pabb

Thanks for this, it echoes my sentiments exactly. I first saw the 1995 film a couple years ago and loved it, but the existential pieces really need some contemplation, or at least further reading, to sink in. And it's precisely because the dialogue is sparse and even vague at times. Anyone complaining that the new one is notably watered down is speaking through their Otaku filter, or otherwise not recalling just how much the original movie left up to interpretation.

Regardless, I loved both the original and the new movie. I have no idea why people are giving it such flak, other than being bum hurt that obviously a Hollywood adaptation is going to make the story more accessible. They did so, while still being mostly faithful to the mood and atmosphere of the original.

Is drinking coffee on an empty stomach actually considered harmful? I do it daily every day of the week. My first meal of the day is lunch a few hours after I've had either an Americano with 2-3 shots of espresso, or a regular coffee with 1-2 espresso shots in it. Almost always black.

On a low carb diet, I get GI distress generally after eating lunch, but outside of dieting I haven't noticed any adverse effects related to it. I've been doing this every weekday for over 2 years now.

I completely agree. I admit that I'm following season 2 because it's still an enjoyable show, but every single one of those points is valid. At times it feels like Esmail is insulting your intelligence or pandering to extreme cliches (points 8 and 9), all the while entirely ripping Fight Club off. And no, he didn't seek Fight Club for "inspiration". He utterly and completely replicated the plot, but executed it poorly. The laziness of his storytelling is clear when we can pretty much assume all of Elliot's confusion is the result of Mr. Robot intervening on his behalf. Except that mysterious intervention doesn't even appear to be attributable to a well-defined and somewhat believable circumstance (Norton's insomnia in Fight Club). Instead, Elliot has some odd lapse in memory, and what do you know, some unthinkable event has occurred.

It's an entertaining show, but only in the same sense as corny superhero movies. Esmail has been trying to wrangle a sensible plot with an interesting premise, but unfortunately he's not as skilled as his execution implies.

It's a common idiom, specifically in modern C code. See "C Interfaces and Implementations", one of the best books on the subject of writing reusable C. The author dedicates an entire chapter to exception handling, with longjmp as the primarily facility for it.

I won't assume that someone on HN wouldn't potentially benefit from this, but it honestly seems like OP submit this without reading the first sentence of the first page. That, or this was blatant trolling of some benign fashion.

Great comment. Echoes a lot of the sentiment I've been feeling since graduating college. Started out at a web startup where everyone was focused on learning the next new framework and applying clever language quirks and idioms, and heralding that knowledge as if it made them more valuable. And then applying it to a company whose product was stale and completely reproducible and non-innovative. I switched into embedded software after less than a year there and I've made a point to focus less on languages, or programming for the sake of programming, and more on learning hardware and Linux kernel internals because it's a domain toward which to apply the programming knowledge that, as you and GP pointed out, is relatively non-novel on its own.

I believe Carmack has a quote about how programming is just a mundane manner in which to solve more interesting underlying problems. I would imagine the world, or more specifically the economy, will eventually see it that way as well.

I know enough to not pretend I'm on a higher plane of racial understanding by giving trite justifications such as "I'm the only rich white guy in a gentrified neighborhood" while simultaneously giving the example of being the target of an attempted theft, so as to not so subtly show the bias of minorities as criminals.

Not to mention the "OG Cody" at the end, once again showing that these must be stereotypical (highly presumably) black minorities, again to hammer home this sort of bizarre feigned legitimacy he presumes. The whole passage is essentially saying "I get these things that you people don't get it, here's why".

Edit: Another way to put it, he's giving the expanded version of "I have black friends, so that racist thing I said can't possibly be racist."

As a white guy who also grew up in a predominantly black area with black friends and makes good money, your attempt to appear as the paragon of racial enlightenment makes me cringe.

I know you meant well, but to give such a stern warning and then admit that you haven't done any kernel-related work at all is frustrating. I've just been getting involved in kernel development for the past month, and it's pretty clear that the go-to taskss for novices is primarily writing device drivers or fixing bugs. I'm not sure what fraction of kernel developers get to work on the kernel core (CPU scheduling, boot/initialization, file systems, memory management), but I'm going to guess it's relatively small, or at least isolated compared to those working on drivers and other modules.

