Given everything I've read from Notch in the last year or two, I would be highly unsurprised if he wasn't pushing this as a way to dump his hands of anything to do with business and/or notoriety (as much as he ever will be able to). His recent sentiments have expressed a lot of regret that he is no longer able to spend his time doing simple game programming & experimentation with a decent level of obscurity -- and I can't blame him for it. This is wild speculation, of course.
He was experimenting/coding on a public stream for the last two weeks while talking to chat. Also he always announces his Ludum Dare entries, when he could make them using a pseudonym. Doesn't seem like he has problems with free time or fame.
I'm really interested in this project, but wish they had left polyphasic sleep entirely out of it. The sleep data they provide (REM and NREM monitoring, etc) seems fantastically useful, and the lucid dream induction is intriguing, if dubious; however, the inclusion of polyphasic sleep makes me suspicious of the scientific rigor of the project on a whole. It's making it hard to decide whether to go ahead and back - on the one hand, I sleep with a mask anyway, definitely want the sleep monitoring capabilities the device offers, but on the other, can I trust it?
I presume that the way the lucid dream induction works is by blinking an LED when the onset of REM sleep is detected. There are other products out there already that do this; the idea is that you'll train yourself to notice any blinking red lights or objects in your dreams and associate that with realizing that you're dreaming.
Yeah, I'd like one just to figure out how much I'm really sleeping and how much of that is deep sleep, etc.
Hardware-wise, it sounds a lot like the old Zeo Personal Sleep Manager. I was interested in getting one of those, but then the company went other and shutdown their API, bricking all their devices. I hope these guys don't make the same mistake.
I can replace the lipo battery with another one with the same capacity. However, I will have to expand the case. My current plan is to seal the battery in a few layers of aluminum tape and to 3D print a "gasket" system.
The company going out of business doesn't "brick" anything, at least for my older system. There are programs that can read the data format.
Especially after pg's response to the blog post about sexual assault at CodeMash, I wonder—why can't the flamewar detector just disable comments?
I tend to have a lot of respect for pg, and found his apology for what happened in that thread to be admirable. Whether or not preventing discussion of the issue on HN is positive or negative...I have very complex feelings on the issue, and see valid arguments on both sides.
What I do not have mixed feelings about, however, is that these issues need to be put front and center, so that people in our industry a) know they exist b) know how common they are c) are inspired to make personal effort to fix it. I would hope that pg agrees.
If he does, why not make such stories, when they set off the flamewar detector, maintain their ranking, but disable comments? That way, the issue is still raised, and people are still alerted to it, but it prevents the (some believe) "unproductive" discussion.
> I wonder—why can't the flamewar detector just disable comments?
In some cases it seems to, though by that time the discussion is long off the front page. I think this is a good thing, if something is on the front page then comments should be enabled, if only in case something in the article desperately needs to be corrected. If we get a post on here about a new study suggesting that vaccines may cause autism, that would almost certainly generate a flamewar but the absolute last thing we would want is for the post to remain on the front page and not permit anyone to post comments that may refute claims made by the study. In situations like those, it is better to kill the discussion and to take the post off the frontpage than to leave it there but disable commenting.
If the flamewar detector takes content in to account, could it consider the overall tone of the discussion and the content of each new comment and selectively kill new comments that seem flame-like?
I wrote a moderation bot to use on a political subreddit that used a text classifier to determine whether comments should be deleted. A goal was to delete flame comments rapidly. It worked, but reddit's reply notifications limited its effectiveness.
Of note: the phrase "you are a" ranked higher for the flame category than any particular insult.
Ahh, that makes sense. Can there be a sliding scale of delay for the ability to comment, or depth of thread allowed (before commenting is disabled for that thread), based on the output of the flamewar detector?
This may also have the side effect of allowing for some opinions to be shared, without being mired in flame-y back and forth. (And, importantly, still allows the story to stay more visible)
Hm? Was that meant to be an insult to me? I'd appreciate hearing your full reasoning for the disparagement. From my perspective, I was only sharing a classic piece of literature that had a theme relevant to the parent's comment, with a message we all could learn from, that happens to be one of my favorite poems. I didn't claim to be out there, throwing myself on the line—though I did attend a protest on the matter, and have previously actively participated in a political campaign to support my views. Anyways, you were saying?
I find it amusing the the Guardian seems to position this article in such a way that it is meant to disparage the Obama administration. While the administration is far from above criticism, and a variety of other Guardian reveals do justifiably criticize the President, my personal takeaway from this is a sign that the administration did at least attempt to curb some Bush era privacy invasions—though perhaps to a pitiful extent. Funny how the article doesn't seem to put it that way.
