Hacker News Books

Personal thoughts - suggest you look into organizational skills. Learn to take great notes, and have a tenacious follow up and follow through.

Personal Blocklist(by me)
http://crossrider.com/download/29789
> here an extension that works with firefox and google chrome (and maybe with some version of ie)
> currently only block w3schools and expert-exchange :-)
> will be extendable soon

it is not on the browser marktplaces right now, so you kind of got to install it manually.

On "kept a scorecard on which he graded himself on how well he realized [self-improvement exercises]", I'm reminded of Personal Unit Tests: http://hober.backpackit.com/pub/1233865

Completely false, very narrow minded perspective that pretty much works backwards from its conclusion using lots of anecdotes.

The Personal-Essay Boom is just getting started, because now people are sharing more interesting things in more interesting ways in the past. Dishing on former employers. Describing personal journeys. Letting people experience a slice of life that they otherwise would not come across.

The only problem with Personal-Essays is that anybody without any training or practice can sit down and give it a try, which is why 95%+ will read like a Sophomoric diary entry based on literary merit (if lucky) or Ranting (overloaded with emotions), or just not as interesting as the Writer thinks.

So, to contrast the anecdotes and conclusion I disagree with in the article, I will happily cite that on my Medium.com page, where I have 70 publications, the highest viewed, most shared, and apparently most liked are Personal Essays. They are about interesting subjects - Film, Music, Writing - not, as the Writer uses as a comparison - some kind of nuveau-critique about life as told through the lens of a Tampon.

The signal to noise ratio has always been a problem. That's the role of Copy Editors (RIP, really they're seemingly extinct in the US outside of Top 1%) and Publications to get things into shape. Or, to re-frame the discussion in terms of guitar and me experience with it, "Anybody can pick up a guitar and make noise, but making beautiful music is going to take a lot of time and effort." Personal Essays also follow this axiom.

> I had had enough of the corporate grind

"Personal Business Commitments"
"Performance Reviews"
"Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"
"Be sure to share stuff about X new project on your social media!"
"Submit your vacation request"

Yes, this. All of this.

I will deliver you technical solutions to the best of my ability, and I will do it as well as I can, making sure things are documented, complete and easy to understand for longer term maintainers, using common tech stacks where possible.

I will not corporate pole-climb or waste my life on company admin, nor pretend I believe in your mission.

- Personal Exceptionalism

The grandiosity associated with mania is a superset of this. (As mentioned elsewhere, the reverse is not necessarily the case.)

- Dichotomous Thinking

Pretty much exactly as described in the slides.

- Overgeneralization

Albeit without the "Correct" part, as often as not, nevertheless leading to some very interesting discoveries.

- Blank Canvas thinking

To an extreme degree, rebuilding ones personality and self image at least once a year.

- Schumpteranism

See previous point. This was mostly internal destruction and rebuilding, but often manifested itself in staying awake for days rearranging furniture, breaking down or building in walls etc.

Source: runs in the family.

These might be too difficult but just for fun here are some ideas for mostly backend.

Personal Music Tracker - You can get new music ideas by scraping content from a community radio station playlist like KCMP (https://www.thecurrent.org/playlist). Run it against a personal database of songs you already know and have the system send you a daily/weekly/monthly list of songs you haven't heard. It's fun to build.

Phone Proxy - Set up a disposable number for yourself on Twilio that will proxy incoming calls against a whitelist of approved numbers. You could do Twilio Studio to build an IVR that prompts the caller to press one to route the call. If they stay on the line you could do fun stuff like transfer to an It's Lenny server or something. It's not difficult to program and will teach you about some phone technology.

IoT Blog Reader - Follow blogs that you like and have them read to you via common IoT devices like Alexa/Google Home. Like an RSS reader but built for speech. Use an RSS reader to pull articles, run transcriptions of the articles with trained ML TTS models, and store the data with SQL. De-dupe the transcriptions based on URL. Use pre configured ML models for text to speech like AWS Polly or GCP Wavenet. Probably way too hard...

TextToSpeech for books - Upload a book. Get emailed the audio transcription. Use pre trained ML models for TTS conversion. Maybe use a SASS company like mailgun for the email part so you can just focus on extracting text from different file formats? Could start with plain text files initially.

