scottrogowski

> And at the end of the day it's just the weird nerd kids being bullied as always.

This. So much. I've been a nerd since middle school and have experienced a fair amount of bullying while growing up.

But the fact is, nothing has really changed between then and now. It has always been 'safe' to bully the nerds. No other group of people receives this level of public venomous screed. We shrug and accept it because we are used to it.

We as a group need to get better about advocating for our rights to live and work as humans just like everyone else and be more deliberate about pointing out the completely bizarre policy environment of California in general and San Francisco in particular that has led to this explosion of issues.

> The whole org is on board with this change. It's definitely not happening in a silo.

Given the seemingly strong chorus of voices responding with cautionary tales about why you might want to rethink this plan, and the number of engineers in your organization, it seems more likely that you have some dissenting voices who have either been too scared to speak up or have already been shot down.

A company I am affiliated with made a decision to rewrite their code in microservices-oriented architecture thinking it would only take one year. Now we're 7 years into the transition and starting to come up against some hard deadlines that threaten revenue streams. It seems obvious to everyone except the leadership and the architects that this has been an unmitigated disaster. Other comments on this thread seem to indicate that many have had similar experiences.

For those who are curious, here is a classic article on why rewriting code from scratch is a bad idea: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-....

For a more in-depth analysis on the unforeseen challenges of microservices in particular, I would encourage a lot of careful research into how other companies have tried and failed at this. In particular, I might look at Uber's ongoing difficulties.

All I have to say to the Khan Academy engineers is to buckle up because frankly, moving from Python 2->3 is not that hard and you have no idea what you are getting yourself into.

A number of the comments so far have been attacking Solein with something along the lines of “why not just eat plants”. In my mind, I see two distinct advantages of this approach as a component of altering the food production system to reduce environmental impact.

The first is that while plants are efficient at utilizing solar energy for their growth, we aren’t actually able to eat most of what they produce. Take the wheat plant, for example. It is widely cultivated partly because it is so good at producing calories cheaply. Even so, of the roots, the stalk, the leaves, and the seeds, we only eat part of the seeds. From the seeds, we will strip away at least the chaff and often the germ and the bran as well leaving only the endosperm to actually eat. Even that assumes that one of a dozen possible crop failure cases didn’t kill the entire plant before it could be harvested. The advantage I see to the Solein manufacturing process is that we can turn a far higher percentage of the gathered solar energy into actual consumable calories with far less land.

The second is that a portion of the carbon footprint of modern agriculture is transportation. The distance between where our food is grown and our local grocery store is often thousands of kilometers. If Solein could be produced in the same urban area that it is eaten in, then we can cut that transportation distance to dozens of kilometers or less.

So it sounds like Libra coins will be minted at a previously agreed-upon exchange rate by one of the consortium companies proving that they have bought one of these low-volatility financial assets. It does not sound like there will be any "mining" and the decentralization will be, for the time, in just a handful of large companies.

Can someone validate that I'm understanding that correctly?

If so, I'd agree with previous commenters that we're not looking at anything which can shift the power structure of monetary policy but improvements in transaction speed and cost could have some real social benefits - especially in the developing world.

I've been a developer for almost 10 years and during that time, have been involved in small rewrites and major rewrites. None of them have gone well and there wasn't a single one that we didn't regret starting on. What you think is a mess of legacy code is often less messy than you think and a lot of the odd decisions were often made for very good reasons. When you rewrite a codebase, you often tend to over-engineer it for the vague goals of being "scalable" and "clean" but, while clean on the surface, it often comes out far more complicated and with the a similar number of bugs. Another way to look at it is you're taking what was previously an agile approach of iterative development and replacing it with a waterfall approach which sees a grand end goal (parity with legacy code). Software is complicated and there's no silver bullet. Adopting React over jQuery will not reduce complexity as much as you think. Adopting microservices over a monolith will not reduce complexity as much as you think. The only thing that will ever reduce complexity is careful iterative development of good abstractions which are inserted into the codebase one-at-a-time.

This. I am surprised to see hacker news jump on this as proof that advertising causes reduced happiness when this article can only conclude that they are correlated. The common statistical maxim is that correlation does not imply causation. A far more likely scenario, in my opinion, is that greater development is associated with both increased advertising and a reduction in happiness. And yes, the summary does state that they were able to show that it is uncorrelated with GDP but what's telling is that the prominent bar graph is "uncorrected". So, after correcting, the advertising effect may be so minor that they chose not to graph it at all.

I do my best to limit advertising in my own life because I myself believe that I am a happier person without it. This study, however, is misleading and doesn't give us evidence of much of anything.

This sounds like an interesting project for YC research. Many of these questions are very open-ended and it will be exciting to see what comes out of it. However, one question in particular upset me as a Bay Area resident:

How can we make and keep housing affordable?

This question is frustrating not only because the problem is particularly acute but also because it is completely self-inflicted and solvable using what we already know.

Take a look at the 7 American cities with the highest rent: SF, NYC, Jersey City, DC, Boston, San Jose, LA https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/national-rent-data...

Then look at the 7 largest American cities that still practice rent control: NYC, LA, San Diego, San Jose, SF, DC, Oakland, Jersey City http://www.landlord.com/rent_control_laws_by_state.htm

Why? It's not a coincidence and it is causal. Rent control: A. Disincentivizes new construction. Simply put, over time, long-term tenants might not be paying enough to make a keep a building profitable. B. Causes owners to take recently-vacated, perfectly-habitable units off the market to avoid these same long-term un-evictable tenants (30,000 units are empty in SF alone. That’s 8.3% of the housing stock! http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2011/03/30/why-so-many-vac...)

