"Disable cache to (re)gain some sanity" because Chrome continues to cache things it shouldn't, including the contents of file:// URLs and in some cases, even content with headers that specify it shouldn't be cached.

mumble grumble

Cool to see some of these features finally documented, though. I had no idea you could drag-drop elements to reorder them.

For those looking to try out the (useful!) Heap Snapshot tool, please be aware that it has a bad habit of crashing tabs. It tends to happen the most when a tab is already using a lot of memory, but sometimes it just happens. So don't do it on a tab that contains any state you might want to hang onto.

One cool feature they don't mention: You can edit code in the script debugger and then hit ctrl+s to update it live in the running page. It's pretty useful for experimenting or for adding tracing points to existing code.

I just used the Chrome Web Inspector (!) to look at the JS libraries, search for the credited authors of the obviously named file and found this:

https://plus.google.com/118075919496626375791/posts/LG93tTdJ...

Which leads to this:

http://code.google.com/p/io-2012-slides/

Which has this code: http://code.google.com/p/io-2012-slides/source/browse/

And this dog food demo: http://io-2012-slides.googlecode.com/git/template.html

Looks great for doing a talk about code. Has a few features for highlighting code, handling links etc

Does anyone know if this is possible using Dev Tools? There is a bookmarklet Visual Event2 (http://www.sprymedia.co.uk/article/Visual+Event+2) that does this, sort of; but it is still lacking.

Some products absolutely depend on pushing the envelope of 'what is possible in the browser'. These trailblazers ultimately spend incredible amounts of effort achieving their desired effect, which a year later will be nicely packaged in an MIT-licensed, open source JS lib you can call with a single line of code.

But one look at my feature roadmap tells me exactly when I'll have the time to analyze HAR files, tweak how often I flush packets, stare at paint rectangles, or write some Chrome devtool plugins -- that would be... NEVER.

Can someone explain TCP Preconnect? My Google-fu has failed me - I understand that DNS prefetching is when Chrome notices that there are links to other domains so it resolves the IP addresses of those domains ahead of time so that their pages will load slightly faster if the user clicks on them. But I'm not clear about TCP preconnecting; are they literally downloading the contents of those pages in advance? Or are they merely opening a connection to the server in case you click on the link so that they'll be able to send the HTTP request slightly faster?

EDIT: I eventually found a link to http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=42694 which indicates that Chrome does indeed open connections to servers and doesn't immediately send an HTTP request, leaving those connections open in case we do need to send HTTP requests.

The paint rectangles thing is amazing. I didn't know browsers even expose this data.

The Audit API looks really useful too.
I'm now thinking of standardizing on Chrome as the development browser for our team (most devs prefer it anyway) so we can share custom development tool add-ons.

http://confreaks.com/videos/886-railsconf2012-let-s-make-the...

(The Chrome Dev tools stuff kicks in about 20 minute)

Am I missing something?

  Uncaught exception: TypeError: Cannot convert 'document.body' to object
  Error thrown at line 38, column 375 in <anonymous function>() in http://www.igvita.com/slides/2012/devtools-tips-and-tricks/js/slide-deck.js:
    Modernizr.load({test:!!document.body.classList&&!!document.body.dataset,nope:['js/polyfills/classList.min.js','js/polyfills/dataset.min.js'],complete:function(){window.slidedeck=new SlideDeck();}});
  called from line 38, column 181 in http://www.igvita.com/slides/2012/devtools-tips-and-tricks/js/slide-deck.js:
    (function(){Modernizr.load({test:!!document.body.classList&&!!document.body.dataset,nope:['js/polyfills/classList.min.js','js/polyfills/dataset.min.js'],complete:function(){window.slidedeck=new SlideDeck();}});})()

I wonder when this will be available for iOS.

-Break on subtree modifications - delete me

Thanks!

"A Re-introduction to the Chrome Developer Tools" by Paul Irish

http://paulirish.com/2011/a-re-introduction-to-the-chrome-de...

"7 MINUTE VIDEOS: JAVASCRIPT CONSOLE PROTIPS & NEWISH DOM APIS" by Paul Irish

http://updates.html5rocks.com/2011/09/7-minute-videos-Javasc...

[1] http://www.igvita.com/slides/2012/devtools-tips-and-tricks/#...

Great slides.

In particular, the geology of Mars in an incredibly fascinating topic. If you're looking for a good primer on the subject, I highly recommend Mapping Mars by Oliver Morton.

Mapping Mars contains a history of the science, highlighting the major contributors to the field and augmented with interviews from such notable science fiction authors as Kim Stanley Robinson. A good discussion is, for example, how much water exists on the planet. Consensus is now that there is water somewhere, but exactly how much water, where it sits, how it flows: great questions that are attacked with lucid explanations.

Hats off to NASA and human curiosity for this grand adventure.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/PIA11858_...

One part of me wants to build another Curiosity style rover and catch the next Earth/Mars orbital cycle and put it down near stuff like this.

I can believe folks would find this as inspiring as looking back at the planet from the Moon.

-- a commenter on that page, Melissa Swanson

That's incredible. Is that really possible? I wonder why the rover doesn't check them out? It seems weird it's digging through soil looking for chemicals possibly related to life when there's potential life out in plain view.

NASA has some very strange priorities.

Everything is dangerous. The key to mitigating that danger is planning ahead for it. A leaf seems harmless, but infection from a cut the leaf gave you could kill you. A marshmallow is fluffy and soft, but if you swallow it without chewing, it could expand and suffocate you.

Asking if something is dangerous is ridiculous. Asking what it is and how to safely handle it is not. The article does a much better job portraying this than the headline does.

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/10vrag/are_those_sp...

My motivation? It's not about the technology, the tools, the apps, the business, the customers, or even the money, although any of those can provide plenty of motivation. And believe it or not, it's not even about the happy dance feeling I get when something I built works for the first time.

It's about the achievements of those who use what I built. Hopefully that'll keep my busy for another 33 years.

I think the author is right in pointing out that there's an ugly side to programming that includes bugs, bad API's, bad tools, bad documentation, etc.

This is what I have come to term "programmer on programmer violence". We certainly can't blame anyone else for these issues.

This I don't enjoy.

Not to single them out --because EVERYONE has these issues-- but you look at the bullshit you have to deal with when doing iOS programming and, yes, it can be down-right demoralizing. Horrible documentation, an IDE that looks more like an iTunes-styled toy than a professional development system, bugs, bugs!, no feedback, huge delays in fixing problems, etc.

Again, this isn't just about Apple, as nearly every system I've worked on over the years has some kind of bullshit that you have to deal with, like it or not.

This, I do not enjoy.

That's why, when justified, I've always gone for projects where I can "own" all of the code. Two typical cases are FPGA-based projects where you start with a blank slate of sorts and develop it into a useful signal processing subsystem. Or, embedded systems where I've had the chance to roll my own RTOS from scratch. These projects are fun. And you don't have to deal with other people's bullshit, laziness, incompetence and technical baggage.

These projects I really enjoy.

The other side of this question is: If you didn't program, what would you do?

I am an odd duck. I am equally at home designing multi-gigahertz digital circuits, programming embedded systems, FPGA signal processors, iOS apps, workstation apps, websites, doing mechanical design and even running a CNC shop. I've been lucky enough to have had the opportunity to learn tons of disciplines through hours-upon-hours of hard-work and dedication. I've enjoyed every minute of it.

What I have not enjoyed --and I'll try not to get too political here-- is when your efforts are affected or even destroyed by external --political-- forces. I recently had to close down a beautiful electronics manufacturing operation that took me fifteen years to build. Typical story: Started in the garage. Worked my ass off. Learned a ton of stuff I didn't know. Worked some more. Grew it to a 15 employee company in a 10,000 square foot building with top-notch manufacturing equipment. That's the good side of the story.

While I was busy doing this, fucking idiots, otherwise known as politicians, where busy meddling with free markets and passing laws and regs that would, ultimately, cause the economic implosion in 2008. My customers couldn't finance their purchases (this was B-to-B in a mostly leased-equipment environment) and orders went to zero or nearly zero instantly. There's a lot more to it, but that's the basics. At one point no option remained but to fire everyone and shut it down.

How does this relate to the "Would you want to be doing this at 50?" question?

Be careful about doing something or falling in love with something that external forces can seriously affect, damage or take away. For me I'll generalize and call this "manufacturing". No, I don't want to be in manufacturing any more. Not now, not when I am 50. It's a shit business in the US and, between our politicians and what's going on in China, it is getting destroyed a little more every day. Here's a case of having invested fifteen years of my life into something that the government destroyed. I did not destroy it. None of my actions caused the economic downturn. None of my employees or my customers caused it. It was government policy that allowed millions of people making $50K a year to buy $500,000 homes they could not afford. And so it went.

The software industry, as fucked-up as it can feel from time to time, can have a lot more isolation from these issues. That's not to say that it isn't affected by economic ebbs and flows, it is.

There's a fundamental difference between the nature of a software business and, say, a manufacturing business. At any given time I had to have one to two million dollars in inventory, tools and equipment (parts, assemblies, raw materials, manufacturing equipment, tools, infrastructure) in order to be a small manufacturer. And, when things go bad, this infrastructure is sitting there, right above your head, ready to squash you, ready to kill you off unceremoniously. It can happen almost literally overnight.

Software is different in that infrastructure is minimal and there is no real inventory investment. You can do software from your bedroom and build a nice lifestyle business or million dollar venture. Most importantly, software is incredible in that you can pivot overnight. You can be doing children's educational apps one day and a real-time process monitoring system the next. This allows for great security and potential stability for years and years. This is a huge advantage and, yes, this is something that would be desirable to have in your life at fifty and beyond.

Two employee candidates interview successively. One is 25, the other 53. Both are comparably conversant in technology, evince comparable cognitive capability, are equivalently literate in the problem domain being tackled by the role they're interviewing for.

Privilege: the 25 year old is not asked (overtly or subtextually) whether they "want to be doing this". It is simply assumed that the 25 year old's head is in the game. No demonstration of lifestyle commitment to the craft is required.

Take the idea and turn it around in your hands for a little while. Try this: imagine that instead of software developers, these were master woodcrafters; luthiers, say. Notice how the subtext changes: age is an asset. A lifetime spent designing guitars is a signifier of passion and competence. Flip the switch back to development and notice how age suddenly connotes something else, like "career failure forcing person to retain technical role".

You will get old someday, if you're lucky. But controlling for spectacularly unlikely values of "lucky", you are aren't going to strike gold in this field, such that you'll have no career concerns when you're 45-50. It is unfortunate that our field manages to devalue competence and experience that way it does; here's a second-time Rails gem author instead of a virtual memory system designer, see you at SXSW!

I actually returned to programming after years managing programmers in part because I was unhappy. I realized that the further I got from the machine and _making_ the less happy I was.

So, if you asked me whether I wanted to be 'managing' at 50, I'd say "Hell, no!".

The enjoyment of making things work, learning and shipping it real. I hope I'm still able to feel those things at 80. I never got the same satisfaction and enjoyment from managing people and processes.

If you want to be able to survive more than 10 years in the software industry, you need to get manager-level clout and full autonomy over your work. That's non-negotiable. This industry destroys you if you don't have those things.

The terrifying thing about the software industry is that if you don't continue to get good work, you decline pretty quickly. Also, I honestly think 90% of what makes some engineers great and most not (once filtering for natural talent has taken place) is past experience: you need a continual stream of high-quality work to become and remain decent at this job, and the good stuff is rare.

The actual work of programming can be a lot better (more interesting, more rewarding) than anything that managers do. The hard part is figuring out a way to be a full-time engineer but retain manager-level clout.

Many engineers think that actually becoming managers will give them what they need to enjoy engineering again, but the problem is that this strategy doesn't work. If you're a manager and your reports figure out that you're taking all the interesting work for yourself and throwing them the scraps, they'll get pissed off and either underperform or leave.

But of course, this sample has survivor bias. How many people who left the profession in their forties are going to post on HN? How many people who are fifty and hate their jobs are going to post on HN?

I love what I do and try to share that love. But my advice to you is this: Don't pay attention to how much we love our jobs at fifty, pay attention to how we got to be fifty without burning out.

If I wanted to rag on programming, I'd point out how many dysfunctional programming workplaces we have, or how our tools are always 100 times more complex than they need to be, or how setting up and managing the programming environment can take the joy right out of actually doing the work. (I could go on at length here)

But overall it's a great place to be. We're the Michelangelos of the great age of machine intelligence which is yet to come. We're sketching out how it's all going to look. We're at the forefront of solving incredible problems and creating magical devices. A guy told me something back in my 20s when I was just getting started that rings true today: technology development is the one area where you can create your own reality. Not only in terms of a virtual reality, but in terms of how you want your work day to go, how you want to interact with your peers, how you get compensated, how you spend your free time. It's all up to you. This is completely unlike many other professions such as doctors where everything is tightly regimented.

I worry that as the job of programming matures, we are losing track of that fundamental insight. One of the reasons I like Agile and Scrum is, when done correctly, it liberates the teams and takes them back to the way programming should be.

It is rarely done correctly.

"To me, there's an innate frustration in programming. It doesn't stem from having to work out the solutions to difficult problems. That takes careful thought, but it's the same kind of thought a novelist uses to organize a story or to write dialog that rings true. That kind of problem-solving is satisfying, even fun.

But that, unfortunately, is not what most programming is about. It's about trying to come up with a working solution in a problem domain that you don't fully understand and don't have time to understand."

If this is a problem that affects you don't do 'most programming'. Nothing really stops a developer from learning a problem domain with economic potential. Sure you may have to go to school or read some books or get some experience, but so what?

The idea that a programmer always has to work in a half understood domain transforming some one else's ideas into code is just that, an idea. It is a dominant idea, but nothing really stops anyone from mastering an interesting domain in addition to programming.

Knowing how to program is like knowing how to write (in a largely illiterate society, so your knowledge has economic value). Or like knowing how to cast spells. Yes, if you spend all your life scribing other people's thoughts or casting spells to manifest other people's wishes, it could get boring. Could, but doesn't have to be. You don't have to be a scribe just because you know how to write.

There are many different kinds of programming, some are fun and some are not.

If you really want to be doing this when you're 50 make sure you get good enough that you can pick the projects that are fun. If by the time you are 50 and you've been doing this for 3 decades you are still gluing api's that's not the fault of 'programming', that's a direct result of choices made earlier.

And one more thing: on the scale of things that you could be doing, look at your parents, grandparents and their grandparents and what they were doing when they were 50. Suddenly that api gluing doesn't look so bad at all.

There is programming, writing code that helps computers do what people tell them to do.

Then there is the experience of programming that this author seems to have, which involves a lot of long hours, and nights until 2 AM.

It is rare for competent and experienced people to be tolerant of the toxic environment that was assumed for programming. Over time you learn that there are lots of professional programmers with reasonable lifestyles, and you'll want to become one of them.

However programming itself, if it is enjoyable for you, is likely to remain enjoyable for a long, long time. (Mid-40s here. Didn't learn that I liked programming until around 30.)

In my case the stress sort of waned by itself. I think I moved a bit towards Wally character from the Dilbert series. I don't overcommit anymore and I certainly gained resistance to "aggressive schedules" and visions of doom and gloom tied to deadline skips. So I stress out less and less and I believe it comes naturally with age.

Because I seriously would like to see myself retired by 40. Not even 50. Would I like to code in my spare time? Yes! But I'm dead sure and certain the nature of programming is likely to have changed so drastically in so many years I might find myself a losing horse in such a race. Not that I cannot compete,but after looking at my father I can say for certain priorities in life at 50 are very different than what they are 25.

