skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. I did it, and here's exactly how:

Right now you get a nice dopamine rush when you start something, but as soon as it gets a little tricky, you quit and go looking for the next thing that gives you a dopamine rush. Productivity has no value for you, because it doesn't make you happy - you're stuck in a local minima. So what do you do? You have to go through a period of suck to get to the much, much bigger reward.

This is exactly the same as dieting, exersise, learning to draw, learning a musical instrument, anything.

Here's how:

- Recognise that productivity and motivation are not related.

A lot of people will tell you that the way to be productive is to find something you're passionate about, or only work on things that motivate you, or that the only way to be productive is by working on something that makes you happy all the time. That's garbage. Every productive person has periods where they feel like what they're doing sucks. Motivation will get you started, it will point the way, but it will absolutely not keep you going.

- Recognise that discipline beats motivation.

Discipline boils down to accepting that something is going to suck, then doing it anyway. Don't try to convince yourself it doesn't suck, because it does. Don't try to convince yourself you love it, you don't. But you have to do it anyway. A lot of people think discipline is about willpower, as if you can will yourself to do something that sucks. You can't. Discipline is about submission to the task at hand. If you like, you can visualise this as submission to your past self as taskmaster. Present you thinks this blows, but past you said you had to get it done.

- Relentless focus.

Being disciplined is hard. You only have so much space in your head to keep track. You can't be disciplined about everything. That means you have to cut stuff out. Write down the tasks you are going to do today on an index card. Do only those tasks. You're going to get that wrong a bunch of times, so you can fix it up. Look at that card every hour, and ask yourself whether you did something on it in the last 60 minutes. Set an alarm in your phone to remind you to do it. You're going to notice when you're spending time on HN a lot more, trust me. It will make you feel bad, but it will make you submit to the task at hand.

- Pick an end.

'Learn C++' is not an end goal. Build a raytracer from scratch is. Don't put a time frame on it. Don't set about breaking it into little tasks, that will happen automatically day-to-day. That thing that motivated you at the start? Write that down. When things start to suck a bit much by going through the 'this sucks' loop day in, day out, you can look at it and remember past you.

Then do that loop, over and over and over until you get to the end. Now you are going to get a huge reward, very different to the one you get just by starting something new when you're motivated. In fact, you're going to get addicted to finishing stuff and being productive because the dopamine hit is so so much sweeter.

That's just what I did.
And where FreeBSD did jails in 2000 (or actually a bit earlier).

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.0R/notes.html
I started school at 28 (after 5 years in Military and then a few years of wandering...), got my AA at 30 and am currently 35 with almost 5 years in my current job.

36 isn't to late... much less 26.
I kind of hinted at that in my original post. If it's a named company that I explicitly desire to work for then I might be willing to jump through a couple of hoops. Generally speaking, though, the name on the sign is not a strong indicator of whether or not I'm interested in working there. I'm usually looking for some combination of salary, technology stack or cool project, and strong/intelligent team. Having a recognizable company name on my resume is a very very low priority.
please excuse me for pointing out that you sound like you've drunk the consulting kool-aid yourself. in my experience it's not in any imaginable way worse down the list no matter where you look.
"But the thing is that without hard work, you can have all the luck in the world and nothing is going to happen."

Unfortunately that's not true. People will the lottery every week. In business that happens too. Look at all the well funded startups which never amount to anything, and factor in the prestige, earnings and opportunity those companies afford their participants. Plenty of people are early employees of hot startups simply via friendships and connections. Many of them leave or are fired. Many of those people become vastly wealthy.

Moreover look at all the one-hit wonders and luck is an even greater factor. If people who are smart, talented and able can reproduce their success why are they so rare? When someone never manages to get close to their initial success lack is often in play. It's not that they weren't clever, or didn't work hard, but it can be that luck picked them from a field of very similar people.

That shouldn't of course change your behavior. Luck is beyond our locus of control and planning for it, or around it, is like planning around a potential meteorite strike, or rain.

Anything you can force via effort isn't luck which is why people get confused. You can achieve against the odds via hard work alone which is why working hard is worthwhile.

You can also scale your success. The difference between making a living, making a million and being Mark Zuckerberg can all be attracted to work and wit without the need to factor luck into the equation at all.

Finally we're all focused on good-luck. Bad luck is the real enemy. To be diagnosed with a serious illness, or to be unable to take an opportunity due to factors you cannot effect will cut the legs out from underneath you however hard you work. Sometimes your good luck is invisible unless you're aware of the bad luck of those who'd otherwise take your place.
I would be interested to hear whether the culture in the engineering departments is similar to this.
He says when you read what he wrote
> No, son, your mom just phrased the question badly.

