iheartpotatoes

I just bought your book and am excited to read it. I've fantasized about doing exactly this, but in South America. Twice I almost did it, and twice I backed out because I didn't know how to start. You might get me over the third hump!

"If I make more money there is not someone else losing."

Actually, that's exactly how it works: we can't both own the same dollar. Duh.

Isn't this a bit like saying you just created an nth-order polynomial regresion for any set of points x/y that someone hands you? They are essentially the same amount of parameters, and both can only approximate one function. So.... no kidding?

VERY COOL! So many questions:

Do you work on the road or take off years at a time?

Are you armed, or do you just avoid central conflict areas?

I take it no family? (hence the 'solo' bit) or are they undersganding?

I build boats.

You are confusing so many things in your comment, that it is hard to decide where to start. I'll pick one.

> planned obsolescence

It amazes me that people keep using this term -- which was associated with washing machines in the 1940's -- to rant about buggy software and engineering improvements.

Stop perpetuating the myth. There is zero truth to it. (And before you say it: Slowing down older phones to account for battery decay and balance battery life is intentional and it PROLONGS the device ... exactly the opposite of planned obsolecense).

Apple does NOT plan to make your devices obsolete. I use an Ipod Mini from 2004 when I work out at the gym. It is 15 years old and works FINE. My iPhone 7 crashes weekly. Prior to that I used an iPhone 4 for six years until I kicked it down a storm drain. (Long story.)

> software bloat

OK. Two. This is due to technoculture determining how technology can be used. New features are added before old features are optimized, and software bloats and breaks. This is a result of pushing the boundaries of tech. Some features will survive the evolution, some will not. But it is not intentional, it is a side effect of insanely rapid development and productization due to customer demand.

No one has a gun to your head making you buy they latest tech. As long as people demand the latest and greatest, the industry will rush to provide. This is a consequence of accelerated innovation.

I have an iPhone 7 and the Phone app periodically freezes requiring a reboot. Let that sink in: the primary function of the phone does not work. And I switched to Apple after too many Android issues turned me off completely.

You think we're going to nail folding screens any time soon?

EXACTLY. I remember us engineers getting 0% raises for years in the mid 2000's when I worked at the Evil-i. Managers had to have meetings to explain to us it was only temporary due to the bubble bursting (options from '97 were underwater until practically 2011). And what, they throw a few $k at us and that's supposed to make up for it? Glad I got out of that toxic shithole. My peers who left in the 90's tried to encourage me to leave, but I thought I'd be stable and loyal. I remember around 1990-91 when former employees who had been "wrongfully terminated" were protesting, and I was a just some mid-20something laughing at them for being slackers. Joke's on me, they were dead right.

The name tho...

As someone who has converted (symmetric) multithreaded apps to embedded, seeing POSIX pthread support excites me.

Here's an easier answer: eat real food, not to much, mostly vegetables. Happy mr/mrs practically extreme lib?

You've just played the no true scotsman on me. Well done!

It's a pretty easy choice for me: I literally eat no food with added chemicals. I simply don't know what is good and what is bad because I've given up following research and meta-studies. There is literally no way to be informed, even if I had a PhD and spent a lifetime studying nutrition and the relevant sciences.

Know what the easy answer is? I'm vegan. I literally eat nothing with added preservatives or chemicals. Nothing. Except when I got to restaurants every now and then, and I don't know what's in the food I ordered. But it isn't 12 meals a year that change you, it is 1,000 meals a year.

It is trivial for me to bypass the good/bad chemical debate.

That's me!

Why?

So many more titles are on DVD than streaming. Many many more.

Try watching anything by Rainer Fassbinder on streaming: does not exist, but are on DVD. But that number is dropping due to licensing issues, just like streaming. My DVD queue has movies saved in "unknown" that I've actually SEEN from Netflix back in 2002 when I first subscribed.

Examples of DVDs from Netflix ca. 2002-2005 that I watched which no longer exist:

Lumiere and Company

The Third Man

The House that Dripped Blood

Lies

Crimes of Passion

Sadly my "unknown availability" list is growing.