Solving problems is something that I would love to do even after retirement. But solving problems doesn't always mean programming.

I love programming, but I just like money a little more!

That's a lot different from "hacking on your homepage" or throwing together a quick Ruby script utility to do some scraping.

2.5 yrs out of college. Code monkey. Really, really good at monkey programming. Used to get upset when people made claims that it can't or shouldn't be done. "Of course it can be done you lazy #$%*$%. You call yourself a software engineer??" Then I pull it off. A couple more people love me, a couple more hate me. I become the monkey programmer. I am the one who brings designs to life the quickest.

That's the gist, and it's getting old. Requirements change. Social issues. It's like trying to drive a ferarri up switchbacks of a mountain. No wonder companies love hiring new grads.

The largest benefit from this is: reading & writing a lot of code. There is no substitute for this. It has helped me identify design areas that I need experience with. It has also helped me reason about code more efficiently, which is a very useful skill when interacting with other programmers.

Edit: And then I go home and read HN and /r/programming and play with other programming languages and build stupid little programs and read my books and try to figure out my next move...

I'm not looking for advancement, since advancement would be out of programming and into management, nor a pay raise, since programmer salaries are already plenty high. I just want to be doing exactly what I'm now doing in thirty years.

I had a large portion of the 'middle' of my career in management, including a couple CTO/VP Eng positions, with the traditional increasing stress.

So I moved to Hawaii for nearly a decade, got rid of the stress, rediscovered programming, and I'm happy again.

That said, I sure hope it's not my day job by then. Programming is much more fun when you're just doing it for yourself than when you're solving other people's problems to extract money.

Although even those projects can be made fun by making a valid business case about cool things to clients.

Back in the day, protocols (tools, languages, ...) were designed by people who thought very hard about the implementation, the required resources and the programmers whom these were inflicted upon.

In contrast, entities like the W3C display complete ignorance for the implementation details (look how they've failed to provide even a half-assed implementation of a browser as proof-of-concept for their "designed by committee" standards). Whatever builds on top of such lackluster work is doomed and will frustrate programmers endlessly ...

I made a long (5 year) detour into management because "I was supposed to" and it took me 4.5 years to realize that I hated 80% of my job. That isn't to say management is "bad" but you need to understand what makes you tick and what doesn't and then find a role that matches that. Don't worry about the money - the money will find you if you love your job.

Hm, maybe the solution is to have people in their 50s design APIs, so they can make sure the bullshit doesn't get in?

BTW, I'm not a coder but I Follow several on Twitter and too often see their frustrations with bizarre APIs and things not working as documented -- and these guys are young!

There are some underlying concepts, foundation ideas which didn't change much since 1960-70-80s, the time when they have been discovered, studied and defined.

Yes, people are piling up tons of crap in order to get money, and this is how we got a millions lines of meaningless Java code which no one could understand or maintain, which seems to work well only because most of unit-tests passed and hardware is so cheap.

I don't even want to mention current Javascript madness.

At the same time, however, almost nothing were added to the ideas expressed by John McCarthy, and followers.

Yes. They are stuffing tons of useless crap into new Scheme standard, as they did with Common Lisp, but, the underlying ideas and the principles of "less is more" and "good enough" remain unshaken, like mountains in Nepal.)

In a very rare occasions we still can witness some miracles. For example, the source code of this site - the engine and the language translator in which it written is less than one megabyte. (just imagine what amount of traffic it handles and how much money already created).

There are also Plan9, nginx and few other wonders.

So, in ones 50s one, perhaps, should enjoy knowing and applying these principles and ideas and produce ones own small wonders. Or teach others, as enlightened people like Gerald Jay Sussman or Brian Harvey do.

It's about getting derailed by hairline fractures in otherwise reliable tools, and apparently being the first person to discover...

I actually live for these moments. When I google the error, in quotes, and get 0 responses. Its a total rush to know that I'm the first one there. Its even better when I figure out a decent fix and then light out across the forums to share my new-found knowledge.

I'm currently 24.

I do still love programming, and I'd like to think i'm pretty damn good at it. But do I want to be doing it as a job in 30 years time? I'm not so sure anymore.

I've been through one software job at the very loose-and-fast end of software development, but the pace (and a huge amount of overtime) burnt me out. I got to the stage where I couldn't get myself out of bed to go to work the next day. Over time I recovered somewhat, but I just wasn't enthusiastic about the work anymore.

My current job is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Medical software development is very slow, conservative, and methodical. To be honest I can see why most of the companies in this industry are at the thousands-to-tens-of-thousands scale; you literally need that critical mass in terms of staffing to deal with all of the overhead associated with a medical product. Reports, standards, committees, meetings, audits. And yet this company is doing it with less than 10 people.

It's really feel-good work, but it is really easy to get bogged down in the day-do-day drudgery and overhead, to the point where you completely miss the big picture of helping save peoples' lives. Do I want to be doing this when i'm 50? I don't think so.

In general in software development there's a couple of things that I've realized you have to work really hard at to have as a software developer. I've also discovered that both of these are much more important to me than I used to think:

-- Physical health and fitness: if you're sitting statically in a chair for 8-16 hours a day you have to really watch your diet and make continuous conscious efforts to exercise at every opportunity: it's going to catch up with you eventually (especially by the time you get to that 50 mark).

-- Varied and changing environments: both of my parents have "desk jobs", but both have extensive trips out of the office to visit customers or other sites. As a programmer I don't get this variety (the spice of life), so it's very easy to get bogged down and forget the big picture. I think this also leads to getting stuck in mental and emotional loops, due to a lack of external stimulus (kind of like what people who work from home report).

Nothing prepares you for actually being in a 9-5 programming job. At university it was obvious that there were people who were able to pass tests well enough, but would obviously struggle to code their way out of a paper bag. What about the people like myself, who are competent and practical, but are not prepared mentally to handle the rigors of 9-5 programming? Maybe that's why there is a shortage of labour in this sector: not only are we struggling to find people who are excited about programming and skilled at it, but we also struggle to find people who can handle working in these commercial scenarios?

There are also a number of companies that aren't like the examples above, especially in SV. But the problem with that is that not all of us are, or want to be, in Silicon Valley. Could I start my own company? Maybe, but that's not where my competencies or passions lie, at least currently.

Some deep thought is required about where exactly I will go next, given the time and effort I've invested up till this point into electronics, computers and programming.

One thing I get an odd pleasure out of is when other programmers use phrases and styles I came up with years ago. A recent example is the $ prefix on a JavaScript variable containing a jQuery object:

    // Set $test to a jQuery object and test to the DOM object
    var $test = $('#test'), test = $test[0];

Much longer ago, I coined the phrase "fire an event" back in the 80's when I was designing the VBX interface for Visual Basic (then called Ruby). Alas, not all the names I coined for that project survived: VB Controls were originally called Gizmos, which I thought was a much more fun name. But still it's neat to see people talk about firing an event.

Don't do the work because it's expected of you, because it's sexy, or because it's "interesting". Don't do it because your friends are impressed, because the pay's good, or because your friends are there.

Do it because it enables you to do what you love.

Hrm... it's like that for me, but it's not like that for others I know. Some people I know have worked in the same industry for several years and have a good grasp on the problem domains they address. That doesn't mean they know the solution to everything off the top of their head, but it does mean they'll likely have time to figure it out, as they're in that business for the long term, and have incentives to get it right vs 'fire and forget and move to the next project'.

I'm in my 40s and have been programming, for 30 years. Initially as a hobby (obviously) but getting paid to do it, first part time, then full time, for about 20 years. I had this same conversation with an uncle last year - shouldn't I be doing something else (OK, not quite the same tone as the OP, but we had the discussion).

I have skills that allow me to solve problems for people. Many people do as well, but with software, I do it with electrons, and can do it wherever and whenever I want. In contrast to many other types of work which dictate location, tools, timing, software work is incredibly flexible. But... more to the point, as more of the world continues to become software-based, the opportunities to offer my problem-solving skills to people increases at a rate few other industries/skills have enjoyed (or will continue to enjoy).

Even if I switched focus to work in "company X" vs "company Y", my core ability will still be "problem solving with software" - I just don't see that changing for me over the next 20-30 years. The 'how' and 'who' may change, but probably not the 'what' so much.

Add to my above para, this other gem of an observation:

<blockquote>
If you're fresh out of school, there are free Starbucks lattes down the hall, and all your friends are still at the office at 2 AM, too...well, that works. But then you have to do it again. And again. It's always a last second skid at 120 miles per hour with brakes smoking and tires shredding that makes all the difference between success and failure, but you pulled off another miracle and survived to do it again.
</blockquote>

That article really resonated with me. And, no I can't see myself doing it at 50 :-)

EDIT: One more thing to add with regards to context of operations, rewards are also skewed in favour of management rather than "engineers", so at some point mortgage, loans, education and medical expenses will overshadow 'fun'.

However I hope that by then I won't be working for a boss and stressing to meet deadlines. I hope that I will be conducting research and working with fellow hackers to seek out the next frontier of the future.

While I think the present we live in now is full of wonders, I don't get a very gratifying sense that it's going to last. It seems more to me that we're finally able to apply the things we've spent enormous amounts of time and money learning over the last thirty years -- we're not out seeking the future so much as we're claiming a stake in the present.

The main thing that looks unappealing to me about being a hacker decades from now is the constant cycle of learning. I'm on probably my 3rd generation upheaval. I've worked on a daily basis in a team of programmers with C, C++, C#, Java and Python. Getting familiar enough with those languages to do more than just tinker took a lot of effort - even for the languages that are pretty similar e.g. C# and Java. I'm now looking to do more front to back website coding (away from pure desktop/server stuff) so I'm trying a few things out before choosing on the main stack of technologies I need to master.

In my early thirties I still have the enthusiasm to do this but I find it hard to picture doing the same ten years from now with the same smile on my face.

But, that is the issue: enjoyment. The author of the article is not enjoying himself (apparently) so time to try something else.

I enjoy the tech and helping people. My only frustration with my work comes when occasionally projects, for whatever reason, don't work out well.

Still happily coding away @ 37 here.

And before people throw a hissy fit about being called 'stupid', look back at 10 years ago and tell me you weren't stupid with regard to what you think is important now.

No one is saying you can't (or shouldn't) code in your 50s or beyond, but the older you get the more particular you get about what you work on and what your working conditions are.

A quick glance through the posts here reviews a lot of folks here have better luck and it is a good thing. To put things in perspective, I have been working in Asia Pac and now in China. Now I am in the business dev turf where a technical background is proven useful.

I think we're lucky to be in such a creative and interesting profession where you get to learn lots (and it pays comparatively well too).

I've written about the joy of programming in "Why I Love Coding" http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/

Writing books, consulting on multiple interesting projects, and being well-remunerated is a very rewarding way of making a living. Can't complain.

I hope to mitigate the frustrations by simplicity - the idea of a few great tools I know inside and out

It isn't just a matter of trying to have a fulfilling life -- it's a matter of survival. People who don't look up once in a while and consider their larger place are the people who get steamrolled when a new technology kills their entire industry.

I doubt I will always program for someone else, solving their problems. I'm sure I'll do it for another 8yrs at least. Which will put me at 50.

I'm still learning. I'm an ACM member and read at least a paper a week from one of the journals. I keep trying to improve my skills. (A couple months ago I realized I hadn't done much work with trees in a few years, so I spent a week going through tree balancing algorithms from several books. It was fun).

Hardest thing: Having to learn new stuff that isn't designed right. I'm going through a fair amount of that now. Having to move in with a large, not very well designed system and make serious additions to it is . . . irritating.

For example, I've just learned a new vision algorithm that came up couple year ago that makes one of the vision problems solvable with modern hardware, that opens up the possibility to build solutions for this kind of problem.

We are slowly but surely automating life with software, and we developers are in the middle of it. Why stop just because you've aged?

I've been building planes for my first 20 years and herding cats for the rest of my career and there is probably nothing in the world I'd be happier doing.

Note: those may be obscure references for some. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7XW-mewUm8 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MaJDK3VNE should help.

I think one point that's maybe not stressed out enough here is that the passion for the activity itself doesn't necessarily have to do with a passion for the job related to that activity. I very often do things at my work I honestly wish I didn't have to do, a lot of it is really, really numb. Consequently, sometimes I think I wouldn't want to do that for too long, but then I realize the problem is the job itself, not programming.

There's also the question of whether I'll still be able to keep up with all the new stuff when I get older. I've often relied on the fact that I can adapt and learn things pretty quickly. Then I think back and it turns out that it's not so much a 'mechanical' problem, it's more of motivation problem. So I suppose as long as you can keep yourself motivated, you'll keep going.

Was there a reason to use "man" instead of "person" here? Being a man doesn't seem important to the article.

As a side note, I work with a well-known researcher/developer in his 70's, and it's like working with Yoda. There is so much to learn from him.

He also mentions something to the effect of not being able to take the time to completely understand everything. But the problem is, it doesn't matter if you are being paid or not. Your lifetime will always be a constraint. You will never completely understand everything you are working with.

Well stated. Man, do I feel like that. But I think this is a universal problem now. Information is freely available, and there's so much of it. An endless buffet, and it doesn't matter what field you get in to.

I'll be 42 in November, and my experience gives me a guided path to understanding and solving problems, independent of technology, language or API.

I don't need to chew through espresso and lattes until 2am, because I've gotten smarter over time. I can identify patterns and problems faster than I did 20 years ago. I work more efficiently and don't need to take a scatter-shot, unfocused approach to work.

I don't disagree that software is a continual source of frustration to develop, but I think that's because we expect at some point to be super-experts for any problem domain.

Yes, tools and frameworks change. Sometimes they suck. Sometimes they don't. If you don't love learning new things and investing yourself in continually keeping up to date, then you doom yourself to being miserable in this profession at any age.

I'm a Ruby on Rails specialist at the moment, and I absolutely love the framework and community. GitHub and rubygems are amazing. Google and Stack Overflow are like all-knowing genies. I'll go out on a limb and say that right now is the best time in history to be a developer, and tomorrow will be even better.

The author here doesn't seem to be particularly passionate about learning from his battles with Hard Problems. I don't blame him, because it's hard and painful to be in a constant battle. But for my part, I hope that I still have a taste for the pain of learning when I'm 50; the day I stop wanting to learn is the day I become bored & boring.

It's not that I am getting any smarter. There are so many new tools and so many new techniques with thoughtful discussion to back them up, that creating cool new stuff is becoming a piece of cake.

My world is all about 3D.

WebGL and libraries like Three.js are breakthrough tools.

Stuff that would have taken weeks to code gets dashed off in hours.

I would not stop coding even if you paid me to stop.

It's way too much fun right now!

  > ... a problem domain you don't fully understand and don't have time to understand.

Of course there's still pressures, and technology still moves, but it's not cut and paste and pray.

(I'm not sedentary, I walk 3 km/day, 8 on week-ends).

If I'm working on a projects/products I care about I think I could easily do that for the rest of my life.

At times, it's the enthusiasm of others which pushes me along, while I provide technical expertise / experience. Other times I will have a silly idea of the way the world should be, and I can use that to gather others around me and make their lives better.

Programming at its best, for me, is vision enabling :) How could you ever grow out of that?

Nothing wrong with being a craftsman, using your intellect, and making others happy. In some ways, pursuing the elusive "big win" seems a little shallow by comparison.

They don't know what is happening behind the scenes like how code gets compiled, how inter machine, inter process communication happens. How browsers work, what is the work involved when someone requests a web page from a server. How to debug issues? Effective debugging requires great knowledge of the components involved and creative thinking and above everything else lot of patience.