Aaaaaand... I am an asshole. Thank you for reminding me.
I worked at a small e-commerce site doing in-house SEO. Eventually I transitioned to doing web development. I could make lots of recommendations for SEO to my employers but it basically boiled down to making the best possible website for users. They needed much more help implementing those changes than "doing SEO."
For example, our site was slow. Improving the site load time would improve user experience and improve SEO. So my point is, don't let SEO distract you. There are arguments about whether SEO is even separable from good web design/development.

But to literally answer your question, the tools I would use are all free and from Google:
Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Trends

You can spend the $5,000 on Google AdWords to drive traffic to your site.
I stand somewhat corrected. It looks like Vox Populi has created a class they're calling "Sunrise Premium Names" and will price discriminate even after the sunrise period ends.

http://domainincite.com/18246-halt-perverted-sucks-shakedown...
"Sunrise Premium names will always cost $2,500, even after sunrise, when registered by the trademark owner."

This is basically without precedent, so it will be interesting to see how this shakes out.
We will get our chance to play with this -- it will just take a while. I emailed the researchers about site snarls, error messages, etc., and they wrote back that all our attention

:... is definitely welcome, even though it’s very unexpected and therefore overloaded the server! Ulrik Plesner, who developed the webserver, is working at the moment to get it up and running again..I think it'll be back over the next 1-2 days if all goes well :) "
This and git-annex (and git-fat and others) use the same basic architecture of storing links in Git and schlepping the binaries around separately.

Git-annex renames binaries with their SHA256 hashes, puts them in a .git/annex/ dir, and replaces files in the working dir with symlinks. Git-LFS seems to use small metadata pointer files (SHA256 hash, file size, git-lfs version) instead of symlinks. Not sure whether the files reside in something like the .git/annex/ dir; I'm guessing the do or there wouldn't be those pointer files.

You can clone a repo without having to download the files.

With git-annex you can sync between non-bare and bare repositories without having a central server.
Git-LFS seems to have a separate server for binaries. It looks like it may act like a git-annex special remote rather than git-annex's usage of synced/master branch.

Git-annex repos share information about the locations of annex files, how many repos contain a given file, etc. You can trust and un-trust repos. It doesn't look like Git-LFS offers this.

Git-LFS has a REST API. I'm using an old version of git-annex so I can't say if it does (I think it does).

Git-LFS is written in Go, git-annex is Haskell.

Git-LFS is a GitHub project.
GitHub will offer object hosting.

Update: clarity, speling, added a bullet point.
Yeah, I believe their RPi version is a lightweight consumer-facing version of Windows 8, not intended for use as a server.
This is not typical behavior for a corporation. I work for one, and believe me, nobody would be calling me during my wedding or giving me work to do in the hospital. If this is true, then Apple has an exceptionally poor work culture.
> tied to GitHub.

The protocol is open (https://github.com/github/git-lfs/blob/master/docs/api.md) and the client additions are open source. There is a reference server implementation at https://github.com/github/lfs-test-server.

edit: added protocol spec
> That's a lot of words to say Apple is a corporation and acts like many others.

What you are actually saying is "shut up and take it." Not the best comment in response to someone voicing their concerns regarding workplace conditions.

It is, however, the standard response by those who want to silence dissent.
> Finally now, for the first time in two years, I feel light, creative and inspired.
But... the author worked in customer support, managing agents. Customer support in any company is like this: it's full of bobblehead managers who make work to justify their own jobs. It's a cost center, and cost centers are where you put executives who are capable, but not exceptional. This is why OP has stories about how firing people was considered heroic -- when you work in a cost center, the only thing the business cares about is getting the same results for less money.

Cost centers also tend to have very toxic work environments as a result: people are constantly reminded that the business can and will go on without them. Hence the epidemic of throwing people under the bus, trying to "catch" coworkers in a screw-up, etc. You don't have to be the fastest zebra, just faster than the slowest one.
"gentrification" == "cleaning up crime"

I for one am glad that I can now safely walk through parts of town I would've never been able to set foot in without being shot, raped, and/or robbed in the 90s.

(I don't live in NYC, but the same thing is happening where I live, and it's the same people whining and acting like lower crime rates are a bad thing)
>Why would publishers offer libraries discounts?

That's the point I'm trying to make. Physical materials, the materials libraries have built their workflows and budgets around, operate using different rules. Wholesalers will provide discounts because libraries buy lots of stuff and so better discounts mean moving more materials and, more importantly, stopping customers from going to another wholesaler. E-books have no wholesaler. They are controlled by the publisher so there is no going to a competitor for better pricing. Thus higher prices (in the realm of 3x the retail hardcover).

That said, publishers have been lowering prices and increasing access slowly. Along with being competitors, libraries are customers, and big ones. Public libraries buy more that 1 billion in materials a year. That's a lot to walk away from because they are "competitors".

