Uroboric's comments

What finally worked for me is listening to history audio books/lectures.

It takes my mind off of real life things, and since it's just audio there is no light involved. History is perfect because there aren't many conceptual hurdles to understanding the material that would require really intense focus. I start to drift off after 30 minutes to 1.5 hours very consistently. It's also easy to find new listening material since there's practically an infinite amount of it.

As a bonus, I've learned a lot about history this way.

My retirement funds are in stock index funds. That and my daughter's 529 are the only stocks I own. Everything else is bonds, cash and real estate.

I'm not sure if my original post just wasn't clear enough or something. Retirement is great, my point was about non-retirement money.

Building capital for a business is exactly the kind of medium-term goal I was referring to, where you wouldn't want it getting spoiled by a market crash at the wrong time.

I agree with your point entirely, but my point is that most people don't just sock money away for decades if it isn't specifically retirement money. Usually it is saved for some medium-term goal, which stocks could potentially spoil. Aside from that risk, why even deal with the psychological effect of that uncertainty for a paltry gain?

Personally, if I was dependent on my assets for the income I use to eat, I wouldn't want those assets to be ones that can wildly swing in value.

If I had enough other investments that the stocks were just icing on the cake that wouldn't be an issue, but that kind of goes back to my point of being extremely wealthy and having truly extra money you can park in risky stuff.

Savings accounts aren't the only option though. Bonds will return like 2-3% depending on the type, without the occasional dramatic crashes in value.

Something that's never made sense to me about stocks:

Unless you're extremely wealthy, any money you are able to save (outside of retirement money) is probably money you are going to want to use for something to improve your life in the semi-near future. Buying a house or car (or just a better one) for example.

With that assumption in place, under what circumstances does investing in index funds make any sense whatsoever? The entire market crashes on occasion due to herd mentality, and yet even given that level of risk index funds still take many years to appreciate in value significantly. It seems like an absolutely terrible place to put money that isn't specifically intended for retirement or something like a 529 plan.

I think you got that backwards. React's abstractions are transparent, as in the developer doesn't need to "see" them or be aware of them. Your existing web dev knowledge largely applies.

I have about two years of experience with both Angular 1 and React. What was truly astounding to me was how while Angular required months of continually poring docs and Stack Overflow threads for every new thing I wanted to do, React took all of a week or two to get pretty comfortable with, and after that minor investment of time I was rewarded with dramatically increased development speed.

I will never go back to using a framework with an approach like Angular. Trying to abstract away the browser environment and have developers learn a whole new set of APIs with nearly the same level of complexity is just a fundamentally bad idea.

Only a year or so into my career I started getting pain in my upper right back from using a mouse. I tried various adjustments to my desk/chair setup but eventually it got to the point where I couldn't use the mouse with my right arm anymore without unbearable pain and it would linger when I wasn't working.

I was able to solve the problem completely by starting to use a trackball with my left arm. I still use a mouse with the right when precision is necessary but 90% of the time I use the left and trackball.

During high school I became aware of community colleges and it actually occurred to me that all the homework and stress involved with maintaining a high GPA simply wasn't worth it. I took easy electives and barely passed everything else.

The solution is to use a boilerplate/generator. I've used one for every JS project I've started in the past two years.

The main benefit is that you get something that already has the whole development/test/build workflow set up, with your framework of choice. Then you can tweak things as necessary.

Since all of the processes should be able to be run through a small set of CLI commands, there isn't much mental overhead switching between projects.

As a counter-example, before I knew about Aspergers/high-functioning autism I was always frustrated and confused about my social difficulties. I forced myself to join social groups and do public speaking in an attempt to improve, but nothing made any difference at all.

I learned about Aspergers in my early 20s and very quickly a lot of my problems made sense. I stopped worrying about the social difficulties and started focusing on building skills where the condition would not hinder me. This is actually why I initially looked into computer programming.

You basically hit the nail on the head.

That said, they were in fact making an effort to increase adoption with initiatives like Famous University, famous-angular and various project demos and usable widgets.

The answer to why they struggled to increase adoption so much isn't that clear to me, but what I do know is that they had a lavish office in an expensive part of SF, free food and a relatively large, well-paid staff.

I briefly contracted there and it was obvious to me that this would happen.

The platform they built is really amazing, but there was no sense of how they could start making money in any reasonable period of time considering their costs. I'm sure everyone who was working there will be fine as they had some tremendously talented engineers.

I feel like a tremendous factor behind the numbers for middle-tier schools is simple geography. For example, I make more than double what many of my college friends who I consider at least equally as smart and motivated as I make, and it's pretty clear that the only reason is I chose to move to California whereas they stayed in Nevada.

Colleges in sparsely populated areas will probably always have dramatically lower numbers given the tendency of graduates to stay close to home, regardless of the actual quality of education. The salary numbers should take the region of a former student's job into account in some way.

I lived quite far from school in my middle and high school days. It meant an hour long bus ride both ways (plus a 1.5 mile walk from the bus stop), and having to wake at 5AM to get ready.

The only way I had any free time was staying up late, which occurred every single school night. I got horrendous grades because focusing was impossible.

I actually blame this single circumstance for a large share of my life problems. It forced me to work my way up from a crappy community college after high school, and everyone I encountered just sort of assumed I was mediocre.

I sold in early March. To me it seems like more of a gamble to be in than out at this point.

It's fairly simple to piece together a framework with React. I'm using React, Flux, React-Router and Superagent.

I'm interested in this primarily because I don't find it appealing to invest in (basically non-transferable) iOS platform skills. I want to build native mobile UIs for my projects, but not with a dead-end language and tools.