On the validity of MBTI, the main use I've found is to use the eight functions as part of my vocabulary. It's a pretty handy approximation to be able to say to someone in conversation "wow, Stephen Fry has a really developed Fe" and have them know what you mean. There an approximation is all you need, and in exchange you get neat symbols to hang entire categories of ideas onto.
On the flip side, it's all too easy to move symbols around in your head without investigating whether the model you've built corresponds to reality...
This is an excellent thought experiment I genuinely wish were reality. That said, the root problem with standardized tests is that they're inherently hackable. Standardized tests are like desktop software: you write once and ship everywhere, and once you do people start reverse engineering it.
Any sufficiently hackable test will appear to work in the short-term if you just place it in front of admission to prestige, because of the large subset of high-achieving people whose lives' missions are to game any test placed in front of them, which drastically skews how well the test appears to predict achievement.
The things mentioned in the article are excellent things to test, but if you start measuring e.g. the number and type of of questions a kid asks within x minutes, cram schools will just adapt, and in a few years you'll hit the end of another cycle.
"Must is a free lifestyle photo recommendation app for discovering, capturing and sharing new experiences across the world."
"DISCOVER. EXPERIENCE. CAPTURE. SHARE."
I'm having a hard time understanding what this app does. The prose is too long and hairy for me to parse. Does it take pictures? Show them in a feed?
What am I going to do with this app? Where will I be? Why will I be doing it? Why will I want to, and what is the increment of improvement over my current technology this will provide? Put that as concisely as possible in the first two pages I scroll through. If it's hard to do in words, make a video or take some screenshots of someone using the app the way I would use it.
This is some solid advice from pg I like:
"Better to start with an overly narrow description of your project than try to describe it in its full generality and lose the audience completely. If there's a simple one-sentence description of what you're doing that only conveys half your potential, that's actually pretty good. You're halfway to your destination in just the first sentence."
I've just been using oDesk. I get referrals from these, but bad clients generally aren't friends with good clients.
Last year I did a cute thing on HN where I offered to build prototypes for $2,345. That was much better, but I can't consistently rely on stunts like that.
Re: my site, I have a private portfolio page I show clients I'm trying to court. My reasoning is that people who hire by googling e.g. "web developer" probably aren't good clients.
Am I the only one who prefers to use Vim bare and just have a terminal open in another tab/window? For some reason having all these plugins weighs me down in a spiritual way, where the benefits of being able to edit a bit of text or open the right file more quickly get drowned out by these extra objects on my desk I have to keep track of.
When I go to a construction site, I only bring a hammer. I feel a screw driver would weigh me down spiritually. Sure, it could be useful, but I sometimes show up at construction sites and all they have is a hammer. Keeping a toolbox of tools, is just more stuff that I have to keep track of.
I think it's a bit unfair to call vim and all the standard command-line tools in a typical linux distro "a hammer." There is a hell of a lot you can do before you begin to customize them.
Nope. I use a bare vim as well. Or should I say, the vim that is installed by my package manager. It includes a lot of plugins in the system runtime path but those are mainly file format and syntax plugins.
I used to use a really tricked out vim with crazy stuff like neocomplete and unite.vim. Then for a while I used plain old vi on FreeBSD (aka nvi). After switching back to arch linux I decided to use bare vim since nvi still has some annoying bugs.
So much of the stuff people write plugins to do can be done more easily and simply with macros and/or the ! or = commands.
Out of the plugins listed there the most useful ones that actually save me time are CtrlP and Syntastic.
Syntastic is useful because it can give (visual) feedback on exactly which lines have warnings/errors a lot faster than recompiling the project. Also I find it easier to use than :make and :cope.
You can setup CtrlP to take its file list directly from git ls-files: very convenient for working with largish projects where files are in subdirs. And if you press Ctrl-t it opens the file in a new tab instead of replacing the currently open one (YMMV).
Depending on the language(s) you use there are other plugins that might be useful, and you can keep using the terminal as a separate app, and for specific operations (like git commit/grep and such).
In fact for a long time I was launching Vim from a terminal (with tabs), but I found out that I had dozens of Vim processes running in the background by the end of the day.
So I switched to using GVim + separate terminal app now.
Some plugins are fairly transparent (eg, ocp-indent for OCaml improves indentation but doesn't get in your way). Others are great productivity boosters. I can't imagine working without syntastic, and fugitive+git-gutter are great productivity boosters.
It is however easy to get overboard and install a great many plugins you don't really need.
Some plugins really increase your productivity. For instance CtrlP or Syntastic. But I agree that sometimes it feels overwhelming to have all those things enabled, and sometimes not even being sure what they do and how to use them.
Common mistake for new vim users - include many cool plugins and forget to read manuals. Before I did the same too - just used single of just few plugin features. Result - multiple plugins which are covering each other features.
My 2 cents - read full plugin manual just after you install it.
No, you're not. I recently deleted all my Vim plugins from my .vim. The only ones I've occasionally missed are surround.vim and a commenting plugin.
Integrating tools to Vim is its Achilles heel. In particular, there's no reasonable debugger integration. And interaction with long running processes is difficult.
I use vim, cgdb and tig (for git) inside tmux. With cscope and ctags for code navigation, this gives me all the "IDE" features I need without any clumsy plugins.
I use tmux rather than terminal tabs, but aside that I'm the same as you in that I never bother with vim plugins.
Though a large part of the reason is because I'm constantly switching between different servers so it's one less config I need to synchronise (and being reliant on plugins that aren't present on half the systems you manage quickly becomes less productive than never using those plugins to begin with).
to see each buffer in a tab, plus minimum configuration to move between tabs with CTRL-PAGEUP/DOWN. Feels like switching tabs in a browser and it's easier to see which files you have open
" Switch buffers
" note that I must first define what is <C-PageUp> for rxvt
" http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2006-07/msg00011.html
nmap <ESC>[5^ <C-PageUp>
nmap <ESC>[6^ <C-PageDown>
nnoremap <silent> <C-PageDown> :bnext<CR>
nnoremap <silent> <C-PageUp> :bprevious<CR>
Steve Jobs said something I think about a lot: "focus is about saying no." He was talking about what to work on in a company, but it extends without loss of generality to individuals. The world is presumably always going to be a fascinating one with an infinite supply of different ideas. Make a conscious effort to take what matters and go.
Still, that just means the long tail is worse, which necessarily happens when anonymity is granted. The best comments-- i.e. the ones that make using the app fun for users-- are also uniquely possible on Yik Yak (or services like it).
While their response is pretty roundabout, my experience with moderating/owning several community sites is that advertisements for competitors really are one of the largest categories of spam, and I wouldn't default to reading an attempt to mute them as a "shady tactic."
Think about the point of view of a founder-developer. You have a list of bugs to fix, a bunch of people to meet with, etc., all while manning a pool of servers to make sure they stay up. Someone says to you, "hey, we're getting a lot of spam from/about this company called Fade." I'd bet a lot of programmers would just write "if 'fade' in message" before getting back to work on other things.
On the flip side, it's all too easy to move symbols around in your head without investigating whether the model you've built corresponds to reality...