I just hope my wrists hold out that long.

This statement verges on ageism, which I forgive you for because it is common in the tech industry. Ask Rob Pike (b.1956) if high impact programming is for young men.

1. You're doing it wrong.
2. You work for some sort of agency / programmer-for-hire outfit where you never work on the same project for longer than a few weeks or months.

Im only 20 and if I can program/code/solve problems for the rest of my life, I know i'll be content until I die.

of course I do

However, doing a quick bit of research earlier today, a search for "Tesla working environment" turned up more than a handful of reports by former and current employees that hint at an unpleasant company culture. Six to seven day workweeks, below average compensation, hyper-political management, management that is quick to fire, and a generally chaotic environment. These factors seemed to be reported even by folks who cited other benefits such as a high degree of autonomy and the opportunity to work with other highly passionate top level engineers on important emerging technologies. One additional oft-repeated concern was that the pace at which Tesla works its engineers is unsustainable, and will lead to burnout for lack of work-life balance.

Can anyone closer to the Valley than I am comment on whether these concerns ring true? And how does this compare to work at other highly innovative and passionate industrial startups?

Elon's explanation of the latest round of fundraising is welcome news, and personally I'm gunning for Tesla to become the Apple of the auto industry. (I plan on buying stock as soon as I'm able.) Is there anything we can infer from these employee reports about the health of Tesla's organizational core/DNA, and what effect that might have on the company's prospects for long term success?
[Edited for clarity]

We are past peak oil. Battery tech will reach oil parity within the decade. Solar PV will reach grid base line within the next 2 decades. Fusion will be introduced within the next 3 decades. Electric engines already run 92% efficiency (vs the combustion engines 15%) and global warming externalities are finally being priced.

The electric car is a no brainer (it wasn't a decade ago, and it'll be too late a decade from now) just like the electrification of trains were. This company will electrify suburbia and reduce costs while they are at it.

Timing + skill = Very nice stock returns (timing is about 10x more important).

Disclaimer: Goes without saying - I am long TSLA and will continue to be long for the foreseeable future.

Given that their balance sheet is decreasing by an extraordinary $30M a month, that would have left only two months until the company was insolvent. No wonder the U.S. government wants their $465M paid back more quickly than planned.

The company has lost over $850 million since being founded in 2003.

Not sure why Elon and a lot of SV entrepreneurs feel this way. You take a loan; if it reduces your weighted average cost of capital, you roll it and/or pay it slowly. As a Tesla shareholder, I hope such cheap financing remains in place as long as possible to maximize shareholder return on equity by keeping cost of capital as low as possible -- and by improving Tesla's cash position (helping it to operationally succeed) to boot.

Another guy thinking about buying Tesla stock.

Never in my wildest dreams did I expect that to become a reality. We truly live in amazing times.

It's well worth listening to.

I wonder how this will play out politically, especially if Tesla gets into trouble financially. That story is already being spun.

* A black coworker is singled out by another (non-black) coworker with "watch out for that guy, he's trouble, he talks a lot of shit"

* Referring to a latino coworker, that same coworker suggests jokes: "Like ‘you're a mexican whore' or like ‘your mother's a Mexican whore?"

* The black coworker is given a dictionary and told "I got this for you cause I know you speak ebonics."

* The latino coworker is then told "I would have gotten you one too but they didn't have wetback to english"

* The author, who is black, is then told "Hey he's dressed like Run DMC, does he know how to rap?" (The author is wearing a Pitchfork Media-compatible outfit including skinny jeans and a long-sleeved print t-shirt)

* The black coworker later informs the author that "Steve wanted me to let you know that we're dressing too thuggish in the office and we need to dress in a way that reflects the company better". "Steve" is the previously-mentioned white guy, and also apparently a manager.

* After telling that coworker that he is considering telling HR about racism in his group, "Steve" takes him aside for a 1-1 meeting. The author is informed that any attire is acceptable except for baggy jeans. After hearing the author's complaints, "Steve" says, "Whoa whoa whoa, those comments you're hearing aren't racist; they're jokes", and then "The problem is that you're too sensitive. You need to check all that at the door before you come here to work", and finally "We don't even tolerate people brining up concerns of racism here.".

* Later, a women asks whether the pendant the author is wearing, which is from Nairobi, is "a calculator".

* "Steve" later informs the author, "it's ok to make jokes about slavery because that's over". Then, "Also, you should be grateful that your ancestors went through slavery."

Peppered throughout the post are cultural signs and signifiers that mark the author as an advocate for a fairly specific set of political and social beliefs. A reader could be excused for having concerns that the author was not an objective witness. On the other hand, those signifiers are so obvious that you could also question whether someone who had set out to unfairly tar the company would put them into the post.

Apart from the comment about the pendant, any one of the comments listed above would be a firing offense here.

The emphasis here is on racism, but there's a ton of casual sexism -- and I'd be surprised if ageism wasn't present, too.

This is, at best, a company where HR have taken their eye off the ball. More likely, there are serious institutional failings (and probable harrassment lawsuits coming down the pipe in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... if they don't do something about the corporate culture fast).

Note: this is me trying to stay dispassionate and non-angry. If I was the author of this piece I'd be incandescent. Props to him for staying calm and documenting this stuff rather than simply walking out. Or exploding.

"then proceeds to do what black men always can't help but do"

"black men always telling which way is up because they feel they are the “authority” when it comes to any and everything, most often when they don't know shit about shit"

" I know when black people start to speak down to me from their pedatsol which is white privilege, they aren't listening, nor will they"

"I cannot afford to take black people's shit anymore."

Those are all quotes from the article, except I put 'black' where the author put 'white', both sets are clearly an unacceptable way to speak. While I am sure this guy has faced real disadvantage from some bigoted people, this post is laced with racism against white people and ridiculously over-the-top statements about colonialism and "neoliberal white supremacy".

From the comment above (and several other parts of his article) he certainly appears to be just as racist as the people he's trying to demonize. Not to mention there's a crazy amount of self entitlement going on.

>I had a whole month of potential creative and community building energy stripped from me for the sake of this company's profits. That shit ain't cool.

A "whole" month of your "potential creative and community building energy"? Really? I have LOTS of months where I don't get to focus ANY time on any sort of creative or community building endeavors because I have other things that need to be taken care of.

I do not condone what he experienced at his workplace and that's terrible that it happened. However, his tone in the article and apparent prejudice towards white people makes it difficult for me to summon a lot of nice things to say.

I've ranted and raved before about how despicable I consider some of the HR practices common in the games industry, how how in particular I feel that certain companies treat their employees as disposable and prioritize the success of individual products over the health of the team and the health of the company culture.

This, however, is on an entirely separate level: The company management itself being complicit in the abuse of employees, and taking actions that not only damage the team & culture but actually jeopardize the success of products by seeding anger and distrust between team members. That even a single person in a management position would allow this kind of shit to go on is disgusting.

When Harbin (Kixeye's CEO) quoted Conan the Barbarian in their tasteless recruitment video ('What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.') my instinctual response was negative. To me, even for a company that intends to appeal to the hardcore male gamer audience, using that kind of language - language of oppression and sexism and violence - when talking about making social games felt unnecessary and excessive. It made me wonder if perhaps the company's CEO actually shared the perspective espoused by the fictional character of Conan - but that couldn't possibly be true, could it? Could someone actually feel that way about others so strongly that he'd be willing to say so, unabstracted, in a video designed to present his company to the rest of the world and excite prospective employees? Of course not, right?

I also find it extremely interesting to contrast-and-compare Kixeye's depictions of Zynga/Mark Pincus, and Kixeye, in their recruitment video [1] with my personal experiences with both companies. I almost feel as if the staff behind that video were projecting their own fears and insecurities onto their competitors.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5l-nnR4Bx0

"Hey, I'm not sure how to tell you this, but you're not black." (laughs all around...)

"You know you're white, right?"

"Slavery ended a long time ago, blacks have nobody to blame but themselves by now" (roughly paraphrased)

"I've got plenty of black friends. They agree with me on [fucked up view]."

I'm a human being and I've seen black Americans treated more like shit than anybody else, by far, throughout my life. Usually it's the side-swiping stuff the author talks about, but sometimes it's right in my face, usually when discussing politics and social issues with my peers.

Ultimately, I end up doing what most everybody else does in my situation: I withdraw. I don't debate anymore. I don't grin, but I bear it. I help people where I can, silently.

I know I really only make technical posts on this website, but shit, sometimes you've gotta vent.

Maybe they should actually try and focus as a company.

1. insist the programmers work. There games are not that great.

2. insist their website get up to 2012 standards. I would assume they were not a serious company based upon their all Flash website.

3. Look at Chick-Fil-A and the onslaught of people pissed off at their stance on gay's in the workplace. We should be equally pissed at Kixeye and boycott them too.

4. There are standard stereotypical jokes and then there are blatant racist comments.

Example Joke: Asians have a lot of trouble parking and stopping at stop signs.

Blatant racism: "Hey Joe, I mean Ying, to use your real name, nice 30 point parallel park this morning, you really are Asian."

There is a difference. I am white and I live in a very predominantly Asian area of Cupertino and the joke would be funny to a lot of Asians. The racism, no.

Kudos to the OP for writing this.

We can all tell he is upset at what he experienced. Some of this shows through but boil this down to the essence and we have a company that is openly encouraging a racist environment and in 2012 nobody should have to worry about being black, white, purple, gay, straight, trans-gender, dress like a thug, cross-dress, etc...

Edit: Thinking about this more, the OP gets irritated when the company served a lunch of "Fried Chicken and Waffles". He implies indirectly to Black folk this is an insult. However, look at the menu of "Waffle House" and it is an item on the menu. There wasn't anything really wrong with the lunch they served. It is one of those lunch combinations that people just know about and associate with Blacks.

Example: Fried Chicken and Watermelon - Black

Corn Beef and Cabbage - Irish

Tea and Cucumbers - WASPS (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant)

Mac and Cheese with Hot Dogs - White

Racist company and an OP that is coming down to their level more often than he should. Let the water roll off a ducks back...

Don't worry though! There IS something you can do to nip this potentially awkward and embarrassing situation in the bud. By simply derailing the conversation, dismissing their opinion as false and ridiculing their experience you can be sure that they continue to be marginalised and unheard and you can continue to look like the expert you know you really are, deep down inside! "

The more you know: http://www.derailingfordummies.com/complete.html

Even if this IS exaggerated the allegations are still very serious. Times like these are a reminder that the tech industry is still living in the dark ages where sexism and racism is rampant at worst and disconcerting at best. WE will not get past this problem if we keep questioning everyone who raises the issue. We need to be more accepting of the issues that exist instead of attacking the messenger.

I wouldn't say I am disappointed by the discussion here because the HN crowd is generally sheltered from the problems of prejudice(consisting mainly of straight, white, men) but unless we as an industry start accepting this issue we will continue to languish as a one of the most gender and racially lopsided industries in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator

He certainly didn't hide the company very well. However knowing the company makes his allegations much more plausible.

I can only imagine this kind of attitude can be go unchecked in an insular frat-boy-ish culture where strong ties and long hours are valued more than respect and work output.

Definitely something to watch out for - even if you're in the in-group and not being harassed, it's not fun witnessing this kind of petty abuse.

There is covert racism. That's harder to stop, but a good way to start ending it is to accept that in the workplace you might want to restrict the "jokes" that you tell.

And then there's all the sub-conscious prejudice that's so hard to eliminate.

As with any story a reader wants to like the characters they are reading about. It's hard to like someone who is constantly angry, depressed, sarcastic, and bitter. You, as a person may feel these things, and be completely correct to feel them, however you make it hard to read your story without a contrast. For example, "I love games" or "I love the way I feel in Oakland" or "I am so proud of my necklace I don't care what others think." People can empathize with pain, but they also need joy, hope, and a reason to like you.

Another way to win the rhetorical battle is to use humor. Your reactions to the abuse are shock, horror, rage, and sarcasm. Feel free to interject a joke or two. In ten years you will be telling jokes about these ignorant people. Make them into caricatures, lampoon them, exaggerate their folly so that people will not just be angry at them on your behalf but seem them as an absurd throwback to a time you wish had passed.

Tell a story that demonstrates the moral high ground. What I remember from your post is that you tried to say something, gave up, then went home, got high and watched Netflix. People want to be inspired to take action, and if you have a story, even if it means talking to HR, that is incredibly powerful. How does your behavior model an appropriate response for others who might be in your shoes? A lawsuit may be appropriate, but from reading your story it seems like a dramatic escalation, you need to lead people into it.

I can't say I understand what you're going through, but I do support your effort and I'm disgusted on behalf of white-straight-geeks everywhere. If an apology means anything I'm sorry you are going through this.

"Oh..hell..no.."

I had to remind myself that this was a blog post. That it wasn't a literary article or technical diagram. I look for unbiased, factual reporting that is meant to educate and improve awareness. This is not one of those things. It's an inflammatory post where an individual is airing his grievances. I feel sorry that someone can be treated so poorly in a workplace, but at the same time, the author damages his point by using equally vitriolic and occasionally stereotypical phrases.

I hope the author is able to find a work environment that is more progressive and that is more respectful of all genders, creeds and sexual orientations.

Was that inherently a racist thing to say? Because looking at it... it does look like something electronic.

There's no question that the workplace was hostile, but there are too many side quests in this article. I'm not sure what Jose's marriage or the Dumbwhite-comment has to do with it. Maybe I'm missing something.

But this wouldn't be my comment if I agreed with everything. Then I'd just have upvoted the post further. The problem here is, that this article also paints a picture about the author and it doesn't paint a very welcoming one to me. The article itself is littered with racism and typical "anti-hate" buzzwords. The kind of words I usually hear from people filled with lots and lots of hate themselves.

That is definitely not the answer to any of the problems OP has faced. Is it understandable? Yes. Does it help? Not at all. Don't get me wrong: It's important that people get the word out to fight racism, because it's still prevalent all over the world but fighting fire with fire never helped and calling a racist any racist slurs only makes things worse.

Then there are some things I personally disagree with in general. PC speech is incredibly bad (and ineffective anyway) I think. Not only does it just shift the problem to a different domain, it also attacks free speech. Being pretty fundamentalist about free speech I can't find any good about trying to make a language "politically correct". After all, the problem aren't the words. The problem are the values different people assign to them. What we need to do isn't "banning bad words", we need to make people more open-minded. If this isn't accomplish, banning words won't help anyway, because one day the "politically correct" word will have the exact same value attached to them as - say, for example - "nigger" has today. Language isn't written in stone. It always moves and evolves and after all it's a reflection of culture and society.

Besides - not really related to the article - I don't believe in never offending anyone. In fact, I think I offend people on a daily basis just by stating my opinions and seriously, I couldn't care less. Obviously, racism is a bit more than just offending.

Oh yeah and by the way, last time I checked, neoliberalism was a school of economic thought.

That said...there is a difference between some guy ranting on a blog and a 200+ company with what appears to be institutionalized problems of sexism and racism ingrained into their culture. In a respectable tech company, any one of the alleged comments made by Steve would have landed him in a hotseat meeting with HR but-quick. The fact that he still works there at all is troubling to say the least.

Put another way, if any of this is even remotely true then you couldn't pay me enough to work there.

On that same note, don't bring yourself to his level and start throwing out racist slurs too. Your words are public domain now, and if they get a lawyer with any sense, they might find a defense in your offense.

kick his teeth in in court though! (figuratively of course)

I have a friend from [insert some exotic country here].
I love [insert some singer from some minority group here]

To the more awkward:

What's up bro!
[insert awkward racial remark of your liking here]

It comes to no surprise that some would even choose to compensate by exhibiting a bold racist behaviour that, they think, should be received with some reverse psychology acrobatics: I'm preemptively making racist jokes, because I want to show you that I'm not actually racist and rather open. (I'm also kinda covering my ass now, in case I do happen to trip over my tongue later and say something really out of place).

