mdm_

Pfft, totally moot anyways. By 2016 the average Canadian internet package will be so expensive/low cap, subscribing to Netflix will be completely impractical.

I remember a similar thing happening when Apple introduced the iMac with no 3.5" floppy drive. People thought that was crazy. Also, to a lesser extent, when they introduced the Air with no CD-ROM. When was the last time you used your CD-ROM? Moral of the story: technology changes.

Not sure if you're serious or just trolling (you seem to be posting snippy responses to everyone's comments here), but there's a big difference between something like O'Reilly's Missing Manual or Head First series and w3schools. As demonstrated on the w3fools site, some of the information on w3schools is inaccurate or just plain wrong. The O'Reilly books have a much higher degree of accuracy yet remain approachable, beginner-level texts.

I'm not sure I understand how anyone can plagiarize themselves either. Isn't that just called "recycling your own material"? For example, several parts of David Foster Wallace's speech/book This Is Water are pretty much verbatim from Infinite Jest. Or what about authors who are pushing ideologies and repeat themselves a lot? For example, there's a lot of overlap between Ayn Rand's novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Isn't this just what writers do?

I'm always turned off by job postings that use words like "rockstar", "ninja", "superstar", etc. I'm mostly a Python and Javascript dev (with some occasional PHP, Java, and Ruby) and I'd rate my ability as "average". I'm currently employed and I build websites and web apps.

When I think of a "superstar" or "ninja", I think of someone who doesn't just, for example, have the ability to write Javascript code. I think of someone who knows every little trick the language has. Someone who knows the internals of V8 and/or Spidermonkey, and has maybe contributed code. Someone who sits on the ECMAScript committee. Who gets invited to large conferences to speak on Javascript. Someone who's written books that major tech publishers like O'Reilly or Apress or Sitepoint have published. Someone who has written a library or framework that thousands of developers use. I think of people like Doug Crockford or John Resig. Y'know, superstars in their field.

I have a suspicion that many of these companies probably only need an average, competent developer, but they use language that makes an average developer think they wouldn't have a snowball's chance.

I'm starting part-time study for a joint honors degree in philosophy/math at the university where I work as a full-time web dev this September, ten days before my 30th birthday. I'm glad to hear that other people have been there, done that, and got through it.

I experience this too. The period when I arrive at work before I've eaten anything is usually my most focused. I feel calm and I would describe my mind as "quiet". Once I eat, it's like everything gets noisy and I have a really difficult time concentrating for longer than about a minute on anything.

> "Learn how YOU can help Hyundai make August National Fuel-Efficiency month!"

Learn what YOU can do help OUR company! Dale Carnegie must be rolling in his grave.

Hi. Long-time lurker here; I just created an HN account to reply to you. Your post expresses some of the things I've been feeling about social media that I haven't been able to express very well myself (I had to look up "Maslow pyramid"). The sort of unease and nausea, the whole thing just feels somehow creepy and wrong.

I deactivated my Facebook account long ago because of this feeling. I think what it boils down to is that I don't think I should know so much stuff about my friends, family, co-workers, etc without having obtained that knowledge by directly interacting with them in meaningful ways over long periods of time. The Facebook model appears to let me know people better, but it's in a shallow, passive way and encourages me to conceptualize people as caricatures, assembled from a handful of their most obvious or outstanding personality traits. I realize this stuff has been around for a long time, but FB turbo-charges it, and I feel like it's an extremely poor way to "know" people.

The really messed up part is that while the effects Facebook seems to have are often anti-social (think of how many times you've been out with someone and they're too busy checking status updates on their phone to carry on a real, actual conversation), people are labelled anti-social for not participating.