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kmtrowbron The Reading Obsession

The brain is wired with language. Our inner monologues are most commonly speaking to ourselves using words. Reading is similar to meditation in that it's about YOU controlling your thoughts, putting focus into what you're reading. Additionally, the content is the result of a process: some form of author qualification, editing, formatting, publication took place. It's also intimate: just the author and you (although, this is not necessarily true). But on the whole I suspect there's more integrity on the printed page, less "big money" certainly. In summary, there are lots of reasons why reading deserves a privileged place.

However, if you want to learn something, you gotta go at it from every direction: maybe first of all just try head on, try & fail. Then read books if available, of course, but search online, look for YouTube videos, seek out mentors, and so on. Just like everything else you can only read effectively for so many hours per day.

In the end I can only really speak for myself: reading books feels TO ME like one of the best possible uses of time. You would have to pry the books out of my cold dead hands, etc. So just out of fellow feeling I try to encourage others to read more. But whatever works for you!

kmtrowbron Oliver Burkeman on the flaw with productivity geek thinking

One thing I've noticed is that, there is some value in stepping away from your work, and then coming back. Something like a "palate cleanser" for your mind. I agree that mindless web browsing is mostly a waste of time, but there might be some value in loading a little static into your mind, then coming back at your problem in a new frame of mind. So I try to not beat myself up too much. I have blockers and other things which I do use sometimes. I like https://selfcontrolapp.com/ the best for the Mac.

kmtrowbron Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional

I've lived in San Francisco for 16 years. Yes, I have experienced the homeless problem. I had my car broken into once when I left my backpack inside. I have never been mugged or robbed or had any physical violence occur, or be threatened. We have many lovely friends who live here. San Francisco is under a lot of pressure: population, finance, environmental. It is not a dystopia. It is a community where people build their lives and deserves love and support. I have spent significant amounts of time in New York, Paris and other world cities. I do not find San Francisco to be all that different from New York or Paris.

kmtrowbron MIT Predicted Society Will Collapse in 2040. Research Shows We're on Schedule

Note: the graphs seem to be mislabeled / misordered. The initials in the upper left hand corner are accurate: CT: Comprehensive Technology, SW: Stabilized World, BAU2: Business As Usual.

kmtrowbron $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

This is definitely a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_...

In theory it's energy positive: burning the crop can produce energy.

kmtrowbron Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2021)

Qwoted | Designer | Remote | https://www.qwoted.com

https://fullyvestedllc.recruiterbox.com/jobs/fk0ukzv?source=...

Qwoted improves the quality of news by quickly connecting reporters with the right experts.

Begin by designing features, but ideally we want someone to take charge of the UX of the entire platform and for all types of users. This is a foundational role: we are looking for our first on-staff designer to help us to create a more consistent, premium, and intuitive experience for our users.

Bonus: Be a frontend developer. We are a Bootstrap shop. The application is a hybrid: server-side rendered (via Ruby on Rails) pages form the bulk of it, but we use React to drop in client-side components where a richer experience is necessary.

kmtrowbron Changing how I review code

You should pull the PR you're reviewing down into your IDE and you should spend like, an hour reviewing it carefully and trying to break it. Have a mental checklist: say they renamed a function ... is the file named the same as the function? Did they remember to rename the file? Did they delete parts of the code? Did they remember to delete everything related to that? Often the most challenging parts are negative: it's harder to remove properly than it is to add new things. Say they changed the validation on a model: is this going to work well with the production database? Do we need to write a migration to catch the database up to the new reality of the code? Automated tests are just automated warning flags that give you confidence that the codebase is basically hanging together. You still need to be very careful & thoughtful as you're making changes.

I like to actually reset the branch so I can see all the raw changes in my IDE, this helps me to think it through, in git you can do this via:

git pull feature-branch; git checkout develop; git checkout -b my_initials/feature-branch; git merge feature-branch --squash --no-commit

kmtrowbron Changing how I review code

You should attack it. You should pick it apart and try to break it in as many ways as possible. Of course you should meter your effort depending on how critical the changes are. It amazes me the lackadaisical attitude towards code review. "It will probably be okay" is the worst attitude to have with computer code. It is the most brittle, brutal environment imaginable.

kmtrowbron Engineers can disrupt climate change

Thank you for this. It is much easier for me to imagine that a relatively small expert team, well funded for the task (which is still virtually zero money in comparison to the cost of changing the world economy) could accomplish some feat of geoengineering which, would buy us time. I find this easiest to imagine. In fact, I see this as somewhat likely.