These both result in less housing in total. A smaller supply coupled with the same demand will cause prices to rise as the few apartments that are available go to the highest bidder.

In a 1992 study, 93% of surveyed economists agreed with the statement "a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available." http://www.factcheck.org/2009/02/when-economists-agree/ For comparison, the consensus that global warming is anthropogenic among climate scientists is 97% - just 4% higher. We rightfully ridicule our elected officials for being skeptical of global warming. Why don’t we also ridicule elected officials who support rent control?

If the problem is keeping housing affordable, the solution is simple. We need to phase out rent control laws and remove regulations around the development of new housing. For now, in the Bay, rent control is not realistically going to be touched for a few years. For the latter, there is evidence that Sacramento is starting to understand that we actually need to build housing to bring down prices http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-brown-afford.... If we are lucky, they might take this new insight and apply it to existing housing for a complete solution to this man-made problem.

A good article on the subject in general: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html

While I find UBI to be a fascinating idea worthy of consideration, I vehemently disagree with running this experiment in East Africa. The proposal seems to either be blind-to or minimizing the potential for unintended consequences. Decades of trying to alleviate poverty in Africa have taught us, more than anything else, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Giving food tends to act as “dumping” and weaken the agricultural industry. Providing foreign aid tends to empower corrupt governments. These consequences only became clear after years of hindsight. Who knows what unintended side effects of UBI will be?

If we are going to try UBI, a fundamentally Western idea, it’s only right that it should be tried in the West. I’m not saying it won’t work - just that we don’t really know what will happen. East Africa has suffered enough from our neo-colonial experiments.

There is no such thing as naturally strong... there might be some genetics in how quickly you can gain muscle strength but no one is born strong. To think of it conversely, if a limb becomes paralyzed, that limb will undergo extreme muscle atrophy no matter who it is. Also, they listed as a mean 83kg for bench press for the "upper third". This is not a very large amount of weight and is easily within the genetic limits of the grand majority of men.

One important thing to keep in mind is that the upper third average bench press measured was 83.8kg (~185lbs). That is still a light bench press by the standards of those in the fitness and bodybuilding industries. I would imagine that there is a limit to the longevity gains that could be made from muscle strength and that these gains might start to reverse for bodybuilders and other strength athletes due to the increased strain it is putting on your heart and other organs.

I got it to work on OSX 10.8!

slunk's suggestion:

`arch -i386 python main.py`

got me halfway there

You also have to run it with python 2.6 like so:

`arch -i386 /usr/bin/python2.6 main.py`

If you only have pyglet for 2.7, you will have to install it for 2.6. Installing packages in python for 2.6 will require pip-2.6 which you get like this:

`sudo easy_install-2.6 pip`

then

`pip-2.6 install pyglet`

Walla!

More than 100 lines of this are textures!

Got this error though. Any ideas?

OSError: dlopen(/System/Library/Frameworks/QuickTime.framework/QuickTime, 6): no suitable image found. Did find: /System/Library/Frameworks/QuickTime.framework/QuickTime: mach-o, but wrong architecture /System/Library/Frameworks/QuickTime.framework/QuickTime: mach-o, but wrong architecture

I was inspired to write a small bash script to let you know which ip exactly to go to. It is hackish due to my limited knowledge of sed but it works on my Mac at least

  #!/bin/bash
  ip=`ifconfig -r en0 inet | sed -E '/en0/d;s/inet[ \t]([0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+).+/\1/'`
  ip=`echo $ip | tr -d '[:space:]'`
  echo "Go to $ip:8000 in a browser on your local network. When you are done, use ctrl-c to exit"
  python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

Really interesting read. That is the first time in a while I have read something that long on the internet without skimming. A couple of thoughts:

You mentioned that your last close friend was when you were 12 and that you were in a distance high school. Do be sure that you realize that middle school was as bad as it gets in regards to social pressure to be normal. This is a different world now. Immediately out of college around your age (22?), nerds like us become pretty cool because we have interesting jobs and make a lot of money. To some extent, almost all programmers have a few social idiosyncrasies and for the most part we share these in common. So what that means for you is that those idiosyncrasies which previously got you bullied are now the same that people associate with success.

While I realize that for you it might be the only way, I think your plan in the 're-life' section is a bit misguided. Learning to be social is a fundamentally different thing from learning a new skill. There is no sense in focusing down and trying to find the core problems because social behaviors generally exist below our stream of consciousness (somewhat related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion). If you approach this in a way that you would learn a new programming language, you will also quickly find that the difference is that learning to socialize is NOT interesting or fun in an academic sense and you will quickly lose motivation. Instead, since you seem to have a lot of varied interests, I would start with a Meetup. There should be hacker or entrepreneurial groups holding meetings near you (unless of course you still live in Idaho!) The important thing is to go out and try to do things you are interested in with other people no matter how painful or awkward at first. Social behaviors will eventually be picked up subconsciously.

Measuring your progress is always a good way to motivate yourself and stay on track. But I would avoid measuring "all the human things" and instead focus on metrics like, "how many people did I say hi to today" or "how long was I outside of my room".

To make this easier for yourself (and therefore increase your chances for success), you might not want to change your name to K-2052 just yet. I think it is great move and I agree with your logic but put it to the side until you are a bit further along on your quest. Then, you will have the ability to rock the name.

And suggestions on where to move? Being in a big city is important more than anything else. I live in San Francisco and a great thing about this city is that weirdness is embraced more than anywhere else I have ever spent time. You might also think about moving to a abroad if you know any foreign languages. People will tend interpret social differences as cultural differences and you will be get a bit more wiggle-room with your weird behaviors while you come out of your shell.

I would venture to say that most of us here (myself included) feel empathy towards parts of your story so just know that you are not as different as you think you are!