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I spent '95-'01 using Linux and in '01 switched to OS X. If you do find the UI strange and unintuitive, then I have a few contrasts.

All Linux desktops that I've used look like a cartoon. There's a lot of design theory you can read about but one thing I've never liked with any of the icons is the dark outline and thick lines and over-use of shadows. Still, to this day, even when I tried Elementary, it's not much different. This has been going on for over a decade and it's the accepted look and feel.

Fonts. Granted, Google fonts are avail now, but Mac font rendering just looks better. Linux still, in my mind has not improved much on this. Honestly, I think Helvetica looks great and there's a reason: it's battle tested and has a long, successful history. Linux distros couldn't/didn't want to license Helvetica. Windows made Arial and the rest is history. (ClearType in my mind looks much worse than Linux, so points for Linux there.)

For the Mac terminal, I use it every day and have for a lonnnng time. It's gotten better over the years for sure with tabs and better rendering. I run fish shell in mine and I don't feel like I ever run into any issues with it. I'm not sure what all the hubub is about Terminal.

As for key layouts, Windows is similar. A Windows key where the Mac command key. I use a wireless Microsoft split kbd at work and it works fine with my Mac. I use my Apple keyboard on Linux servers sometimes and I don't get lost in some dark place trying to type my way out to no avail.

ALL my servers are CentOS. I never have any problems shelling in, using vi, getting work done. This has never been an issue for me. And frankly, I dunno why it would be. The Mac Terminal has never blocked me on these things.

I spent a lot of time with Slackware, Redhat/Fedora, Gentoo, and FreeBSD on the desktop. I think Linux is great, but I'm just over fuckin around with things. I wanna work, read/post the web a little, and then have a life. It's awesome if you have and want to spend the time compiling your kernel - I did that and I'm glad I did years ago. But I think after a while, endless configuration becomes old.

macOS is not perfect and I'm actually waiting for the 'Snow Leopard' bug fix release that hasn't happened in a long time. I'm not sure what's going to happen with macOS over the coming years. For me, it hasn't gotten so bad that it's unbearable. I do dislike A LOT the stupid animations for desktop switching. The fact I have to find a utility that disables that (for anyone looking for this it's called TotalSpaces) is moronic. But overall, I've been fine with each upgrade.

The UI is rock solid for me and stuff pretty much just always works. I might be one of those outliers that doesn't experience backups not restoring or iCloud completely dissolving people's music libraries. Dunno..

To each his own I guess. I'm not super excited about some Apple releases this year, but I think there's a lot of drama queens whining about things that don't matter much. And only Apple gets this type of attention. We'll see what next year brings.

Hah, this is easy. (This is a stretch of my dumb decisions from 2003-2013)

1. Decided not to work on a company with a good friend. Friend grew the company successfully, isn't involved in the day-to-day anymore, he's worth millions and is trying to think of what he wants to do next. I would have been a co-founder. All this because I didn't think we would work together well, which might have been true, but I'll never know.

2. I walked away from an interview (before interviews became 500% harder by having to know all the latest algos off the top of my head) where a guy told me he wanted to make all their Rails developers millionaires in the next year. I would have learned a lot from these guys because they were building and hyper-growing 'community' sites once every few months. The company sold to Monster.com for $400m a year later.

3. Walked away from another company (a consulting company) where I was one of the top Rails guys - I helped them build their first Rails project (they were mostly a .Net & Java shop before). Super smart and stable team, I was offered a Sr. position and profit sharing. They ended up incubating a few successful Google ventures. My good friend in the company, after a lot of years of making good connections and stockpiling away cash, went on to found a company that Google and other big names backed.

4. I walked away, after a successful contract, from a design company I had worked with on multiple occasions. I had friends there and I was well regarded as a smart developer. They 'only' offered me a Sr. position (I wanted a Dir. of Technology role). A year later, facebook bought the entire company and some of the js devs I worked with went on to create React and Flux...

I spent about a decade working on my own startups with CEO's that either (this affected all 4 of the examples above):

* Didn't understand technology at all

* Were just fuck ups that misused funds and wanted to shoestring years of product development for no reason

* Couldn't decide on how to grow a team to build a sustainable product

Of course, my startups all failed and I never learned or figured out why until lately. I'm probably in the rule of the majority of businesses failing.

So, what have I learned then?

1. Fail before you have a family or even a significant other. Failure and family are a bad mix and you will have less and less time to try to fix things, if you can.

