ef4

23 ms·

211.
by ef4 12y ago
It's not even a question of risk tolerance. If you're willing to lose $100k, that's your risk tolerance. Some of the bets you can make with that $100k are much stupider than others, based on expected value. If you just want t
212.
by ef4 12y ago
Often not. It can do UPnP automatically. But in my case I don't even need that, because I just run a dedicated server node with a public IP, and everybody else can sync via that.
213.
by ef4 12y ago
I highly recommend Syncthing.
214.
by ef4 12y ago
If black boxes are dangerous then you really should be writing machine code. Which is absurd of course, and demonstrates that black boxes are a very good thing. Javascript itself is a black box. It would totally suck if you had to know how
215.
by ef4 12y ago
No, it's not a true statement. It's fundamentally wrong. Because if abstraction is dangerous, we should all be laying out transistors by hand instead of writing code. People get so comfortable with their familiar abstractions that
216.
by ef4 12y ago
> "Abstraction is dangerous" The fact that Javascript people keep saying this with a straight face is getting really absurd. You do realize Javascript is also just an abstraction, right? And that the browsers that run it also
217.
by ef4 12y ago
I feel like the author is ignoring a giant caveat. The liberal educational ideal has always been connected to a certain degree of elitism. The author quotes Jefferson about broad access to liberal education, but Jefferson himself expected h
218.
by ef4 12y ago
> time is money at their stage of business. Yes, this is one of your best sources of leverage, as long as you can take your time and be picky (which you absolutely should be able to do if you're a working programmer). The longer you
219.
by ef4 12y ago
This is completely backward. Your perceived worth is tied to your price. You will literally get better treatment and more respect by negotiating a better price. Not negotiating just makes you look like you don't understand business and
220.
by ef4 12y ago
Yes, definitely this. Don't go through the front door. At most, use publicly listed job ads as a form of research. Never assume they represent all the jobs that are actually available to you. There is no substitute for actually talking
221.
by ef4 12y ago
> those of us who actually work in IT for a living expect downtime and architect for it. Does Verizon not work in IT for a living? Why does their architecture not allow them to switch over to a backup despite having many days of warning?
222.
by ef4 12y ago
This pattern works all over the place . Get to know any kind of small business owner and you'll see they need good software that doesn't exist. Partly that's because they can be cheap and hard to market to at scale, which di
223.
by ef4 12y ago
The problem is that one-time hacks have a nasty habit of living on and becoming long-lived systems. And it can be hard to explain to users / business owners that just because it appears to work doesn't mean it's "already
224.
by ef4 12y ago
The bar is pretty low. When there are tens of millions of unpatched machines floating around on the internet, and hundreds of weaponized exploits already written by other people, all it takes is patience and lack of good judgement.
225.
by ef4 12y ago
This belief that there's one blessed version of any open source project is common, but pointless. I have contributed to dozens of other people's repos. As a rule, I make a change, share it back, but run my own fork . Later if the
226.
by ef4 12y ago
> Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening In the US, yes. Globally, no. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/upshot/income-inequality-i...
227.
by ef4 12y ago
I keep hearing people ask "why won't they just get the core tech right instead of adding all these tangentially related features?". If Docker was just an open source project, it could focus on getting the core tech right. But
228.
by ef4 12y ago
> While not everyone can be coders, (if everyone could, then the salary/demand would drop and this solution would be invalid) I think we really can't know how much the supply of programmers would rise if we gave everyone access
229.
by ef4 12y ago
How's this for reality: I know a consulting business that goes into nursing homes -- often rural nursing homes -- and charges them $3000 a day. That's hardly a high-margin industry, and yet it works, and the customers are happy
230.
by ef4 12y ago
Most people can't FizzBuzz. That's not ridiculous breadth of expertise. My basic filter question was always this: in any language you know, write a function that reverses a string. No tricks, no gotchas. Any reasonable solution
231.
by ef4 12y ago
Most of the unconscious nonverbal cues we experience can be captured just fine visually. I agree that haptics and smell are much longer-term technologies. But making you smell a certain smell is "just" a question of poking the rig
232.
by ef4 12y ago
> We live in "meatspace" to an extent no matter what, so it's unfortunate that we have a less fulfilling experience when we're there. The distinction is an artifact of our tech still being pretty immature. There'
233.
by ef4 12y ago
The whole thesis falls apart if you accept that digitally-mediated communication can be as meaningful as in meatspace. And it should be obvious that many people already treat it as meaningful in their own lives. Finding it meaningful depend
234.
by ef4 12y ago
I'll believe you when you open source it. I've been using syncthing and it's pretty great.
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by ef4 12y ago
> As far as I know, all atypical anti-psychotics have been black boxed (major league warning) for treating the elderly with dementia, the side effects in them are worse than the benefit. Yes, there has been a major push by Medicare and o
236.
by ef4 12y ago
I have heard that people in post-acute care (think nursing homes) frequently end up taking Seroquel because it appears on their hospital discharge paperwork, despite never having any diagnosis of psychosis. It turns out that certain hospita
237.
by ef4 12y ago
> Have I interfered with your first amendment rights? Not unless you're from the government. Otherwise you're probably just disturbing the peace or trespassing.
238.
by ef4 12y ago
"Normal" means working a low-wage service sector job until the robots replace you. The last thing I want for my kid is normal. Being a geek is only isolating if you can't find a strong community of other geeks (of all ages) a
239.
by ef4 12y ago
> Tech parents of HN, do you think this will help or hurt this young man in the long run? We don't have any information on the factors that actually matter. If he is intrinsically motivated to do what he's done, and not just
240.
by ef4 12y ago
I funded my brother's business and would do it again in a heartbeat. It's a huge advantage to truly know the character of a potential business partner before you even start. I know we could both laugh/cry it off together if h

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