples and figures, tuning and tweaking, etc.

So, to recap my experience, I would suggest that you think of a topic about which you know enough to have something to say. Not just "pure knowledge," but real opinions founded in real-world experience. Pretend you're going to give a series of presentations, lectures or articles on the matter. Start typing up the notes, looking for organizational structure as you go. Keep typing. Reorganize as you go. Keep typing. At some point you'll realize you're on your way, then the momentum will start to carry you as you figure out to what "depth" you want to go. Don't edit at this point, just keep generating content.

When you think you're close, start "spiraling" back through the book, editing, cleaning, editing, adding, editing...If the material deserves an index, go read up on that (again, it is NOT just a cross-reference of non-trivial words!) Somewhere around now hand it out to some friends to read. Incorporate their feedback. Edit again.

Look! You've written a book! :)

I, too, want competition in this space. Unfortunately, Tizen got some bad press this week: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/04/samsungs-tizen-is-ri.... The past year has not been good for Samsung on so many fronts.

> "Why do you want to turn that off anyway?!?"

This. I can remember asking years ago, back when I had to work on OS X, asking how to turn off that freakin' annoying jumping icon in the system tray that leaped up and down after every successful print job until you dismissed it, just like an excited two-year-old telling you they went potty in the potty chair AGAIN, "Just like a big kid!" I can't imagine anyone thinking that attention-grabbing, ADHD-exacerbating, flow-destroying behavior was good by design, but was asked, "Why do you want to turn that off anyway?"

It's all good. I just replicated all the work (setting up the account, my forked repo, the change, my pull request) the next day.

"IT...COULD...WORK!!!" - Dr. Frederick Frankenstein

Cool idea. Especially not reinventing wheels but chaining them together instead. Good work.

Not quite. I coincidentally signed up for a GitLab account that very day, at that very time period, to make a minor change to someone else's project. I (1) set up my account, (2) forked their project, (3) made the change, and (4) issued a pull request. Came back the next day and none of that was there, including my forked git repo. I had to do it all over again, and it was clear it was a clean wipeout of everything, because I was allowed to re-register with the exact same userid, etc. I know that is a rare-snowflake event, but the fact I had a repo and had even sent a pull request from it shows they did, in fact, lose some data in git itself.

Am I the only one put off by the bad "s-t" ligatures as being too twee? It may or may not be a good approach, but I stopped reading literally ("Archer" literally) got too annoyed by the distraction of that font face. Edit: I want to downvote myself-my wife's W10 box show no annoying ligatures. My Linux Mint 18/Firefox setup is otherwise. Sorry for the distraction!

That's a great quote. Thanks for that.

"Perhaps a conscious effort to make one think a bit harder about how one writes?"

Yes, this. That looks like one of their goals, and I would say it's a welcome addition. The world has enough platforms for short, terse meme wars already.

Yeah, I was thinking that, too. At the current price point I would gladly pay for about 10 people to get those important to me over to the service without having to count on them paying for it. That seems like one way to help build up the "network effect" yet get past the cheapskates among friends and family. :)

Home-rolled solution using Markdown, pandoc and make.

His "If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth" is still once of the most moving (and cautionary) Sci-Fi short stories ever written. http://hermiene.net/short-stories/if_i_forget_thee.html

Later in the wiki article: "Wagner operates his various business interests from a holding company called Bright Station. Bright Station has revenues of $50 million and employs 450 staff." Am I the only one who thinks $111,111 in annual revenue per staff member is really low for a supposed tech holding company? The multiplier should be much higher than that (or they're paying slave wages plus stock options to make those numbers work).

And now that comment seems to have disappeared behind an "awaiting moderation" message after it has already been out there four hours. Nice. But the above link still works (for now).

What a great way to stifle dissent - find the people most efficient at spreading it and neutralize them via arrest, National Security Letters or "other means." No wonder the military is funding this. They aren't interested in marketing - they are interested in the control of the flow of information, period.

Use a similar approach, except with Mercurial. It works. :)

Install isn't a link but a span, so you can't tell what it's doing/where it's going by hovering. Hmmm...Feels REALLY spammy, or is it just me?