Further, if the maintainers were so cautious as to want to limit contributions to the kernel, you wouldn't see initiatives like the aforementioned (and awesome) Eudyptula Challenge, or Greg KH's "Linux Kernel In a Nutshell", which he chose to give away for free in order to garner more interest in kernel dev. The state of the project right now is clearly weighted towards getting new involvement as opposed to discouraging contribution because of extremely rare and unlikely cases like the one you mentioned.

Federal prosecutors said the suspects targeted companies including Alcoa Inc, Allegheny Technologies Inc, United States Steel Corp, Toshiba Corp unit Westinghouse Electric Co, the U.S. subsidiary of SolarWorld AG, and a steel workers' union.

These are all Pittsburgh-based companies. Why?

He took down his reply, but he shares a name with a fairly famous actor. Gonna take a stab that the "amateur ... xxx" was related to that guy.

Also, you're an idiot.

I started typing a really verbose and roundabout answer that really just amounted to this.

I don't even really agree with learning Python first. If you can get over the hurdle that is learning C (or really even just Java), you have the benefit of learning so much more about computing and the fact that types are implicitly being adhered to, memory is being managed beneath the surface, garbage collection, etc. I learned Java for my intro programming course and luckily had an instructor who really emphasized those topics. It made learning C and subsequently assembly much simpler. Had I started in Python, I don't see really learning much more than "wow, I can do some cool things with a computer." I suppose that's okay if the class is advertised as programming for non-CS majors, but to teach Python as an introductory course for CS curriculum seems almost like robbery to me. Jump the initial hurdle of learning the (somewhat) low-level stuff, and then the rest will come easily.

That's for non SSD drives.

Yep, clarified in my edit.

So every other laptop/desktop you're gonna get with those storage sizes also has rotating rust disks, with are more volatile due to moving parts, have much worse read/write speeds and are noisy.

That's cute. So now hard disks are so obtrusive, fallible, and out-dated that they're literally not an option anymore? I think some people have such a love affair for the acronym SSD that they forget, disk access is still hundreds of thousands of clock cycles regardless.

See: http://imgur.com/pQ8BriQ

SSD benchmarks are clearly better than HDD all around, but not by the orders of magnitude that you seem to believe.

Aha. You can spot the Apple fanboys rushing to contend this just by saying they don't use 128GB to begin with.

The entire point is that pretty much any other (read: non-Apple) laptop/desktop you buy nowadays is going to come with at least 500 GB, and generally 1 TB nowadays.

No need to get up in arms and whine that Apple is doing everything just right for your tastes.

edit: I obviously wasn't referring to 1 TB SSDs. The parent's comment said that 128 GB is pretty paltry for storage capacity nowadays, as the thread is concerning the rate of growth of SSDs.

I mean, I get that he's trying to make a point here, and he clearly feels as strongly about this as he's written. But it sounds like an idealistic 13-year-old wrote the whole diatribe: "Boo, how dare you you big jerk spy. Spying on my mom and friends. You just want money. Like a big fat bully jerk."

Seriously? All corporations are in pursuit of profit. I get the underlying issue he has, but only through the context of growing up with Google and seeing them grow to what they are now. His post is littered with tons of hard to believe idealistic BS.

Berating them for not closing down their service like Lavabit? Are you kidding? "Yes, let's shut down our 15+ year old company, one of the most profitable and successful in the world, just to prove a point" -- surely that's the rational thing to do. I'm not a fan of Google's "spying", but you need to look at the situation from the lense of this being how they (and Facebook, and probably any other web-based company that had the clout) are seizing a competitive advantage that almost no one else can provide. People are feeding them petabytes of data, and it's in their best interest to turn that information into financial gain. Yes, I think a big side-effect of that they appear to be intrusive and "evil", but to pretend that the company is the issue, and that only Google would take advantage of such a situation is comical, and incredibly naive. The writer of the article surely can understand that any other entity with such great access to user information would use it.

As someone who actually enjoys making offensive comments in the _right context_, I can't disagree more with you.

When somebody says something offensive, context is everything. If you're in a meeting with a group of adult men that are culturally similar to you and there's nothing pressing on the table, sure, a dick joke might be fine.

But in the case of the article, I think the author even let off lightly situations like the "dick in the hand" anecdote. It's one thing to make an off-color joke to ease the mood when the context is appropriate, but if you're sitting in a room with a woman, and you make a comment like that, you know for a fact you're crossing a boundary, no matter how small it may be.

