mlwarren

For the specific examples you're asking about, I'd suggest the Web Application Architecture book.(http://www.amazon.com/Web-Application-Architecture-Principle...)

I've had similar experiences. A lot of simple things in OSX just don't feel natural or when done give me a result that I didn't expect. I've been using the OS for almost a year now and still feel that way.

Maybe some broad-sweeping entry level books or literature reviews would be good. For me (and possibly many others on hn), the extent of my knowledge in the field as a whole is pretty small so I think some introductory resources geared towards someone coming from a strong software or math background would be best.

Maybe some of the people contributing answers to this comment thread could also suggest some literature on bioinformatics? (specifically for Software Engineers with limited biology backgrounds)

The DDG !Bang feature is the reason I like to use DDG. I have it as my default search engine in Chrome and I can search just about anything without having to first load a site, enter my query, and click search. I just pop open a tab and write one simple, concise query. Using DDG as sort of a "search portal" is where I find the most value.

For reference, the !Bang list is very large. http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

"We are going to have failures. There are going to be sacrifices made in the program; we've been lucky so far. If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life." — Virgil 'Gus' Grissom.

It seems like most of the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era astronauts felt like their lives came second to mission success. I'm sure there are plenty of astronauts that feel the same way today.

With a pool of astronauts willing to take reasonable risks to advance space exploration, it's the NASA management that has been responsible for disallowing the more dangerous missions. On the one hand that's tragic, but on the other it makes sense from a PR perspective. With each spaceflight tragedy there has been a backlash from taxpayers and Congress. Politicians will use spaceflight accidents to push agendas that cut funding, etc.

NASA has to walk a fine line between keeping the program safe enough to maintain funding and adventurous enough to make gains in space exploration. I think in early NASA it was easier to justify the human cost of accidents because of Cold War pressure, but now there is a harder time with this justification and thus the huge emphasis on safety.

Not necessarily. There are plenty of things we "don't need" but many of those succeed because they're part of what the developer community "wants". People can profit from these wants, making things developers don't necessarily need and "real people" neither need nor want.

The point of the article is that it's easier to build and profit from these wants, even if they're not truly beneficial to people outside of the developer community.

I suppose that depends on the individual, their life situation (single, married, college student, full time job, etc), and how long they can stay excited about their idea.

I'm curious about how long the OP specifically has been pulling these 49 hour additional work-weeks.

Also, OSX has mission control. You don't necessarily have to "go back to the single desktop paradigm of Mac or Windows". There are solutions for that, and on OSX it's even built in.

It's a great feature in Ubuntu but it's definitely not exclusive.

Interesting list but the notion that "ideas are only valuable when someone (like you) makes something happen" can only go so far. If you have a bad idea that you make happen it doesn't automatically become valuable.

This story might prove that ideas are a dime a dozen, but one can argue that good ideas are not.