I didn't follow the extension workaround. Won't google block that as well, or are the different rules for extensions?

Also, thanks for pushing on them. I've seen numbers posts on HN recently about the opaque walls folks encounter on Google, Amazon and Facebook property monopolies. This is just another great example. Would it make sense to file this with the EFF? Someone has to be collecting all of these issues for the impending class-action suit?

A tiny bit misleading: yes it was a teardown, but I was hoping we'd see a discussion of the circuits, like the guy that built the analog video game console a few weeks ago. Still cool tho.

Right. But there's a difference between drinking a glass of water and glass of bleach. You are claiming they are equivalent.

There's something called "context" in reading comprehension, it is when words take on the meaning relevant to the discussion. In this case, "chemicals" is shorthand for "bad chemicals." I don't understand why so many people fail to understand this and have to make this inane, childish observation that in fact, everything is a chemical. We know already.

These are very hard businesses to run.

Pubs have to deal with liquor licenses, rowdy clients, high staff turnover, and very high rents to be anywhere other than a dive.

Bakeries have extremely high turnover, razor thin margins, expensive equipment, large kitchen, odd hours, and significant hours

Gas stations are all franchises. It is notoriously difficult to make money on a franchise (e.g., you might make 30 or 40k a year take home) and there are huge lists of things that a franchisee can be penalized for. Plus you are hiring the least educated staff on earth and have to deal with all that shit.

Compared to white collar work, which can pay 4-8x what you'd make doing any one of these, for a fraction of the headache.

Doesn't really make sense to me that "cat <jpg>" should render the bitmap to the screen. 'cat' is a concatenation tool. 'cat'ing two JPEGs together isn't the same as 'cat'ing two text files. So why? Use another tool, don't break the idiom.

"I can go home and play a space marine with my friends, or build castles, or ride dragons, or be the last one standing in any number of variations on king of the hill."

Wow. Just: wow.

I am eager to see how a generation that grew up in virtual reality deals with actual reality. So far it ain't lookin' so good.

I love tech startups: Longitude and lattitude have worked fine for centuries (well, ever since clocks became reliable enough, that is!). So let's... disrupt it? ...with something less intuitive? ...and proprietary? Typical VC mentality! Shut these jokers down.

Please. You are pretending White Supremacy is this totally benign thing because you are ignoring reality in pursuit of egalitarian ideology. You cannot simply ignore context for the sake of argument.

I volunteer at STEM after school program at a Northern California suburban public school in a very affluent county. Engineers from the local companies work on projects with hacker kids.

It's a pretty dreamy albeit "canned" town, I never lived in a place that nice. Lots of cul de sacs and "mini malls" and "canned fun" places that are very walkable (unlike the poorer suburbs where kids have to cross 8 lanes of traffic to meet at a Shari's).

I noticed that before I show up at 5PM (I get to leave work early two fridays a month, yay!, the kids are sitting around on their phones. And when I leave at 7pm, kids just go home with their parents. First: few of them drive. WTF?! Then the weird part: there's a frigging movieplex down the street with a bunch of restaurants and TWO parks on opposite sides of the main E/W street... and they just ... go home. WTF.

Maybe they are lying to the adults in the room, but the parents claim they go home and text or play computer games all night.

Right? This feels like a foundational article used to build bullshit credentials somewhere else by planting bogus citations that no one will check because they are >1 level deep. Hell, people don't even check 1-level deep citations.

Oh man, I know exactly what you are going through. I had the "3am chest squeezes" for a long time, I'd wake up thinking I should be working harding doing SOMETHING to make SOMETHING happen. And realizing that even if I worked 80 hours a week there were somethings I could not budge. It's like with coding if you put in a lot of effort you can fix things, but with management there is no feedback loop like that. It took me a long time to get used to.

Delegation is necessary but it hard the first few times. It takes a lot of getting used to because very few people are going to do things up to your standards (some will do >= you which is awesome). Note that eventually these feelings went away...until I got promoted and then they came back again: 3am chest squeezes and a sense of "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing again and no matter how hard I work the needle doesn't move."