Sadly, an increasing amount of people who behave like this also think that it's ok and that racism is now in the eye of the beholder. So they will tell their jokes to Kevin, who they've just barely met and if Kevin takes offence, then it's Kevin who's too sensitive about that kind of humour. So they will apologize by saying something like relax bro, I didn't mean it in a racist way. I have many black friends. Racism doesn't exist anymore. Chill, have a sense of humour. They never stop to wonder, did Kevin, who is from Ghana, connect with their African American stereotyped jokes? Do his black friends actually even call him "bro"? Does he or the people he associates with actually use the n word?

Do they actually acknowledge that this behaviour isn't acceptable? The way they reason is, I'm not racist, so I can just keep calling my black friends n, as long as I don't mean it in a negative way. So it's not surprising that later they'll try the exact same jokes on Robert, thinking he might be of the "more open minded inclination".

My tip when it comes to befriend minorities (this is going to be a let down): They're just people, get to know them like you would anybody else. Don't attempt any "hacks", don't play games, don't test them thinking that the outcome should be different from any other human being. Take the time to know the person, don't assume that you've figured them out based on their gender, orientation or physical appearance.

We have at least: "You're too hostile", with a side order of "You're being Overemotional" and "You Are Damaging Your Cause By Being Angry" plus a few "But that Happens to Me Too!" and plenty of "But I'm Not Like That - Stop Stereotying!". Any more?

(I could link to the guilty parties, but they'd probably only start arguing the toss.)

There are upsides to such an anything-goes environment as well (creativity, originality), but it's clear that in this case, anything goes to the extent that you're white and male. I'm not wholly in sympathy with the author (that necklace does kinda look like a pocket calculator, and the inquiry didn't seem malicious), but think he is right to seek redress. That said, it would be a good idea to consult an attorney about how much to say in public; showing an advert for your employer that will be recognizable to many other people in the locality may be a bad idea.

If you are going to take exception to racist, sexist and stereotypical joking - which is most certainly your right in a professional work environment, you may want to re-evaluate your own notions of "the evil white oppressor" and recognize it for the racism that it is.

I wish I could take this tale at face value, but the author is clearly looking for oppression whether it exists or not. I'm not sure at this point one could expect that this telling is even remotely close to accurate.

But this dude's attitude is fucked up. It's statements like OP's that keep me from engaging in any meaningful way with organizing against racism and gentrification.

If you're a white cis male, even one that acknowledges and tries to check his privilege, who thinks poor people shouldn't be displaced on account of Twitter moving to the Tenderloin, a whole lot of people in the anti-gentrification movement think the only appropriate thing for you to do is move out of the city yourself, because you being white and male and having gainful employment is part of the problem.

I went to one meeting where one black speaker insinuated that white people "don't have a right" to move to Oakland, whether or not they're moving for economic reasons.

That's racist. Straight up. Nobody should make excuses for that kind of language, regardless of the extreme privilege historically enjoyed by white men in this country.

Just because I'm white doesn't mean I'm a colonizer, or fetishizing poverty, or anything else, and the knee-jerk bigotry expressed by the original poster needs to be addressed by people in activist circles who just let stuff like that go unchallenged.

Maybe this is a dumb response, but I'm immediately led to wonder if this has anything to do with it being in QA. I have a friend who worked in QA at a game company and, while he never mentioned witnessing such racism, he did describe a shocking amount of disrespect and hostility and a widespread attitude that HR would do absolutely nothing to deal with it. Again perhaps it's a silly thought, but maybe when your barriers to entry are "hey do you play videogames" and you're picking up anybody off the street, you aren't going to create the best team.

Note who has given them funding. Send this blog post to the VC companies that have given them funding. Should hit them where it hurts.

And yes, take legal action. (Although seek legal council to ensure first bit isn't considered slander or what have you. Be in best possible position for a legal battle.) Companies like this give the profession a bad name.

But the comments should be turned off. This is such a heated topic and are there aren't any right answers to this problem besides "keep it in mind, don't do what they did". What can possibly be discussed here besides emotional bickering from both sides. It does not seem productive and is not interesting conversation.

(I posted this exact same comment on another thread on HN today, about the sexism at a tech conference... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4602688)

Don't let racists bring you down to their level.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5l-nnR4Bx0 probably NSFW)

This blog post has been a very sad reality check for me.

I will be sure to avoid Kixeye's games (Battle Pirates, Backyard Monsters, War Commanders), and hope to hear of them going under soon.

I mean, you should be able to sue people for saying enormities like that!

I didn't see it as me being racist, just as retaliation.

But then again, I didn't see the other guy as racist, just as an asshole.

I was eccentric and the mean kids wanted to pick on me.

I assumed that their basic motivation was malice, so had I been white (so they couldn't use mild racial slurs against me) they'd just have found something else nasty to say.

I put that into a separate category than racist, which to me meant something like the members of the KKK or the Nazi party.

Is this a false distinction?

I get the same vibe about the mentioned workplace, like it's a bunch of jock assholes (and definitely meets the definitions of "hostility" and "harassment", for what it's worth).

http://derailingfordummies.com/complete.html

While it might sound as if in effect there is no difference, I think there might be: one variant makes the victim think "whoa, the world is full of racists out to get me", the other is "just another asshole boss".

I mean the latter case would be somebody looking for weaknesses in his opponents. If the other person is a white guy, he would probably find something else, joke about is weight, being poor or whatever applies.

That's of course no excuse, it just seems easier to remove yourself from the affects of one bad boss/colleague than from racism.

Between the racist PoS featured in the story, and the author's various nasties about "white neoliberal imperialist blah blah blah", the above quote is my take on things.

I'll also add that articles meant to elicit rage are usually not great; they're often intended to shut down one's thinking processes, and lead to heated discussions.

"And it's not a matter of generalizing white people, rather it's being real about the culture San Francisco creates."

The author is angry that white culture perpetuates racism and privilege, which himself and other cultural minorities are now forced to tolerate at their workplace. His choice of words was obviously inappropriate and while I'm not excusing how his point was said I don't believe it was his intention to make his point using racist statements.

This is a classic example of "What you said was racist VS. You are a racist":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Ti-gkJiXc

I find it hard to take seriously a rant on racism in the work place where, on not just one but several occasions, refer to someone who is being ignorant as a "dumbwhitemotherfucker".

Yeah, not buying it.

plus the run dmc segue into the 'what i wore today' image was a bit gratuitous

The author seems to imply that SF is really racist. Is there any truth to that or did I just not notice while I was there?

Instead of jumping on what the guy with no power did wrong, why not focus on the utterly despicable way in which he's been treated? If that's not your first and most urgent concern, then you really need to ask yourself why it isn't.

... which is where the story starts to go bad. Videogame testing is a notoriously terrible space with incredibly unacceptable behaviors (see http://trenchescomic.com/tales for a selection of them). Which is not something I note to imply that our blogger should have known better; it's something I want to hilite to raise consciousness about it.

I'm glad this author is taking action and hope he gets all the support he can from his communities (including this one). This stuff is poisonous, unacceptable, and right under the noses of a lot of tech companies. It needs to stop.

Backwards racism at it's finest.

I understood what she meant when Steve Jobs died - I was really overwhelmed, I think because I derived such a big part of my life, livelihood, and identity from iOS over the last 3-4 years.

I also did the same when Dennis Ritchie died, though not every story was about that - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/140966/hn_ritchie.png

RIP to both of them.

http://www.hausmag.com/steve-jobs.html

Miss you, Steve.

Link to audio: http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/62010118/download?client_id...

From where you're watching Steve, thanks.

http://www.txtpost.com/playboy-interview-steven-jobs/

RIP Steve Jobs

And from Amazon: http://imgur.com/eJ77c (upper right corner)

Also, BT 4.0 LE is perfect for this -- since there's no NFC in the iPhone 5, I suspect BT 4.0 LE will end up taking the place of NFC for a lot of "heavier duty" NFC applications -- not that the Bluetooth protocol is great or elegant, but it's a lot easier to work with than NFC, and now BT 4.0 LE exists on both major smartphone platforms.

All my earlier criticism of not having a local ACL and local RF communication to the lock, vs. going to/from the Internet, is now resolved.

The only thing they're missing is a BT 4.0 LE dongle (which I've seen on Kickstarter called "hone" http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/690528216/hone-for-iphon... -- you could put that on your keyring and use it as an expensive HID proxcard replacement. Same thing works for electronic leash.

Now all they need to do is support 5-10 locksets in some kind of private/small business network (vs. putting in a HID access control system), for 0-99 users, and they'll be really innovative. Managing a single door with 0-5 people is comparatively easy; managing an office with turnover is a lot harder, and businesses would happily pay $1-2k for a system to cover their doors and employees with a nice LDAP/AD/FB/etc. interface.

Since you can upload your own firmware, it would be entirely possible for a customer to build this.

  your phone working
  2.4 Ghz
  your internet connection
  your power
  their datacenter
  their website software

anyone in the area could easily ddos off your wireless more or less permanently by spamming disconnect.

doesn't seem like a very good risk/reward ratio to me.

whats the problem with a more traditional (read local) keyless approach? door too thick?

a. Remote entry -- unlock your door from afar.
b. A nice home automation system (mine's expanded to control lights and thermostat now)
c. Keypad and key-entry as backups

I love it. Being able to remotely lock and unlock your doors is super handy, whether it be for guests, contractors or what not. But what's really handy? Never worrying about locking yourself out of your house again.

If I could just get rid of my car key, I'd be thrilled.

[1]http://micasaverde.com/
[2]http://amzn.to/QGn2Im

http://consumer.schlage.com/Products/Pages/category-landing....

[1] http://www.unikeytech.com/

One of the biggest improvements, not offered by the Lockitron, is the lack of needing to fumble in your pockets for anything. If you've got a handful of groceries, it's much easier to shift a bag or two to get a hand free and punch the code than it is to go digging in your pockets.

I would want to understand how Lockitron might use and secure my lock-usage, location, and other personal information before using the device and service to lock anything important, like my office or my house.

I did get a look and was going to make a comment (which I wanted to verify) that the site in no way shows that the company had built another product (at least not from a quick look).

Now I can't even get a look at the site. This isn't 1996. Why are people having so many issues with delivering simple reliability to a 1 page website?

It could be more clear that the lockitron does two very interesting things, I had to watch the video to figure them out:

- knock detection via microphone so you know someone is at the door (awesome)

- auto-unlock based on nearby phone presence (presumably bluetooth) so you can just walk into your house.

If it works like it's supposed to, this is seriously great.

*I hate it when people say that so I'll expand. Simply put, I'm worried about it getting hacked. For instance, could you gain access to someone's wifi and then flash a new image (which includes a rogue key) onto the device?

Interesting.. so you don't even need the money for the first production run, pure crowd-hype marketing. Also very ballsy of YC to sidestep kickstarter like this.. although i suppose 1000 pre-sales isn't huge.

As for the product, some nice feature improvements over v1.0, although i'm not a fan of the new plasticy design-- i would not want to see that thing on my door unless I had to, for any price.

Too slow! Well played, Lockitron.

Regardless, I'm a fan. The fact that granting and revoking access is so trivial meant that when I was an intern I still had full ability to come and go regardless of the presence of a fulltimer (contrasting with other internships, where hesitance to give interns keys meant if I showed up too early I had to sit on my butt till someone arrived to let me in).

And when I actually do want to open it remotely, I get a call with a code I can enter. In other words, some sort of 2 step authentication.

And I want to be notified by the app every time that door opens if I am not using the app right then to open it.

One issue with the video around 0:40...
Lockitron really needs to buy their hardware engineers some eye protection and magnification devices. You should never solder up close like that without eye protection. What they show in the video probably violates OSHA guidelines.

I also hope they salt their password hashes.

Incidentally, this is also just a workaround. It's a hack. It's likely not to work in all homes or with all locks.

Moreover, this thing will likely look out of place and fairly undesirable on most doors, especially on older buildings.

An actual installable lock would be incredibly more compelling due to the fact that it will be less bulky and intrusive.

http://today.ucf.edu/ucf-engineering-alum-lands-500000-deal-...

http://abc.go.com/watch/shark-tank/SH559076/VD55203511/week-...

1. Wow, that device must have a lot of torque as many deadbolts, mine for example, actually requires some effort to turn, either to lock or unlock. This resistance is caused mainly by the springiness of the weather stripping which pushes back against the door when it is closed.

2. Sometimes, when sunlight falls upon�"and heats�"the door I need to push or pull slightly on the door in order to turn the deadbolt at all. The door is not dimensionally stable and deadbolt alignment changes. This makes me think that the system would not be reliable. I know my door and deadbolt are not unique in this regard.

Don't know why they don't do it like that instead of having to send a text...

Granted the risk there seems small, basically limited to people without a smart phone who are also in the market for a smart gadget like this.

It is good to see that this is disabled by default, but it seems like a really unnecessary security hole.

Will Sense work with multiple phones at a time?

I love the idea of this device, but I also love seeing locks defeated.

This product can be about much more than solving the problem of forgetting your keys. People with limited dexterity (such as my father, a quadriplegic) would love a product like this. When leaving the house, he would be able to make a few taps on an iPad to lock things up. Right now we don't use a lock because it's behind a garage door, but this would allow us much more flexibility.

A year from now if my phone runs out of battery, I am homeless. :)

http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/22/after-surviving-the-shark-t...

Here is some context behind the current incarnation of Online Python Tutor:

https://plus.google.com/+ResearchatGoogle/posts/cseo9qi7LWq

This is exactly what I needed to help people visualize their code. I can't tell you how many beginners have a hard time figuring out how a program steps through their code and this is a huge win there.

Huge thanks!

However, my big criticism of these sorts of visualisations is they seem to be entirely geared towards imperative programming. Has anyone seen similar visualisations for more functionally structured code?

Oh, I see you can write your own code to be visualised. Here's a simple list comprehension:
http://pythontutor.com/visualize.html#code=myList+%3D+range(...

Not the most enlightening visual.

[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4577133

(1) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3759858

locals() and globals() are undefined.

Still crazy slick (if it were the early 90's I'd say "l33t") bit of coding.

This should definitely be integrated into Udacity and other learning platforms! Most instructors have to do this by hand in CS 101 lectures anyways.

I'm a big fan of #1 being "State the problem." rather than "Is this a 'Good Idea'?" they are inter-related of course, but any good software architect has their eyes fixed on the problem so they don't get distracted by the opportunities to 'decorate'.

I like asking people what they think the 'architect' does, that is to weed out people who think architect implies a leadership role, it can be but it isn't necessarily. In the 'real' world the architect is the person who notices you've got a banquet room for 100 people but the nearest restroom is two floors down, or a single hallway connecting both the people and the kitchen to the room. They see the 'whole' goal (feed large groups of people) and then work out what has to be true for it to be not a problem.

I look for similar skills in software architects, they don't care if the implementation is rails/django/node but they do care that individuals can be identified as users or guests, given capabilities or not, can be disabled or not, and the largest possible number are welcome.

Sometimes architecture is combined with the person who does design, sometimes with the person who does coding, and sometimes its just a person asking really good questions at the launch planning meeting.

Related: http://gawande.com/the-checklist-manifesto

If you're using an RDBMS, use it. The model is just a representation of the data's canonical, authoritative state, which is what it looks like when it's been committed to the DB. The only way to keep your data sane is with Foreign Keys enforcing referential integrity between tables, and the only way to do that is to specify the relationship in both your models, and in your migrations.

