hmbg

This is the key. I'd argue that you can keep a 20k codebase in your head. If the codebase is larger than that, you need to be confident that you can safely ignore the rest of it while working on your piece.

If you need to manually check with the rest of the codebase before making changes to the chunk at hand, you're lost.

Even if technology, or more likely the web, will get to a point where it's good enough, people are notoriously awful at identifying that point when it comes. See old quotes about five computers in the world and whatnot.

I always find it very hard to believe a person saying "we've reached the end now, progress was good up until now, but this is quite enough really".

"Before Google the Internet was more useful" Wow, could not disagree more. It's order of magnitudes easier for me to find a good answer for virtually any question. Not to mention how much better gmail is than mail clients of old. Or google maps, my lord how it has simplified my life.

Google isn't solely responsible for this, but them and other ad-financed companies played a crucial part in building the web as we know it to day. And for me, and everyone I've ever met, the web is a lot more useful today than 15 year ago.

The proper way of playing fast notes on a guitar (with a pick) is alternate picking, up/down/up/down. So a three note per string scale ascension would be dud udu dud udu ... I never learned that. Instead I took the shortcut called economy picking, just picking in the direction the pick moves. The same scale ascension would be dud dud dud dud... (since you move down to the next string). This is also a valid technique, but meant as a compliment and normally learned after mastering alternate picking.

Now, economy picking worked pretty well for me for a while, but I'm starting to feel the disadvantages now (very hard to keep a perfectly even pace, easy to get "stuck" in certain picking patterns, etc.) But now for the life of me I cannot unlearn and relearn.

Far fetched parallel, but it makes me think that he could be right about the math as well.

CoffeeScript has no types. I have no clue why people keep including CoffeeScript when they talk about static type alternatives to JavaScript.

I've just used this to get a solid undo/redo in our WebGL editor. It works amazingly well, and is very performant. However, our backend is not in Javascript, so if I'd want to use it for data transport I'd have to make a compatible python implementation. So I get the point of a standard, so long as it's up to par.

The OP was talking about the current incumbent, and the solution proposed does not work for web applications, since the JSON.stringify in most browsers do not sort keys. Sure, you could implement your own javascript version, but it will be at least a couple of orders of magnitude slower.

I like this idea, and I think it's helped my confidence greatly over the years because of my disparate hobbies (he's a better coder than me, but can he do a backflip?).

I've been pondering lately, if I defined my own decathlon, would I win the world championship? Maybe the state championship at least?

It's not there yet, but we're working hard to make it happen at gootechnologies.com. Main focus is 3D games for now, but we're going to attack 2d in early summer.

Right now you can prepare your scenes and do some basic interaction, but to make a full game you'd export the scenes and code javascript directly against our goo engine.

It's still in private beta, but if you PM I might be able to speed things up.

Our (goo's) idea is to make it easier for game developers to make web based games, so you don't have to be a web developer to get a great browser experience. Still quite early in the process, but I have a good feeling.

Yes, it seems the server was not expecting this kind of attention. Should be fixed now.

I think the point is that writing code on isolated parts without thinking about the overall purpose and architecture of the program leads to bloat, repeated functionality and diverging paradigms/conventions in the same codebase. I agree that's not the traditional definition of spaghetti code, but it's a problem in many large software projects.

Adding that together, well designed code is the foundation of really bad code. That could explain a lot.

That one (and similar guides) really helps. When I started out programming and went to IRC for help people frequently pointed me to those tutorials. When I started to follow the gist of them, I got friendly answers all the time.

This goes both ways: If you're and expert annoyed by this moron who can't even state his question properly, point him to this tutorial and leave it at that.

So it's a no on preparing some in your pressure cooker?

http://what-if.xkcd.com/40/

I'm guessing an automatic ID reader is a lot cheaper than a fingerprint reader. Most long-distance buses around here have them, so you don't have to bring a ticket (just book with your id number).

It might be easier to spoof an ID reader, but I bet it would be hard enough to seriously hamper the second hand market for day passes at least.

Agreed, bad things are bad. I was in pain for 3-4 years in my early twenties due to Bechterew's disease, and it was a thoroughly bad experience. Though still mild compared to what the author describes, it really messed me up, making me angry and depressed. I had a good life before I got sick, and I have a good life now that I have a proper diagnosis and working drugs.

It's fantastic that the author found peace with his pain, but I wouldn't wish chronic pain on my worst enemy, and I definitely wouldn't expect people with chronic pain to view it as a new opportunity.

I really hope your [random bad thing] works out to something not quite as bad. Modern medicine is pretty awesome.

