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steven_nobleon Ask HN: What book(s) had a profound impact on your life and why?

When I found it in a second-hand bookstore in roughly 1990, "The Third Wave" by the Tofflers had a huge impact on me as it made the future seem foreseeable and not automatically gloomy. I don't think it would stand up today, but that's a different matter

steven_nobleon Ask HN: Focus Hacks?

lots of little things, but recently I've found that good, comfortable noise-cancelling headphones with good built-in mics help when it comes to maintaining focus on an online meeting

steven_nobleon Gross domestic product is a misleading measure of national success (2014)

It's grossly misleading to suggest that economists use GDP as a measure of national success

steven_nobleon Show HN: I built a site that finds the cheapest place to buy a book

I'm a huge fan of Booko, which has been doing exactly this for years

steven_nobleon Vanilla JavaScript State Management and Rendering Framework

if it's a framework, it's not vanilla JS

steven_nobleon Ask HN: MBA if I want to run a business one day?

Depends massively on (1) the size and type of business and (2) your current skill gaps. I did an MBA and it helped a lot with well paid business consulting until I decided that was a highway to hell. But most of the relevant skills I think you can best learn on the job, hopefully before the stakes get too great.

steven_nobleon Ask HN: Any Recommendation for Vim Beginner

Learn it while working on a programming project that does not present any other learning challenges

steven_nobleon Super weird Apple AppStore error seen the wild

What gives?

steven_nobleon Ask HN: What are you currently excited about?

Advanced geothermal. Jacobin magazine. Emerging cancer treatments. The end-ish of the pandemic. The return of a true labor-orientated left. New melodic hardcore from Press Club. Finally fixing my bike.

steven_nobleon Ask HN: How to make a photogenic server room

Just a thought. You can buy low-voltage very pretty LED strip lighting in just about any colour for next to nothing. Maybe just get whatever racks/servers/you want and then decorate them with these...?

steven_nobleon Ask HN: Share Your Personal Site

https://snoble.net

Just links ATM -- think I might try adding some original textual content if I can work out how to keep it ultra simple

steven_nobleon Gold Grows On Eucalyptus Trees (2013)

It's the same in parts of Spain. You take a walk in the wild, hoping to experience the local flora, and you find yourself surrounded by these highly flammable trees that have travelled as far as you have to get there. Pretty, but no more so than the displaced native flora, and disastrous from an environmental or fire management point of view.

steven_nobleon Ask HN: Where is your favorite place to donate to?

givedirectly.com

Cash for those who lack it, to use in whatever way they see fit

steven_nobleon Ask HN: Is hydrogen likely to be a major source of power in the next 10 years?

as per the other comments -- not a source of energy but a store of energy

whether the energy stored is green or not

steven_nobleon Ask HN: My manager suggested me to start taking Ritalin

fair enough -- i was basing it on my memory of a documentary I saw once -- i looked up the documentary but could not find a list of the studies it cited, so I Googled for studies on the question

steven_nobleon Ask HN: My manager suggested me to start taking Ritalin

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3489818/#__sec7...

steven_nobleon Ask HN: My manager suggested me to start taking Ritalin

Clearly unethical. Take written notes. Join your union.

But a few side points:

- ADHD is an actual condition that can cause lack of focus and/or hyperfocus

- there are plenty of other reasons why a person can exhibit lack of focus and/or hyperfocus

- in people with ADHD, stimulants are often very effective, but dosage and side-effects need careful medical management

- in people without ADHD, stimulants often make them feel like they are more focused that ever before, but blind studies have shown that their actual focus is not truly affected

steven_nobleon Ask HN: First time working from home; what to do or not do?

Do you with others? In particular, with children? Then it's crucial that you have an office or similar with a door you can shut. Then you have to nicely train everyone you live with to not do things like shouting to you through the shut door on the assumption that you're free because they can't hear you listening to a conference call.

steven_nobleon Ask HN: Affordable, online university for getting a degree to quit programming?

Given you taught yourself programming, you'll probably find you can teach yourself your next skill too. Three common next careers for once-software developers are recruitment (kill me now), engineering management (makes sense) and developer relations (fascinating if you have a knack for storytelling). In my MBA I'm sue I did learn things that I otherwise would not have eventually taught myself. But not because they could not be self-taught. Just because I wouldn't have thought to have included them in my never-ending program of self-education.

steven_nobleon Ask HN: What's your most controversial or contrarian idea to improve the world?

Decriminalise all drugs. Not just on the demand side (purchase/use of drugs) but also on the supply side (manufacture/sale of drugs). The goal would be to decimimate the drug syndicates that hold entire communities to randsom under regimes that are no less brutal than Isis. They use terror to control a lucrative illegal trade. Instead of making these drugs illegal, strongly discourage their use with policies like the successful measures that Australian governments have taken to discourage the use of tobacco and addictive prescription drugs and the successful measures that Portuguese governments have taken to help the users of street drugs to put their lives back together.

steven_nobleon Ask HN: Best books on the psychology of religion?

Plus one for The Righteous Mind, mentioned below.

Also in the vein of 'not quite psychology of religion, but related', The Hero's Journey, by Joseph Campbell.

steven_nobleon Ask HN: Should I abandon a functioning SaaS with no paying users?

Ditto to the 'who are your customers' question.

You may find that, say, food van operators are keen on a tool that turns their Facebook page into just the type of website that a food van operator needs.

Ditto for a dozen other possible segments.

steven_nobleon Ask HN: Do you write code on the train? What's your setup?

working on the train is never comfortable, but I find Dash comes in handy for offline access to documentation

steven_nobleon Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?

This response to someone on StackOverflow asking how to parse HTML with regex: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/145684

steven_nobleon Ask HN: Which scifi authors to interview about immortality?

steven_nobleon Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

Sometimes yes -- sometimes no.

Yes, if you're creating better entertainment, but furniture, better toys, better gadgets, and people are willing to pay for them, you have made the world better.

But people are also willing to pay for weapons, for software that helps them to violate the privacy of others, for financial products that promise much and deliver little, for products that have addictive properties from sugar to gambling to everything else.

So, yes, just building things that other people want and getting rich in the process CAN be a good thing to do. But it is not AUTOMATICALLY a good thing to do.

steven_nobleon No, country X did NOT just run entirely on wind

The point that all the energy mixes together is not the main point. The main point is that dialling up wind does not always help anyone dial down fossil fuels for many reasons, and what we should be striving for and measuring is the reduction in fossil fuel use not the increase in the use of any other generation technology.

steven_nobleon How can I learn to program?

+1 for actually answering the "how to learn" question rather than the "what should I learn question".

To your comment "Solve a specific real-world problem" I would say +1, but add that you should start by trying to solve the smallest possible specific real-world problem that will create some sort of value for your customers.

And before you start, describe that problem using a testing tool like Cucumber (cukes.info). This will ensure that all your early coding and learning is completely focused on solving that one small problem.

Keeping reading, Googling and experimenting until you find you can write enough code to solve that small customer problem. Then set your sights on a slightly larger customer problem.

As for tools, I like and recommend Ruby on the Mac but there are a number of options that seem to have lots of community support and free tutorials, including Python and Perl, whether on the Mac or Linux.