2. Learn from others first. I'm fine with pursuing an idea, but see how others fail and succeed before you step out on your own. You'll be glad you did.

3. If someone promises you they're going to exit or you see some momentum with the team/product, spend a year with them and see what happens. Or even 6 months. Life is short, but a year goes by quickly. If you can get some win out of a year and this allows you up to be more financially 'free', do it! Once you can own your time, then the game completely changes.

4. Be true to yourself about who you really are. Be responsible for your decisions and get organized about your life. Don't float (for too long). Act with purpose and don't forget that discipline coupled with action is the most powerful thing you can be/do in regards to business (I think).

5. Pay yourself first. Just google this and you'll see why it's smart.

Hah, these are great, thanks for posting.

I agree with the OP and have also seen it over the years. I had and ex that got her urban planning degree from Columbia and worked for NYC planning dept. I learned alot from her degree via osmosis.

There is an overarching theme here though that doesn't just permeate things like transportation, but frankly, many aspects of city residence: ivory tower power grabs. The political system here is broken in my mind and like the op said, controlled by these little groups of, really, anti-progress people. Look no further than transportation and education.

Not to change the subject, but we're going through the 'school lottery' now for our first child and it's fucking ridiculous. We're touring 15 schools and have talked to people that have said "you need at least 30 so they know you're serious..."! We live 3 blocks from one of the best schools in the city and probably won't get in. Hacks that people richer than us are doing? Move across town to increase your chances of getting into the school 3 blocks from us!

I first moved to SF in the 90's from southern california and it was amazing. Mostly because I came to a 'real' city. But, many things have not changed much. Homeless is worse than ever, I never knew how shitty the school situation was, transportation still sub-par, police brutality about the same but more documented.

I've also lived in NYC and Chicago, traveled all over the world and have seen how real big cities work. I've never seen a subway in Japan, the UK, Paris, Berlin, even India, that is like ours. Bart passengers deal with a lot of transient people in the cars directly, while muni has that plus some of the stations are so awful that you get close to puking because of the filth. Powell muni exit at 4th is fucked up.

Honestly, I have no idea what will fix any of this. Every mayor since I moved here has had a homeless program and it hasn't done much. I think rent control has backfired, permitting process and nimbyism are still a joke, edu system is ridiculous, etc. It seems like there are these 'educated' people that love experimenting with ideas that have no basis in reality.

I never used to really get why families would leave. "Who would leave the city?!" But, once you get trapped in any of these things, it's a grind. And nobody cares much.

There are a lot of great things about the city and I have a lot of history here, but it's only been in the last few years that I seriously thought about leaving. I have a good friend that's lived in the east bay for over a decade now (they bought their house when it was _only_ $700k). We would get into heated discussions about suburbia vs. the city and I'd always defend the virtues of the city. My spiky ideals have been ground down to nubs and now it's just like, get me past the everyday garbage to work and back home.

So now I ask myself, do I really want to raise a family in a place where high minded idealism rules over common sense and reality? Or do we flee like countless others?

I have both as well and the Mirra 2, in my mind, is the way to go. For me, the Aeron has the edge of the seat part where the back of my thighs rest and it starts getting uncomfortable after 15 mins. The Mirra doesn't have this issue. The Mirra back also hugs my shoulder blades a little better. The plastic back of my Mirra doesn't bother me vs. the Aeron mesh.

I would recommend the Mirra for anyone looking at Aeron. They're usually cheaper too. I got my Mirra on Amazon for around $600 which the Aeron was going for, I think at the time, around $900.

Indie Hackers (http://indiehackers.com) also has some great projects earning over $1k/mo on it. It's been on the front page of HN multiple times.

I don't get why this is such an issue. I understand the sheer numbers of people that use fb and get their 'news' from it, but it amazes me that people are shocked that fb censors the content.

Facebook never claimed to be a news organization nor part of the 5th estate (which, pretty much doesn't exist). So that being the case, I would never expect fb to be a partner for democracy.

Just because some recent revolutions were helped by fb and twitter doesn't mean that these for profit corporations are for freedom of expression and 1st amendment rights.

People need to remember this whenever they post something on these sites. Especially since they outright claim to own the content (last time I checked).

Yah, it does work well. I do a lot with my watch.

* Morning alarm clock (buzzes me instead of noise - key when I sleep with my kids) * Heartrate tracking (all day long across multiple things - biking, walking, resting, etc) * Sleep tracking * Notifications (small part, but useful) * Calorie burn * Sunrise/sunset * Temp outdoors * And of course, date/time

I have a complication setup that delivers 6 stats quickly. Biggest feature for me. For quantifying my data, the watch has been really good for me. I'll prob go series 2 so I can go all in for water activities.

