phillipamann

Yes! Thank you! I'll even see if I can help contribute.

Does iCloud iOS backup accomplish an exact sync for iPhone and iOS? I've never used it so I am not sure. If I use iCloud backup and I lose my phone, will an iCloud backup restore bring my phone back to exactly what it was like before?

I will elaborate a bit more. You've taken the time to have this macOS set up configured exactly to your liking. All of these apps have settings and application data. Sometimes the application data and settings are synchronized in the cloud and sometimes they aren't. Maybe you use an app like Notes which has application data (your notes) that is synced to iCloud but application settings which reside somewhere on the computer locally. How do you handle situations like this? Do your back up solutions essentially allow you to back up the complete state of your computer so that if something happens you can restore it back to to the exact state you left it? What about upgrading macOS versions?

This is a puzzle I've struggled with both on macOS and iOS.

What do you do if you lose your data and have to start over? As far as I know, there is no way to automate the settings of all of these macOS apps that don't have config files that can be backed up like VSCode. Do you use Time Machine?

It is likely that if you did an experiment that compared retention and understanding of reading with the real books and these Instagram Stories, the readers of real books would trounce the Instagram readers. I suppose that something is better than nothing but at a certain point, I also wonder, what is the point of doing this? I wonder how many Instagram readers will drop their habits and read more? I also wonder how many of these readers will finish the books? I didn't see that information presented in the article.

Yeah... I think about this too... Is there any major city in the world that doesn't suffer this fate now?

I was subletting from painters in Yad Eliyahu and they told me they are moving to Haifa. There is also the south of Tel Aviv which is cheap and you get to be the first wave gentrifier if you do art.

"I wanted to be near a Jewish population because that is important to me."

I didn't know that Jewish people are only Jewish people and not Jewish product managers or jewish musicians, for example.

Well, if the data is accurate about Silicon Valley. The techies you surround yourself with don't com from many different races, religions, ethnicities, genders, beliefs, etc. Your whole talk about full diversity is just talk. The Bay Area, and especially tech, is not a diverse place or a particularly enlightened place.

You saw me mention a word (Jewish) and you honed in on it. Additionally, you don't understand that a Jewish population is more than a religious population.

Merry Christmas from Israel :o

I feel that this site is just as addictive and with marginal utility as so many other sites and social networks on the internet.

I've read enough books about the internet now to realize that all of the benefits come with costs. I can be just as addicted to any of the information spouts on the internet. Hacker News provides the same sort of response for me as Facebook might for someone else. It is almost ironic but it is harder to 'delete' Hacker News than Facebook because of the walled garden approach of Facebook.

I think to me the value is equal in a way. It comes down to fear of missing out. What events/social activities will I miss out on by not having Facebook? What possible job/career opportunities will I miss out on by not having LinkedIn?

Yes. I deleted everything except LinkedIn this year. I will delete that soon. I wish I could delete everything including this site...

I started to contemplate this too. I love Apple products and I use a 13" 2017 tbMBP at work and a 15" 2017 tbMBP at home. I, of course, have an iPhone. I have my complaints like everyone else about these products and the decisions made for software and hardware but I recently had my first moment of doubt when Apple removed Freedom from the App Store [1]. It bothered me greatly that I wasn't free to install software that I wanted to on my iPhone that I purchased unlocked and paid quite a great deal of money for. Of course, this is exactly the sort of argument that Richard Stallman makes and has been making for years. Of course, he is more extreme than me but I now understand his point well.

It was the first time that I decided to look at Ubuntu again but I just can't go back to this. I like to use my Mac for more than programming and the Mac just excels at everything else. The iPhone is so much better of an experience to me compared to an Android device as well.

However, despite all of the complaints and issues, there really isn't a computer that does everything as well as the Mac can. If all I did with my computer was programming, it wouldn't be a big deal to go Linux but then of course my iPhone wouldn't have as nice as an experience so I'd likely have to go Android too.

Unfortunately, in this new age of monopolies, I doubt I'll see a new provider arise to challenge Apple, Microsoft, or Google with either a new operating system, hardware, and software. We have to chose the system that will work the best for us individually including the possible flaws that will come with the system.

I personally think the macOS will become more and more closed as time goes and it will resemble iOS further and further. I wonder what that will mean for developers and programmers who do more than use Xcode for our own development and need a nice full featured shell...

[1] https://freedom.to/blog/freedom-has-been-temporarily-removed...

This is just corporate posturing. Apple recently banned VPN's that have the potential to block ads including Freedom [1].

[1] https://freedom.to/blog/freedom-has-been-temporarily-removed...

I think about this a lot. With the rise of cloud computing, I wonder if what I am doing is even programming. I even searched Stack Overflow recently to see if working on complex configurations counts as programming or not. There obviously wasn't consensus.

I saved this thread to "read later" in the hope that I can identify how to get into a position where I am working on interesting problems but more or less, I implement business logic. Of course, it's still slightly interesting when you think about the scale or what I actually created but it's not technically interesting.

