wdewind

Hey Matt,

Not sure if you remember me but we talked about Lean Designs many years back (back then it was called jMockups). Excited to this next step for you! Congrats and good luck!

Sidekiq by Mike Perham is amazing. I’ve scaled multiple businesses on it’s back.

I wished this too, and got close enough by buying the Hue remote switches:

https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/p/hue-dimmer-switch--lates...

It turns out there are really only 3-4 different temperatures I use normally, and this allows you to switch between them. I also use the Hue timers so I frankly don't need to use this that often, but it's nice to be able to switch between both scenes and brightness levels without pulling out my phone (edit: and more importantly so people who aren't me can control the lights if they need).

It's not a perfect solution: there are still some annoyances with people forgetting to leave the main switch on and only use the mounted remote, but overall I am very happy with this system.

How do you handle scraping 1000+ different store websites at scale? Isn't it an enormous amount of work just to maintain the scrapers?

N=1, maybe people aren't experiencing the same thing, but I was hoping to move all my whatsapp chats over to Signal and never expected anyone to care because I've watched the internet do it's thing for the last 10 years. Much to my surprise someone else suggested it and within 30 minutes all of my groups had moved over and with very little loss of membership. I was shocked at how quickly things moved, including my parents in my family groups, and how willing non-tech people were to move. YMMV, but it may not. Give it a shot.

> "Generation Kill" by Evan Wright which was turned into a mini-series on HBO)

I haven't read the book but I've seen the miniseries many times, it is one of my favorites. It has a TON of great lessons about how large groups of people organize themselves and how the individuals within those groups behave and why that are very pertinent to tech and management in general.

I wonder if this has to do with getting less blue light. After I started using flux I found myself getting exhausted and unable to focus after around 3-4pm especially in the winter. Bumping flux back to only after work made a huge, noticeable difference for me. Might be a similar effect with bright vs. dark screen.

I don't think it's subconscious. It shows up obviously in bezel thickness and radius of corners. When they release a new product the bezel is thick and the corners are very round. As they are able to reduce the bezel size, they also reduce the rounding of the corners. This has the effect of making the last generation look toy-like and the new generation look more serious. They have used this pattern for like 20 years across many product lines.

Exactly, this stuff needs to be monitored either intensely for 24 hours (or maybe even longer), or periodically for longer periods of time (days, weeks, months). What they did doesn't really give us useful data other than "directionally this is an area for more investigation."

Did you read my entire comment? Feel like I addressed this here:

> We already have small pilot studies showing this stuff that have the same problems. Repeated science is often underrated, but these results are uncontroversial, they are just over interpreted and old.

In general I am strongly in favor of reproducing science, this study doesn't really test anything helpful for either outcome though.

I don't mean to be negative but this is another useless nutrition paper. It shows effects we already know about, and it doesn't show them in more convincing ways than previous studies, and it then it misinterprets the relevance of these results for a headline.

You can't get anything useful if you focus the entire window on the post prandial. The body is complex and caloric balancing is not a simple thing. Studies that focus on appropriate (24 hrs+) periods of time never measure any difference. Not only that their own study showed that:

> Low-calorie breakfast increased feelings of hunger (P < .001), specifically appetite for sweets (P = .007), in the course of the day.

So for many people who don't eat a large breakfast your compliance is going to be impacted. Anyone familiar with nutritional science will tell you that compliance is a much bigger deal than eeking out tiny theoretical shifts in calories by shifting meal times, which even if you could prove were real would absolutely not be worth it if it broke your overall compliance.

Outside of that, this isn't a novel finding. We already have small pilot studies showing this stuff that have the same problems. Repeated science is often underrated, but these results are uncontroversial, they are just over interpreted and old.

> Extensive breakfasting should therefore be preferred over large dinner meals to prevent obesity and high blood glucose peaks even under conditions of a hypocaloric diet.

Like, sorry, no that's absolutely not a fair conclusion of these results. It's just not.

