I'm not sure why they get upvoted either, but I get why they're written. The real point of this article is the second-to-last paragraph, where he says (paraphrased) "check out my startup website that I didn't even use Bootstrap to make."
Ehh when integrating with the Dropbox API you're given a choice of "full Dropbox" or "app folder", the latter option creates a folder in your Dropbox which is all your app can access. For an app like this "full Dropbox" is probably more useful (so that you can edit existing files), but in O'Reilly's case it seems they should have chosen "app folder".
While I'd like to agree, I'd also like to see something beyond anecdotal evidence on this. It'd give me a great excuse next time someone wants a Facebook login and a Twitter login and a Pinterest login [sic] on the same site.
100% agreed -- anecdotal blog posts should not be up-voted to oblivion simply because the community at HN agrees with them. (Though I find it ironic that such a technical community doesn't consider lack of data in arguments like these an issue.)
I like this idea a lot, I think I'll try it myself. You already have some well dug marketing channels though, as made evident by your book sales - any advice for the rest of us? Better yet, any interest in making this a community challenge?
The nootropics community would find this very interesting. I wonder what the process of NGF isolation entails (or if she published anything about the process).
His point about the commissioned artist vs. the self-motivated artist is very interesting to me as a freelance developer. I often feel bored/discouraged doing projects for hire, yet when building something for myself I'll dedicate 18-hour days to it - even if it's basically the same project. A similar psychology is likely what caused me to excel as a self-taught hacker but fail as a student.
On a similar note, with all the hubbub about how worthwhile college is, it seems that curiosity and self motivation are some powerful deciding factors. Perhaps the current standard of going straight to college after high school is not the right way to go about it.
> On a similar note, with all the hubbub about how worthwhile college is, it seems that curiosity and self motivation are some powerful deciding factors. Perhaps the current standard of going straight to college after high school is not the right way to go about it.
The problem is deeper in culture than that. All education as a whole should not be about raw numbers or facts, it should be about exposure and lighting a creative or investigative spark. We never had an education system centered around motivating interest in topics rather than route fact memorization (insert the Einstien quote about don't memorize what you can look up vis-a-vis the internet) but I think that has to be the end goal of education for humans in general. You can't be content teaching a topic, taking a test, and calling it quits. It has to be about inspiring people to persue more, and Chomsky really hits on that.
I have the same thing you do with software. I'll spend hundreds of hours on personal projects in a month, but for school assignments I'd do semester long assignments the last day. It is about what you are interested in vs what others force upon you to accomplish in that structured environment, the former is the goal and the latter is the failure in that objective.
Mainly because on some projects in my CS undergrad I would put in those hundred hour sessions. I wrote my own shell, for example, that I spent a combined ~100 hours on over 2 weeks, where most people did it in ~10, and I had autocompletion, history, pipes, and primitive variable / looping implemented. Most other people couldn't even do a proper execvP.
I've had the similar experience, of working on personal projects quite close to undergrad coursework yet having a huge difference in my motivation between them. What helped me was the modules that really fit with levelling up my knowledge (for instance a report on System/360 microprogramming).
It's always seemed to me that this kind of person should be a good candidate for postgraduate degrees: driven in their own exploration, effort on interesting things, etc. I've never managed to really find out the reality though.
