HN user
So many, it's why I got into the field I suppose.
Like everyone else, I have a hacker news client, which is "universal" (in the Apple sense), and is made around how I use the site. I might even release this one, one day.
I wonder what the fallout of this will be, it seems a lot worse than the maps launch that's given as the reason for Scott Forstall leaving the company.
The quality of their software has declined significantly in the past 15 years. That said, it's still pretty good and this is probably down to reducing scope.
Apple's software only runs on their hardware, they regularly exclude recent and capable devices from running the latest versions and they deprecate and ignore insustry standards liberally (OpenGL, Vulkan, Nvidia GPUs). This makes their software much simpler to write. Compare that to Android, which runs on anything, or Windows, which I hear can do crazy stuff like run apps from the 3.X days.
"The uploader has not made this video available in your country"
It doesn't even have to be this convoluted. They can just do what they did with email. Step one, wait until they have the vast majority of users, then due to spam/'problematic' content, algorithmically block the vast majority of other instances from interacting with theirs.
I saw the announcement yesterday for 'Substack Notes', which is clearly inspired by Twitter, and thought to myself that these companies are going to clash sometime in the future. Pretty outrageous reaction, lol.
The problem here is that the vast majority of "social" activity has migrated from thousands of little silos into 3 websites (Reddit, Facebook and Twitter).
This creates a massive attack surface for would-be spammers, as well as a situation where "Xbox fans" have to share a space with "Playstation fans" and are expected to get along i.e. fertile ground for trolls.
The only solution I can see for this, is a return to the world we had in 2005, forum.xbox-fanatics.foo and forum.ps-fanatics.bar
I'm primarily a mobile dev, so I generally don't have much choice in the matter of what languages I use (Swift, Java, Kotlin).
Occasionally, for a side project, I'll need some sort of back-end. This usually means I need to get some data from somewhere, process it a bit, store it and then ask for it at a later date. JS (Typescript in my case) is more than adequate for this, and if I add Redis and Nginx I can get away with paying very little for a VPS to run it on quite reliably.
The JS landscape has lots of problems, but I don't wade too deep into it so I'm mostly content.
Event Horizon by John Michael Godier [1], just very interesting discussions about space, SETI and other stuff.
The episode with Isaac Arthur [2] is a good place to start.
[1]https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/john-michael-godiers-e...
I've been mac-only for over a decade, and the first thing I do is swap CMD and CTRL. I could never get used to the default layout.
Is this compute alone? Also, how likely do you think it is that we’ll see anything in the next 12(ish) months?
I would be interested to see the stats on what percentage of the profits of top companies went to all administrative employees(managers, hr, execs, etc) not just CEOs over the same period.
Seems like an epic pain in the ass for a 4.1% yield
I think this is a major factor. A lot of the hardware gains over the that period have been used by developers to make their own lives easier.
When I was in university made a small 2d game engine in J2SE. Performance wasn't great, so I had to use sprite sheets, pallette swaps, masking 256 color images etc just to make things playable in most cases.
When I graduated I decided to get into mobile development, to my surprise doing things like just dumping a bunch transluscent PNG's into the workspace were recommended in the docs. Seems like the web had a similar trajectory.
I actually watched someone do this recently. With the right equipment, it works surprisingly well.
Thanks.
I seem to remember that Magic Carpet was a massive hardware hog
I'm not sure about that. A quick search shows that the (on the box) requirements were 33mhz 486, which seems to have been fairly reasonable for the time.
Very interesting. Does anyone know if Magic Carpet by Bullfrog used a similar technique for rendering its terrain?
Yeah, newsletters seem big these days so that could work.
Alternatively you could let users make profiles with their preferences for their ideal job (remote only, MEAN stack, >£80k, etc) and notify them when a matching ad appears, you could even charge for this. This strategy allows you to also charge employers to contact/see your users, I think Dribbble does this, so it might be worth taking a look there.
Good luck and let us know how it works out, I love hearing about stuff like that.
Depends how low your costs are and long you can go without needing to make any money from it. If your expenses are manageable and profitability isn't an issue, it might make sense to improve your product (nicer UI, more features, etc) while growing your user base and getting more information about them (location, demographic, age, etc). This will improve your pitch to advertisers when decide to cash in by, perhaps, selling premium placement for ads by keyword (iOS, Python, Devops, etc).
One issue you might have is that your user's are "shortlived", I would imagine a typical user is going to use it for a couple of months every 2-3 years, hence why I'm stressing quick growth.
This is probably the case in a lot if instances, however, it's not always the true. I think there is a lot of value to be gained for existing programmers who wish to dip their toes into something new before fully committing or refresh their skills after some time away.
I say this because it's helped me do both of these things. When MongoDB came out and I was looking to start a new personal project that looked like it could benefit from a nosql db, I bought a cheap course and was able to quickly see that boring old MySQL was more suitable. There was also the time when I needed to get back into Android development after a couple of years of doing only iOS and back-end work. For $10 I was able to quickly get up to speed on what had changed and identify what I needed to do deeper reading on.
All that said, I have trouble seeing how they will be able to make this investment worthwhile for their backers in the long-run.
It is indeed very frustrating, especially for those of us who bought Pascal cards before they stopped "working". In the end only the customers suffer.
This is really good advice. In addition:
1) Your network will be your main source of work. I've been freelancing for just over a year and every single job I've had has come as a result of relationships I made when I was in full-time employment.
2) In terms of billing do not be afraid to charge a lot more than you would expect to make if doing the same work as an employee. You'll get better at this.
3) It also helps if you can save a few months worth of money before hand. I've found that it helps psychologically when negotiating if you know you don't need to take a job. In practice you will (ideally) a fair amount of what you are offered, this can be because some jobs simply aren't worth taking and the opportunity cost of a mediocre pay-day.
4) Take time off when you can and always sleep well. You will switch between periods of no work and periods of too much work. Relax during the former so you are ready for the latter.
5) Know your stuff and work hard.
Spare a thought for those of us in developing countries. I can now watch the latest Marvel or Star Wars blockbuster in 3D as soon as it is available in western markets, but little else. Many of the films you mention never saw the light of day in my neck of the woods and the Disney et al titles seem to stay forever, where I live Infinity War is still being screened.
This looks fantastic, thank you.
This sounds pretty interesting, can you recommend any books on Japan about this particular period/topic?
I would say that America in its current state is more simillar to one of the BRICS nations. It has levels of poverty/wealth disparity that will be familiar to anyone who has spent enough time in South Africa or Brazil but simply do not exist in most parts of western Europe.