ark15

Haven't read the article yet (I usually read HN comments first before reading the original) but your comment caught my attention. If you are really curious to see how well you could do in solitary confinement, maybe one of the ways to 'try out' the concept of not being 'connected' is to go to a week or two meditation course like Vipassana[1].

(Disclaimer: I haven't been to one, I am not affiliated in any way) From what I have read about this - The idea is to give up as many sources of external stimulation as possible. For e.g. they don't allow cell phones, any gadgets, internet connection, reading, writing,etc. The setting also takes away from you - having to think about cooking and other daily chores and all you are left to do is either meditate OR take a walk in the campus OR sleep.

[1] https://www.dhamma.org/en-US/index

>Can you explain why archaeologists, astronomers and professors have the highest life expectancy and athletes and body builders have that among the lowest?

That's a pretty serious statement hidden as a question. Can you point to your source(s) claiming this to be true? I am sure a huge % of HN population would be interested in this.

For those interested, I found parent's claim very intriguing so I spent a few minutes Googling and the best I came close to answering yes/no was this -

The life-prolonging benefits of a scrupulous life have come to light from a comparison of 20 previous studies which together rated 8900 people for conscientiousness using a standard psychological survey, and also recorded the age they died.

Howard Friedman and Margaret Kern at the University of California at Riverside found that people who were less conscientious were 50 per cent more likely to die at any given age, on average, than those of the same age who scored highly (Health Psychology, DOI: 10.1037/0278-6133.27.5.505). This exceeds the effects of socioeconomic status and intelligence, which are also known to increase longevity.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026794-800-conscien...

Do elite athletes live longer? TLDR; - In most cases, not really http://www.athletesheart.org/2013/11/do-elite-athletes-live-...

https://www.quora.com/Which-professions-have-the-longest-lif...

>> Clients who push hard for zero dollar pricing don't value the relationship. Long term B2B relationships are built around mutual success and the value of working with the same people on future projects.

>> Essentially no matter how much they pay a big IT service your client won't get what they really want. That's why they've contacted you.

As someone who runs ( _is trying to run_ might be more appropriate) a small practice with enterprise clients, I just want to say to other readers that this advice is absolute gold.

Or to walk away, you could use one of the 17 Mindy Kaling Inspired One-Liners For Escaping A Conversation - http://www.slideshare.net/sidekick/17-mindy-kaling-inspired-...

Yes. My workflow is similar to yours.

Also, I have noticed I bookmark the HN item, not the actual story link.

For some reason, reading the articles seem like a waste of time in a way that reading the comments on the article on HN does not.

This. Is what I do, exactly!

most of the times, I work _with_ the client's in house dev teams so that they can take over when we are done. I _love_ this model as everybody wins.

Key is to staff with the right people offshore.

I use Keepass + $cloudsyncprovider so that my KDB file is available where ever I need it.

Will work for now but you are still following a pretty straightforward 'pattern' that the algorithms can easily catch up with if algorithm authors wanted them to. (i.e. if too many people start doing this)

I guess using random@domainname may work better?

I am an Android phone user, past iPhone user and current iPad user and my experience has been the exact opposite. Google Now always understands me better than Siri.

When Siri fails for me, I sometimes ask my 7 year old to talk the same thing to Siri and she gets better results. My daughter has a more 'American' accent than me so I have concluded that Android is better at hearing through accents than iOS.

(I haven't yet read the original article but wanted to quickly comment since our observations are completely opposite)

EDIT - iOS tablet user = iPad user.

I have run into 2, 3, 4, 5 as well. And in general, I often feel like the tool is not telling me what it is doing (especially while handling large repos when operations some time take considerably longer)

I have since switched to SourceTree and it is working out well so far.

I don't have much to add but just wanted to say that IMHO, this is an example of hacker mindset at its best. Great Job. Congratulations!

Can you elaborate with a few examples? I am curious.

Just bought. Haven't yet read it yet but if I go by the table of contents, it seems to be well thought of and rich in content.

Thanks for the promo code. Also, thanks for all your writing on the topic that I have consumed for free. (Glad to pay for this one)

This was shared over a day ago. I would expect to see something like this on the front page. Not sure why this wasn't upvoted/commented on enough.