"The feasibility of using an L1 positioned dust cloud as a method of space-based geoengineering" https://pure.strath.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/12714106/Bew...

> In this paper a method of geoengineering is proposed involving clouds of dust placed in the vicinity of the L1 point as an alternative to the use of thin film reflectors ... it is envisaged that the required mass of dust can be extracted from captured near Earth asteroids, whilst stabilized in the required position using the impulse provided by solar collectors or mass drivers used to eject material from the asteroid surface.

kmtrowbron I wrote a children's book / illustrated guide to Apache Kafka

From the review: "The Story About Ping has earned a place on my bookshelf, right between Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, and my dog-eared copy of Dante's seminal work on MS Windows, Inferno. Who can read that passage on the Windows API ("Obscure, profound it was, and nebulous, So that by fixing on its depths my sight -- Nothing whatever I discerned therein."), without shaking their head with deep understanding. But I digress."

kmtrowbron A reading list for new engineering managers

Each minute that you read per day, equals about 1 book per year. So if you read 20 minutes per day, you will read around 20 books per year.

A bookstand such as https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MVBDIPU/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... is helpful to hold the book on the table where you eat. This way whenever you sit down, the book is open and ready to go.

Books are simply a media format like a podcast or a movie. The only difference is that, they are pure language, and it requires a bit more from you to read, than it does to listen or watch. Reading is a bit more "active." However the pure language, and the active reading, makes them really dense and effective for communicating ideas. The "ideas per minute" is very high for books.

If you are a software developer, you're already a writer in some sense. Books therefore I see as very familiar for developers.

kmtrowbron NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

Possession of the private key also allows you to create signatures which prove your ownership, while not revealing your private key. Artworks could be encrypted and only decryptable by such signatures. Client applications could be built to incorporate this.

We have a big problem today in that our information technology's ability to infinitely create copies of digital artifacts seemingly breaks the incentive mechanism to create. I.e. art, news, authorship worked better when you could sell physically sell copies of your album, book, painting. This has resulted in a glut of low quality stuff.

Think of the long term. It would be very good for society to solve this problem. With the distribution abilities of the internet, plus the ability to monetize adding incentives to create, we should see much more, and higher quality art. It would enable more of our economy to move online, which would be good for the environment. I.e. humans are mostly interested in social status. Today we show that status by creating and showing off possessions. But also we need jobs. What will people do for work in 2050? Perhaps we'll still be busily working to climb the pile of monkeys, but now with virtual goods. That's more sustainable than the current situation.

For a hacker & technology forum, Hacker News is remarkably negative on crypto topics. Part is a justifiable reaction against the hype. Another part I think is FOMO. But also, the crypto space is only partially about technology. It is very inefficient technology from a functionality point of view. But from an economic point of view, where the problem is coordinating human activity in the way that money does, I think there's a lot of potential there.

At a certain point there is more risk in being a "permabear" than there is in taking a measured interest. The crypto space has been growing for 12 years ... is it really just a giant fraud at this point? No value, nothing of interest at all?

kmtrowbron Tech’s flight from San Francisco is a relief to some advocates

I agree with you. I have lived in SF since 2005. In my opinion, the problem is that the tech workers are not engaged with the city. They are here for the jobs, and resent the city. The high prices chased the old SFers away, the artists and eccentrics who enjoyed and loved SF ... and the influx was such that there was no opportunity to pass along the culture. More people needed to be shown what was fun and groovy about SF, than the existing population had the capacity to do.

What was neat about SF circa 2005-2012 is that folks in general were happy, excited, and proud to be here. Current day tech workers complain a lot, while contributing little (presence, acceptance, consciousness) to help solve anything: viz the comments on this post. Now they dance upon its grave as they decamp to Montana or Ohio, etc. So in a sense part of the problem is just the mood of the place.

If you ever read Jane Jacobs "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" she describes exactly the cycle we are experiencing: a cheap place is colonized by artists and eccentrics, it becomes cool, this attracts mainstream folks, this makes the place hyped & expensive, the people who made it cool move away, it then becomes lame, eventually it decays, is abandoned, and becomes cheap again.

Be zen, this is all part of the normal life of the world. In the fullness of time, SF will have many more boom and bust cycles.

kmtrowbron Google to end the “top stories carousel” benefit to AMP next spring

I use Apple's parental features to block news websites, because I constantly find myself spending too much time reading junk news on my phone. The AMP feature allowed me to get around this, so instead of going to politico.com (which I blocked), I would instead, go to Google, type Politico, then read the stories via AMP.