My point was just to communicate that though libraries offer value, It's difficult to compete with something like Oyster at the moment.
Japan is a very different country— one is not able to own a car without a certificate demonstrating they have an off-street place to park it (resulting in lower car ownership), and, more importantly, very narrow streets that largely preclude the kind of high speed motoring that's dangerous to cyclists.
I still worry that devs who say, "oh crap we can't build because of this library" are doing something wrong. I'm curious why I must depend on complexities like this or godeps to write effective go either by myself or in a team. Can't you just take a snapshot of the source including third party libs and keep it somewhere safe?

Edit: stablelibs is an inviting idea if you believe you must vendor, and plenty of people do believe that.
For you starry eyed youngsters, just remember that this is Apple, the world`s most profitable company. It only gets worse as you go down the list.

I wouldn't go that far. I mean, quite a large number of organizations are dysfunctional, but the mean-spiritedness and overt psychopathy described by the OP is fairly rare, even in Corporate America.

From his description I'd guess that Apple is worse than 95% of places where people work, between the 16-hour days and the bizarre status games.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9332097
In Pursuit of Purple Unicorns
While the use case you describe isn't solved by this, other use cases are. For example, wanting to easily access versioned, compiled binaries for a revision.
Sounds like Samsung.

EDIT: No really, IT SOUNDS JUST LIKE SAMSUNG.
According to his LinkedIn profile[1], he was responsible for:

Managing Quality Customer Experience Programs for AppleCare's technical support contact centres across APAC; including vendor and internal teams in Australia, New Zealand, thePhilippines and the USA. Vendor management and quality initiative planning and execution to ensure Apples technical support contact centres maintain the highest level of customer satisfaction & consistently deliver an exceptional standard of customer experience by measuring & analysing performance in-line with regional and global standards of excellence and technical aptitude.

He was there for 19 months.

1: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bencfarrell
many implies OP's experience would be commonplace, and it most certainly isn't.
So first, a lot of problems with Internet routing do not really affect SCP's safety--for example bogus route announcements. Part of the reason is that SCP depends on transitive reachability. And of course part of the reason is that SCP is built on top of the Internet, so can already assume a basically running network underneath.

I can't predict the future, but I do think it is likely that a bunch of de facto important players will emerge and have fairly complete pairwise dependencies. One reason is that Stellar follows a gateway model, where counterparties issue credits. So for example, down the line people might want to store their money as Chase or Citibank USD credits. So people will already have some notion that some participants are trustworthy enough to hold their USD deposits, and these institutions will emerge as important. If I'm a Citibank customer and you send me money, I obviously won't consider the payment complete until Citibank says it is. And of course Citibank is likely to want to depend on a bunch of institutions they do business with, so even just one bank should give me good transitive reachability.

But the nice thing about safety is that you can reduce any individual party's trust by depending on more people. So for example Stellar will run a validator node for the foreseeable future, and their incentives are different from Citibank's. To gain more trust in the system, I might want to wait for both Stellar and Citibank to agree before considering any payment fully settled.
I was standing in line at the grocery store last week and overheard a father talking to his son about purchasing some item of candy from the display at the register.

Son (holding up candy): Dad can you get this for me?

Father: No.

Son: It's only a dollar. That's not a lot of money.

Father: Do you have four quarters?

Son: No

Father: A dollar is a lot when you don't have it.
Delphi completes trans-continental drive, and Hyundai goes big
> OS X has a fundamentally unreliable filesystem

Unfortunately so is every other filesystem. Which is also why Apple heavily emphasizes making backups.
Well, you're not alone. I also think the "malleability" we see in children is just because of the attributes of their existence: nothing to worry about, nothing to do but play (and voluntary learning is play) and so on.

And like you, I also use this to motivate me in Haskell. Little by little I learn things I didn't know before. It takes me years but I do it at the pace I choose. And why would Haskell be different from any other subject I learned as an adult? Everything makes no sense in the beginning, then it's hard, then you can kind of see what they're talking about, then you get some practice, and before you know it you are equipped enough to dig into intermediate stuff and then the advanced parts.

Was it not the Japanese that came up with Kaizen - continuous improvement? I believe in that principle.
I know that, but it still is 15 years of photos I now have UI showing me that I have access to at all times and I'm not sure I want that.
Is it because you assumed it was a dad? Me too. :(
A huge downgrade for Aperture users. :-(
You are absolutely correct, thank you for the correction.
> I'm confused, is this a curated set of existing Go libraries, or a brand-new set of libraries?

Toward the bottom of the page they talk about contributing back to open source projects and sponsoring the development of some packages, so it certainly appears to be a curated set of existing Go libraries.

> If the former, how are they going to guarantee their "3 years of bug fixes"?