I do not mind reading about this every year, even if it is the same news and 'nothing new to see here'

Just being reminded about Voyager and the vastness and other miracles of space helps put that daily to-do list in perspective. For me anyway. Your mileage may vary, no pun intended.

I second your JavaFX Webview recommendation. And if you are using JavaFX, you can always use its built-in native packaging tool

http://docs.oracle.com/javafx/2/deployment/self-contained-pa...

Not to say everything else is perfect in JavaFX world but I think if you want to deploy a JavaFX application that is cross platform, the only major missing piece now is auto update support/framework for these self contained applications

Two issues with your landing page

1. major - Breaks back button

2. minor(nitpick) - If I click on the green "notify me" button and then "cancel" on the prompt dialog instead of "OK", it still shows me the green "Success - you will be notified" message

Good luck though!

Background - I have been using ExtJS in production systems since before they started charging for it (remember yui-ext?) I have worked with all of their major releases and am now dabbling in ExtJS 5.

It is obvious that OP has great deal of experience in ExtJS and JavaScript and his nightmare points are valid for his use case. Here is what I think about his nightmare points -

1. ExtJS shows an empty page if an error occurs somewhere - YES. This is a real nightmare. And no matter how much they try to make it 100% cross browser compatible, there ARE instances when the application will load in Firefox but not IE and vice-versa.

2. Abuse of divs - I do not see how this is a problem if you are using ExtJS as an application framework and not just a component library within your bigger application. If you are using ExtJS as an application framework, you are letting ExtJS render to the body and never have to directly deal with DIVs except in some cases through some inspector to understand what you custom css should override. (This is also getting easier with theme customization support in Architect)

As far as load speed is concerned I don't see it as a major issue but my use is mostly enterprise applications where it is OK for an application to load and respond slightly slowly as long as the functionality is robust, "always works" and there is look and feel consistency among different applications - all of which ExtJS helps me with.

3. Inline styles - This is not really an issue again for the same reason that if you are using ExtJS an application framework, you let it do whatever it wants to with the DOM. There is no reason to directly manipulate DOM and if you need to, you can always override or extend a component with a new/modified template that suits your needs. I do agree about the fluidity issue though but I feel it needs to be addressed at the framework level by providing more controls through the component/layout API. (flex attributes only help so much)

4. Steep learning curve - Absolutely agree with this one. I have had the chance to work with developers new to ExtJS on multiple occasions. One thing I have found is that the learning curve is much less steep if (a) the developer has some level of javascript competence i.e. understands prototype, closures, etc. (b) Is willing to look at ExtJS as a FRAMEWORK with APIs and is humble enough to bookmark and use the API doc as often as necessary. It surprises me that so many otherwise good developers refuse to frequently access API documentation before asking questions.

5. Licensing - Absolute nightmare. There was a big backlash against Sencha when they first introduced commercial licensing and thwarted the ability of other developers to develop commercial frameworks on top of extjs.

I am all for commercial licensing and heck (I was happy when they started charging for it), they should charge more if that's what will help keep their lights on and continue spending good effort on improving the product. But the problem with their commercial licensing is the built in "vagueness". Last I checked, a license is tied to a _particular developer_ and cannot be transferred to another developer so theoretically, each time a developer quits and you want to bring in another developer, you have to buy a new license.

Other two important pain points I face are -

1. Support - The best support you can get is from other users on stackoverflow. Even there, approximately 5K out of 15K questions are unanswered (I don't know how that stacks up against SO average). To put things in perspective, I stopped answering questions actively about year ago but I just checked and I am still listed in the topusers page for extjs on SO.

2. Toolchain - Architect and Cmd are good steps in the right direction but are not even scratching the surface of what a solid toolchain support should be like. I have a big wishlist for Architect and I believe Sencha Cmd is too much of a mess than it should be.

Overall, I am glad the framework exists, wish there were options out there but for single page enterprise web applications, I don't see any other rich js component framework worth abandoning ExtJS for.

I don't have any words of wisdom since there are too many people here who are smarter than I am that you should be listening to.

But for whatever it is worth -

I signed up to freelanceinbox to show my support.

Not sure how useful it would be since my niche is enterprise web applications but I am going to keep my subscription alive for at least a few months to see if anything converts.

