jaymon's comments

I'll second someone else's recommendation for The Martian, that was just a really fun read you can just burn through because it is so enjoyable.

If you want another really fun read, Ready Player One was fantastic.

I've also enjoyed the Old Man's War saga, there are 6 books but you can skip book 4 since it is a retelling of book 3 from the POV of another character. This is a space saga and I really like the universe he created.

In the hard sci-fi genre, I really enjoyed The Forever War.

And for just pure world building fantasy, the Game of Thrones books (The song of Ice and Fire series) are some of the best written books I've ever read.

You could try a plugin I wrote to quickly comment/uncomment blocks of code:

https://github.com/Jaymon/vim-commentify

It's a no frills plugin that only does one thing, but it does it pretty well.

I've added it to my list of books to inspire my kids. So if they ever come to me and say, "Dad, what is chemistry good for?" I can just give them The Martian and say, "read this and you'll know"

Did you like The Atlantis Gene? I've almost pulled the trigger at Amazon a couple times but the reviews seem hit or miss and my reading list is already so long.

I started The Martian by Andy Weir about 3 days ago and I'm really enjoying it. It's a really entertaining book that I highly recommend!

Last week I finished The Paradox of Choice and Zero Day. I enjoyed both of them, although I don't think I'll be reading any of the sequels to Zero Day.

Before that I went through The Maze Runner trilogy, those were entertaining reads.

Some other books I've read recently that I can remember off the top of my head are the Divergent series of books (eh), How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen (great read), Ready Player One (loved, loved, loved this book), Starters (didn't bother reading any more in the series) and Moon walking With Einstein (I enjoyed it).

Just a note so people don't get confused, while specifying packages with >=1.1,<1.2 seems to be similar to the tilde in npm, in practice it isn't.

Basically, when you use >=1.1,<1.2 it will install the best version that matches at the time of first install, and then that version will never be upgraded because it will always satisfy the requirements. So you don't actually get 1.1.x release updates unless you install them manually.

We do, however, use this syntax in development when testing new versions to make sure any subsequent runnings of pip doesn't obliterate the new versions of modules we are testing.

I'd love official pip support for ~1.1 type declarations.

Medicare and medicaid have traditionally underpaid regular commercial insurance with the result that more and more doctors have dropped it over the years.

So it makes sense that payments would concentrate around certain doctors that are still accepting it because more people on medicare will go to them simply because they don't have any other choice, especially in areas that have high concentrations of the elderly, like Florida.

I've got a semi-similar python library that I've been adding to for a few years called testdata: https://github.com/Jaymon/testdata

testdata has a lot of unicode and file system stuff I've found really useful, it looks like between this and testdata I'll be in generated data heaven :)

I'm pretty sure milesskorpen was just referencing this post by Matthew Yglesias:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/29/amazon_q4_pro...

The quote, while probably not wholly accurate, is funny. I think milesskorpen was going for funny, so don't take it too literally.

The problem I have with analysis like this is it doesn't take into account what Yahoo actually needs to do to grow. For the most part, the companies on the list are innovative companies, led by talented CEOs/entrepreneurs and are leaders in there sphere.

But Yahoo's revenue is about $1.2 billion a quarter, and I would say that they would need to grow that by 5-10% to even approach any sort of potential turnaround territory. That means they need roughly $50 to $150 million in new revenue a quarter, I bet you all those companies together don't make that amount of money in a year.

I think it would be awesome for Yahoo to buy innovative companies and give creative people free reign, but the reality is Yahoo buying these companies is like putting a band aid on a bullet wound. Yahoo's just too big and those companies are just too small to turn Yahoo around.

Reminds me of a story about Larry Ellison:

"He told me a story of how Larry Ellison actually got efficiencies from teams. If a team wasn’t productive, he’d come every couple of weeks and say, let me help you out. What did he do? He took away another person until the team started shipping and stopped having unproductive meetings."

I love that quote, via: http://scobleizer.com/2010/11/12/why-google-cant-build-insta...

I wrote this a few years ago to archive my Gmail emails to text files (and the attachments to whatever they are).

I haven't ran it in awhile but when I did it worked and was able to download my emails from the very beginning without crashing. Anyway, you might find it useful...

http://github.com/Jaymon/Popbak

This reminds of the Evan Williams quote from "Founders at Work" pg 124:

"luck comes in many forms -- and often looks bad at first. I always look back on the deals that we didn't do and the things that didn't work out, and realize what seemed like a bummer at the time was really lucky [...] if you have some plan and it doesn't go that way, roll with it. There's no way to know if it's good or bad until later, if ever."

A lot of what is "best" has to do with how specific you want to be. Appending "every" to a date is great if you want something to occur every N. But what if you want it to occur every other N? Or the first N of every M? There's a reason why things like Crontab or iCalendar's RRULE are so specific and verbose.

In order to decide what is "best" I would first decide how specific I needed to be and then start to narrow my input options based on my defined need.

If anyone wants to know more about how the Penguin logo was designed, Alex (the designer) has a great blog post here:

http://blog.iso50.com/2010/03/10/plancast-penguin-developmen...

The site looks great. It's very clean, which I love.

One of the things I would do is split the main page into left and right and move the "Recent Artwork" to the right of bullet point list on the left. This will let prospective users see artwork right away and you don't really lose anything since there isn't much content in the bullet points anyway.

Also, I would lose the captcha for the signup until you have a spam user signup problem. No point in giving people another obstacle to signup if you don't have to. I would lose the "password again" field also as I've never really liked it.

Good luck.

You are not alone in your desire for better privacy controls. Here's kind of what our roadmap has been/will be:

The last few weeks have been focused on the iPhone app and API. I'm guessing the next few weeks will be focused on keeping the site up (it's already gone down once today because of traffic) and working on the overall speed of the site (that's what I'm working on right now).

But after that, Privacy is the next major item on our todo list.

I know right? I wanted to be manly about it but that little Penguin just melted my heart.

Touche.

We have been going back and forth on how to do this, the problem is we really don't want to clutter the simpleness of "what, when, where" with lots of other dialog boxes, so we are trying to find the best way to integrate advanced functionality like privacy and still remain simple.