So what I ended up doing, was to switch to DuckDuckGo as my phone's primary search engine, and then I blocked google.com from my phone. It seems drastic, but I am a big advocate of taking control of how you use your phone with the parental features, pointed at yourself.

I constantly notice that reading news on my phone makes me feel bad, but I have a hard time stopping. This addiction to the news, is very correlated with times where I am tired or depressed. It reminds me of drinking or smoking cigarettes in that respect.

I keep the PIN in 1Password, but I try to use it rarely and try to "forget" it. So there's an extra step to seeing the sites, looking up the PIN. It's helpful for me, perhaps it seems elaborate.

Because of all this, however, I am glad to see the AMP pages will be going away from Google's search results, although I have found in the interim, that DuckDuckGo actually works pretty well for me.

kmtrowbron San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

Proposition L is not enough tax to take away the economic prosperity.

I am all for building more and more dense housing. I'm not sure how to accomplish it. The way I see it, SF either becomes more dense, or it becomes even more of "a toy city for rich people" & loses all hope of economic diversity.

I grew up in Michigan. I am well aware of how cities can fall into decline. My wife on the other hand grew up in Minnesota. So in my mind, I often compare Detroit with Minneapolis. I think the problem with Detroit is that, it never diversified. It was all auto industry. Minneapolis's economy has several pillars: finance, insurance, healthcare, industry. You can ask yourself whether or not SF is either Detroit or Minneapolis in this example. I tend to think of SF as the New York of the West coast. It has very unique geographical advantages. It will have ups and downs, but will continue to be reborn.

kmtrowbron San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

> the kind of problem that multitudes of cities and regions in the world are desperately trying to recreate

I always tell people that, "it is a nice problem to have." Totally agree with you.

But it is still a problem nonetheless. It's fair enough to raise taxes to try to solve some of the problems which hugely successful businesses have created by displacing people.

Building more housing: YES, more dense housing: YES, programs for homeless people: YES -- on the back of such success, we should have all the money we need to maintain San Francisco.

YES my presence is symptomatic of the problem but, being self-aware, I try to address that by genuinely loving San Francisco, paying more taxes myself when I am asked to do so, participating in local art and culture, and not treating it like a transient place but rather my home and a treasure.

Regarding your statement that I'm trying to block others' advancement: proposition L is about taxing companies whose CEOs make 100-600x more than the median at their company. I am not hurting other regular folks by supporting this, furthermore I'm not even hurting the CEOs (they make 100x more than normal folks). If you benefit from society to the point where you're the leader of such a company, for goodness sake, give a little back gracefully, that's progressive taxation and it has been one of the foundations of our society since 1862.

SF is a liberal, expensive place, because supporting such population density and giving everyone a high quality of life is hard and requires work and money. If we categorically define all taxation as bad, we lose all basis for collective action. America is getting lost in the labyrinth of its own arguments.

kmtrowbron San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

I have lived in San Francisco since 2005. Over the time I've lived here, we've had the opposite problem: lots of highly paid tech firms moving into SF. This has changed the nature of San Francisco in a way that many dislike, including me. I was initially attracted to San Francisco because, it was chill, it was beautiful, and it had a lot of eccentric, really interesting people. Many of our good friends had to leave over the years as SF has becoming more unlivable because rents have gone up so much, and also it's just not as fun, it's crowded and stressed.

I am aware that I am a part of the problem: my wife and I are white, yuppie, dink tech workers. :)

These issues are complex.

I voted yes on Proposition L: the tax is quite small and I think the tech firms are unlikely to leave, meanwhile SF can get more taxes from them (many of them were historically given tax breaks, like Twitter, to move into the mid-market area). If they do leave, I don't see that as a bad thing.

Meanwhile socioeconomic disparity is an oozing sore in San Francisco, we have billionaires rubbing elbows with homeless people every day. Nationally, we've had round after round of tax cuts for the wealthiest, if SF wants to tax excessive income disparity, I say, fair enough.

kmtrowbron Study helps explain why motivation to learn declines with age

There are some evergreen computer topics, like SQL, and bash, design patterns. I focus on those rather than the latest Javascript library. But otherwise, I really want to focus on things which help me give back, communicate, or understand the world better. For example, I am studying Latin because it helps me understand the deep history of humanity, and of languages, and the evolution of thought and consciousness. I practice guitar because I realize that music is all about communication and creating special, authentic experiences. I love to get outside, and I am more interested in geology, botony, and the birds and the animals than I ever was. Because those things are deep and unchanging.

kmtrowbron Are we losing our ability to remember?

