htp

Not quite geared toward photography, but your description reminded me of http://layervault.com .

I had some trouble finding where the sort options went, so for anyone else who's struggling to find them:

Go to View => View Options… (or hit Command-J).

How would this differ from a playlist and/or Up Next?

Just wanted to say thanks for a calm, level-headed, and informative response.

Another unexpected use of GitHub:

https://github.com/norinori2222/boyfriend_require/

"Cant" and "can't" are different words. If you're going to be a Grammar Nazi, be a good one.

(More importantly, couldn't you have done more to add to the discussion than correct the grammar of a person whose primary language probably isn't English? Why did Linux get better hardware support than BSD? Why did it take until now for FreeBSD to get an installation process accessible to mere mortals?)

I'd wager "Whoever told you that, lied to you" was meant to say "Whoever told you 'you have to be artistic to be creative' lied to you."

Yes, but instead of being a giant, monolithic wall of pain, it's now broken down into much less daunting chunks of text.

I caught myself actively reading the agreement like it was a blog post. The questions helped frame what I was about to read, and made the answers feel a lot more accessible.

(It also helps that the answers seem like they were written for normal people to understand. They're a little wordy, but in a thorough-yet-not-quite-legalese-y kind of way.)

Er, I think you meant http://www.backblaze.com/ . The link you've got goes to a somewhat NSFW site.

For some reason, I've got it in my head that everything I show the world must succeed.

A project where failure is the goal sounds liberating.

Looks like shipping things (good or otherwise) is the name of the game here.

Thanks for your comments!

Thank you for this.

  looking for validation.

In a way. I'm not here to fish for compliments or reassurances, and if my post conveyed that, that wasn't what I intended to do.

I'm looking for ways other HNers have internalized that they're (at least partially) responsible for their successes; how to "self-validate" rather than trust and rely on external validation.

  This might not be the most delicate thing to say, but
  maybe you feel this way because it's true?

A cold, hard slap from reality wouldn't be the worst thing to receive- it'd at least give me a point of reference to define my abilities.

  Try a controlled experiment. Do something on your own,
  so you know it's all you.

This is so bewilderingly straightforward I can't believe I didn't think of it sooner. Thanks.

As of about 8:20 PST / 4:20 GMT, the page has been updated to include information about the earthquake in Japan.

I feel the same way you do, but I'll hazard a boilerplate "don't feed the trolls" statement here.

It's clear emotions are running a bit high in this part of the comments.

I didn't down- or up-vote you, but my immediate response to your comment was: "is this really the time to worry about what HN is or isn't turning into?"

If your downvoters think the same way I do, they're downvoting because they don't think right now is a good time to worry about the future of HN, no matter what the guidelines say. This isn't to say your opinion is invalid (it's a perfectly legitimate thing to worry about); it just seems ill-timed in the face of potentially catastrophic disaster, and downvoting is an easy way to express disapproval.

These are things you can't do yet. The yet is the important part- never forget that.

I read somewhere above that you spend a lot of time fixing bugs. Congratulations! You're already a programmer!

To move onward and upward, the biggest thing you can do is change your mindset from "how do I make this problem go away?" to "what is causing this problem to happen?" At the end of the day, you'll still get those bugs fixed, but you'll have a deeper understanding of the things that led to them in the first place.

Once you know that, breaking things down and shuffling ideas becomes second nature.

OP, if you make it down here: the overwhelming majority of my programming ability comes from doing variations of what the above post says.

I didn't get much education from university, except for the occasional nagging feeling of "I think I covered this in a class once". That usually turns into a Google spree, where I re-teach myself whatever concept I almost-remembered.

  You are stuck being a cargo-cult architecture-astronaut because you are stuck in a
  language that exemplifies and encourages it. ROR and python, while perfectly
  good in themselves, will allow you to stay there.

I'd abstract one step up, and suggest it's the environment that's to blame instead of the tools.

At a previous company, I found that there was a not-insignificant number of my coworkers were seemingly-incapable. I originally blamed the people for their lack of skill; later, I moved on to faulting the tools (Java / Oracle / a less-than-stellar in-house "framework"), but eventually realized the problem was with the environment, and nothing else.

A couple of the biggest contributing factors:

* A near-constant state of panic ("is it done yet?")

* The implicit requirement that all decisions had to be routed through at least two stakeholders for confirmation

* Old guard programmers enforcing that things be done the One True Way, despite any evidence that alternate approaches would be better

Early-to-medium-ish into my time at that company, I stuck to my guns and did what I felt was right. I wound up writing toy apps in Rails and Node that changed how the company managed its production and release pipelines. Toward the end, I would constantly question my skills and abilities--despite the success of my toy apps--because I'd been conditioned to do so. I settled into a rut-of-despair very similar to the OP's for a few months.

I quit when I realized what my environment was doing to me.

I didn't get a personal office, but barring a handful of individuals, nobody did. Everyone worked in shared space. No cubes though- just adjoining desks, grouped by department.

Everyone got free snacks and drinks, and free lunches delivered to the office on Fridays. There wasn't an on-site gym, but the company paid for memberships to a local gym. There was also the beginning of a game room with a ping-pong table, a foosball table, and a dartboard.

The perks were by no means Google-scale, but they were nice nonetheless.

Speaking as a former straight-to-EE-out-of-college employee:

I didn't experience any of the "not very nice"-ness you're referring to- my coworkers there were and are actually really nice folks.

I did, however, leave because of burnout.

If you were looking for help with all of this, what would you be looking for?