> The fake news sources will have you believe that their lies are of equal stature as others' facts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

Right, and my point is this is the exact same argument the church, and other centralized publishing powers at the time, made about the printing press:

Imagine there being competing interpretations of God? How could we form a community? Wont people have completely different experiences in life if they don't have the same experience with God? If we let someone get exposed to the "bad media" before they are exposed to the "good media" how will they ever know what the "good media" is? Can someone please think of the children?

It turns out not a lot of people are actually in favor of freedom when push comes to shove.

> every idiot now has an amplifier the strength of which allows them to reach the rest of their country, including all like thinking idiots

Honest question for you: how is this different from criticisms of the early days of the printing press?

Yes there is a real lesson about the pragmatic impossibility of true decentralization in email. Specialization of labor is a useful thing, it turns out.

That being said: the fact that is a protocol and not a proprietary standard does have decentralizing effects that do provide a useful incentive check against providers, even if there are only a few of them. There is also a real lesson there too, that one I'll leave for the reader.

Sendgrid puts a huge amount of money and resources into maintaining both technical and political legitimacy. They have relationships with other major senders and receivers of email, they follow every single rule to the T, they aggressively police their own IPs (of which they have many) etc. It's a complicated business, which is why it's totally worth it to pay them to do it for you.

Basically you don't. It's a really big challenge to create a consistently non-blocked email sending service, especially if you host on a big cloud provider like AWS.

Sounds like you are using the Gmail API. To be honest that's not really fit for sending transactional emails, and is increasingly unfit for 3rd party consumption due to API restrictions.

Sendgrid also has a free tier that may work for your use case if the app is for a very limited audience, other than that you're kind of asking "how do I get something really difficult for free?"

My experience has just been that SES is a little less user friendly to setup and debug. It's not a huge deal, you'll probably be fine.

Not OP but I've spent a lot of time setting up email sending for SaaS apps. It shouldn't be too difficult, just use a third party provider like sendgrid and make sure your DKIM and SPF records are setup properly and you should be good to go. I've also used stuff like Amazon SES and it's not worth the trouble for side projects (or even medium sized, real businesses, honestly). If you have specific questions feel free to ask.

> In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science

I have some questions about this model. Big ask I know but I am wondering if you'd reach out to me to discuss your interpretation of it (contact info in profile). I think there are some missing pieces here, and I'd really like to discuss this issue in depth with someone who understands the tech and the law as I think there may be a startup in some other places this law is applicable.

This is the part where the people who brought us PRISM tell us how the real problem is facebook and they are the solution. Ok.

> What % of the population can play video games for 16 hours a day?

Honestly not a ton. It's really really difficult. Even pros struggle with substantially fewer hours than this.

> video game addiction is substantially worse than a running addiction

I'm not really convinced that's true. I don't know anyone who has torn a meniscus or developed arthritis playing video games. While mostly people who run don't develop a pathological relationship with running I stand by my argument that it's completely possible, and the effects on your body are comparably damaging, though in different ways. People also don't usually play video games for 16 hours a day, but sure, it happens. I think balance is required no matter what you are doing, even if the raw number of hours may be different.

Let's broaden the discussion a little bit: think about how uncomfortable most adults are right now with e-sports, but glorify regular sports. That's fine, I have no problem with regular sports, but it's far from uncommon to hear something like "I just don't get it: my son actually enjoys watching other people play video games, what is the world coming to?" That same parent will then sit down and watch other people throw a ball around, and then sigh and shake their head as the announcers discuss yet another veteran of the sport who regularly forgets his wife's name or where he is. Being an elite athlete in any sport completely fucks you up, and yet we choose to ignore that and focus on the insane displays of superhuman ability.

The larger point here is that any activity can be done pathologically, even, in some ways especially, the ones we glorify the most. A lot of our choice to focus on the positives of one activity and the negatives of another largely come down to personal taste.

I have a hard time thinking of anything you can do for 16 hours a day without having detriments to your health. If you think about it this is probably at least one big contributing factor to the evolutionary benefit of sleeping 1/3 of our lives.

Thanks for sharing and glad to hear you're doing better now.