I also promise to sign up for your pro community when you launch that.

If there is at least one lead that converts into a decent client every month, I'd be happy to pay 2-3x of what you are charging right now.

Good luck!

SEEKING WORK - Remote (Based in TX)

I am originally a full stack enterprise software engineer with focus on building web/backend applications on HTML5 & JAVA stack.

--

I have realized that my ability to communicate equally effectively with business and technical people adds way more value than utilizing just my technical skill set.

I remain my client's single point of contact for everything from signing contracts to pointing to the line of code under discussion but I work with a small but top notch technical team (off shore) where everyone takes pride in their craft.

It helps me keep our rates considerably low compared to my full time rates and provide terrific value at a really good price point.

My current clients (individual groups within large enterprises) love this approach.

--

Keywords: JAVA, springframework, Sencha (ExtJS/Touch,Architect), JavaScript, JAX-RS, JAX-WS, enterprise applications

Contact info in my profile.

===Frontend===

- Sencha products (ExtJS 4.x, Touch)

- jQuery

===Backend===

- Java 7 - Jersey (for Restful Services)

- Sometimes springramework

===Deploy===

Glassfish or Tomcat fronted by Nginx and hosted on corporate servers OR aws stack OR VPS (linode/DO) depending on the project.

===Tool chain & Ops===

- Eclipse based Dev environment on Windows 7 Pro or Ubuntu

- Github, Fogbugz+Kiln or even SVN (depending on project) Trello

- Good attitude

- stackoverflow

Just wanted to say that the time, effort and thought you have put in this project is a very apparent once you spend a few minutes poking through the UI. Excellent execution.

I like how as a new user, you get to start 'simply' (no trackers or readings or due dates or targets) and the UI is not overwhelming and add those things as/when you need them.

The dexterity of the application is not obvious when you see /use it for the first time (I think this is a 'good' thing in that you have managed to successfully keep the UI 'simple' while providing all the bells and whistles for when needed)

Great job, keep it up, this looks helpful and I'll probably be using it.

Any good/bad experience using prebuilt VM images that contractors can just download and start working in ? (Struggling with kind of the same issue)

I also tried Amazon Workspaces the day it was released but it looks like the RDP connection from locations with low bandwidth internet connections (where most of my contractors are ) is not good enough to do actual development/coding work

I second that. I sometimes wonder why FogBugz+Kiln combination has not 'caught on' as much as other offerings like github, atlassian products, etc.

My only (but major) gripe I have with FogBugz is that it is stupidly hard to insert inline images in cases (compared to how easy it is in a github issue)..and while at it, the entire editor could use a makeover for ease of use/markdown capability

H1B Transfers don't count against the H1B quota. If you still have time left on your H1B (i.e. approved I797 petiton) and have not violated the 'leave immediately if out of job' rule, it is possible to have a new employer file a petition for transfer of the I797 (H1B)

In fact, in such cases, you don't even need a new visa stamp for the transferred H1B. As long old H1B stamp has not expired, you can present this H1B along with the approved transfer petition and they will let you in.

This is just my understanding of the process and does not constitute legal advice. I am not an immigration attorney or any such. Just a technology guy -:)

I use evernote (wish there was a better alternative) for notes I create but I use http://diigo.com extensively for online content that I consume.

Why I like diigo -

1. Available everywhere - they have good, working extensions for popular browsers, native apps for mobile

2. You can highlight and annotate parts of web pages and if you visit that page again while logged in to diigo through the extension, it will show you your highlights/annotations

3. Tagging & bookmarking (I switched from delicious while it was in future:uncertain state)

4. You can create groups and add links to groups (e.g. I use this feature to share links and my comments with my wife on topic we are concentrating on/discussing)

5. Share feature. Very easy to share a link and a quick note to anyone with email address

6. It has other _social_ features (share on twitter/facebook, etc.) but I don't use those

I am not affiliated with diigo in any way. Just a happy user.

Have you tried Zoho? http://www.zoho.com/mail/

Switch your sim card over to Nexus 4. If you buy Nexus 4 unlocked, it can probably do out-of-the-box WiFi tethering (My Nexus One could but not sure if 4.2 stock android still has that feature preserved). To use your iPhone 5, connect it to your Nexus 4's WiFi hotspot.