cannikin's comments

Does this require the client to pay by credit card? I've worked for several clients where they'll only pay by direct deposit, or check.

Funny, I just learned about this command a couple of days ago as a simple way to max out your CPU. I was trying to drain the battery on my Macbook Pro and running 4 of these at the same time did the trick nicely. Redirected to /dev/null and run in the background: "yes > /dev/null &"

Yeah, what kind of strong typing is going to keep you from NOT calling a function?

This book has everything you need: http://www.amazon.com/ARRL-Ham-Radio-License-Manual/dp/16259...

The judge said that the webcam provided them the same view, from a public place, that agents would have had if assigned to watch the guy 24/7. (It seems to me that the view from ~30ft up is very different than one from the ground.)

Is there a line where the surveillance would NOT be legal? Could they have had a drone circling his house? What about a satellite? Do you have an expectation of privacy from ABOVE your house even if you don't have it from public roads?

It seems like this could be huge for small/local fire departments and law enforcement. If your town can't afford its own helicopter with FLIR imaging, now you can get a dedicated system for ~$1500.

Imagine the benefits if there's a night time 911 call complaining of an ominous crowd gathering in a public place or a band of hooligans tagging homes in a crowded suburban area. Cops could scout the area ahead of time by just launching a drone from their trunk before putting themselves in harm's way. There may be some issues in trying to maintain radio/video contact during something like a high speed chase, of course.

It's interesting that DJI is specifically not targeting these markets with their advertising because of drawing attention from the government? Is the government concerned that the technology will somehow relay the imagery to Chinese spies? Or that it will report false data that would put people in danger?

1099 here. My wife has great health insurance through her employer so I was okay. If I had to purchase our insurance I'm not sure I would have been as quick to make the leap.

See above. :)

No problem: [email protected]

I was strictly a full-time corporate guy until about 2 years ago. I got an email out of the blue from a tech recruiter guy, asking if I was interested in freelance. I hadn't given it much thought at the time, but figured I'd at least ask what the rate was.

$100/hour.

My eyes bulged out my skull. My highest fulltime salary to that point had been $120k/year (about $58/hour). My wife has benefits so it seemed like a fairly small risk to jump out of the fulltime pool and try my hand at contracting.

I've since been freelance-only, getting as much as $180/hour for a 6-month commitment. I haven't been unemployed at all during that time. It's just been word-of-mouth. In one instance an ex-fulltime employer needed someone to come in and work on some code. In another a previous co-worker at a fulltime gig recommended me to just consult on the codebase and that led to my current gig.

All positions have been work-from-home except for the first one, that was about a 30-min drive 2 days a week.

I'm a full-stack dev, Ruby on the backend (almost 10 years experience with Rails). I'm not too shabby a designer, either, so I'm lucky that I can kind of fit in with any dev team or become a company's sole development resource if needed (which is my role at my current gig).

My advice would be to hit up several recruiters and get them looking for jobs for you. At one point I had 3 separate ones hitting me up for positions on a daily basis. They only get paid if they get people hired so they're very motivated to find you a job ASAP. I always figured that becoming freelance meant you had to spend your days marketing yourself, schmoozing people on LinkedIn, etc (all stuff I hate). It's turned out to be nothing like that. When you're a month or so from the end of a contract let the recruiters know you're available and the offers come rolling in. In my experience, at least.

Not sure if "taking control" of a drone would be considered a form a jamming, but the FCC says:

> Federal law prohibits the operation, marketing, or sale of any type of jamming equipment, including devices that interfere with cellular and Personal Communication Services (PCS), police radar, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), and wireless networking services (Wi-Fi).[1]

The FCC just handed out their largest fine ever ($34.9 million) against a Chinese company for selling jammers in the US capable of interfering with GPS reception from a half mile away.[2]

I recently became a licensed amateur radio operator (W6AKJ) and was surprised by how seriously the FCC takes enforcement of those radio bands that are available for public use. I find it highly dubious that these guys would be able to market and sell to the public a device that interferes with the lawful use of a radio band used for remote control.

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/jammer-enforcement [2] http://www.dronejournalism.org/news/2014/6/fccs-historic-fin...

I want to love Digital Ocean but is there any talk about providing load balancers? It seems like as soon as you want to scale beyond one server you're stuck rolling your own with something like HA Proxy, but you've still got a single point of failure. I guess you have that with a hardware load balancer as well, but at least those things are specifically built to be available all of the time, versus just a piece of software you're running on yet another VM.