Blind, slavish adherence to a pithy acronym is just going to get you into trouble.

Whatever happened it feels like Adam wants to make the point that Charlie was essentially fired. "We" is a lovely ambiguous term. They royal "We"? I suppose it's meant to imply that Charlie also agreed. But "Best for Charlie to step away" is pretty telling. There's a whole slew of options you could use to make it sound like it was Charlie's idea (although he's probably too young to 'focus on his family'

I always thought Quora should monetize around an RFP type concept. It feels to me like 80% of users are there for technology recommendations from the horses' mouth.

I've met both Adam and Charlie (and Marc and much of the rest of the Quora team), and I can't see Adam/Charlie having a falling out over any personal or professional issues as a likely cause.

The weirdest thing IMO is that Charlie has totally disappeared from online (FB, Quora, etc.). Either it's to avoid being asked questions, or some kind of personal issue. Either way, I wish him the best.

This leads me to think: does the needle really have to go up? According to pg's latest awesome essay on growth, the answer seems to be yes. But as the hacker news site has shown, no can also be a valid answer. pg's goal with hacker news is to keep a high quality of discussion, and not to grow the site to more users.

As you bring in more users, you are bound to reduce engagement of existing users; this is justified if the growth is an order of magnitude higher (eg. when Facebook went from ivy leagues to colleges to high school to public). But for a site like Quora, I doubt if growth at the cost of pissing off existing users is justified at all.

The first clause (investing money) is a much less profound statement than the second clause (buying sole control).

In order to buy sole control, he set the valuation of the new shares at something that washed out the "A" round guys. That should be a giant red-flashing signal to everyone involved.

Is Quora a great service? Absolutely. Is Quora something I would be incredibly sad to see die? Without a doubt. Is Quora ever going to make enough money to cover costs? Probably not.

This leaves a sale as the only possible exit. Adam is taking the unsexy role of being the business guy that drives Quora towards this conclusion. Great product and engineering minds will quit (especially with the departure of Charlie). People will cry out about how "the Quora I loved is dead" and new features will prompt blog posts like this one: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/09/10/the-misstep-of... . But Adam has no choice, either he does this or the company dies and everything that is good about it is lost.

Here's the original: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-sudden-mysterious-exit-of...

Mr Cheever is "something of a product design genius, and lots of people give him credit for Facebook's best features;" even the now-removed-from-Quora post says "to him the user came first and growth features would sacrifice that." That puts him in complete opposition to the guy (Mr D'Angelo, who to his credit is putting his money where his mouth is) who is paying the bills.

The problem is that almost every Q&A type site has the same issue as Quora: only a small percentage of its membership is actively engaged. The number cited by the article is eight per cent, and in my experience, that's about par for the course. Since revenues (and therefore stock performance) are directly tied to use, there are two ways to increase revenues, with implications regarding the user experience for both:

1. Increase traffic, AKA "make the pie bigger". This means doing the kinds of things Mr D'Angelo probably championed -- the SEO Solution, playing nice with Google, low barriers to entry (i.e. Free). This is the tactic taken by most startups, since they're generally looking at Mountain View and saying "Gee, if we could just get our hands wet in THAT revenue stream, we'd be rich."

2. Keep your existing userbase more engaged, AKA "get your customers to eat more pie". This means doing the kinds of things Mr Cheever championed -- making the experience better, providing more services to them, concentrating on getting lifelong customers rather than more customers for less time. Most startups aren't in it for the long haul; they're in it for the big payday.

The NYTimes obit of Arthur Sulzberger pointed out the difference. His family has always wanted to be in the business of disseminating the news; their competitors are in the business of selling advertising. Mr Cheever wanted to take care of users; Mr D'Angelo wants to see a return on his investment. If there was ever a startup in the position to do the former, it's Quora; I know my colleagues would dearly love to have enough money to where they wouldn't have to worry for a while how to keep the lights on.

But as William F. Buckley noted a long time ago, "Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive," and that's when someone like Mr Cheever moves on to his next venture.

I think the italicized bit is the most interesting part of the comment. It seems that that Adam wants to sell the site at some point? but to who? Also, interesting that he is building Quora to flipped it instead of making it into a valid business.

-- With the sound of silence, the Market has spoken.

http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/The...

Pretty good example the bubble we live in here on HN.

They have produced a system which is creating some of the best authored information online. Each time I get their weekly email, I lose about half of my day because each item in it is so amazing that I have to read it.

Watch Charlie Cheever's interview with TechCrunch recently. I think it's pretty telling that he was done with the company, it might have been the best call for him to leave.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/27/quora-we-have-an-explicit-n...

Also, how much does running Quora actually cost? If Adam D'Angelo has many Billions of dollars, I can't see them ever having a financial issue.

Yes, it was a terrific waste of time, but boy did it feel good. I consider it volunteering. All the time I spent on the phone with the scammer was time they couldn't spend targeting vulnerable individuals.

Why wouldn't people feel bad about scamming someone like this? You have to talk to someone, get them on your side, and then scam them?

I could maybe imagine myself in an alternate universe doing something like this, perhaps enjoying a sort of "heist" feeling like when you're playing poker and no one's aware that you're totally prepared to take the table. But if I succeeded (at the scamming call) I'm sure I would feel devastated that I just did that to someone.

Maybe I'm just supremely naive, but it seems hard for me to imagine anyone I've ever met in my life scamming someone like this. It seems so completely incredible that it could ever happen on such a large scale.

--------------

Is there something in a culture (besides wealth discrepancy per se) that makes this sort of thing more OK?

That said I don't think I'd have the patience to do it more than once. And I suppose there are better ways to help humanity than trolling scammers.

Edit: I'll point out, this happens in legitimate call centres as well. I worked for a fairly well known a credit card company and left not long after I heard a top seller say "Focus on old people, scare them enough and they'll always buy".

So , they want to install some kind of remote admin software on your PC? I'm going to assume it is something based on VNC or RDP.

In that case if you really wanted to troll them it might be fun to figure out which protocol it was using and implement a custom server that you can run when they call you.

Any fun ideas as to what that could do?

Or are there actually physical call centres with rows of desks of scammers doing this as a 9-5?

If you get one of these calls, just screw with them - pretend you are following their instructions for as long as possible before saying "Ubuntu doesn't have that."

(DISCLAIMER: I belong to the same part of the world and probably have the same accent)

http://soundcloud.com/gbrewer-1/microsoft-telephone-scam/s-e...

I felt a bit sorry for the guy it's clearly a boiler room with high expectations.

There are some classic mp3s to listen to.

Very smart though, targeting home phones, as they're just the right generation to fall for this type of scam.

Some of them are amazing: http://www.419eater.com/html/samuel_eze.htm

EDIT: Webs.com has just frozen it.

can someone call me like this?

i got windows xp only in a VM :D

Second, this is rad! Maybe we're getting cynical or a bit lost in history, but the idea that for about what lunch costs lately a kid (chronological or spiritual) can get a website to send them something totally custom is pretty awesome. Think hard about how long this has even been practical to do at all, much less as a tiny upstart.

Oh, and it appears to be a successful Kickstarter project... so it's nice to see evidence of those.

I'm sure most of HN visitors would be able to do the same. Not sure if you should patch it, though: your target audience will surely won't do things like that, and visualization is already a complex beast.

Anyway, thanks for the free foldable design (:

foldable.me goes viral as friends see their friends use the site. You end up with tons of people using the site who would never consider paying $12 for a piece of coloured cardboard...

but once they get an emotional attachment to their avatar you can follow up with some lifecycle emails to convert them into a purchasing customer.

You could also have a feature where friends could gift their foldable.me to other friends.

Edit: Maybe remote teams can print out all your coworkers so they keep you company.

[1] http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?CardboardProgrammer

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

[3] Suggestion from [1]: "Uma Thurman's analytical, diagnostic, and motivational skills were amazing."

For all the people saying you could download the files and do it yourself, I say sure. You could do that. But you could also send something nice to someone in the mail at some point in the future as a surprise. People like getting mail. Real mail. Ya you could put it in the mail yourself, but will you? $12 is cheeper than a movie in NYC. Totally worth it.

For the team at foldable.me: Great product. I would work on:

-expanding the selections and options

-adding high heel shoes

-allowing someone to upload a head shot and "cartoonize" it. There are some sites that do this... partner with them?

-add different sizes to your cutouts... s/m/l

-animals like dogs, cats, horses, sheep, cows, etc.

Might also consider a family pack. Don't know if these family stickers are popular in the UK, but they are everywhere here in the states. http://www.familystickers.com/

I'd pay $$ to have a 3d printout of my XBOX 360 avatar...perhaps even with articulating appendages.

This mechanism gives you an array of 9 random faces to choose from, and asks you to pick the closest one. Using that information, it generates 9 more random faces, but guided towards the features that you've selected. After 10 or 15 rounds of this, you have converged on a near-perfect likeness.

It relies on the fact that I can often tell that a face doesn't quite look like me, but I'm not sure along what parameters. However, when presented with a variant with slightly larger eyes and a variant with slightly smaller eyes, I can immediately select the correct one.

EDIT: You should also make some animal shapes for pets!

Lovely 3D animation. Really lovely. I'm always happy to see 3D native on the web.

I think siculars's comment for adding animals is brilliant. I think a lot of people would like a desktop version of their favorite cat or dog :-)

There's PDF and PSD; load it into Photoshop or Illustrator (or whatever works) and have at it.

I've built lots of papercraft toys, and designed a few. Half the fun is in downloading a file, printing it out, cutting it up, and ending up with something tangible.

BTW there's a copyright on this template, too. It looks identical to the Foldable.me figure.

I'm not totally sure I'd trust myself to give one of these as a gift, though, as I'd end up either creating a likeness of someone that they didn't like, or a completely narcissistic gift of my own likeness. But, hey, best of luck--I bet there are plenty of people who think otherwise!

Spock: http://blog.patokon.com/2011/08/spock-wobblehead-papercraft....

Spidey 50th Wobblehead and Old 52: http://blog.patokon.com/2012/06/spidey-50th-wobblehead-and-o...

Captain America and Conan: http://blog.patokon.com/2011/09/marvel-comics-wobbleheads-ca...

Yoda: http://blog.patokon.com/2011/07/yoda-papercraft.html

Putter King: http://www.slideshare.net/putterking/putter-king-wobblehead

Sales tip: this would make great Christmass Tree ornaments. I imagine a Chrsitmass tree with my whole family represneted as little carboard figures. Lovely.

http://www.cubeecraft.com/

However I prefer http://facemakr.com/ when it comes to the variations of facial parts.

It would be cool if you could get super mini versions that you could hand out as business cards. It's the kind of thing that recipients would definitely show around, and hold on to.

(Also, a ponytail hairstyle would be nice.)

;-)

just kidding. awesome work, guys!

Bug report: the rotation and bottom scrolling buttons for lists didn't work for me in Chrome.

If your underlying method is pixels, you can render any image you want. I'm afraid I'm missing the "hack" here.

The resulting CSS is 247KB. Taking the same image and saving as a JPG (which I think is fair, since it's fairly blurry) results in a 40KB file. That's more than 6 times smaller.

If you scale it down to the detail level found the CSS (each CSS-"pixel" being a 4x5 unit) even a PNG will easily beat it at 24KB. Here the JPG also clocks in at 6KB.

So I don't get it. Using CSS, using a text-format to encode bitmaps has always been and will always provide subpar results. Ok. So it can be done. We know that. It has been proven times and times again.

Apart from that: What's the point?

PS: Forgot to mention. The reason I wrote the converter at the time was as an experiment to avoid people from right-click and saving images.

http://codepen.io/JBay1337/pen/Ejtfl

Webkit only though

It started kinda supidly over a beer yesterday with the joconde guy, then one friend posted a 50 mo animated nyan cat, I posted a 22mo version, and we kept iterating until he won.

His last version is kinda smart: it uses css keyframes like divx use video keyframes, with diff in between. Almost the first css video codec :-p

If anybody wants to take a gander at my very slow PHP code, it's here: https://gist.github.com/3831235

Anybody have any optimization tips?

(Nice hack, though; didn't know box-shadow could be abused that way)

Pixel by pixel... seriously.

http://codepen.io/anon/pen/zbcJq

Photographer stitches together thousands of photos as a two-dimensional panorama. Very impressive and very beautiful, but the "hyperphoto" nomenclature might be a bit bombastic.

Direct links to each photo:

http://www.rauzier-hyperphoto.com/cour-de-marbre/

http://www.rauzier-hyperphoto.com/versaillesversailles/

http://www.rauzier-hyperphoto.com/escalier-de-la-reine/

http://www.rauzier-hyperphoto.com/versailles-city-hall-stair...

http://www.rauzier-hyperphoto.com/cle_de_voutecle_de_voute/

http://www.rauzier-hyperphoto.com/bibliotheques-ideale-1bibl...

http://www.rauzier-hyperphoto.com/telephones/

http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn/

A truly great photo is not about what you found, but what is already there. http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTU4OTI3MDk4MV5BMl5Ban...

Our own teams have a set of practices which are similar but different from what Linus outlines here. And different projects on my company use different practices from those.

The worst thing is that there's no way of enforcing these workflows or practices other than out-of-band social conventions. And so minor mistakes happen, all the time. Our Git projects are never as pretty as they should be.

In other words, Git provides an awesome set of primitives for source control. I'm not sure what it'd look like, but I'd like to see a product that built on those primitives to enforce a little more order on projects.

That said, IMO there is still quite a lot of room for customization in git workflow when using Github. For example, we don't "send patches around" as Linus says. Our private feature branches live on Github but we've adopted the convention that the "private" branch name is prefixed by who's working on it, e.g. mdeboard-oauth, jschmoe-url-routes. If it has someone's name at the front, don't touch it. That enables us to still use the "D" in DVCS while retaining the ability to safely rebase our own work to keep our history clean.

The only reason I'd want a git-based product to "enforce order" is a culture-related one: ensure that contributors/collaborators do things in line with the conventions we've established. However, IMO it's always better to have a conversation about that than work with an overly prescriptive tool.

When I develop, I split my commits into as many small changes as I can so that the commit messages are single topic. I thought that was basically the idea. Every once in a while I use rebase to combine a few commits that should have been done together as they all addressed the same issue. This all seems right to me. I am left with a clean history of everything I have done on a very fine grained time scale. But the large number of commits, each with little significance to whole program hides the large scale structure of the development.

However, I could use rebase to start combining loosely related commits, trading the time resolution for clarity in the commit history. There seems to be a continuum along this scale. Where is the proper place in that continuum to say this is clean enough? Also, I don't like making changes where I am losing perfectly good information.

I know that I can group certain commits by defining a branch, developing on it, then merging (non-fast-forward) back to the original. The branch should keep the grouping in the commit history. I even suppose that this is can be done after the fact using rebase with the proper amount of git-fu. Is branching and non-fast-forward merges the preferred method of grouping related commits in the history?

If so, this seems troubling as it means that partially fixing something is difficult to do with a clean history. Until the piece of the program you wish to fix is completely working, it shouldn't be merged into master because it would ruin the grouping of the related commits. This means that there can't be any partial thought's like fixing bugs as you find them, because presumably you might want to group all bug fixes of a function together, but have a distinct commit for each.

Now I'm more confused than when I started. Seriously, any references or advice on this sort of topic are welcome.

Or perhaps intentional. I can never tell when I read a Linus fiat.

http://www.mail-archive.com/dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/...

