raamdev

No, I was quite annoyed. I only turned it on to help remind me when I might be wasting time, not prevent me from reading HN. Without an override, that feature is useless to me.

Thanks! I've been using a tool called pstree for the same thing (I didn't even realize ps had such a feature). It looks like the ps utility on OS X doesn't support --forest though, so pstree is still useful there.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/pstree/

Thanks, that's exactly what I was trying to say.

And I believe over the long-term, proper education (from an early age) is the only thing that will fix this kind of problem. Buy what you need, not what you want. (OK, buy what you want too, but it should be like a 20:1 ratio!)

Thanks for the summary and the great quote by Henry Ford. What he said is so true.

The scary thing is that for most people, their lack of understanding the bigger picture means that when things get really bad, it will happen fast. I'm shocked by how many people simply don't even somewhat understand the way the US financial system works (I can't even say I fully understand it), and by how many of them treat bills and debt as their absolute, life-long moral responsibility. To the bankers, it's all a big game. To the average consumer, it's their entire life.

The most important thing I see missing from all this is education. Financial education should be required by every public school (and should be taught by the parents) to help prepare people for the "real world" of managing debt, credit cards, loans, and even mortgages and investments.

If everybody understood that filing for bankruptcy (I did after losing 3 investment properties to sub-prime) or downsizing and living a more simple life was perfectly OK to keep your family fed (I went from $2.5k /mo expenses to $800), then we wouldn't have people killing their families and committing suicide because of a few financial issues.

I was actually trying to figure out where my window was on the outside of an office building I work in (5th floor). So I started with 0 which would have meant I would be looking at the 6th floor, not 5th.

I frequently watch full-screen movies on my 15" MBP while laying on the couch 7ft away. In fact, I don't watch (or have) a TV, so it's really my only option. Then again, I have really good eyesight and I grew up without a TV in the house, so maybe that's why. :)

I do this too! Only sometimes I confuse myself and end up looking like an idiot.

When I count things (in the real world), I now have a bad habit of starting a zero.

"How many floors on that building?"

"Let's see, 0, 1, 2... oh wait..."

When I got a 15" MacBook Pro (2.4ghz, 4GB RAM, 320GB HD, Glossy LED screen), I quickly discovered my desktop became obsolete and I unexpectedly stopped using it. It's not that it became obsolete tech-wise; there was just no reason to continue using it.

My MBP has enough power to run OS X + two VMs (Debian and WinXP) so everything I could ever need to do, I can do on my MBP. (For gaming, I installed Win XP on a second partition and boot to that when I need to get some FPS in.) And since I bring it to work and use it there too, it's basically the only computer I use from day to day.

(Of course, the downside to this is that it's also a single point of failure. Just yesterday I got to work and discovered my laptop's screen was blank. It turned out to be the infamous NVidia defect that created much commotion last year. But, even though I was 6 months past the warranty, Apple is fixing it free of charge: http://tinyurl.com/ctz3h9. Luckily, I also create bootable backups on a fairly regular basis.)

On the big screen issue, I've found it has less to do with the physical size of the screen as it does the screen resolution and your multi-tasking habits. If you really need more screen real estate, use the Unix screen utility or some form of desktop switching with keyboard shortcuts.

The findings basically show that people generally don’t use verbs when tagging and that the titles and descriptions they write are almost always a more useful definition of the thing being tagged (especially when searching across large datasets).

The book "Making Things Talk" (O'Reilly) is a great way to start:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510510/

This is quite a big list and a very good one at that. The title should be '50 Useful PHP Tools' to emphasize that it's not just another small list of PHP tools.

The categories covered are as broad as the list is long:

  * Debugging Tools
  * Testing and Optimization Tools
  * Documentation Tools
  * Security Tools
  * Image Manipulation and Graphs
  * PHP Code Beautifier
  * Version-Control Systems
  * Useful Extensions, Utilities and Classes
  * PHP Online Tools and Resources
  * In-Browser Tools (Firefox Add-Ons)
  * Frameworks for PHP
  * PHP IDEs and Editors

A list like this would have saved me so much time when I started using PHP. Then again, most of this stuff didn't even exist when I started using PHP.

You might want to try using the free Stock Market Game UpDown for a few weeks/months to practice investing:

http://www.updown.com/?_refer=36311

They give you $1 million in play money to invest, but you actually make real money based on your performance (no minimum transfer amount -- I've made a whooping $0.82 so far, but I can withdraw it if I want).

The Python tutorial linked on the site looks very well laid out and easy for beginners to learn from:

http://www.openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english2e/inde...

I work in Cambridge and usually frequent 1369 Coffee House (Central Sq.). I'll definitely have to check out Sebastian's and the BPL. Thanks!

I try to find a seat close to the restroom and generally just leave my laptop there (with the screen saver lock on). The way I see it, it usually takes me under 35 seconds to take a leak: 10 seconds to get up and walk into the bathroom and 15-20 seconds to take a leak. Sitting in a long coffee shop, far from the entrance, that really doesn't give someone much time to swipe my laptop without me seeing them.

Plus, if others around me have seen me there long enough, I feel like they'll point out who/where the thief went when I come back out. You also just need to use your judgment. I'd never leave it there in an unfamiliar coffee shop or if I planned to be gone for more than 40 seconds.