Looking forward in the future to measuring even more.

I've had this debate with my wife before. She absolutely pummels her MB Pro from 2012. Keys are breaking, she has a gazillion windows open (including vmware since she runs an old quickbooks on windows), desktop completely covered in photos of family/kids. I look at how she 'works' and I think at first 'wow, what a mess'. But then it's clear it's totally just a lower rung tool for her business - she is not in the tech space.

For anyone who doesn't program or create all day on a screen, it's hard for them to empathize. But all these things are real to me. Knocking 30s off a build can knock off 10-30 mins of wait time a day. It all adds up. On a scale from 1 - 10 (10 being an ultra maxed out everything machine) I usually hover around 7-8. I know after all these years that my concentration and execution are the most important thing I have and I don't need workspace things to get in the way of that.

Sadly, headphones are a part of that now. ;-(

I have a friend like this. I've been in bands in the past and worked in (even built my own) studios. I seen and partaken the 24/96 vs. 16/48 debate (spoiler: that only matters in the studio). I've worked with high end mics, pres, dacs, boards, tape, etc.

The big thing we tangle on is always digital vs. analog. Oh boy.... Zzzzz... I've cut tape and editing on analog sucks. Noise on analog is not ideal. Compression and 'natural' bottom end warmth are nice. But that's where it stops. Most of (all of?) these things can now be simulated by plugins. We don't even have to say digital has won because it's so obvious. Analog is there for the minority purists.

This debate has between us has taken many hours over many years. Oh yah, let's not forget vinyl too!..

I've had to recently redirect the argument to musicianmanship, which I feel is really where the rubber meets the road. It all starts at the source. If your source sucks, then you'll have some work to do to fix it. Stuff like autotune, sample triggers, etc. In this way, analog is better as it will demand more of the musician's performance. Hard to swap out the kick drum on analog.

All in all, I personally don't think any non-studio experienced audiophiles would know if something was recorded digitally vs. analog. There are so many things you can do now and unless you know those studio 'tricks', you can't even tell. This has already been the case since the 90's I think. Everything can pretty much be simulated, processed, filtered, chopped, moved, etc.

One great resource for all this is Ken Andrews. Look him up. He's got a lot of great stories and insight on recording.

My advice to my friend: learn the tools and use what make sense artistically. But debate for theory's sake is pointless in my mind.

I don't think it's that much harder, unfortunately. They just take a million or so of tax payer money and hire a firm to crack the target. I'm not sure they're too worried about the constitution, sadly. Why they need to have a 'discussion' about it, I'm not sure.

I have a 12" Macbook and an 11" Air and I think anything smaller than the Air is not really practical. I suppose if I rotate my 6s+ I could get something super tiny, then just attach a bluetooth keyboard..

But, I just don't see the point of going that small. The Macbook and Air are really light - I don't notice them much at all if I out them in my backpack (a 15" is definitely noticeable).

Anyway, it just seems like a thought exercise.

Good luck! Truly. I think if you can't find a place that wants you, then you make your own. Or at least try. Something will work out for you, I'm sure of it. Key is to not quit, to not stop, and to always look for another way. :)

I have Sonic FTTN 50Mbps service. I've used Sonic over the years and have always enjoyed their service and their mission as a business. I've lapsed a few times because their DSL in some places in SF is just crap, but that's because of AT&T and distance to the closest CO.

Where I'm at now (prob less than a mile from their fiber service, sigh..), when we first moved in, we got Comcast. Of course, the Comcast service was all over the place. Some days 1Mb, some 100Mb (which I never signed up for, but just received), some 45Mb (what I signed up for). As usual, I had man techs come out to try to fix things and of course, none did and all of them had a different excuse as to why things didn't work. So many support people promised me good service but I never got it.

Fed up, I saw I could get Sonic FTTN and it's been rock solid for over a year. It's never gone down and just works - as I would expect. It's too bad we don't have more ISPs like them because if we did, access would be a totally different experience.

Not really. It's called the Enterprise Program. While this is for 'enterprise', you can also use it - and Apple allows this - to distribute _outside the App Store_.

A few years ago I built a nice sms delivery system for installing an app I was working on. Text anything to our number (we had multiple numbers thru twilio based on market). App replies back with a download link. Install. It worked perfect and we could actually tell who requested the app and who installed it. We had around 75k users installing. Not millions, of course, but still, not too bad.