Story Point Estimation - Use ML (or basic statistics) to estimate how long JIRA tasks or projects will take to complete. Use a general corpus of data to train an ML model, then feed it a team's data so it can adapt accordingly. There are some whitepapers on it like https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.00489.pdf but you could look around for easier statistics algorithms to use instead so it's easier to build.

"Take Down Obligations: What Google Can Do To Hosted App Engine Web Sites"

That's seems reasonable to me. If I violate their TOS or in any way act immoral, they have the right to ask me to remove my content from their server. If I refuse to do so, it's completely within their rights to take it down themselves.

"Non-Performance Clause: How Google Puts All Risk and Liability on App Engine “Customers”"

AKA, you're responsible for your data. If something goes wrong and a commit fails, Google isn't responsible, just like if a MySQL query fails, you don't lay the blame on Sun. Again, this sounds pretty reasonable.

"Personal Data Capture Machine: How Google Usurps Private Consumer Information"

In the interest of full disclosure to my customers, I'd be more than willing to say "We use the Google Apps Engine!"

This article seems like one big mess of FUD. Google is providing some cool services at no cost. You don't like it? Go somewhere else.

If you haven't seen it here's R. P. Feynman's Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle. I think the reason that additional safeguards were added was not because they begun to feel emotional about it, but rather NASA had underestimated the failure rate in the first instance. The emotional factor is what prompted the investigation.

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...

- Personal Analog Assistant: literally just a small notepad where I jot notes and To-Dos. A cell phone or desktop app could work just as well, but I like the paper approach.

- "Spellbook": any command that's not something bog-standard and simple gets added to a Notepad++ file; e.g. a bunch of Cisco commands go in the Network Spellbook, SQL queries go in the DB Spellbook, Linux one-liners in the Bash Spellbook, etc.

At the People's Computer Company (PCC) we published many BASIC (and other programs) beginning in the early 1970s in a number of publications: PCC Newspaper, Personal Computing, Recreational Computing, and Doctor Dobb's Journal. We also ran storefront computer facilities where people (kids and adults) could rent time on a TTY connected to a computer. Most of the computers we used for that were DEC PDP-8s.

One of our most popular books was What to Do After You Hit Return, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_to_Do_After_You_Hit_Retur.... It remains, to this day, a classic.

Typing in a program from a magazine or book was always a crapshoot unless you really understood and could change the program simply because of the large number of different dialects of BASIC.

Microsoft BASIC eventually became a "standard" of sorts, but that was later.

(I've been running social bookmarking site, Faves.com, since 2005).

I still think there is a largely unmet need that fits into the "Social Bookmarking" niche. But I don't think "Social" is the best way to think about it.

As an avid user (of Faves.com, in my case) - I use it for (in order of importance):

    1. Pack Rat - I don't ever want to loose a link I
       found interesting enough to want to recall later.
    2. Personal Search - I need a great search interface
       to quickly find anything I've saved (search across
       tags, and comment text).

The unmet need - NOT "Social" in the sense that I want to share links with my "friends" - but, rather, topic-based "Communities". Help me interact with people who share the same interests. This is more in the vein of Hacker News or Reddit. But I don't have any one service (Faves, included) that do this "right" yet.

I think I want a well integrated system that spans:

    - Personal Bookmarking
    - Personal Knowledge Base w/ Search
    - Topic Forums
    - Commenting system
    - Micro-blogging/publishing

* Life advice type stuff - Tim Urban (http://waitbutwhy.com/), Eric Barker (http://www.bakadesuyo.com/)

* Personal Finance - Mr Money Moustache (http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/), Afford Anything (http://affordanything.com/)

* Laravel (PHP) - Laracasts (https://laracasts.com/), Taylor Otwell (https://twitter.com/taylorotwell)

* YouTube music cover artists/producers - Kurt Schneider (https://www.youtube.com/user/KurtHugoSchneider), Sam Tsui (https://www.youtube.com/user/TheSamTsui), Madilyn Bailey (https://www.youtube.com/user/MadilynBailey), Tyler Ward (https://www.youtube.com/user/TylerWardMusic), Alex Goot (https://www.youtube.com/user/gootmusic), Against the Current (https://www.youtube.com/user/againstthecurrentNY), a few others.