I did this by reflecting on my own life. I reflected on my habits and behaviors. I thought about how my life was before and after this. I thought about this even more compared to when I became a smartphone owner and when I was not a smart phone owner. There is no algorithm for this. There is no correct answer and that's the point. Some people love being connected to 10 social networks and constantly checking them. Some people don't. I am of the later group.

This article speaks to me and what I've been preaching to others for a while now. I got high speed internet in 1999. I was 13 years old. I am now 29 on the cusp of 30 and I think that this experiment has been detrimental to me rather than beneficial. I am currently in the process of doing what Fry talks about. While I can not be absolute and still want to visit some sites and some communities, I am trying to treat each website as if it were a magazine subscription or something I have to buy and own.

I like to live a minimalist lifestyle at home and prefer owning as few things as possible. I know many others feel this way too. However, with the internet and computing, ownership is abstract. I become overwhelmed and anxious under the deluge of files, apps, notifications, settings, and upkeep required for it all. I know I am not alone in this. Below is a quotation I loved from Deep Work by Cal Newport:

"These services aren’t necessarily, as advertised, the lifeblood of our modern connected world. They’re just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed ultimately to capture then sell your personal information and attention to advertisers. They can be fun, but in the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish, they’re a lightweight whimsy, one unimportant distraction among many threatening to derail you from something deeper. Or maybe social media tools are at the core of your existence. You won’t know either way until you sample life without them."

Newport, Cal (2016-01-05). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (p. 209). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

This is something I talk about with my friend who is doing a PhD in linguistics. I noticed as well that the internet is changing the English language. The rampant globalization that came with the internet combined with English being the defacto language of the internet has allowed it to change. It would be interested to mine Twitter and a few other sources and try to observe how English is changing.

I suspect if you mined Twitter, you would see a 'dumbing down' of English due to the constraints of Twitter. How one would quantify 'dumbing down' is a challenge (if it hasn't been solved already). However, I am more interested in how this 'Twitter effect' cascades to other areas of English.

There are other implications of the internet too I'd love to study but these questions are relevant to this article.

What is the name of this anti-constipation drug and do you have a link to the commercial?

AJ+ is all the worst things about social media. These bite sized share friendly hip news clips about complex issues lacking tons of context. Their Israel coverage is fucking terrible. I have to hand it to them though. They are very clever for coming up with it.

This is exactly my thoughts exactly. Reality is biased. It just depends which opinions and ideologies you subscribe to. I am progressive and am against police brutality and a lot of the drug policies, I just could never trust the intentions of the Qatari news organization. I read the NYT for domestic and world news. Being Jewish and with all of my relatives in Israel, I read Times of Israel and Haaretz for Israel / Middle East coverage. I am a news junky and I subscribe to both NYT and Haaretz.

I'm sorry but why do people love a news organization that is funded by Qatar? People claim that they were completely separate but they weren't at all and gripped by controversy that one would expect from an organization based out of Qatar [1]. I think there are better sources for American and global news than what is essentially the media arm for the corrupt and fascist government of Qatar.

[1] https://pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/al-jazeera-...

I took this course last year. I had a degree in statistics already. I just wanted to go through this GREAT book and watch these great professors. If you have any interest in learning actual statistics, this is a great introduction. Again, I can't repeat this enough but both the book and the professors are great!

This course is more of an introduction to statistics.

Sorry for delay. I think it's just better interoperability with many other systems. R has very hacked on interoperability in my opinion but I am not an expert.

I thought this was interesting but the resulting code was so ugly and awkward that I would refrain from using it. I would just prototype in R and convert to Python rather than using both in this sort of Frankenstein way.

As usual, slow and steady with tried and true methods is the way to go. Startup wealth has too much luck involved. Great post in my opinion.

R is a wonderful language if you chose to get used to it. I love it. I've even used R in production quality assurance to check for regressions in data (not the statistical regressions). I see countless R posts where people try to compare it to Python to find the one true language for working with data. Article after article, there clearly isn't a winner. People like R and Python for different reasons. I think it's actually quite intuitive to think about everything in terms of vectors with R. I like the functional aspects of R. I wish R was a bit faster but I am pretty sure the people who maintain R are working on that. You can't beat the enormous library that R has.

Ah OK. I saw that it kept state so I thought it was like Storm. I don't fully understand Storm. However, Kafka can not keep state (and neither can Flume). So Kinesis is a queue that has some state?

This looks like an AWS version of Apache Flume and Kinesis looks like an AWS version of Apache Storm. Does AWS have a Kafka equivalent i.e. a pub/sub message queue?

I pay for the website and phone subscription. I'm probably going to get a tablet soon and it's annoying to me that I have to pay additionally for a tablet subscription. I have not seen this model anywhere else. Is it wrong that I think there should only be one digital subscription that covers everything? Is there something about he NYT tablet app that I am not aware of compared to the phone app?