We've now decided to use this model, while only deleting feature branches after RC acceptance.

http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

My colleague just suggested to rebase regularly from the develop branch while developing features
"I'm working on a branch.
someone - e.g. you - updates the develop branch.
I will have no info if that is related to my stuff or not
so, I should rebase regularly to the latest version of the develop branch"

I'm kinda clueless now. Git is really powerful and flexible in strageties, and that adds to complexity.

Nope, not simple. Yep, this is a git usability problem.

In the ruby/github world, people generally violate this and DO rewrite 'public' history in order to get 'cleanness', primarily because almost ALL history is 'public', since you tend to show people work in progress on github, or just push it there to have a reliable copy in the cloud. And yes, this sometimes leads to madness.

Now the most valuable thing to me in source control, history, I'm supposed to keep clean? That's like a sacred cow, you _don't_ mess with history.

>> That's fairly straightforward, no?

No _Linus_ it isn't. Git is hard to get right. If it wasn't for EGit I'd be lost. I tried Canonical's bzr and it is more understandable for ordinary humans.

All that aside I really like Linux. :)

Slashdot was a critical piece of Internet history. In my mind it was last big thing that came out of the Internet from the era when it was exclusively for geeks. It continued in the footsteps of what we had done previously with email, usenet, ftp/archie, and irc, and became one of the biggest websites for us old timers.

After Slashdot the next big thing was probably Napster, and at that point the chasm was crossed to traditional mainstream youth demographics. Never again would the biggest thing on the Internet also be the geekiest.

Godspeed cmdrtaco.

It's not what it once was, but it's still the best at what it does.

Thanks for everything Rob!

I've grown a lot, slashdot was a part of that growth and while I don't visit it that often any longer, it's still a part of my professional and personal DNA.

Nostalgia is a good thing, after all; memories are the only things you have to think back on. ;)

Slashdot was absolutely the best community from the late 90s up through maybe 2005 or '06. I learned so much from both the news articles and the subsequent discussion. Still have never found a better comments section than what Slashdot had then, though I keep searching.

When reddit came along, I was splitting my time about equally for six months or so. And then, I realized a few months after that that I hadn't logged into Slashdot in months, and hadn't really noticed. I came back to Slashdot a couple of times to answer questions about something I was involved in (like Y Combinator), and found that it still led to a huge spike to my company/Open Source project website...slashdot is, or was, a firehose of very focused traffic that may never be replicated (at least, not for really nerdy folks). reddit never sent that kind of traffic our way, and neither has HN, or any other single source.

Anyway, it must be hard to let go of something awesome. But, it's also hard to watch something awesome die while you try to save it. Slashdot may not be "dying" per se (any more than any of us are dying, at a slow but steady clip), but I'm pretty sure it's in a steady decline that will never be turned around, and that's tough to watch.

Let's start a list of funny and cool things that we learned about for the first time on Slashdot. Here's mine:

1. Google - I still remember the first postings about their search engine and how awesome it was compared to everything else when I first tried it out back in the mid 90's.

2. RootServers, a startup that sold colo'd linux boxes and would give you root--a big deal back in the mid 90's. I saw their ad on /. and was surprised that they were based in my hometown. They later morphed into Rackspace, which has been my employer for the last five years!

3. Mac OS X. I remember the early posts about Rhapsody, which encouraged me to go buy a Mac at the just-opened second-ever Apple Store in DC. Been a Mac user ever since.

I'm sure there's more...

I remember coming into the Uni IT labs and seeing everyone usually had /. up on the monitors of their Solaris Workstations.

Hat tip to you.

However, I am still waiting for the box of swag I was supposed to get to pass out at the 10th anniversary party that I organized.

Thanks for everything /.

I'm curious though, do you know if Dice has any plans for reviving Slashcode or creating a new version of it? It looks like it hasn't been touched in about two years.

In any case, thanks for everything, and I'm sorry that the site seemed to grow away from you. I think most people here agree that it was better when you were part of it.

I started reading Slashdot when the first days of the "slashdot effect" for flattening websites was being mentioned. Late 90's?

It was always a go-to site for me, and for events like 9/11 it was a better news source, simply because the team was agile enough to swap to static pages to handle the load, unlike CNN etc.

But the biggest thing I remember was 9/11 and the updates from /. users who lived in NYC, Brooklyn, and Queens right after the disaster happened...at the point when the only other coverage was CNN.

Thanks man!

http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

Also, thanks for building something awesome.

myself, i had a modest user number, a few mentions for my work, posted some book reviews, hosted timothy at my condo a couple of times, even got slashdotted a couple of times (including once to distribute star wars prequel trailers via a grad school server i ran, which should give you an idea of how old i am now). "focused traffic" is hardly an apt description, and we still call it "the slashdot effect."

good times.

thank you. what was always clear is that it was first and foremost a labor of love and interest, and that's a rare thing among the net's high profile sites. that has had a profound impact on the site's long term quality.

But I've yet to submit one. :)

thx @cmdrtaco for starting slashdot.

It really filled the gap on the web in Perl, Linux & FOSS, information and was the go-to place in startups I've worked in. Now for a few questions,

Q. /. for me was the start of 'social software' through commenting & friends (fondly remembering 'friends of foes' & freaks) - what lessons learned in moderating & story post moderation do you think HN could improve with?

Q. Is there any way to get a dump of old posts. I've got 'em back to '96 & wouldn't mind getting a copy.

I just wish there was a way to find out when my slashdot account was created!

What do I mean by this? The other day we were watching TV and a Charmin ad comes in. At the end of the ad they actually say "go to facebook.com/charmin"

What? They have a perfectly good and highly recognizable brand. And, they happen to have a great URL: charmin.com. Why send traffic to Facebook and diminish or even completely fail to promote your own bran?

OK, the other question might be: Who is visiting a Facebook page for toilet paper. The point is that I've seen this many, many times from all kinds of companies.

Maybe someone can explain? Maybe this is just sheep following sheep off the cliff?

Personally I'd much rather log in with Google in this case, which means there would need to be three buttons: Twitter, Facebook, and Google. I'm sympathetic to the "nascar-ization" argument, but I also believe your customers are smart enough to process at least as many options as there are in their wallet for providing identity.

Perhaps the best solution is even more minimal: no login options at all! Let the browser auto-generate credentials and a unique password on your behalf, then automatically use that to log you in every time it sees that website.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/09/cutting-the-gordian...

Also, regarding the CEO's email and the confusion of so many options on the homepage, that's merely a design issue. Those buttons don't need to take up so much room or be so bold. They could simply be links with tiny corresponding icons underneath the default login form. Taking those options away would be a detriment to both current users of those methods and future users who prefer the quick registration process it provides.

The argument thereafter that these logins could easily dissipate and are therefore unreliable is solved the same way SoundCloud does it; allow the user to set a username and password separate from their social networking account in their settings. The only problem with the SoundCloud method, at least at the time I did it, was that in order for it to activate, you had to reset your password. As far as the security point is concerned, that's a risk the user takes and another benefit to having both site-specific credentials and the social media tie-in.

"Social login buttons put security in someone else's hands"
You're damn right they do! I argue that in 99.9% of cases that's a great thing, for 3 reasons:

1. Facebook invests significant resources in both keeping bad guys out (we have been able to dramatically reduce large-scale phishing with a number of updates to our login security systems) and ensuring everyone else can get into their accounts easily. I can only speak for us, but I assume Twitter spends a lot of time on this as well. I imagine it'd be tough for a startup to keep up with the 10-20 people we have working on this problem at any given time.

2. It's incredibly difficult to build a password system that is both easy to use and secure. There's an almost endless ever changing list to make sure you're hashing and salting properly, don't have SQL injection flaws, implement robust rate-limiting without allowing DoS, etc. We've all seen many people screw it up in recent years. One of the largest benefits of Facebook Connect for startups is the ability to leverage our investment in these systems, without having to invest the significant time we have spent iterating on them.

3. We've spent a lot of time working on every aspect of login, so that startups don't have to. Your job is to build whatever technology differentiates you from your competitors, and make it worlds better than theirs. Any time you spend pfutzing with password hashing, building a better password recovery flow, or arguing about how to fail when people type in the wrong password is time you could better spend making a truly wonderful product. Unless you're trying to build a startup that helps people login, any time spent on this is better spent elsewhere.

* I want to use email as username

* limit the number of possible ways to login (no NASCAR)

* I want to keep personal and business logins seperate

* don't slap competitor logos all over my pages (CEO quite right there)

this however all begs the question how do I move accounts to a new login?

Few sites (stackoverflow is a shining exception) allow you to associate more than one login with one account. And fewer give different settings by login (admin, power user etc)

we have been lulled by oauth and openid into thinking we have just to authenticate me, rather than authorise a role - and few sites have concepts ofanything other than one role == one set of privileges == one login.

There is a reckoning coming - it is when these sites need to provide fine grained control, as businesses run on them full time, we shall discover why ACLs exist, and what chmod is for. It's going to be painful. But then it's better for mailchimp to take the pain in a couple of years than not be there at all

now go install persona. And allow me to associate more than one login with one account

Test your changes independently, and make incremental changes

They thought social buttons improved login success. They didn't. An unconnected copy change improved login success. If you test these things independently, you'll get much better insight into what makes a difference.

This'll date me, but I'm still amazed that so many companies eagerly slap other company's logos on everything they do. Even if it's just a blog post.

This page is a case in point: Facebook's brand appears four times. Twitter's appears a dozen times (more because of the comments). Mailchimp? Just once.

Mailchimp found that clarifying login error messages reduced login failures by 66%!!

The rest of the story is a coincidental tale about the CEO trying to pull a "Jobs" by thinking he knew what his customers wanted better than they did. The social media buttons only had an effect on 3.4% of their users, a small group compared to the reduction in failed logins. By making the social login buttons the main point of their blog article, they hide this valuable tidbit.

On one of my previous projects, Twitter was the only allowed login method. After some complaints, we implemented an email-based login and reduced the bounce rate by over 50%.

Another anecdote: whenever my Asana session expires, I always struggle to remember which Google account I registered with or if I used email. The worst part of their flow is that if you're wrong, a new account is created and you login to a blank slate. It takes forever to find the log out button to try again too.

Because it's one less !$@%!@$! password to remember. Or it's one less $@&%!@$ hassle adapting my password creation formula to a new site's password requirements. Or it's one less place where my don't-care-use-it-everywhere username/password key is stored, perhaps @$2(! in the clear. Or perhaps it's just one less time I have to type in a @$@(%^! username and password. Or @*($&%! create one.

1. they added the social buttons late in the game, and are surprised about 4% of users are using the social buttons. what if that 4% was compromised entirely of users who registered since you added the buttons? that would be a totally different ballgame.

2. the problem they were trying to solve was login errors. that's not the problem facebook and twitter sign in solve. therefor it seems fallacious to say "they aren't worth it" when you're not even considering the standard use case.

"Is it worth it? Nope, it's not to us." (my emphasis)

Not all businesses are the same. B2B businesses like MailChimp usually don't see major increases in value through third party auth. They're providing serious value. People will go to the effort regardless.

With a casual use B2C site removing even the tiniest piece of friction in the login process can mean the difference between a purchase and people just going away.

It depends. This is why we test shit :-)

(Also - unrelated to this - is that the "login" bit is often not where the biggest win for third-part auth is. It's in reducing friction in registration. I've seen high single digit percentage improvements in abandonment of registration for some B2C sites due to getting profile info from twitter/linkedin/etc. cutting the time it takes to setup accounts fully. Lifetime value also increased since profile info was generally better from those sources which was an important part of users getting value out of the system, and so the business getting value out of those users).

[edit: also - they seem to be looking at total numbers, rather than doing any kind of cohort analysis on the folk using twitter/facebook/whatever... which may well lead to different conclusions]

This is one reason I am extremely pissed at instagram. Instagram as a product gives you a sense of privacy because it provides very limited ways to access your photos. You can't just goto instagram.com, login and begin browsing. On the other hand, few people realize that your instagram pictures are public by default and there are dozens of sites which using instagram's API(I'm guessing) are republishing our photos without even your knowledge.

Obviously a business-focused company is going to have less people logging in with Facebook than a consumer-focused company.

People shouldn't write generalizing blog posts unless they have some understanding of proper experimental design.

I'm amazed by everything that they do. Elegant api and ux that "you get" from the get-go. It is a huge problem to solve and i'm now engaging with 1100 subscribers.

Now i want to pay ($30/m) but they don't accept paypal - the service i use to pay for everything since i'm a digital vendor. There are companies in the U.S that don't understand that alot of foreigners do business solely with paypal. There are those who dig it though(Elance, Envato, Odesk)

mailchimp take the leap! eeee

Alright so this security hole already existed in their system elsewhere. After raising the issue that this type of message leaks data, which is a completely valid concern, they dropped it because they were already leaking that data elsewhere? It isn't like email based account reset/reminder forms have to leak the existence of an email within the system, a fact they just gloss right over.

For a system that stores quite a lot of very sensitive data it is surprising to see them knowingly keep such a hole open. I understand the desire to smooth out the user experience but this honestly seems more driven by the desire to not field customer support requests for what feels like a "stupid issue".

I'm not currently a MailChimp customer but I used to be and before reading this I would have chosen to use them again if the need was there. Please don't compromise the security of customers for convenience.

I think the simple value for social login is context. There's an obvious overuse case and a useful use case.

I think the article dismisses one huge benefit to federated logins:

* ease of use for users - instead of choosing a username, entering all the customer information, verifying the email address etc, choosing a password, you can sign in with one or two clicks.

If you have a catch-all error message, it's much harder to guess the username/password combo.

Online companies are largely valued by the size of their userbase and by working to build Fb or twitter's userbase rather than your own, you are sacrificing the value you add to your own company for the sake of the social network that a user signs in with.

2. Having both social & native logon.

You could actually solve both by either 1. Only using native logon. or 2. Picking one (maybe 2) social logins.

I went with #2. Granted it was on a small test site, but the trade off of managing customer logins sucks. I'd rather have google get busted for getting hacked than for my little SQL DB getting attacked.

The way I look at it, I have time to write code and secure it to the best of my ability. However, Google and other social logins have whole teams that can manage security and keep up to date with the latest technology etc.

So there is more to social logins than the actual act of logging in. And some of the problems listed aren't really with social logins, but rather with a particular implementation.

http://i.imgur.com/LExHd.png

We run a service that makes it simple to add Email&Password style login, or Social login to your site: http://www.dailycred.com

[1] http://dailycred.tumblr.com/post/30602034530/surprise-people...

ONLY being able to use them to log in somewhere else is obviously a reason to never sign up with that "somewhere else" site altogether.

The review explains why the rapid action of ketamine excites so many researchers:

The discovery that ketamine rapidly increases the number and function of synaptic connections has focused attention on synaptogenesis as a fundamental process for the treatment of depressive symptoms and also suggests that disruption of synaptogenesis and loss of connections underlies the pathophysiology of depression.

This excites researchers not because ketamine itself would be used to combat depression, but because depression is still extremely symptomatically defined, making it difficult to design treatments for. That's roughly how it's diagnosed in the diagnostic manual used by most psychiatrists: check off a list of symptoms, if you have enough, you're depressed. It's like going to the doctor and explaining that your stomach hurts and they say "well, looks like you have abdominal pain, here's some Advil." Treating the symptoms would be great if only there were a happiness dial in the brain. Indeed, the effect of most anti-depressants is often demonstrated prior to a mechanistic understanding of why they make many patients feel better.

Recently there has been substantial evidence of "synaptogenesis" - the formation of new potential connections between neurons - from multiple treatments, including ketamine. So now we have this new picture emerging: depressed patients tend to have atrophied and "less-connected" neurons in some brain areas, and some drugs can reverse it, in particular ketamine can reverse it quite rapidly, and it works in rodents as well as humans.