I don't know much about the engineering stuff behind this, but if fuel inefficiency is the only real reason they don't want to add grills, then why not have a mechanical system that removes the grill after they pass a particular altitude (where flocks of birds don't exist) and then add the grill again for landing?

I actually like working from coffee shops when they're busy. The more noise the easier it is for me to concentrate. But if I can easily make out several conversations, then I find it difficult not to listen and it becomes more difficult to concentrate.

Comfortable, over-the-ear headphones are always a huge plus if you enjoy listening to music while you work (beyerdynamic headphones are very nice, although a bit expensive).

Everyone is unique. I work well in both very quite, and very noisy environments, but not so well in-between. You just need to figure out what works for you.

Very nice collection. A tech at the datacenter that hosts one my servers showed me trick #3 and I remember being thrilled sitting there watching him do stuff on my server and sharing the keyboard to type messages back and forth in vi.

My company uses trick #5 as a primary feature for accessing the remote Linux machines that our product is built upon. We have it set up so that every single machine automatically creates a reverse SSH tunnel to the server on boot, so that the tunnel is always accessible in case we need it. Very cool stuff.

I browse YC mostly for the comments, searching for interesting titles with comments and then jumping right into the comments. Nine times out of ten, the comments are way more interesting and informative than the article itself (this is the same reason I read Slashdot from time to time).

Sometimes, I'll get to the comments of what looks to be an interesting article and see discussion about how the article is crap or misleading. This saves me from wasting my time.

The raw nature of individuals discussing their experience, opinions, and knowledge of a particular topic is always more informative and interesting than an article, which needs to stay on topic and have a theme and an ending.

That is why I tend not to write about things in my life that have happened in the past, but rather discuss things I learn, as I learn them. Then, sometimes years later, people with similar problems find my posts through Google and thank me (and sometimes I search my own blog for solutions to problems I remember writing about).

If I find myself with nothing to write on my blog, then I take that as an indication that I'm not learning enough!

The first thing that came to mind when I read the title were the movies Cube and Hyper Cube.

This looks awesome!

Glancing at the documentation I can tell it will easily solve a lot of the reoccurring issues I usually deal with on small projects. I'm definitely going to give it a try.

Thanks!

I think you meant microrecyccoop.org.

Donating to those who need a computer would be my first choice; donating CPU power to something like BOINC my second.

I find remembering the images that the text created helps me recall the smaller details. For example, using the size of Rhode Island and the height of cirrus clouds easily painted a vivid image in my head. I'll remember that image in the future and the context it was used, but not necessarily the smaller details like "125 miles down in the Earth", or "forty-five miles across".

However, if I want to remember those smaller details, then consciously linking them to the vivid image makes recalling them a lot easier whenever I recall the image.

I believe this is the same reason why learning new languages is much easier when we're surrounded by people who speak them. When we can link pieces of the language to various interactions in the real world, our brain then has visual stimuli to connect various bits of the language with in our brain. Of course everyone is unique and what works for one person may not be optimal for the other.

I've run across this problem several times. I now recommend to my clients (and use in my own projects) AuthSMTP: http://www.authsmtp.com. I've been using them for a few years and I have never had a single outage or problem with their service. I also use them for all of my personal and work email.

Their FAQ states their system is configured to allow a maximum of 50 recipients per message, though they recommend you keep it to 10:

http://authsmtp.com/faqs/faq-20.html

If you contact their support team, they can answer any questions regarding limits. The few times I've had to interact with them they were very knowledgeable and helpful.

I too almost never have, and when I do it's usually a rare occurrence. For that reason, yes, I'd happily buy a laptop with a built-in battery, especially if the battery gives a 17" laptop 8 hours of charge!

And I'm sure it won't be long before ifixit.com has a guide explaining how to replace the battery yourself.

I find the best solution to avoiding procrastination is to simply figure out exactly what the next step is that you need to take to be one step closer to being done. Once you've figured that out, picture yourself doing it and then think about how you'll feel when the completed action is just a thing of the past. Rinse and repeat.

We set ourselves up for procrastination by not thinking about the next step and instead only thinking about the end result.

I agree with most of your points but I'd like to add that people seem to prefer one broadly capable device because of the nuisances attached to having multiple devices. If every piece of clothing came with invisible sensors that monitored our vitals and communicated them to, perhaps, a single hand-held device that we carry with us, I'm sure people wouldn't mind.

As things get smaller and smaller, it's less about what you're carrying as it is about the functionality provided. Think Web 2.0. Fifteen years ago, something like GMail wouldn't make sense because Internet speeds and browsers were not advanced enough to handle such features, therefore people wouldn't even think to demand them.

Think Virtualization. Even 10 years ago, laptops were too slow to handle a whole lot. Now I've replaced two desktops and a laptop with a single MacBook Pro laptop (Dual Core 2.4ghz, 4GB RAM, 320GB HD) and VMWare running Ubuntu and Windows XP. I'm no longer thinking hardware, but instead thinking about what I can do with all that power in one spot.

If the technology existed to put podcasts on earrings and listen to them clearly, then I'm sure the technology would exist to wirelessly sync all your earrings so they all contain the same podcasts.

HTTP pipelining support was added in curl and libcurl 7.16.0:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/curl/?branch_id=1612&relea...

So it should work with PHP as well.