So, it is possible. We also did not have to wait for any approval process. And when the app started up, it checked for an updated version on our system. If there was, the app would then prompt the user to start the update. It was a very nice flow and we had many comments from users telling us that 'it just worked'.

This was app pre-iOS 7 and automatic app update, but it's still being used today.

Author is spot on. My son and daughter have about 2 and 4 years to go before I probably intro them to programming. When I do, it's going to be a C64 all the way. And a real one. With a real old school monitor and a luxury a didn't have for about a year or two: a floppy drive.

I've get a lot of the start with JS comments. But that would be the last thing I do. As a child learning, you need to remove the complexities and distractions of a modern system. Windows, browsers, edit js in one app, run it in another, use a mouse, open the js debug console, etc. Just wayyy to much stuff for a young mind to try to focus on.

Don't get me wrong, they probably _can_ learn js, but after decades of programming in all kinds of different languages, just because js is the latest fashion, doesn't mean I'd every try to teach it to a kid. No way.

BASIC, on the other hand, was created _for beginners_. I learned A LOT over the years when I was using BASIC. I also had magazines (COMPUTE! & Gazette) and books that helped immensely. I was just thinking yesterday actually, that it was awesome having the C64 Programmers Ref Guide that had the machine schematics and port pin outs in it!! You'll never get that for a Mac or iPhone nowadays (and these sorts of things usually only show up on 'hacker' sites). This was a book put you closer to the hardware so you could more easily understand what PEEK and POKE really did. :D

I'm _really_ looking forward to the instruction days. The C64 was so popular for a reason: it was powerful & simple. This is how I want to introduce my kids to programming. They'll figure out Ruby, JS, C and things (maybe 8-bit assembly too!) later.

I loved my C64 (still do) and I hope that will rub off on them. Can't wait.

Hah, how true..

Exactly. The 3rd party will hold this method (until patched some day in the future possibly) and they FBI will keep coming back, paying an initial seed round equivalent for possibly no usable data, claiming the same 'defense'.

This just shows typical contempt for the public in general. Why should we be surprised?

This is called a drip campaign my friend. Marketing 101. I expect along the way there will be a few emails that contain some info to buy something - a class, another lesson, book, etc. nothing wrong with this and I think it's a nice way for devs to offset time costs associated with free.

Now, for building RESTful JSON apps, it's actually not hard at all. Your two friends in this are:

NSJSONSerialization NSURLSession

Apple has made a lot of progress in his area and, from my experience, where people go wrong is using some other library to handle these tasks. Granted, other libraties are there because someone saw an opportunity to 'simplify' things, but more times than not, they're abused and misused.

My advice, get to know the above classes and separae your your networking and model de/serializing into other parts of your app architecture. Do not shove all this oun a view controller!

Think about clean separation and you'll benefit later down the road. I've built about a dozen json api's and iOS app counterparts and this approach has always worked well.

Good luck!

Sure, but the reality is that none of the ISPs are going to lay any new cable. Don't forget, all of the original copper laid was financed by the govt back in the 50's/60's. For fiber, unless there's a real need for an ISP to add more, they're just not going to do it. There is absolutely no incentive.

I am not a believer in big or overbearing govt per se, but I feel like, just like power or water, Internet is a utility and it needs to be regulated - hard. The future depends on it. Imagine you're a startup and between 2p-6p you don't have any or super stoddy internet access. Kinda like Comcast from 5p-11p actually..

Anyway, It's pathetic really; we invented the f-ing internet and other countries completely surpass our speeds and ability to access. My brother teases me all the time because he has gigabit in Japan (in the early 00's, he had 100 Mb).

Step outside the US and you realize our options are a total joke.

(Edits: spelling)

The bigger question though is who is this a badge of honor for and why?

For startups, it's sexy for founders to say they cranked 16 hour days and they had a great exit. They won! Sure, they may have won, but on the other side of that is that they've ground their employees into the ground. Families and friends be damned. Seriously. There's nothing worse having a family that's second to an unsustainable and poisonous work ethic. Talk about breaking down the American family, this is one perfect example; a society that values monetary success over raising the next generation...

I went through one of these and I'll never do it again. I've worked for a lot of startups too and it's only good for investors and founders that get a good exit. It's never good for the employee, even if there is a good exit. For them, the damage is done because they see "wow, we succeeded, this must be the way to do it".