Set time aside: for example when eating breakfast, or before bed. Use a timer, set it to at least 20 minutes. Each minute you read per day, equals about 1 book per year. So if you read 20 minutes per day, you will read 20 books per year.

kmtrowbron Foreboding Skies over the SF Bay Area

The rest of the U.S., munching on almonds and avocados, doesn't see the interconnectedness of it all. There's only one earth. California isn't on Mars. There's not really anyone who isn't affected, or anyplace to go to escape.

kmtrowbron Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

I have wanted an app like this for so long -- I love it just hooking into a local folder of markdown files, and making editing and navigating those files better. Little touches like, prepending the date in, sort order format, e.g. 2020-05-27 at the beginning of new files, for things like that, it's like you're reading my brain.

Basically, in order to win me over, you're competing with JetBrains. JetBrains is so good, so wired into my brain, they have good Markdown support, they just miss the little touches such as the easy linking and backlinking.

But primarily when I get into my giant collection of notes, I need to be able to find things very quickly -- this means navigating via keyboard shortcuts and having very rich file management, as well as close integration with the OS.

Things this doesn't have: * Really good keyboard navigation in the file pane, using the arrow keys. For example if I navigate down to a folder, then I want to be able to press the right key to open the folder and navigate into the folder. This doesn't work, so I have to open the folder using the mouse. * It's great that you have the [[quick links]] -- but why not work really hard to make the regular inter-linking work? E.g. if I have [my link](./my-file.md), that should work too, but it doesn't. * Say I find a file, and I want to open it up in the finder. JetBrains has a right-click action to "Open in enclosing folder" and it pops up the Finder. Something like that acknowledges that a tool is a part of an ecosystem & provides an "escape hatch" to interact with the files in another way.

Overall this is the best attempt I have found. I will spend more time with it trying to organize my notes using your excellent inter-linking features.

Git repo of markdown files is the best way I have found to keep notes. A game changing tool to to make that even more awesome will come along one day -- you are on the path. Thank you for your work.

kmtrowbron L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

https://www.businessinsider.com/new-coronavirus-mutates-slow...

Thanks for sharing -- great link, I learned something, thank you.

kmtrowbron L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

It seems like you know more than I do -- that's good news, thank you for correcting me! I was wrong about coronavirus causing all forms of the common cold. They only cause 15%, whereas rhinoviruses as you say, cause 30–80%.

Still, "the Coronavirus" COVID-19 causing virus is an RNA virus correct? Those mutate rapidly & in fact, evading immune systems via rapid evolution, is part of what has allowed RNA viruses to exist & thrive.

This fact of being an RNA virus, might be one reason that making a vaccine is difficult & that long term immunity is in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_virus#Mutation_rates

> Preliminary analysis of COVID-19 indicates that catching it once is likely to confer life-long immunity.

I wasn't able to find this in your links. Regardless, I hope that is the case.

kmtrowbron L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

common cold = caused by coronaviruses, COVID-19 = an uncommonly deadly coronavirus

RNA viruses have a faster mutation rate than DNA viruses.

Chickenpox = DNA virus, Coronavirus = RNA virus.

That Chickenpox is a DNA virus is why, like HIV, it can survive in the body for the long term and re-emerge decades later as shingles. DNA has a double helix which has error-correction and is more stable. However that makes it also physically larger and more complicated. RNA is small, sloppy, and cheap.

Source of all this: Spillover, David Quammen: https://www.amazon.com/Spillover-Animal-Infections-Human-Pan..., it's a good & topical book, a little bleak but good. There's a discussion of exactly this about halfway through the book.

So I do not believe your comment is factually correct. Sadly, the COVID-19 causing virus should have a high potential mutation rate similarly to all RNA viruses.

kmtrowbron A Message to Our Users

I have to believe the aim of these features was to make it easier for Zoom to be installed and to "just work." I'm inclined to give them the benefit of a doubt right now.

kmtrowbron A Message to Our Users

December 2019: 10M daily participants. March 2020: 200M daily participants. A sustained 20x spike in usage. And it’s still working! I think that’s amazing.

