zupatol

Around the year 2000, there still was almost no advertising on the internet. I remember that a search for "how to meet women" returned a website with lots of pages/chapters into which someone had obviously poured a lot of earnest effort. The advice sounded sensible. The only thing I remember is that it recommended to work on yourself, in particular to develop a sense of responsibility, and said that getting a dog could give you a first taste of it.

I think it was actually called "how to meet women", but it's impossible to find today.

> the very notion of motivation — striving to obtain a more desirable future — implies some degree of discontentment with the present

Surely there must be a study somewhere that shows how the right kind of misery makes employees more productive.

I worked part-time during almost all of my programming career, maybe 17 years. One job was 3 days a week, another 9 months out of 15, currently it's two weeks out of three.

If you want to do something like that, my only advice is to stubbornly refuse to work more. I always make that clear before the first interview.

How about lack of debt, education, satisfying jobs and free time?

Meditation showed you can step back from the anxiety generated by the social hierarchy. It should also help you interact with it without letting it push your buttons.

It always sounds strange to hear a developer job is future proof. I'm a developer in Switzerland and my main impression of the market is that many jobs have left to cheaper places.

Shouldn't it say "meet people who believe less is more"?

It seems I got many things wrong about ClojureScript. If I don't use the closure compiler, can I use any requirejs javascript library without problem?

Once you have the JavaScript version of the ClojureScript compiler, will it be reasonable to use it for compiling in the browser? That would be great.

Clojurescript has to be compiled by the google closure compiler on the server side. The closure compiler doesn't work out of the box with other libraries, you need some kind of bridge.

Lispyscript has the very nice advantage of being able to run directly in the browser. Since it's translated directly to javascript, I expect it won't have problems using other javascript libraries.

Great post, thanks.

For some reason the css doesn't get applied to your page when I look at it in firefox.

Strange that he mentions a 101 Dalmatians film in 1985. I can't remember that and wikipedia knows nothing about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hundred_and_One_Dalmatians...

The 1961 film was actually rereleased in 1979. That fits better with my childhood memories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSF3qlTNbOA

Location: Geneva, Switzerland

Remote: I never did that but wouldn't mind trying

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Java, Python, JavaScript, some HTML/CSS

Resume/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/public-profile-settings?trk...

Email: andreas.kuendig@gmx.ch

I have about 15 years of experience in development in many different industries. I'm interested in any kind of role that includes coding. I'm looking for a job that allows me to work 60% of my time, for example by alternatively working full-time several weeks or months and then taking time off (for writing and drawing comics).

This law was not backed by the party that usually campaigns for harsher immigration laws. The reason is that this party just recently managed to pass an immigration law so harsh it's incompatible with Switzerland's treaties with the EU. All through the campaign they said if the law would pass then we would just renegotiate the treaties. Nine months later no one knows yet how to convince the EU of accepting to change the treaties, or how to interpret that law in way the EU won't mind. And there seems to be a wide agreement that people want to keep the treaties. So we have this huge unsolved problem and on top of that we have to vote on an insanely restrictive immigration law that goes much further than the last one, and doesn't even really pretend it won't harm the economy.

When you vote you get a little brochure with the recommendations of the different parties. Here in Geneva every single party, even the most rabid racists, recommended to vote no. I think it's the first time in my life I saw this unanimity.

The referendum system has been in place for more than a hundred years and it's hard to argue that Switzerland has a tradition of extremism.

Far right parties are on the rise everywhere in Europe, regardless of the voting system.

The way the internet is addictive. I still haven't found the discipline to stop wasting time.

And I thought he would recommend spending times with family and friends, reading books and taking walks.

Give us a little time. It's been only one week, the government and the politicians are still clueless about how to implement the text, while Europe is unleashing a mild shitstorm on the country.

I bet that soon enough we will vote again about measures to fix this vote.

It's not necessary to be a "skilled artist" to make beautiful drawings. Technical limitations force you to be creative. That's true in art as well as in programming.

Don't discourage people. Enthusiasm is what brings them to interesting places. Who knows what a "skilled artist" is anyway?

This would probably result in a lot of illiteracy, good education only for the rich, and very little fundamental research.

Market mechanisms are excellent at solving many problems, but they're not magic. They don't work well to provide public goods like high education standards or social mobility, and they generally have a hard time with intangible goods like knowledge.

Do people really understand this as an apology? Being sorry has two meanings in english, right? It can also mean that you share someone else's pain.

If someone told me he's sorry about the rain, I would think what he really means is that he's sorry for me having to stand in the rain.

> They need everything to be perfect and they need it done yesterday.

Nothing is ever perfect of course, but this is never a problem because these demanding clients always turn out to be capable of accepting reality after all. If you would make reality even harder and suddenly make it illegal for bankers to work at night, no one would be surprised to see deals still being done.

I find it hard to believe that working so much that your faculties are diminished brings something valuable to a job. It's more likely that this has something to do with social dynamics. It could be just a convention that was needed to please those who decide on your promotion, a way to signal your dedication, or a way to protect yourself against what others could do to you when you're not here. Finding a way to get rid of this would surely benefit all. This seems obvious now that one worker died of it.

> Deals are fragile creatures

So are we

Most of the sex seen in media has the purpose of making you buy things. While striking down moral barriers about sex will probably allow healthier discussions to take place, it will be drowned by mindless attention grabbing material without any balance nor legitimacy.

There's a wealth of information on solitary confinement in the US, including a few excellent articles like this one. This makes me think that the problem is on the way to being solved. A lot still needs to be done, but solitary confinement is now declining.

This site has a huge amount of information, this is probably also the place to look if you want to help: http://solitarywatch.com/

If you want to know more, a good place to start is this national geographic documentary http://documentarystorm.com/solitary-confinement/

and these two excellent articles https://www.byliner.com/susan-greene/stories/the-gray-box-an... http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_...

> At one point, the psychologists thought of designing a mobile app, a sort of electronic nagging mother, to help people break bad social habits. (You’d check an item off the list, say, if you remembered to talk to anyone that day—a store clerk or a librarian.) But they didn’t get funding for the software, so now they’re focusing on a simpler and more low-tech fix.

This mobile app sounds like something that would be really easy to write.

It shouldn't be possible to win a hackathon. Building things is fun, and the fun of one team is not worth more than the fun of another.

Here's one happening worldwide next month: http://spaceappschallenge.org/

I agree with using IoC for different implementations, but I'm puzzled by those who want to use it everywhere, because it supposedly makes the code easier to test.

Guice is a nice IoC framework, but look at what they say on their website:

"Think of Guice's @Inject as the new new."

http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/

I've been thinking about odesk, but didn't know vworker. Good to know it can work, thanks.

I'm an unemployed programmer with 10 years of experience and I've been looking for a (part-time) job for less than six months. I keep telling myself it would be great if instead of looking for a job I could spend all that time just coding. I have plenty of ideas. I've avoided that because it feels like running away from my responsibilities, but this post makes me think again.

On the other hand the situation seems to be more difficult where I live (Geneva, Switzerland). I've always been so enthusiastic about programming that I want to encourage everyone to learn it, but today it sounds like bad career advice around here.

> Instead of writing a giant set of XML files to create a giant set of POJOs and wire them together, you write a similar set of Java classes

This is how you would do it without spring. I suppose there must be an advantage of using @Configuration and @Bean instead of plain java, but what is it?