> She doesn't realise that without that escape I wasn't far off suicide. That addiction gave me enough time to sort out my life and figure things out.

This is huge! I always think about stuff like this when people dismiss "entertainment."

Sure I can buy all that, but It's Complicated, and I'm sure you know some runners who are running when they shouldn't be. For instance, I know of someone who had both hips replaced at the age of 25. This was probably primarily due to a genetic predisposition to developing OA, but the earliness and extremity of the onset were obviously impacted by excessive (5-10 miles 2x a day) running, which she continued against doctors orders. I'm not trying to damn an entire hobby: my point is exactly the opposite. People cope with being alive in a variety of ways, and most of those ways hurt you if not kept in balance. We shouldn't vilify video games just like we shouldn't vilify running.

I mean pathological from a death avoidance stand point. For instance, if you are a marathon runner you are running far more than is necessary to contribute to a longer life span. I'm not a runner, but as a weight lifter I lift far more weight than is necessary to contribute to injury or death avoidance. That is the nature of sport. I don't know any old athletes who don't have pretty banged up bodies.

I don't have peer reviewed research about hip replacement and number of miles per day, that comment was a bit more rhetorical than the way you are engaging with it, but I can give you peer reviewed evidence for heart damage: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3119133/

Diablo is orders of magnitude less successful than Fortnite (or even Overwatch, by the same company), and I'd argue the reason is exactly what you are talking about: it's just not a very good game and the things you can get out of it just aren't that valuable. Overwhelmingly people choose more teamwork based, deeply social games. This is what the numbers say.

A second premise I want to address is the idea that using games (or movies or books or whatever) as a mind numbing distraction is a waste of time or the fault of the escape itself. Tons of people are dealing with really intense trauma, and it's not really clear that there really is a better short term alternative for stress management. I think if people are doing things like slashing monsters for 100 hours in Diablo don't look at Diablo, look at what's going on in the rest of their life. Because you can take away Diablo, but you if you aren't fixing what makes them play a shitty game as a distraction for 100 hours you haven't really helped them at all.

Finally: tons of people run pathologically. I mean basically anyone who is serious about the sport does more damage to themselves than is necessary, and runs far more than the optimal amount. I don't think running is exactly the same as gaming, but it's worth examining why we as a culture have no problem discussing Larry's second hip replacement from running 10 miles a day but tremble when discussing Larry's son's 10th hour this week playing Fortnite.

This article addresses moral panic and so it may seem like it is not an extension of it, but I think it basically still is. People have tried for decades, through scientific research, to quantify harm caused by video games and have failed over and over again. Can people become "addicted" to them and use them as escape mechanisms? Sure, But that happens with all kinds of things, from chess to reading to running.

It's rare to see a real impassioned defense of gaming outside of "it's not that bad" but I'd like to go out and say it had a hugely positive impact on my life and I think it's really doubtful I'd be where I am today without gaming. Beyond giving me the foundations of the technical skills I used to become an engineer, gaming gave me tons of social skills as well. As an adolescent I was able to play a ton of different roles in a group in a way that I wasn't able to in real life, even in sports and mock trial and things like that, where other elements of teamwork were present. This prepared me greatly for understanding deep collaboration with teammates at work today. Much more than group projects in school. Like orders of magnitude more so.

It's also important to note that despite being the safest the country has ever been, adolescents are more restricted than ever before. It is extremely rare for them to have places where they can be free, with their friends, and also trying out new social roles. This is an extremely valuable process and it's really difficult to do these days. I don't think there is anything wrong with Fortnite, but I think if you're trying to figure out why people play it and you reduce that down to "bright flashing colors and escapism" you're missing a ton of the context.

And this isn't to rag on sports and say gaming is better (or theater, or woodworking, if those are your things) it's just to say: it's 2019. This gaming thing has been going on for quite some time. It's a real thing with depth, mastery and real benefits that spread into the rest of your life just like playing sports, or chess or however else you think kids should be spending their time. Let's stop tiptoeing around gaming like it's just a vice and start emphasizing the positive things we get out of it.