Think through this situation — 90,000 schools suddenly using Zoom, children doing their classes. What is most important: option 1) it just works option 2) it’s 100% secure

Imagine you were a member of Zoom's team, would you not be justified in feeling proud right now?

kmtrowbron Show HN: Time Cop – A simple, private, open-source time tracking app

I have used OfficeTime https://www.officetime.net/ for the past 10 years. I use the OSX version. You can sync between multiple clients on different devices, but I don't use this. For me, it's just a very simple, lightweight client app which keeps track of time and has basic reporting and invoicing functionality. I really like it. It is paid though but, it's a one time fee for years and years of use, if that makes sense.

kmtrowbron How to Do Nothing (2017)

I found the article to be really meaningful. Me too, after the 2016 election I found I had to withdraw, because it became more obvious to me that there's something deeply sick about the relationship between the news media, "scaring people," and modern smartphones.

Since the news and social media apps are purposefully built to be addictive, you have to "save yourself from yourself." I now know a lot about filtering technologies for both my desktop and my mobile phone. I have always loved camping and being outdoors, but these days I feel it more as a need: just sitting in the sun and listening to the wind in the trees. That, and reading really good books.

I see her work here as similar to art movements like Dada: I don't know if the world has really "gone mad" but, as the collective behavior of humanity makes less sense, playful silliness might be the best way to express that you have free will, you love folks and want them to be happy, and that in certain ways, you refuse to engage & put more energy, into events and processes that are harmful.

kmtrowbron My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

I speak French and Spanish both fairly well. I learned them both, over the past 20 years. Studied them in college, then lived in Lausanne, Switzerland for a year, then lived in Mexico for a year. It all started off when I had a giant crush on a French exchange student in high school.

> conversations, they terrify me

It is awkward! But that's why you should do it. Because, it doesn't matter. You have to stretch yourself. You have to get comfortable with being bad.

Everyone feels embarrassed and weird when learning a second language. They feel embarrassed that they are bad. But, of course they're bad, they never learned. It doesn't mean you're stupid. In fact, if you can force yourself to do something hard and you can force yourself through the awkwardness in the pursuit of a goal, to me that's a high indicator that you are smarter than average.

For me, learning a second language was so important in terms of the humility (being as a child again, accepting being bad, being the foreigner, being "that one weird guy"), then the recognition that the foreign culture & foreign people are so very similar to my own, and then the ability to see my own culture from another perspective. It's so good for your brain and there are so many fascinating little details, just the poetry of the foreign language and its words ... the way the words echo English in some ways and then in other ways are different.

In a practical sense it would be hard to point to specific things that the foreign language did for me, but in another sense it was one of the deepest, most soul-expanding things I could have done. Gave me courage, a lot of perspective, many friends, and many good times. Anyone who wants more specific advice feel free to write me: good luck, go for it, it's worth it!

kmtrowbron Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2017)

ALPINE DATA | SENIOR JAVASCRIPT DEVELOPER | SAN FRANCISCO | ONSITE, VISA, http://alpinedata.com/

My company is looking to hire a senior Javascript developer to take change of our Backbone.js frontend.

Here are a few of the things I believe we should try to accomplish (I'm looking for someone to have this conversation with):

* Our Backbone codebase is currently located deep within a Rails app, and served with the Rails asset pipeline. I think we should separate the two codebases. The Backbone Javascript codebase could then use be set up with modern tooling such as npm, webpack, etc.

* Some folks have thought we should scrap the Backbone codebase entirely and rebuild it using a newer framework like React or Angular. But, I believe that it's too large for that, and I'd prefer a moderate approach where, we upgrade to the latest Backbone version, perhaps using Marionette as well, while also refactoring / cleaning the codebase. We could also refactor it to use a v2 of the Rails API.

You should be a modern Javascript expert who has worked on many (minimum 2-5) Backbone.js projects. You should be comfortable and passionate enough about Backbone.js to be willing and interested to refactor a large, existing app to be more performant, easier to work with, and so on.

So -- and thank you for reading this far -- basically we have a great opportunity -- lots of well paid, very comfortable, steady, challenging and interesting work, for the right person.

We offer very competitive pay, a very diverse, friendly, modern (unlimited snacks and drinks! not too many meetings!) and relaxed work environment, as well as valuable stock options. Office is in SF, SOMA and you must be able to come into the office several times per week.

Please apply here: https://www.jsco.re/l-zx OR you can email me directly at kevin@alpinenow.com