mattdlondon

I found the intense focus music (and the "white noise"/hissing in it) to be really, really grating and kinda put me on-edge while listening.

I also found the repetitiveness/predictability of the rhythm to be troubling - I'd end up focusing on the noise and thinking about "what was coming next" to be ultra-distracting.

Kinda like when you have a noisy neighbor at night and you are just trying to get to sleep, but all you can focus on is the noise coming from your neighbor. You cant switch off - all you can do is focus on the noise.

Personally nothing beats rainymood.com for focus for me, but thanks for sharing. I guess I am different as everyone else seems to think this is effective.

I have been doing something similar for a couple of years.

My printer can scan to a shared drive on my home LAN, saving files as PDFs. These are then uploaded Google Drive where everything else happens automatically (e.g. if you search for something, it will find it in scanned PDFs automatically).

Its super-useful especially since the mobile clients for drive is rock solid. I can be on the phone to someone and pull up basically any document I've had since the 90s in a couple of seconds, for free. Its kinda fun being on the phone to a call centre and being able to pull up data quicker than they can. Tax returns are an absolute doddle when everything is paperless.

The only thing that is missing for me from Google Drive is like a "Knowledge Graph" for my own documents - I can search by keyword or filename etc sure, but I'd like to get some "intelligence" next like we're used to with Google Now, but for my scanned docs, like "show me my bank statements with a payment to Amazon in the last 3 months" etc.

Not sure if that was bait or not, but you can get normal (i.e. not google glass) lens + frames for less than £10 delivered in the UK from many different online retailers.

The quality is not amazing - they probably won't last more than a year or so, but then neither does a prescription.

Glasses don't need to be expensive.

Just a spin on this: as a java developer that recently started doing a lot of python, what has really annoyed me (apart from the utterly woeful IDE functionality compared to typed languages) is the extra "boiler plate" thinking you need to do with python because of the dynamicness meaning you have to keep the types and classes you're using for your codebase in your head, rather than letting the computer deal with that.

e.g. you have a function with a "database" parameter ... it could be a string, it could be a dict, another class, or even a number. There is no way to know apart from back-tracking through the code (or run it and wait for it to fail with a TypeError when that code gets hit). With java you just read the type off the screen and you can get on with solving the problem at hand without extra thinking, and even if you do screw up your IDE tells you right away with a nice squiggly red underline, or if you're not using an IDE during compile time. With Python you might not find out about that TypeError until that 3am pager call.

People have suggested that the answer to this is forcing strict naming conventions and/or strict docstring conventions ... but if you are going to go with that level of extra work of typing "database_string" or """Lots of long docstrings explaining exactly what type the database parameter is.""" (and maintaining it!!!),you're not saving any boilerplate (biggest complaint I've seen levelled at java) so why not just use a statically typed language ?

tl;dr - for me, python adds cognitive load of keeping the minutiae of the code in my head on top of solving the actual task at hand.

That said, I like the "pick up and go" prototyping feel of Python for quick jobs - java sucks for that.

You can ask for them to provide "extra detail" over email outside of the call as you think that question may need some detailed thought/extra checks etc.

Shameless self promotion for something I threw together ages ago and may be implemented in a better way these days. https://github.com/matt1/doc.js

So it uses "doc" instead of "$" but feel free to fork :-)

The "back to their roots" thing inspired this useful reference website: http://standardjavascript.info

How is this Google's fault? Google's name is used in the article title, but then it is basically not mentioned again apart from in a list of equally well-known companies?

For every person that "makes it", there are probably a million or two who do not.

Find your passion, do the best you can, learn, improve your skills and you might get lucky one day or just live a good life. Money is nice but its not everything.

Agreed - what struck me with that site is that all the CVs had photos of the applicants.

For anyone applying to where I work please please please do not include a photo because I instantly know your age & ethnicity - things that I am not supposed to know about you.

Obviously I am going to see your face eventually (assuming you get to an on-site interview), but seeing it all before I get to talk to you in person can lead unconscious bias which is not good for anyone.

Yep - you offer up a sacrificial bikeshed/duck for management to meddle with, whilst the important stuff is left alone. Could be one person or a committee/group - its the same thing.

It is called bikeshedding. People have been using "bike sheds" in software development for years to get project managers off their back about the important stuff.

The share link doesn't work!

1) Find a niche area of interest and build a web site and put AdSense ads on it

2) Promote the website a bit

3) Profit.

The trick is working out what your niche is that hadn't already been done by someone else.

I lucked out with some websites in the UK about fuel consumption (for cars) a few years ago. I invested a weekend of my time and a little promotion effort and it snowballed - initially it made maybe £1 a month for the first year to 24 months but now I get about 150,000 hits a month which with ads earns a decent amount of money (more than you are looking for)

About these super tablets... "...least a 13” screen, 64 bit processor, 2GB of RAM, 256GB drive, a real keyboard, an actual file system, and an improved operating system with windowing and true multitasking capability..."

They've just described a laptop/chromebook, right?

I was previously an IBMer (not US based) until I left a couple of years ago, and I know someone very close to me who has just been offered redundancy from IBM (also not US based).

I appreciate the company's responsibilities are to the shareholders, but their approach seems to be short-sighted.

The culture in IBM seems to be if you are a sales person or a project manager you are the well-treated elite, and anyone else (i.e. the researchers, the developers, designers, consultants - basically anyone who actually makes anything that IBM sells) can go fuck themselves and are treated as dispensable/replaceable assets.

They're painting themselves into a corner - there are only a limited number of times you can get rid of the people on the ground actually doing anything before it really starts to hurt.

I think they've realised this and that is why they are now just buying companies rather than creating their own offerings.

Is it too late? Probably - they are only just getting their act together with cloud offerings whilst a bookshop has become a market leader. I dont think they can catch up.