HN user
I'm not certain that I agree with this because a URL makes no claims about idempotency or side-effects or many other behaviors that we take for granted when building systems. While it is possible to construct such a system, URLs do not guarantee this.
I think the fundamental issue here is that semantics matter and URLs in isolation don't make strong enough guarantees about them.
I'm all for elegant URL design but they're just one part of the puzzle.
I like the idea of an e-bike but in South Africa I’d be worried that it would easily be stolen.
We also have grid challenges here but that can be dealt with by planning one’s charging schedule.
Agree that saying "intimate understanding" is a bit off the mark. Had the author written "intuitive understanding", it would have made a bit more sense.
However, given the prevalence of the von Neumann computing architecture, I don't think it's completely off the mark - even if people don't know von Neumann's name :)
I think society, collectively, puts a lot of currency is "knowing what you're going to do". It's a question that adults ask children, especially precocious ones.
But, frankly, it's pretty much bullshit.
I was an average student in university. The courses I liked, I did well in. The ones that I struggled to engage with, not so much. The reality is that once you are out in the real world, no one's going to tell you what to do.
If getting a CS degree is that important to you, then stick with it until you can qualify for it. But there's no requirement that you must have one just because you want to work in the field.
Note: There might be companies that won't consider you as a candidate if you don't have a CS degree. My recommendation is that, again, unless you really want to work at a company like that, find your own path.
I had the interesting experience to work at Palm in the early 2000's on a project that was to compete with the Blackberry.
Needless to say, it never saw the light of day but I still remember that we had to ask the PalmOS engineering group to create a hardware layer thread so that we could do network I/O in parallel with running the user app.
It was an enormously challenging platform to work with.
Interesting narrative - all we need is Bruce Willis at the controls and we’re gold ;)
I’m sure it was all planned and coordinated with their marketing team. After all, they need to figure out important things like how much fuel, time to arrival, etc.
Right?
Definitely experienced this as well playing music in public.
I also experienced a variation of it when I did karate. During sparring, once my sparring partners hit me for the first time, I was able to start focusing on sparring and not the fear of being struck.
Helping and mentoring the next generation of coders to be successful.
I remember taking a graduate level networking course at NYU in the early 1990s. The instructor was an IBM consultant. We studied token ring, FDDI, SNA, HDLC/SDLC and several other commercial products.
One evening, I raised my hand and asked when we were going to study TCP/IP.
He simply quipped, "TCP/IP is not a real networking protocol."
So I wouldn't say that universities are always behind the curve :)
I worked at Sun Microsystems in the late 90s/early 2000s and at the World Trade Center offices, pretty much everyone had to hot desk.
I was in a group that, unlike our "pure" sales brothers & sisters, spent a lot of time in the office. The whole hot desk was a big PITA because we had to reserve our desks and we could only reserve, I think, 1 week in advance.
But, one of my colleagues figured out that the back-end of the reservation system had an RMI interface and it didn't do any validation of the reservation requests. So he wrote a CLI utility that let us reserve the same offices week after week.
We would've gotten away with it except that the head of sales realized one Monday morning that we always seemed to be sitting in the same place. I guess she made some enquiries because not long after that, we were all called into her office and made to promise that we wouldn't hack the reservation system anymore.
At the bard so famously wrote, "Pride goeth before a fall." :)
Wouldn't the Victorians have used 'enquiry' and not 'inquiry'?
(Asked in all honesty and w/o an ounce of snarkiness because to this day I still struggle with the difference)
This behavior always reminds me of book "The World Without Us"[0] in which the author points out that, of all our domesticated animals, cats would definitely survive due to their excellent hunting skills in a world without humans. — [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us
My experience with eSIM has been with my Apple phone. I have an app that basically does this - it's Ubigi and I've generally been happy with it. I installed it from the App Store.
As to why Apple themselves don't have such an app, I would have to assume that it's because they don't see reselling of mobile data as a core competency nor a profitable business line.
I'm 58 and feel like I still have a lot to offer. But my focus in these days is to help my team (most of whom are easily half my age) be successful. I find that their success gives me a lot more of a buzz than coding something I've probably written more times than I remember.
I do step and code from time to time but only when it's clear that it will have some kind of multiplier effect for my team.
[Edit] I just wanted to thank the poster for starting this discussion. It takes more than a bit of courage, I think, to write something like that.
This is a great idea. Any chance you can back port it to older versions of macOS? My laptop is running Big Sur (11.6.7) and I see it requires Monterey (12.3+).
First of all, that sounds like a shit situation.
If you think it'll be valuable, you could ask them why it's important that you hit their date. Most likely they're being pressured by someone else.
But at the end of the day, you own the delivery of the product. Smile, nod, and get back to delivery.
(And yes, it's easier to write that then to do it)
The Pascal compiler on our CDC Cyber (used by undergraduate courses when I went to NYU) would do this, too. Yeah, was a long time ago :)
I think part of it is that while this may be a win for your customers and maybe for the founders, the payoff for the startup’s employees may not be that lucrative, based purely on the wages that are typically paid in-country as compared with the US, for example.
I’ve meditated on and off for a few decades and have only ever experienced a sense of calm and clarity.
Is the author’s experience common for other people?
JUST_SAY_NO?
:)
What’s odd is that we have back-end services that send messages to Slack and those seem to be working absolutely fine.
Guess the failure is in a different part of their platform…
Just giving people money forever will only cause destruction.
Would you agree that this is equally true for someone who comes from a wealthy family and has a trust fund that essentially guarantees that they will be "given money", usually in the form of capital gains, forever?
My point was that IBM Plex, as a recent font, is not bound by historical traditions or practices regarding the use of ligatures in the font.
Sorry for the confusion.
Sympathize with all the comments about the horrific web page.
More concretely, is it too much to expect that fonts have ligature support by default? I get it that certain fonts, for historical and aesthetic reasons do not support them.
For me, having ligatures, especially in a fixed width font I'm going to use for coding, is a deal-breaker.
YMMV
My experience with this issue has correlated highly with poorly written specs and/or stories (or worse, none at all). This in turn usually means that someone in the team is being lazy about the work to be undertaken.
I get it - writing good specs and stories is hard work. But as a way of organizing and "guard-railing" work, they are priceless. If you can't explain in words the work that needs to be done and share and socialize that, you're not ready to start building the product.
I can count on one hand, literally, the number of engineers I've worked with who could magically craft an amazing product out of thin air and even then, there were parts of those codebases that were horrifyingly difficult to modify down the road.
Always imagined that these places would have more in common with Westworld where we (the product) are there for the pleasure of the rich.
This is just the latest installment of MZ's (literal) self-enrichment. OP have mentioned that people like him don't get it - they're the villain in these narratives - I can only but agree.
Facebook usage isn’t a good metric. My first post was in 2008 but had been using the internet since the early 1980s.
There were these early internet tribes called researchers ;)
Inline with other comments here, I think that Mr Stephenson missed the point.
*nix operating systems were and continue to be successful because they are a complete and powerful toolbox for computing at all different levels.
And yes, if I had to identify a "Hole Hawg" of Unix it would probably be the `dd' command. But I certainly don't use it on a daily basis :)
Having spent a fair amount of time in Japan with the "hyper-advanced toilets", I would kill to have those easily accessible where I live now (South Africa).
Not only did they leave my bum amazingly clean, a packet of toilet paper literally sat there and gathered dust.
I think that there is a lot of tech in Japan focused on quality of life improvements that just sits in the background. Perhaps given the aging demographics of the society, this is a good fit.
The HalloApp blog [1] indicates that they will eventually move to a subscription-based service.