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SamPutnam's comments

SamPutnam | 8 years ago | on: Warren Miller, Ski Bum Turned Filmmaker, Dies at 93

In a 2008 speech, Mr. Miller summed up with uncharacteristic seriousness what had led him - as well as ski bums and heads of state and corporations - to head for the mountains.

"It's our search for freedom," he said. "It's what it's all about - man's instinctive search for freedom."

SamPutnam | 8 years ago | on: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

I stopped using a smartphone 2 months ago, switching to a flipphone with wi-fi calling. When I made the switch, the employees in the mobile store acted as if they had lost one of their own and outwardly displayed the 7 stages of grief for my old phone as I returned it for something without a touch screen...

1. Shock & Denial - ...I was asked if I was 'sure about this' more than 10 times during the transfer and repeatedly dissuaded from making the "down"grade.

2. Pain & Guilt- ...I was told that no one had done this before, that it was not recommended for any customer, and skeptically prodded as if in attempts to uncover that I lacked the qualities and smartphone use cases that make one human.

3. Anger & Bargaining- ...As one of the employees started setting up the phone for me, another came over, asked what model it was, and snickered loudly before saying how sh&@$#y the outdated messaging system was on the phone. I begrudgingly sat through spiels on several other models that didn't fit my requirement of 'just no apps'.

4. "Depression", Reflection, Loneliness- ...The 4 employees started talking amongst themselves in a ring about the old days, before any of them had a smartphone. There were noticeable pauses and head tilts throughout the conversation. I had been here an hour at this point.

5. The Upward Turn- ...They handed me the phone and one even said he envied me and wished me good luck.

6. Reconstruction & Working Through- ...I signed the contract and they showed me how to do wi-fi calling, cellular, and send messages, the only features I had wanted in the first place.

7. Acceptance & Hope- ...The employee who originally helped me said I "just had" to email him back to tell him what it was like on the "outside".

It was the most surreal experience, a basic exchange of products and services that from the perspective of everyone around me was akin to renouncing my citizenship.

SamPutnam | 8 years ago | on: Feature comparison of ack, ag, git-grep, GNU grep and ripgrep

Emphasis mine-

Excerpt: "Some might say that ag and ripgrep and any of the other tools I list on beyondgrep.com are competing projects, but I think that way of thinking is wrong. It’s only a competition if you see it as a competition. I’m not competing against anyone for anything: Clicks, dollars, popularity, etc. If someone uses ripgrep instead of ack, it doesn’t hurt me. It’s the difference between an abundance vs. scarcity view of the world. I choose abundance. I think most of us who work in open source do, too."

I never thought I would see the confluence of the "woo-woo" space abundance mindset and a blog post about an open source command-line utility. I must say I am intrigued.

If this explanatory medium doesn't substantiate the reasonability of a mindset of abundance in the minds of programmers, I don't know what ever will.

SamPutnam | 8 years ago | on: Under River, Outside Time: The Woolwich Foot Tunnel Anomaly

I've experienced something like this programming in a room in the basement of a hospital at a medical imaging device for 8 hours, where notable project progress came in the course of days, not hours. With the absence of light, external stimulation, voices, or people, which would traditionally alert the mind to refocus on another stimuli and contextualize the stimulation against the time of day, the only alert is progress. To be clear, there is no mistaking the long period of time spent during the day whilst performing the mechanics of the task, but at the conclusion of the day, if there was no milestone of progress hit, and were it a day where there were literally zero interruptions, it would feel like I had only been down there 3 hours.

SamPutnam | 8 years ago | on: Casting a $20M Mirror for the World’s Largest Telescope [video]

For those wondering why do they have to go to Chile?, I presume it's for the same reason as given here for the ELT (extremely large telescope, to be completed in 2024): The location was chosen because of its high percentage of cloudless nights and low light pollution [1] and (notably but with a lower weight of importance) the temperature is cold enough that there will not be differences in temperature between the interior and exterior of the telescope which could cause the rays of light to defract (ever so) slightly [2].

[1] https://newatlas.com/extremely-large-telescope-construction-... [2] https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/a/21413

SamPutnam | 8 years ago | on: How We Built Uber Engineering’s Highest Query per Second Service (2016)

Instead of indexing the geofences using R-tree or the complicated S2, we chose a simpler route based on the observation that Uber’s business model is city-centric; the business rules and the geofences used to define them are typically associated with a city. This allows us to organize the geofences into a two-level hierarchy where the first level is the city geofences (geofences defining city boundaries), and the second level is the geofences within each city.

What about Uber's business model impacted this choice of algorithm?

Edit: left only the unanswered question

SamPutnam | 8 years ago | on: Vim: Seven habits of effective text editing (2000)

A couple of things to watch out for when you are using these three steps:

"I want to get the work done, I don't have time to look through the documentation to find some new command". If you think like this, you will get stuck in the stone age of computing. Some people use Notepad for everything, and then wonder why other people get their work done in half the time...

It's not directly related to vim, but... Some tool you use will always seem extraneous to someone further down the stack with more experience than you...

I remember at the beginning of my coding career asking a software engineer what IDE was the best and getting back the answer, "you don't need one, you can do everything in NotePad if you want."

(Suffice to say the impetus to go home and want to start coding from a blank NotePad file that night was dead on arrival.)

Now, if he had asked me why I was asking what IDE was best, I would probably have said "I want to create something as quickly as possible that helps me understand what code does," and then I would have been off to the races. Googling and learning along the way...

SamPutnam | 8 years ago | on: The $25B eigenvector (2006) [pdf]

For example: "2 or 3 years ago links was 80-90% of what it took to get something ranked, Panda has changed that in an insane way. Here's the test example. Go to Google and search for 'best time to visit Tahiti'. You'll find my little site, VisualItineraries up there, #1 for that, ahead of TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet, USA Today, all these other sites. These other sites have between 10,000 and 250,000 domains linking to them. My site has under 100. I rank #1 for that. Now in case you think it's internal link, anchor text, or page title match. Here's the other proof. Do a google search for 'when should I go to French Polynesia'. The only word in that that matches the page title or any anchor text is the word 'to' - (and it's a) stop word - that's not going to count. VisualItineraries.com is #1 for that too.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RvRUt9ejkw

SamPutnam | 8 years ago | on: JVM Anatomy Park

To clarify, I don't think this is improper use of the upvote mechanism, I was just hoping for more engagement with the comment feature of Hacker News, given the 7k click thrus.

SamPutnam | 8 years ago | on: A Message to the Hacker News Community

Max, while I appreciate your comment, I think you are the only one who saw it, because it is a showdead post. Do you have any tips to make this more gratifying to one's intellectual curiosity, so that it becomes unflagged?

SamPutnam | 8 years ago | on: Show HN: How I Made $1934.66 in Two Days Consulting with No Proposal

52 weeks/year, 40 hours/week = 2080 hours. You can turn those knobs up/down based on vacation, non-billable time, etc, but just to pick a number, let's say you have 1,500 billed hours per year. $250,000 / 1,500 hours = $167/hour. I know car mechanics who make more than that. If someone's telling you $250k isn't realistic, they're either underestimating hours worked, or underestimating billable rates, or thinking about being a full time employee of a consulting company (rather than an independent consultant.) They're likely contractors, not consultants" - A Seasoned Tech Consultant
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