I was close to leaving tech - something I've done for decades - because of this attitude that is really ingrained in tech now. It's a cancer, really. I couldn't agree with the article more and hope people really take it to heart.

The overall gist of this article to me seems like a similar SF argument: let's keep the city the way it was. Let's not build more housing, let's not build up, let's not move forward into the future.

Obviously, this isn't how a city moves forward and grows.

Peskin is not necessarily a bad guy.. I agree with him on some things, but neighborhood preservation is not one. It's easy to single out tech in all of this, but the prior non-tech landlords have a lot of blame on this. Sure, market dictates pricing and the large tech community has been willing to let the prices go up. (Mind you, this isn't just real estate, but also food.) But, I feel like, as someone in tech not able to afford buying _today_, I'd rather have the city moving forward vs. stagnant just so another group of people can live here.

I appreciate diversity and my wife and I have talked for a few years of where else we should move to. Portland? Seattle? Austin? But, SF seems to have the right mix of diversity (more or less), compact city-ness (like NYC), close to a lot of great outdoors, and a lot of other things. We just keep coming back to SF has pretty much all the boxes checked off for us, even if it's in this crazy inflated market right now.

Nothing lasts forever and we will probably get some kind of housing correction. But look a look back historically will show that you can't buy a house anywhere (at least in the bay area) for $20k, like our parents did. To think that things should stand still and stay fixed is just ignoring how reality works for cities that keep growing..

Maybe this will all go away once we have no need for money like in Star Trek. But today, this isn't the case.

Ironic when you think about how this country was founded on tax revolt. Seems like a completely silly law.

Also, even if you can bid, cash is king. So, not only is everyone driving the prices up, but the winners are usually all cash. I don't know anyone who has a few million in the bank, ready to move on property. Sadly..

Let us direct our attention to the superhero Mike Ash and his latest post on secure enclave. https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2016-02-19-what-is-...

Honestly, this is really the shit..

Yup, I'll third that. DSL is hampered by the fact it's AT&T. If you can get 'pure' Sonic fiber, revel in that. Aside from their great customer service, they are also pro-privacy and no caps! We have FTTN service and I sync a lot of data to and from work. It's nice to know that they don't play that lame game of limits.

It'll be interesting to see how Google works out. Can't recommend Somic enough tho.

Rails biggest weakness is Ruby?!?! The only reason Rails came about (so says DHH) is because of Ruby and its expressiveness as a dynamic language.

Granted, we're in Swift mode here and it's static typing, protocols, generics, and closures all the way. I'm fine with this (I write in Swift everyday) but Ruby is a great language as well - I love them both.

I think there's a place for both static and dynamic typed languages and I'm not going to throw away Ruby just because Swift is more "correct" with typing.

Having worked on my own Swift web framework for the past few months, and Rails for years, we're not even close to approaching Rails feature set. Rails has been in active development for over a decade and it's going to take a while for a Swift framework to make some inroads.

I think one thing that needs to be said is Mike Ash is just one of those super humans where Apple & code are concerned.

I've been reading Friday Q&A for years and the posts never cease to amaze. He doesn't politicize or whine about anything. It's always thoughts from a teacher, a master.

I wish there was more in the tech world like him. Thanks Mike!

Yup, thank you. :)

I like Github, but I've had Gitlab repos for a few years because they allow me to keep some projects "off the books" without having to pay. So, thank you again for this.

I've also used your CI, which is great. I've recommended it to a few clients, so thank you again!

You guys have done a great job for the community and I wish you all the best!

Correct. I'm working with a flask app now and the tendency was to have a few files with thousands of lines of code - this encapsulates about 25-30 api endpoints along with all the necessary imports, etc at the top. Including sql and the usual suspects.

I think flask is great, like sinatra, for small apps. But I would never consider it for 'big' apps that represented more than half a dozen api endpoints and some sort of in-depth feature set.

Above that size, unless it's super simple, you'll pay the price in tech debt. While our api has worked up until this point, we're gonna scrap it for a Rails api-only app because we need convention + orm + other things to scale not just the app, but the team. There probably is a way to do this in flask, but 95% of our team are Rails guys, so it just makes more sense to go with q company wide maintainable system vs. what's there now.

For small/single devs working on small projects, flask (and sinatra) are great.

Wasn't this the initial goal of app.net? I know it's morphed somewhat now, but, if I remember correctly, it came about as a direct response to some Twitter developer in-niceness.