Are you under the impression that you can review the entire federal government, decide which programs to get rid of, and shut down every one of those programs, during your first year on office?
Because if so, please, run, I'd like to see it happen.
By pitiful, I meant that this shutdown seems minuscule among the variety of other privacy violations—but that hardly justifies the Guardian using this specific reveal as an attack piece.
> Are you under the impression that you can review the entire federal government, decide which programs to get rid of, and shut down every one of those programs, during your first year on office?
No, I'm not. But I do believe that we were all given the impression that ending unconstitutional wiretaps was going to be near the top of Obama's to-do list.
Like many people here, I agree that there is nothing more important than building things that you can show people. However, the process of getting to that level of capability can often be somewhat mystifying. There are a few tools I recommend for that. First of all, interactive tutorials, like those at Code School, are fantastic introductions to web frameworks, if you're just getting started. I first learned Ruby on Rails with Rails for Zombies. However, these tutorials will not give you the skills to actually build anything—rather, they are a good primer. From there, find a good book, preferably one that focuses on actually building something, like Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial. Finally, I really love to use screencasts (a la Railscasts) for picking up domain specific information for particular tasks. Hope that helps!
Second, a relevant question:
I've just recently started freelancing myself, and I see a variety of advice. "No Rails developer should make under $75/hour!", "Take what you can get, work your way up slowly!" "You probably charge too little!", etc. How do you actually evaluate how much your skills are worth as a freelancer? How do you match with clients who need and are willing to pay for your particular skill level? If anyone has any links to relevant advice, those would be great to.
Your skills are worth what someone will pay. "How much are you worth?" It depends on how you frame the question. Consider the following scenarios for the same question.
If you make yourself available on oDesk or similiar, your client is looking for a cheap code monkey to do usually, crappy work. You'll maybe get $10-$15 an hour.
If you get yourself a permie job at a small agency in Edinburgh where i'm from, you'll get maybe £28k a year.
If you become a contractor and work in London, you'll command £450 a day.
If you position yourself as a technical business consultant that provides a piece of software that allows an international car manufacturer to sell more cars every year, you'll earn millions.
All of those things can be true for "a rails developer". It depends on a lot of other factors that have nothing to do with programming and are often overlooked by developers.
> How do you actually evaluate how much your skills are worth as a freelancer? How do you match with clients who need and are willing to pay for your particular skill level?
They are worth what a client will pay.
Trick: if you show a client “this will make you $20K in 6 months for this, this, and this reason, as I have done for this, this, and this client”—they don't care how much you make an hour. Bid $8K for the project, even if it only takes you a week, and they're still crazy happy.
This is one of the most important points in the wake of this scandal. Be pragmatic, and look at the incentive system. The truth is, not only will most citizens never find out mass spying programs like this, but a great number won't even care, because they have "nothing to hide". However, there is a massive negative reaction to acts of terrorism.
If we want this to change, we will first have to, as a people, seriously disincentives these actions from politicians—which is hard to do, considering neither major party has been the "better" one on this issue—but perhaps more importantly, we must understand that there is only so much government can do to keep you safe, if you want to keep your liberty. The sense of entitlement to both has to go.
Critical thinking is not prioritized because it is hard to evaluate.
Due to the demand for teacher accountability, the insane level of competition for college entry, and the political games surrounding education policy, modern public education is entirely centered around examination and evaluation.
Not only is critical thinking challenging to evaluate, but, more importantly, people—read, parents—do not accept evaluations that report bad critical thinking skills. If a child can't answer 2 + 2 or who President Washington was, then they clearly didn't know. But if you ask a question that truly challenges critical thinking skills, and the child receives a bad score, the parents will be marching into an administrator's office with complaints of "trick questions" and "unfair grading". And fear of parent backlash drives American public school administration's decision making.
> Critical thinking is not prioritized because it is hard to evaluate.
I don't think that's the root cause for why its never been considered a core skill and treated (when treated at all) as sort of an optional additional skill usually addressed, if at all, late in schooling as part of the English curriculum.
But I do think that's an additional challenge to getting it treated as a core focus in today's testing-obsessed public education context.
I'm a web dev who's been looking to start trying game development, particularly with canvas. However, I've hit a huge wall with any type of graphics programming. Have you found any particularly good resources while trying to learn canvas, or graphics programming in general? Or anyone else here? If you have something feel free to email it to mrjordangoldstein at gmail.com if it doesn't seem strictly relevant to this thread—and thanks!
As part of the team behind the now-defunct http://mentor.im AngelHack project, I wish you luck, and would love to hear how it goes! I love the concept.