Red Hat provides 10+ years on the code they ship. What's so shocking about 3?
False. I've worked (briefly) in two large corporations, neither of which demonstrated this behavior. And, having talked to friends who work in larger companies...this is nowhere are common as you make it out to be.
quadruple back-flip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2maZ1UNjbk
I wonder how many people the author has really interacted with? Even if it was 100 individuals (which is probably unlikely) that's still <2% (I think Apple has > 5000 employees?) of the total organization. Basically a rounding error.

It's very hard to make conclusions for the whole company from such a small sample. That borders discrimination/racism thinking. Not in any way trying to say that he had a pleasant experience or that his management was solid. Probably wasn't. Just hard to make conclusions for a big group from such a small sample.
You are wrong about IEEE and ABET programs that can call themselves engineer. This is from the IEEE publication posted above:
"It is our position that the title, “Engineer,” in the United States should be available for use by individuals who have graduated with an engineering degree from an ABET/EAC accredited program of engineering education (or its equivalent). "
IEEE's position is you must graduate from a ABET accredited Engineering program. Computer Scientists are not Software Engineers.
CHIP:
My father told me, "Chip, my boy,
There'll come a time when you leave home;
If you should ever hit New York,
Be sure to see the Hippodrome."

HILDY:
The Hippodrome?

CHIP:
The Hippodrome.

HILDY:
Did I hear right?
Did you say the Hippodrome?

CHIP:
Yes, you heard right.
Yes, I said the Hip-

(Hildy brakes.)

Hey what did you stop for?

HILDY:
It ain't there anymore.
Aida sang an "A"
And blew the place away!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQj3sbXivYY
To be fair, it's not like Netflix's digital library is exactly "Netflix for movies" either. That's also true with Oyster and their limited front list titles. For broad access, physical is still where it's at.
Yes, that is the free tier. If you want to use it seriously, it will cost some money. OR you can use it and host your own file server, for free.

I don't think these facts are a problem. They create an open source tool, provide a location to try it out, and a service to pay to use it if you like it and don't want to host yourself. Seems like a fair offer.
Whoa whoa. Consulting isn't the answer. There are plenty of opportunities in both private and public sector on awesome teams with amazing management.
>Usually home by 8 or 9pm

I assume they got into work at 8 or 9am? That's terrible. I'm really glad that I work a standard 8 hour day at my small no-name company.
In fact, it is common advice to reject any offers that don't include a tuition waver. It signals that the candidate didn't really meet the department's standards, but that an exception will be made if they are independently wealthy.
IIRC (using Firefox nowadays) it did tell the user what sites it was allowed on, although it did this through wildcards (e.g. "http://news.ycombinator.com/*") instead of regexes.
From reading about Apple I have the feeling innovation comes from the top (or from small special teams) and the rest of the organization is about pulling that innovation together. Which would make endless meetings make sense because instead of innovation you just need organization to push the innovation made by a tiny fraction of the company forward.

The positive is just having Apple on your resume you will make landing a job anywhere easier. So the torture is more then worth it.
Literally every digital image management application shares this complaint.

Why on earth should any software development shop cater the design of a robust management app to the person who has nothing to manage?
Even contextual messages are game-able - the default text "enter your verification code" showing up on the website will likely catch a LOT of people, since they're thinking it's from the bank.

Extensions are Apps.

Without a meaningfully robust (and mandatory) security model and some basic security audits to prevent over-reaching security defaults/requests, you might as well be running Windows XP.
Verdict: Jury finds Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty of Boston Marathon bombings
Analyzing Nintendo's Move into Mobile Gaming [Podcast]
Apple could build all this into an OSX-local service that is just a push-button away from being easy to use. Plug in an external hard drive, Log in with a special pre-configured user account, assign the drive to that user, and leave your computer running - from that point on, you can access everything that user has ever submitted, with their iDevice, over the 'net, etc.

I think the desire is definitely not there to make things this easy to use - precisely because of the Cloud-Zeitgeist that we're all involved in ..
The solar system and beyond is awash in water
How handy is this?
I need to get a simple Ray Tracer working by the end of the month for a course. :)

Thanks! heh.
The irony is that, if I remember correctly for what I read in the book about the biography of Steve Jobs, in the very old apple of Jobs and the Lisa, the team leaded by Jobs was working 120 hours/week and even making t-shirt to brag about it.
What a normal day activity at work looks like
More like 10 or 11. Most of my friends are late-risers (perhaps because I'm a late-riser), and Google doesn't have set hours. People have been known to roll into work around 2:30 PM as long as they get their work done.
Experienced SaaS entrepreneurs: please get in touch
Hi - I'm looking to chat with entrepreneurs with previous SaaS exits. Am in the enterprise solutions space, have traction and could use advice. Thank you. adena@au.thentiQ.com