That makes it very amenable to study. The way this often works in the lab is the following. Take some rodents, subject them to unpredictable stress to get them depressed, then give some ketamine. It makes them better. Euthanize the rodents, slice the brains, and note that the non-ketamine ones have less dendritic spines in certain areas ("potential input points to a neuron"), but remarkably, the ketamine ones have more in those areas.

The most important step comes next, where you try to find out what ketamine is actually doing, since, again, there's no happiness dial in the brain. Create strains of "knock-out" rodents, where you block the production of certain chemicals or proteins you think ketamine might affect by altering their genetic composition. This step is crucial, because it allows you to find out which effect of ketamine is providing the benefit, because there are many. You can do this both by observing both behavior (does the ketamine not improve mood in the genetically altered rodents?) and in physiology (does the ketamine still increase synaptogenesis in the altered rodents?).

In the end you can kind of work out a map of sorts: ketamine does X things to the brain and Y in X are the ones that are important, sometimes in certain combinations. Then you can start creating intelligent drugs that pinpoint those important processes, to avoid the unfortunate side effects of drugs like ketamine. Moreover, you now have a better physiological understanding of depression, instead of just a symptomatic one.

To put it in machine-learning language, it's like going from ideal observer analysis like mutual information, to an actual parametric model where you understand the distributions themselves.

I heard a National Public Radio story with interviews of researchers on the same issue as the press release submitted here while on a drive this afternoon. What most excites researchers about the ketamine studies is not a prospect of using ketamine itself as a frequent first-line drug for treating depression, but rather as a model for understanding brain function better and eventually developing new drugs that are even longer-lasting for treating depression and even less likely to trigger mania. Human mood disorders are very diverse--there are probably hundreds of rare genetic variants that increase the risk of mood system disruption under varying kinds of environmental stress--so there surely will not be just one drug that will successfully treat all patients, but rather a gradually growing toolkit of better and better drugs to treat more and more patients with less risk and fewer side-effects.

AFTER EDIT: User shrivats just kindly pointed, in a subcomment, to the overall summary of the Science special issue on depression, in which the ketamine research and related research is discussed. A paragraph describing another article in that issue is especially helpful for HN participants: "However, not all is bleak. There are individuals who overcome difficult situations and show astonishing resilience in the face of adverse circumstances and other forms of acute or chronic traumatic stress. Studying them might provide us with clues about what can go right. Southwick and Charney (p. 79) provide an overview of current ideas about why some people are more protected against stress and depression than others and how this knowledge may help us develop better treatments and successful prevention strategies." Several HN participants regularly write about strategies of building resilience to face the stress that many hackers face. Further research on that issue will also be part of the package in future improved treatments for mood disorders.

This news doesn't surprise me at all.

There's burgeoning evidence that depression is tied to a lack of neurogenesis (creation of new brain cells), which may also be tied to serotonin levels. Some believe that the reason SSRIs take weeks to have antidepressive effects, even though serotonin levels are restored almost immediately, is that it takes a while for that to stimulate new brain cells. It's far from certain though that serotonin has anything to do with depression or neurogenesis. The atypical antidepressant tianeptine (currently unapproved in the US, but widely used in western europe) apparently reduces serotonin levels while boosting neurogenesis, the study of which is summarized well by Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky [1]:

> … tianeptine prevented many of these stress-induced changes. These included the spectroscopic alterations, the inhibition of cell proliferation, and a significant increase in hippocampal volume (as compared with stress + vehicle animals). Of significance (see below), tianeptine did not prevent the stress-induced rise in cortisol levels.

The restoration of hippocampal volume is important because it's been shown that low hippocampal volumes correlate with emotional abuse in adolescents [2] (also by Yale researchers). This was breathtaking for me - bad parenting literally causes brain damage.

Special K and tianeptine aren't the only efforts at curing depression through neurogenesis. Neuralstem [3] is testing a drug in humans to treat major depressive disorder by restoring hippocampal volume, with a controlled study to complete early next year. That is the only new drug I'm aware of. Regardless, the serotonin model of depression, the one which produced Prozac etc. isn't the last word, and it's looking more likely that a dearth of new synapses may be the culprit in clinical depression.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC60045/

[2] http://www.medpagetoday.com/Pediatrics/DomesticViolence/3002...

[3] http://www.neuralstem.com/pharmaceuticals-for-depression

I'm not trying to stop them, but there are reports of Ketamine abuse being damaging to the bladder. Some people have had their bladders removed.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17411492)

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17344089)

I have no idea on the dosing needed for harmful effects - is several large doses enough? Would very many small doses be harmful?

Some people taking anti-depressants do so for a long time. Most are recommended to take them for at least two years to prevent relapse, but some medications (especially venlafaxine) can be hard to come off. (I've been told that I'll probably be taking venlafaxine for the rest of my life.)

So, this news is exciting because better understanding of mental health problems is really important, and better treatments would be fantastic. But please be careful when self-experimenting with possible nootropics.

Not really something you should want to self medicate with at this point until more research is done.

http://www.dextroverse.org/txt/olney.txt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olneys_lesions

MSG is monosodium glutamate, and there is research to show MSG is toxic -- it's the glutamate that's bad for you, not the sodium. Flooding your body with excess glutamate throws off the brain's delicate balance of this neurotransmitter and leads to excitotoxicity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excitotoxicity).

The blood-brain barrier protects you from some of it, but the blood-brain barrier is not fully formed in babies, and this is why MSG not allowed in baby food. However, the blood brain barrier can be weakened by any number of reasons in adults, such as when you have a fever.

Why would ketamine's release of glutamate be different and good for you in this case?

_________________

Abstract

Basic and clinical studies demonstrate that depression is associated with reduced size of brain regions that regulate mood and cognition, including the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, and decreased neuronal synapses in these areas. Antidepressants can block or reverse these neuronal deficits, although typical antidepressants have limited efficacy and delayed response times of weeks to months. A notable recent discovery shows that ketamine, a N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor antagonist, produces rapid (within hours) antidepressant responses in patients who are resistant to typical antidepressants. Basic studies show that ketamine rapidly induces synaptogenesis and reverses the synaptic deficits caused by chronic stress. These findings highlight the central importance of homeostatic control of mood circuit connections and form the basis of a synaptogenic hypothesis of depression and treatment response.

"Drug Reverses Abnormal Brain Function in Rett Syndrome Mice"

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121003132418.ht...

"ScienceDaily (Oct. 3, 2012) �" A promising study out October 3 in the Journal of Neuroscience showed that in a mouse model of Rett syndrome, researchers were able to reverse abnormalities in brain activity and improve neurological function by treating the animals with an FDA-approved anesthesia drug, ketamine. Rett syndrome is among the most severe autism-related disorders, affecting about one in 10,000 female births per year, with no effective treatments available."

I've read too many Onion headlines to ever read headlines like this again.

Translation: "Yale scientists speculate about how ketamine vanquishes depression within hours" And until there's a strictly designed study with a control group, we'll be no closer to a definitive answer. But considering the drug and its role and target, a control group would be unethical.

"Efforts to develop drugs that replicate the effects of ketamine have produced some promising results, but they do not act as quickly as ketamine. Researchers are investigating alternatives they hope can duplicate the efficacy and rapid response of ketamine."

So my question is, why not just administer K?

I love to read. At some points in my life I have been able to read two or three books every week. I have spent years of time drifting through the endlessly multiplicating realities of prose.

However: since moving to the Valley, working full time whilst attacking various business and development side projects, I can usually manage 2-3 pages (immediately before bed).

Where do you find the time to read?

  return result;
    }

Really though... Is there some sort of clever reason why this person's blog is on a xxx domain aside from annoying people like myself stuck behind corporate proxies?

Javascript is not a better language than others (in fact it's a far worse language), and it's downright insulting to put words in the mouth of someone like Hemingway to try and make yourself feel better.

"No surprises here. Code reduced to its essentials with no word or variable wasted. It's not fancy; maybe its even a little pedantic - but that's the beauty of Hemingway's writing. No need for elaborate logic or clever variable names. It's plain and its clear and it does what it has to - and nothing more."

I am not sure why he did not choose this style:

    function fibonacci(size) {

      var result = [0, 1], i;

      if(size < 2)
        return "the request was made but it was not good"

      for(i=2; i<size; i++)
        result.push(result[i-1] + result[i-2]));
  
      return result;

Perhaps because Hemmingway would care about performance?

-----

Slightly related: One year ago Javascript inspired me to write the javascript version of genesis:

http://nadamhu.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/javascript-genesis/

when i first skimmed the article i got down to that section, read the code, with a list of names, and expected something french and post-modern. was really surprised when i checked back to the title to see bolaño.

(if you haven't read him, i wouldn't start with 2666, but with the savage detectives, which is a really sweet, funny, smart novel. also, if you speak spanish as a second language, he's very easy to read in the original - a modern, simple, colloquial style, just like you're used to speaking.)

[edit: huh; i don't even remember the dream sequences at the start of 2666, so maybe my bad. will have to go back and re-read. edit2: oh, yeah, i do remember. ok... but there's nothing like that in any other book of his i have read. hmph. you might as well characterise his writing as a list of murders.]

Using one-step equation to solve iterative problem is IMHO better (obvious speed benefits for large n, the only drawback is floating point imprecision), and deriving the equation requires deeper understanding of the problem than simply modeling the iterative equation with a loop.

https://github.com/angus-c/literaryJavaScript

This is the coding equivalent of the garage musician who says, "Don't bother me with rules �" I'm playing pure emotion here, man!"

For example I am an engineer, so this comment is written like code. It contains just enough words to express my point, it's clearly structured and my goal is to make it easy to read.

That's okay writing, but far from great. Great writers can just sit down and write amazing text. I could never do that. I have to go back, read after myself and refactor.

I wonder if other engineers feel similarly.

You got that right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_(programming_langua...

or, well, Arc, which, I think, is already obese.)

I waded carefully though this, expecting the usual noise, but surprisingly found lots of signal. This is excellent and already downloaded, printed twice, on my bulletin board, and in my binder. I need to go through it a few more times and make notes with a red marker as it applies to myself. What a handy barometer.

As a programmer, I love to hear unconventional technical wisdom that I know in my gut is true (3,38,47,53). The business advice was a little more conventional, but coming from OP, was heard in a new voice (too many to mention). Some of the "self-help" advice was fresh and interesting (9,18,29,36,72) while some was the same old stuff (41,77). Oh well, you can't have everything.

Thank you, OP! What a nice way to pay it forward. I know this will make a difference in my life, and probably for others too.

"Don't outsource" may have been right for fab.com but its not always good advice. Simple websites that are just retail stores care about brand, real technology companies that actually do something that hasn't been done before often outsource with good success. Like Apple for example, that outsource quite a lot of their product and yet seem to be doing ok. (Maps aside)

Most of this reads like a 60's flower child that went to Harvard and got an MBA.

I'd like to see some of this craving for perfection and every pixel needs my approval put into practice and not see fab.com paint itself smaller than the viewport on the iPad and then onReady() redraw itself to fit the screen. Or menus that don't need to be double clicked.

I really wish I had something more insightful to say about it... but it's just absolute gold, and better than 99% of the "founder advice" posts I've ever seen on HN.

Seriously, this deserves to be a book with 90 3-page chapters.

http://betashop.com/post/32913573235/90-things-ive-learned-f...

As soon as Betashop posts again to their blog it will start to get confusing.

Smile, you're designed to.

Jason

Thanks!

ie: Learning to say 'no' and don't be afraid to voice your opinions to CEO/Founders. You know, some bullet points like the OP but more to the audience of those not in founder positions.

Feel free to share articles/links if you have any too!

*edit: I love the list, it's awesome :)

True success it is (I think) if you can enter any market, build the best product, and dominate it.

Thanks Jason!

Clearly, appealing to a popular audience wasn't on the list. Rescue your article by changing its title and make a few editorial changes:

Title: "My Ten Principles for Startup Success"

Edit the article to highlight the ten most important principles from your long list -- write this section carefully, knowing that most people aren't going to read any further. Then append a list of 80 corollaries for those few souls willing to read a longer article.

http://www.kauffman.org//uploadedFiles/Then_and_now_americas...

of which he was the principal author.

Get ready for the key statistic from the report: "The proportion of immigrant-founded companies nationwide has dropped from 25.3 percent to 24.3 percent since 2005. While the margins of error of these numbers overlap, they nonetheless indicate that immigrant-founded companies' dynamic period of expansion has come to an end." Okay, so the change in percentage is within the standard error of measurement; a percentage change of that kind would be seen even if there were more immigrant-founded companies than ever, as long as more native-born Americans than ever found companies; and there is NO indication that Silicon Valley's flood of innovation has ceased.

What is the problem here? Quantitatively, what is the proof that any policy change is needed?

AFTER EDIT: Responding to the offense taken by the replies kindly posted below, let me explain my position. My PERSONAL position on immigration to the United States as a matter of policy is that I would be happy to see it go back to the way it was in the 1870s, when anyone could immigrate from anywhere with hardly any regulation of immigration at all. All of my ancestors arrived in the United States by those rules--all of my ancestors were in North America well in advance of the building of the immigration processing station at Ellis Island in New York City.

I am intimately familiar with United States immigration law, having formerly worked as an immigration lawyer (as described in my user profile here on Hacker News) and being the husband of a first-generation immigrant to the United States from Taiwan. I have lived abroad for six years of my life (in two separate three-year stays), so I have a pretty good idea of how one country treats foreign residents from America. The clients for my current occupation, teaching mathematics lessons through a local nonprofit organization, included first-generation immigrants from China, India, Russia, Romania, the Philippines, Korea, Ghana, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, and other countries I may be forgetting at the moment. I like immigrants, and I like America to be full of immigrants--that makes life here more interesting.

But to persuade the legislative process in the United States to change the rules requires more convincing evidence than the anecdotes that Vivek Wadhwa repeatedly brings forward. Another comment here astutely pointed out that the recent trend line in immigration from Taiwan is that entrepreneur immigration to the United States is decreasing. That's because Taiwan has democratized, liberalized, and prospered during my lifetime. Now people who were born in Taiwan can pursue their advanced education in many different countries, being well prepared by the generally excellent primary and secondary education there, and then can decide for themselves where to settle to establish a career. They can go back to the country where they grew up and where their relatives and childhood friends live if they like. I think it's great for people to have choice like that. I don't think it is any problem for the United States at all if people from Taiwan develop their entrepreneurial businesses in Taiwan. The same is true of India and China. People from India and China continue to come to the United States in large numbers, as I can personally observe. Some study here and then go back to the countries of their birth. No one has made a case that United States policy has to change much to influence the numbers one way or another.

Trying to tweak the immigration process in the name of "increased entrepreneurship" is often just a ruse for "open the borders!!!". Fine in and of itself if that's your beef. Just please file it right folder.

Letting Congress, political donors, H1-B employers and college administrators try and engineer the future by selecting "winners" seems like something they're going to mess up.

Better to have limited, legal only immigration based on a points system rather than turn it into a subsidy for Sand Hill Road.

Essentially everyone agrees on easier and longer (to permanent) visas for future or currently-legal but temporary visa entrepreneurs, high skill immigrants (for various definitions), etc. There isn't a clear consensus on how to handle pre-existing other immigrants, or future low-skill immigrants. There are also weird corner cases caused by long-term illegal/undocumented presence by children, which is what the DREAM act is supposed to address -- a child who was brought here shortly after birth, who grew up a US citizen, graduated high school, college, etc., really doesn't seem the same as an adult who recently and of his own free will crossed the border.