> Bullshit. I didn't do my first startup until I was 32. Stop thinking like that. If you're a programmer, your prime is still 20 years ahead of you. (Believe me, I know.)

I love you a little for that

Without having done much research I also find it easy to imagine that the sedentariness of the paleo-people where, on average, a lot less than of people nowadays.

Some 37 signals outlet had a nice discussion on this. The key in their view was to limit the number of features rather than the quality of said features. Something about thinking of the features you want on a 2D map, and the thickness being the quality, building up your volume of work. To reduce volume you can break off pieces, but you should strive for even (and sufficient) thickness.

Too thin - pump & dump. To big volume - group 2. Small, but thick - good shit.

In the foreseeable future, the form factor of a phone makes it impractical to e.g. strap on your helmet, while the more cubical gopro would be a very impractical handset.

I guess it comes down to how specific expectations you have. I don't plan everything minutely, I just expect it will be a great experience in general, whatever happens. That way I look forward to it, and enjoy thinking about it. But I don't have detailed plans.

Still, if I did, the important thing would be to handle changes of plans well. The absence of plans in it self does not determine happiness for me.

This doesn't work at all for me. I love having expectations. I love looking forward to things.

I'm going on a trip in May, and I expect it to be great. If it sucks, I might be a bit disappointed, but the vacation is a week, and the time I can look forward to it is several months. If the vacation turns out to be great, I'll feel great about it. Would I feel even greater if I had no expectations? Don't know. I really don't think the delta of getting pleasantly surprised outweighs the months of looking forward to the trip.

Being able to accept what you can't change (e.g. being stuck in traffic) without getting overly frustrated is conducive to happiness, no doubt. I'm not sure what it has to do with expectations; if I expect to be stuck in traffic all morning, that doesn't make it more fun when it actually happens.

I'd guess it will work the same as with facebook login. If you have a good reason to get your users private data, you may do so (using facebook, twitter, google+, etc). If you only need a login mechanism, you need to provide an alternative that does not collect user data beyond what's strictly needed for your app.

At least that's what apple's reviewers told me when my app was rejected.

If you did something wrong, and know it, I think it's laudable to own up to it and be nice about it. If you get a free pass, great, if not, well, you deserve it.

The OP was trying to do something right, and got punished for it.

I believe the argument is not that the Quora team should be incarcerated for putting up a wall, but rather that this setup may not be the best way to build a large community and, in the long term, a profitable company.

I get what you're saying. Maybe you could throw in a lower bound of the hue variation of the image as a parameter into the search to find "natural looking" images but with prominent fields of the desired color.

Your second reason is an interesting one. Winning the lottery may be nice, but I don't think it would impact my level of happiness in a big way. The confidence I'd get from selling my company for millions of dollars, that's another thing entirely. That's something I strive for.

It might be correct about the 4 hours. It might also be irrelevant for most people. For most disciplines, accomplishing anything consists of some cognitively very demanding work, and a lot of 'admin'. Some violin players and mathematicians may get by on doing only the hard stuff, but most have to apply for grants, participate in conferences, transcribe/arrange, maintain equipment, etc.

For a startup founder I think this is especially true. A lot of the things you do won't be very cognitively demanding. That doesn't mean you can skip it if you want to get anywhere. It doesn't even mean those 'menial' task create less value in your context than the hardcore 100% concentration parts.

Maybe when you've settled down to a predictable working pattern and managed to configure your environment to cater to all the necessary but trivial tasks (and create enough value in your 4 hours to pay for other people taking care of the rest) you can realize this. I'm not there yet.

Agreed; flashcards have worked quite well for me for learning lots of words. Also for me, vocabulary is normally the limiting factor, while Getting grammar an pronounciation up to a usable level is a lot easier. I guess that differs from individual to individual.

Trying to work with flashcards without a context (Learn the 1000 nost common words!), however, doesn't work at all. The words need to belong in a context with which I'm familiar, such as a book, film, or recurring conversation topic.

My attempt at vocabulary training (shameless plug, you call it): http://vocabulous.net. But that's pretty much only vocabulary, still on the drawing board on the rest of the components.

That said, the most important thing for the next big thing in language learning is that it's fun. Very few users will stick with it on willpower alone. Good thougts on this is at http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com. If I ever get the idea to learn japanese I'd check his stuff out.

I spend most of my public transport time reading books - on my smartphone. That is one of the features I'd miss most if my phone broke.

People are engrossed in their smartphones, but whether they're looking at cat pics or reading Nietzsche, you won't know until you ask.