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lemevi

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I didn't really like the article. It was too conversational with unnecessary anecdotes. While reading it I was pretty much annoyed by how the writer didn't respect my time and couldn't just spit out what their main idea was. Like I shouldn't need to read three or four paragraphs to find out if the topic is something I already know about or interesting to me.

This article is basically a fluff entertainment piece for people who just enjoy reading for the sake of it and want to feel smart for it when they're done.

Pricing Programmers 11 years ago

For years, from one job in the bay area to the next I worked on products that never made any money and ended up being canceled. Even when I worked on a project that ended up making money I spent a year working on a version that was rebooted from scratch before customers ever saw it.

At a couple of startups that never took of afterward I could clearly see the impact that code I wrote was making on sales and value. It wasn't very much.

I'm not sure why people pay me so much, but I'm glad they do because I get to do what I love (programming, not not shipping), and I get to live off of that at the now rare and fading middle class standard of living.

and the rest is total crap.

Do you actually have an Android phone? Because this is totally not true at all. Like for example I just installed the imgur app and it's fantastic. I have 1password and it's great. Hearthstone? Yup, amazing. Just like every app I have I'm happy with. I just don't think you have any idea what you're talking about. I know an Android engineer who works for Square and they've got a huge Android team that is doing amazing work.

People with a shared opinion may have a variety of reasons for why they stand on an issue. By creating a label you make it very easy to dismiss at once the entire group without having to consider any of their arguments because of some personal bias or incorrect idea. Maybe you're less likely consider some new criticism because it came from dirty bioconservative who you're not going to even bother with.

I don't think my pebble time is a gimmick. Not having to fumble through my bag to pull out my phone on every other notification or to check the time makes the pebble worth it. It's not a gimmick, it's a time saver.

I also no longer have notification noises on, I just have a thing on my wrist that vibrates. Again, a not insignificant quality of life improvement.

If I used iOS instead of Android I'd probably have an Apple Watch instead of a PT, since that works better with that platform.

I don't really care about smart watches being a platform for apps. Maybe that has stalled, but it doesn't matter to me. I haven't found a single app for the PT I think is useful. It doesn't mean I don't find my PT useful. If I lost it today, I'd order another one without hesitation.

I love containers as I can finally give up OS X because docker makes developing with virtual machines so painless. I can now once again buy windows hardware and just do my dev using a project's docker container.

Containers democratize dev environments.

How is Java low level. Java is a high level language. What is "low level" about Java? Do you mean statically typed makes it low level? No it doesn't. It makes it safer though. Low level means direct access to hardware and having to deal with network protocols manually and shit like that. None of which you almost ever do or would want to do with Java considering it runs on a cross platform runtime mostly isolated from the actual OS of the host machine.

As far as the cultural impact of the companies themselves, I think it's been modest at best.

Parents staring at their phones instead of paying attention to kids.

Social networks and their impacts on relationships. Movies these days are unrealistic these days because so much important dialogue happens via WhatsApp, text messages and Facebook Messenger, etc.

Guess who will not be driving their own vehicles in 10 or 20 years? Consumers.

Lists 11 years ago

The killer list app will appear when AI is better. Lists are very personal things. They can cause stress, they can be important or not so much depending on the context. They intersect work and home life. The killer list app for executives is their executive assistant. Once we have a little machine implanted in our skulls that is smart enough to make fun of its wearer, ala KSR's 2312 qubit, the killer list app will remain elusive.

The gpio pins have low tolerance. Apply more than the 8mA or 3.3v and you permanently damage your board. LED's usually require 20mA to achieve a good brightness so you have to create a safe circuit using a bipolar transistor and the 3.3v power pin which supplies way more current than a gpio pin. If you hook up that transistor wrong or short the circuit it's game over.

I actually think you can even damage the board if you create a short between the gpio pins and ground. So any kind of circuit requires a resistor, carefully reading the system manual and data sheets for your components and using ohm's law prior to hooking up components.

Have you tried a BeagleBone Black or any kind of BeagleBoard? What are you scaling RPi's for? Arduino and Raspberry pis strike me as toys compared to BBB's. BBBs are a lot less forgiving and require way more understanding of basic electronics to do anything with, even as simple as lighting an external LED will break your BBB if you didn't do it right, but they seem more powerful in terms of what you can do (although underpowered compared to Rasbperry Pi when it comes to video processing).

That's a nice setup. Only thing that is incompatible with our react redux setup is thunk. We use redux-promise to work with async/await from babel stage 0.

Did he even try to contact Udemy support and get a response? It would seem like the thing to do before writing a hit piece. I interviewed at Udemy, but ended up taking a position somewhere else, yet they struck me as good people trying to make a good product. I don't like piracy and the author has been wronged, but this blog post is unfair.

What you're saying sounds like that in the absence of evidence that GMO causes harm you're just going believe whatever you want. There's no scientific basis to suspect GMO of causing harm to anything. Your suspicions are based on a big company being involved and oh my god it's made by people. Nature good, people bad. I don't share this sentiment. Aflotoxin is made by nature, it is bad for you. Very very bad. It occurs in everyday food. GMO has been shown by research to mitigate the presence of aflotoxin. GMO is a product of people. If they put GMO labels on stuff, I will be happy, because I will eat the GMO stuff. You can have your organic local peanut butter with its aflotoxins.

Also nobody forced farmers to by the GMO crops, they're buying it for a reason. They're buying it because it's good.

Like the other commentator, the stated problems in your comment have nothing to do with GMO, they are a problem with a specific company and patent politics. I don't like software patents but I don't go around telling people software is dangerous and that they shouldn't use software.

Genetically modified foods are not any more harmful than regular foods. If you have a problem with Montsanto then talk about Montsanto, and not spread fear and doubt about a technology that is wholly beneficial and may lead to many lives saved.

Interesting. Personally I have a hard time seeing how anything that requires separate templates as being better than React. I never want to go back to that. There's hardly a need to query elements. The only time one does is when using non-react libraries or doing some animation logic. And so there's no state in the HTML, and no need to render HTML elements that aren't visible. Virtual DOM seems ok except I find looking at JSX to be much easier on the eyes than JavaScript.

Technology is empowering teenage stupidity. Some kids go through a bad mix of negative emotions and a naive understanding of danger. In time these issues can become resolved and the teenager becomes a responsible person. This phase though has become more dangerous with the things technology lets kids do.

In my opinion as long as teenagers are a thing this is an inescapable trait of human life. Unless you are law enforcement, try to stay out of their way and not be a target.

In Crime & Punishment Rodya only has to serve 8 years for the double axe murder of two women in the commission of a robbery. It's a fictional tale about justice in 19th century Russia, but still an interesting comparison I think of when reading about modern sentencing.