Part of it is racial/racism, but a lot of it is economics; trying to paint enemies of mass unskilled immigration or immigration amnesty as just racists is doing everyone a disservice. But it's also undeniable that the high-skill immigrants with problems are generally from India and China (where the H1B system is most broken due to nationwide quotas) and from other parts of Asia, Europe, etc., and the illegal/low skill immigrants are largely from Mexico, Guatemala, and other Latin American countries.

There is also some confusion about credentials vs. actual skills, too -- I'd rather bring Bill Gates in than most people with BA's from diploma mills or even legitimate PhDs.

The problem with comprehensive reform (as championed by the democrats and Obama) is that it's all or nothing, vs. incrementally solving each class. The proponents of comprehensive believe (probably rightly) that solving the most obvious and pressing problem (the 1 million or so skilled immigrants who are all currently legal) will take away the drive to solve the 12 million unskilled/illegal immigrants already here, or the many million who would immigrate without skills if it were easy and open. It would also quite possibly lead to a more restrictive regime for the unskilled vs. skilled.

Ultimately we seem to be solving the immigration problem by destroying the US economy (outside high tech and government, neither of which employs a lot of illegals), thus depressing wages and job opportunities for illegal/unskilled immigrants, while mexico continues to develop its economy -- it makes more sense to work there legally for 10% the cost of living and 30% the wage in many cases.

Top 5 reasons why you should move to Berlin, now:

1. Lowest livings costs with highest quality of living. Stay in gorgeous, perfectly renovated apartments in pre-WWII residential buildings with high ceilings, right in the middle of the center and pay a fraction of costs of any other capital (even cheaper than any Eastern European capital). No need for a car�"Berlin has one of the densest subway nets and wide streets make biking fun.

2. A vibrant and fast growing ecosystem of smart people. A vast number of new software talents, founders, software companies and VCs are moving to Berlin, every day (Twitter, Google, Soundcloud, Early Bird and many more).

3. People here are open-minded, outgoing, mix well and international�"no need to learn German, everyone speaks English! Making new friends is a matter of days. Visit tons of networking and startup events, every week.

4. Easy work permissions�"Europeans do not need any and can work from day one and the rest applies for the hassle-free Blue Card.

5. Berlin's night life is unmatched, huge and changing every day (plus ridiculously cheap). Berlin has got some of the most dazzling, naughty, and original clubs on the face of the Earth.

Berlin is calling and getting the new tech hub of Europe. If you are passionate about building great software, we'd love to talk with you. If you don't live in Berlin yet, we could help to fix that.

=> http://urge.io/jobs (shameless plug)

I'm sure that for every American with a story like mine, there are dozens of people who could have been employed at companies started by foreign-born entrepreneurs but never had the chance. The US is doing serious, long-term damage to itself with these wrong-headed policies.

The glorification and, sometimes deification, of various entrepreneurs as almost single handedly bringing the world out of the darkness is complete bullshit and merely an example of the fundamental attribution error writ large (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error).

People just completely forget that a) the world is an incredibly complex system that rarely has single factor causes to various effects and b) that people just don't matter - the ecosystem that surrounds them matters much more.

For example not worrying about personal security frees up employees to take more risk. A strong rule of law that attempts to equate wrongs allows people to focus on value added services rather than the fear of litigation. Access to cheap raw materials (plentiful mining/food/water) allows one to easily build things that would be quite simply uneconomical anywhere else. A capitalist system allows more niches to be profitably exploited than centrally planned economies. "Special innovative people" are by far the least of your worries.

Systems matter more than any one person and anyone who gives you the "A player" talk is full of crap - "A player" yourself out of Afghanistan as a sick female and we'll see who's talking.

I am always amazed at the different kinds of programs and rules introduced by USA for giving permanency to illegal immigrants where as people moving/moved legally (H1b/L1b etc) have to wait forever(like 10 years and still waiting) to get that status.People on H1B/L1B can not start a side business and these are the tech people(mostly) who can add lots of value to the existing market.

I chuckle a bit and then move onto the headline "America to immigrants: ‘Give me your tired, your poor' but keep your entrepreneurs" Written by Vivek Wadhwa and chuckle some more.

I then having got past the title got to read a rather insightful article about how it is easy to come and work in America and visa's for that exist. But if you which to start a company and as such have a situation were you have to apply for citizenship, then you could have a top 25 existing company in-play already employing American's and pay lots of TAX then you can still be told sorry no. That said there was mention of a % drop in immigrant started companies and this still points to them happening.
I suspect the tighter limits has meant raising the bar beyond what it needs to be for many and with that perhaps a new type of VISA needs to be made. I don't know the whole American VISA system that well, but certainly some middle ground from worker VISA to citizen VISA to cater for those employing American's can be met. Maybe if they employ so many then they qualify. So for example if you can form a company and employ say 5 people full time then you are granted say a 5 year business VISA which is reviewed every 5 years to see that you meet checks and after say 3 period gain a full citizenship. Something like that, though a lot more detailed against loopholes I suspect.

But still, very nice read and very good article, despite the interesting choice of title, albeit once you have read the article you will see why it is just on so many levels sadly.

The author points to statistics about tech companies started by immigrants and presents Desai as part of the team that developed new technology, but Desai studied MBA and he was only doing an administrative job at IR Diagnostyx[0].

Moreover, the openning example does not seem to be precise; the author claims that Desai was not given an opportunity to start his business, which does not seem to be aligned with Desai being affiliated with IR Diagnostyx from 2009 to Feb 2012[1]. Furthermore, upon graduation in 2009, the US did give Desai 12 months of OPT[2], for which self-employment does qualify. In fact, if Desai had studied Science/Tech/Engineering/Math, he would have been give
an an extension of 17 months of OPT[3], for a total of ~2.5 years to work on his business.

[0] http://it-jobs.fins.com/Articles/SB130652363641519729/Americ...

[1] http://www.linkedin.com/in/hardikadesai

[2] Optional Practical Training, assuming he was on F1 visa as a student: http://icenter.stanford.edu/students/current/employment_faq....

[3] http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f...

Less known is that a person can also sponsor you for an H-1B if you are going to be working for them.

I know personally that I started my own business specifically because I was allowed to stay on my parents healthcare until I'm 25(26? Shit I should figure that out) so even with $5k in savings, I was like why not?

founding companies is not simply a matter of talent and risk-appetite, which, arguably, the STEM immigrant has more of. its also a matter of feeling secure with your finances, having a house in a good school district, having a CD or two for the rainy day, having some connections to the VC community, having the time & desire to hack up a prototype & blog about it & build a community & attract enough interest...all of which immigrants are less likely to do, given that we are already preoccupied with keeping a job, keeping our immigration papers in order, gradually building up savings, digging ourselves out of the negative equity hole that most of us are in because we borrowed money to get here in the first place...i could go on and on, but i won't. suffice it to say, the sun definitely rises in the west, because vivek has said its the east.

Obstacles like this shouldn't stop an entrepreneur. I had to do the whole H1-B thing myself, while bootstrapping another business on the side - and there are no rules against that. I know others who did the same. Have a job, launch a company in your spare time.

The US government and corporations have sold you out as a US CITIZEN. See the proof http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU&;

From what I understand this is a fairly universal problem with immigration policy. Most developed countries are unwilling hand over work permits for hopes and dreams. I wish there was a way around this but as far as I know you cannot start a company without permanent residency.

I have no idea whose interest it is currently serving - I know for a fact not America's though.

If you must embrace high-tech in the car cockpit, voice control is fine (if it works well), but touchscreens are horrible in this environment.

1. Get (real) wallet.

2. Find the right card.

3. Swipe the card.

4. Press 'Debit' on the machine.

5. Press 'No' to the cash back prompt.

6. Enter my PIN.

Versus:

1. Get out phone.

2. Wake the screen.

3. Touch the phone to the machine.

4. Enter my PIN on the Google Wallet prompt that appears.

5. Confirm the payment.

If they were to list the steps for paying with a normal credit card would their list include "find the teller's hand so you can give them the card"?

Edit: How do I <ol>?

1. While standing in line, I searched the app and had it on, but the phone kept turning auto-off till my turn (I re-opened it 3 times atleast)

2. The app would not scan as the screen brightness was low. I frantically went to settings to change brightness then re-trying and all this time there were people standing behind me pissed.

I think using phones as "keys" or "payment cards" is not the best interface. Ideally there should be a separate device (like a credit card) to do payments and a "Key" device to open all my locks.

In any well-designed interaction it needs to be clear what you (the user) can do, and what the state of the system you're interacting with is. 'No UI' only works when you're augmenting a system where these two things are already clear. For instance, in the case of the car door system, you already know that you can open the car with your key, and you can tell when the car door unlocks.

When I open a new app for the first time, I don't already know everything it can do. I need to see the interface to know what's possible. And I need to see feedback to know that I'm making progress.

I've heard that many Nest owners are actually a bit disappointed in its smart features, as there's no way to tell why it's doing the things it's doing (why did it just make it cold in here?) Without a way of communicating its reasoning, people are suspicious of its "father knows best" recommendations. Even Amazon tells you roughly why it's recommending something to you.

And Voice UIs don't count as no UI. In fact, they're often a very poor interface, as they convey information much more slowly and invasively than a visual interface, and there's no a priori way to know what voice commands a system accepts.

Fortunately the Nest's UI is good enough that it's still a good thermostat without the learning mode. There was a comment on HN the other day along the lines of "if you have good enough AI, does UI design quality matter so much?" and I guess I think that it does if there's any way for the AI to mispredict then you need something good for correcting it.

Key + keyhole = interface.

A keyhole that "knows" when the correct key is close = better interface.

Wallet + Money + cashier + cash register = interface.

If you could do NFC without an app & without a cashier, that would be even better.

There is no such thing as "no interface" if something is being accomplished.

Rock + coconut = interface.

Hand + mouse = interface.

Your eyes + my words = interface.

Now they have iDrive.. Complete mess!

- Find remote or phone

- Navigate to Netflix/Amazon/etc

- Click around miserable arrow keys to find whatever I'm watching

- Press play

Is now reduced to

- "Xbox, Bing [ugh] Star Trek"

- "Play on Amazon"

It clearly still needs some refinement (keywords get a bit verbose), but it's definitely the future of TV (lack of) UIs.

If Apple starts buying tons of directional mics, every TV manufacturer on the planet should be scared to death.

Google search is an e.g.: almost no UI, improves over time, adapts to you.

That's why Internet of Things will become big. It's not the use case of turning the oven on 20 minutes before coming home yourself. It's about the oven knowing you're eating a prepared lasagna that needs be to in oven for 20 minutes. While driving home all traffic information and your location are used to determine when the oven needs to start its work.

What you can strive for is interfaces that are so intuitive and easy to use that you don't need to fight them or rtfm.

Great UI designers know how to do this.

Exactly. This is why I'm in favor of a worldwide shift to hieroglyphics and touchscreens for business. Writing business correspondence is old hat. Letters, words, sentences, parapgraphs, what a nightmare. And shorthand? Don't get me started. Let's face it, we all would much rather touch some graphical shapes on a screen to communicate. A picture says a thousand words, so why are we typing them out? What a waste of effort. Text has got to go. It's time to leave the alphabet soup behind.

Finally a design firm who really "gets it".

Awesome, I agree, except that all of those examples are shit.

It's not "more simple" to just walk up to your car and have it magically unlock based on proximity. Simple is using your damn key to unlock the car, not layering stacks of abstractions in order to compute ones location juxtaposed to a vehicle. In fact, that order of events should have gone something like this (as a generic, modern day implementation of this functionality):

- owner approaches car

- owner's keyfob transmits signal to car

- owner's car polls for incoming signal

- owner's car decrypts keyfob signal

- owner's car verifies that the keyfob has a legitimate encrypted key for that vehicle

- owner's vehicle signals the locking routine in the ECU

- owner's ecu flips solenoid for only the drivers side door

- door unlocks

- owner enters vehicle

How the hell is this more simple than:

- owner approaches car

- owner unlocks door with key

- owner enters vehicle.

Likewise, having your payments automagically charged based on location is NOT more simple. Simple is ordering your food and handing over money at the register.

The best interface is a simple interface, not a whole bunch of programming voodoo to achieve a simple task.

Close. In 2011, all the engineer desktops got upgraded to 36Gigs. At the time, the eng department still hadn't figured out how to deploy without duplicating hundreds of jar files everywere.

It's also a great post illuminating how in hindsight some things can be really obvious (that building a high capacity web service dependent on a single-threaded server will give you problems down the road), but at the time it's not always easy seeing the woods for the trees.

For me though, the big takeaway was that one line summary: "You're comparing a lower level server to a full stack web framework." Node.js has a pretty nice library/module ecosystem now, but for a complete full-stack solution with maximum productivity I would venture that there is nothing out there that compares to Rails currently.

But I completely agree with "the rewrite thing". I guess the other factors made it necessary to still do it....

Never once did I ever feel this article was advising that node.js was superior to RoR - they only every justified, at a high level, a way better approach (in terms of server load) to an "MVC" like architecture by leveraging client side frameworks and technique to lessen server load.

The author of this article also makes it clear at the end by stating that comparing the solutions is apples to oranges, but so did the original article...so I don't get the need for "clarification".

EDIT: I retract my "way better" statement - I mean "way better" in the sense of server load.

:o
That may explain why they had spam and security issues.

Billy Madison: "High school is great. I mean I'm learning a lot. And all the kids are treating me very nice. It's great."

I mean I was really into this image when I was 20. Now, after had some experience in the field I see that, this very act should be resorted when you have no choice. If you have a tight deadline and all you have to do is code, I mean not think and code but just code - no abstractization is involved, this works. But if you have to plan-code a project this approach sucks. Because you get tired as the night progresses and tired minds do make mistakes. A lot. So while the bugs coalesce you go into smart fixes. Because it has to end tomorrow, right? Then when you return to your code one week/month/year later you'll say:
- What the heck have I done here?!

Resting is as important as coding for a coder IMHO. No need to burn ourselves out for a myth. And yes I want to do it when I am 50 or 60.

People who want to be coding in their 50s should follow this advice. It's burning yourself out on arbitrary deadlines for meaningless business bullshit that pushes a lot of us out. A 5-year burnout, at any age, is pretty much impossible to recover from in this industry.

Programming becomes less bipolar (for lack of a better word) as you get older because you stop getting emotionally invested in things that don't deserve it, and you also become more willing to steal an education at work (thus ensuring that, regardless of what your project does, you'll be fine).

Choose poorly from among this variety and you'll burn out. Choose wisely and you'll have a long, enjoyable career with plenty of extra mind and body capacity for other interests. It's up to you.

I looked over at his sidebar hoping to see a blogroll. Remember when people used to do that ... about 5 years ago? I wouldn't call it irony, but reading about coding at 56 while getting nostalgic for 5 year old internet practices is a strange juxtaposition.

I think the one thing that I find most common in my career has been coworkers, within 10 years of retirement, that have just given up and no longer put in what's needed to be a coder. I enjoy the company of someone who has had more experience (it's part of how you learn) and love to hear about the battles that the people before me had to fight.

I start my day by asking myself some questions. Where is the technology at right now? Where is it going? How does it relate to my job? How does it relate to my interests? How does it relate to what I've done in the past? Where am I at as a developer? The problem is that people stop asking themselves all of these questions and start weighting towards a few in particular.

Perhaps it is a matter of patience. I would not know since I'm not 56 yet. OP - A toast to the fire that is still burning within you. May it keep burning for a long time. Have fun writing code.