Over the years I realized this is just a side effect of new challenges with increased responsibility. You (YOU) are a natural problem solver and it takes MONTHS to come up to speed so don't beat yourself up. You will solve the problems and invent your own systems.

Finding mentors is hard, but I found some through Meetup.com of all places (bay area, austin, and portland are my haunts). Note: they're not all older than me, but they have had similar experiences. Mentors can be younger than you. And mostly they don't have specific help because at this level techniques aren't really transferrable from person to person... my startup founder friends just remind me I'm not a phony fuckup. And that matters.

Welcome to being a grown up!!! It'll never be quite as fun as being a 20-something hacking code 80 hours a week for years on end, but there are new things to enjoy with age!!! (Confession: I still write shell scripts to procrastinate because it makes me feel like I've accomplished something.)

Good luck! This sounds cliche, but remember YOU REALLY CAN DO IT, don't set the bar impossibly high. You've got the right attitude with your realization in the sentence to last. Just trust that your knack for problem solving as a coder will cause your brain to inevitably figure out creative solutions to your current problems.

Literally would crunch ice from a big metal cup ALL DAY LONG (walk to the soda fountain in the break room and refill with ice every hour).

I encountered two people like this in my life. It would make me physically ill, like an allergy, but no one else around us complained so I tried to get over it and ended up just working in a lab.

I'm old enough now were it to happen again I'd flood every channel with complaints until we arrived at a compromise, but I was younger then.

When I got my tech job out of college in the 80's I was embarrassed because most of my friends in non-tech (especially finance) had offices with doors that closed. Sometimes nice wooden doors.

It took a lot of getting used to: constant chatter, loud talkers, ice chewers, mouth noises, farting, personal phone calls that were too personal... But I acclimated.

I continued to work in a 9'x9'x (x5' high) cube for 25+ years and the last company I worked for switched to an open floorplan for my last 3 years there.

IT WAS HELL. At least in my small cube I had some sense of privacy, but now everyone could see my screen, or see me having to deal with various biological discomforts, it just sucked. I'm glad I became a contractor 5 years ago because it is great to be out of that mess. Hopefully I'll never have to return.

You can't overstate the importance of a specification. It is the most loathed thing to write, like unit tests, but in the end is essential. I think the OP romanticizes a bit: K&R C had a spec, a very very very loose spec. It took ANSI a decade to put some meat on it. Early C compilers weren't much help: Sparc had SystemV and AIX had POSIX which are OS specs but still defined C behavior in their compilers, and it made life so much easier in the early 90's when they converged on Gnu.

My favorite part of the article is the footnote. We really need to stop referring to C/C++ as "roughly the same" because they are so so so radically different.

I realize there is a need to stratify engineers based on performance in order compensate accordingly each year during raise time, but having been in the tech ranking system for ~30 years, it turns my stomach. About 40% of the time the people promoted are really not that good, they just waited long enough or knew the right people (or were in the right division that needed to boost its clout so it promoted everyone arbitrarily). This whole "special name" business is so very misleading. You want the title of famous engineer? open source your work, let us see what you made. The masses will decide.

(And before you say "sour grapes", at my last job i rejected promotion to principal because I like my work/life balance, but eventually dropped in ranking because I refused to work 60+ hours a week in my 50's.)

"Best practices" is a bit of a red herring. Every company differs considerably, and online blogospher experts throw the term around as sort of a gatekeep-y way to keep the order ("What do you mean you don't know (arbitrary) best practices??!?!") The only way to learn best practices is to work at multiple companies / projects.

For example, I worked at Intel, Lucent, Apple and DEC. Each one had significantly different "best practices". When I look at how we did code there vs something like, oh, the GNU project, they were WORLDS apart. So even if you made the claim, you'd still fall short from the new environment.

If you're lucky, eventually YOU'LL be the one defining best practices.

Caldo de Tomato!!!

https://www.amazon.com/Knorr-Granulated-Bouillon-Tomato-Chic...

This stuff is essential for good Mexican cooking. Funny that only Chinese food gets a bad rap for MSG when it is far more pervasive.

I expected this to be tongue-in-cheek. Hoo boy was I wrong.