Dropbox isn't even close to this experience. Yes the files themselves would be everywhere, but I don't want to have to go into the Dropbox app to view my photos (not to mention the Dropbox app being extremely slow in my experience). With iCloud they're all in your regular Photos app ready to be shared or used in other apps just like the photos you shot with your phone.

I've been running the beta for a month or so and I can't imagine going back. FINALLY all of my photos are available everywhere and safely stored without me doing any extra work. Photo Stream was a nice first step, but it was a rolling 1000 latest photos—everything else just disappeared if you didn't open iPhoto occasionally and let it download the latest stuff from your stream.

Now everything is present on all devices and they don't even take up a ton of storage: by default only the thumbnails are saved locally and then when you expand a photo you'll see a little cloud icon in the corner until it has a chance to download the full res version from iCloud.

The only downside I've noticed is that now that I have 25,000 photos on my iPhone, apps that want to access the camera roll take a few seconds to open the photo browser now (most noticeably in Instagram). To me that's a fair trade off, and, if possible, I'm sure most apps will release updates to make it faster.

Does the laptop in the splash photo bother anyone else? It looks like they photoshopped the keyboard to be much shorter. Look how tall the screen is, then imagine you folded that down to meet the keyboard. That's no laptop I've ever seen!

It sounds like he likes Minitest better for everything except that the output doesn't make it easy to run only the failing tests. Seems like that should be an easy patch if he just wants to be able to copy/paste like the Rspec output.

He's got a pros/cons for each, but the cons for Rspec seem like deal breakers: the DSL is weird and it's tough to tell what's going on. Minitest is just Ruby classes, plain and simple.

This is my own issue with Rspec (and apparently DHH's as well). Rspec's almost-english syntax has never appealed to me. I can never remember if it's `this.should eq(that)` or `this == that` or `expect(this).to be_that`...and those are only the variations I've seen in the last 24 hours. I'm a programmer—I can read code. `assert this` is all I need.

Just sent you an email. :)

What did you do to get the word out to the world? Word of mouth? Ads? Tech blog writeups? I have a pretty polished app I wrote a couple of years ago but it didn't even cover the AWS fees once I dropped off the free year. :( Great app, I just don't know how to get the word out...

I got to try out Glass a couple of weeks ago and (for me, at least) there is a huge problem: the display floats about a foot or so in front of you, up and to the right. That means you have to shift your focus from what's in front of you to see it. And not just look to the side, but actually focus closer, which means the rest of the world goes blurry. It would be very hard to walk down the street and be accessing Glass without running into things - the same problem as looking down and being engrossed in your phone.

In the video demos everything (the Glass interface and the background) are in sharp focus so you don't even think about it being an issue. But when you're actually using them it's extremely distracting to shift your field of vision back and forth. Not to mention that when someone else is wearing them it is extremely obvious when they're looking at Glass instead of you.

The technology is amazing, but for me the interface is just too distracting right now. Have the HUD appear at the same depth of field as wherever I'm currently looking and this thing would be unstoppable. But it's going to be quite an engineering challenge to determine where your eye is focused and adjust the display to match on the fly.

I'm a programmer and recently (in the last couple of years, I'm 33) come to the realization that nothing that I do during my day job is an actual, tangible thing, nor will it be around 5, 10 or 20 years from now. The thing I spend most of my waking life doing is flipping some bits on a spinning magnetized piece of metal. Is that really all there's going to be to life? So I've worked on two things. Things that permanent and will actually be around 10, 20 or 100 years from now.

First, I'm a fairly proficient woodworker in my spare time in the garage (started about three years ago). Building a dresser from scratch involves a lot of the same problem solving challenges that I face as a programmer, but I'm building an actual tangible thing that exists in the real world and can't be destroying by a strong magnet. I feel like I'm actually making a place for myself in the world and doing something useful. I might build a chair that someone lives with for 30 years and then gives to their children, who then give it to their children. It's still makes me smile to think about.

Second, I've had a son and will hopefully have another in the next couple years. As sappy as it sounds, when you really think about it, having children is the meaning of life. We, as humans, are just our DNA's way of making more DNA. That's kind of depressing but also extremely amazing and awesome. And there are millions of kids out there that no longer have parents for whatever reason, so if you can't have your own then please please consider adopting. Any of the crap you do in your life, work or travel or building houses, none of it will mean as much to you as raising a kid. Again, sappy, especially at 23 when you probably couldn't care less about kids. But damn, the fact that you have another human being who you can teach about the world and will smile when you walk in the door...it's unbelievable. And the stuff I teach him about the world now will be with him the rest of his life. I've been a part of something meaningful that will outlast me.

tl;dr Find a hobby (or job) that actually has some permanence in the world, and find someone to love and raise a family with.