For some reason, it reminds me of a former (male) roommate of mine who would always make comments containing indirect sexual references in the presence of our (only) female roommate. He would never say something sexually related pertaining to her, but things like "I watch too many TV shows? Nonsense. Are you calling me a whore??" Shit that would be subtle enough that he could easily shrug off an accusation that he was being offensive, yet he very much knew he was trying to spin the conversation toward sex as a means of flirting.

I don't think there are many excuses to be made in these contexts. If you've ever known your mother, or had a sister or a girlfriend who was attractive (and the recipient of suggestive comments), you know exactly what's acceptable and what's not. Picture it's your girlfriend getting harassed.

I'm hardly the whiteknight, social-justice type whatsoever, but for fuck sake, keep business as business and play bullshit kiddie flirt games at the bar.

Not sure why someone felt the appropriate response was to downvote you rather than voicing their disagreement. I think you're right.

With WhatsApp picking up speed in my close friend circle, Facebook messenger being used for everyone else, and the occasional Google hangouts messages when I feel like being online, I don't think even taking the "ephemeral" approach is going to make a difference in persuading me to start picking Snapchat over competing platforms. Snapchat is fun because as other users mentioned, I get to send bullshit one-off joke snaps to my friends. I don't want to maintain a conversation of any sort through another app. However, knowing the conversation is immediately cleared further dissuades me. The point of this feature is that it's good for non-committal "conversations" and very easy to engage/disengage. But I already have WhatsApp for that, and I have group conversations there, and my messages aren't deleted.

I had an issue with this while finishing up classes at school, although I understand being a college student isn't really the main demographic for this article. I had a group of friends that I met with only through convenience (we were all in the same fraternity, and then I quit).

After some time, one of the guys made a multi-way text/chat group on WhatsApp and it gave us all an opportunity to bullshit amongst each other about whatever we felt like. The best part was that it didn't leave anyone out of the loop, and held us each accountable for responding to attempts to get together. Most of the time the interactions are pretty pointless (cracking jokes at someone, sending links to a funny picture or article, changing the group photo to a hotter girl than the last one someone put up, etc), but it's just a good outlet to stay in sync with one another, even if we don't all have time to hang out. I'd recommend it to anyone who connected with the article.

"None of them read hackernews, so they have no idea that living and breathing computers is prereq for becoming an employable programmer."

I know, right? I forgot that we who check HN habitually are the ones destined for developer Valhalla. Go us!

That's because that's all "data science" is. A buzzword (phrase?) used to make people who like the sexy sound of "big data" but don't want to put in the effort to become computer scientists or exert the time and effort to learn technical skills beyond whatever trendy statistics software they can find.

Precisely. I've read the counter sentiment multiple times from black hats who are exasperated seeing "hacker" tied to any notion of someone who programs or likes to "tinker with shit". I'd much rather keep the word definition at its root. (disclosure: I'm not a hacker)

Notch isn't developing, but it's ultimately his IP. He's made over $100M in licensing deals on the brand alone. I'm sure he's going to be the shotcaller (if not just a providing a massive influence) for any large-scale potential deals involving it.

Even with that aside, he's a massive figure in the game development community. A lot of people respect him and look up to him for making out huge in the Indie game in industry pretty much of his own accord. His opinion is pivotal.

I think Notch of Minecraft fame just cemented the folly of this in a Tweet a second ago:

"We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out."

The guy literally just visited Carmack (whom he admits is his idol) and the Oculus team less than a couple weeks ago, and kept mentioning how excited he was to start working on new VR games. I think this says a mouthful.

Commenting on this incredibly late, but I knew there'd be some good fodder in this comment thread.

You have a good point, but unfortunately you're still missing the point. Not being able to effectively cure cancer isn't the issue Silicon Valley is facing. As others have said, as software engineers, we would have gone to school to do bioinformatics and study the natural sciences if that's what we wanted. The issue is that a vast number of people are working on shitty, pointless, worthless apps.

It has nothing to do with barriers to entry. What kind of problems do you learn to solve in this field? Computational ones, i.e. things involving facets of computing. So why are less companies devoting resources to working on facets of networking, optimizing computer architecture, writing more efficient compilers and operating systems? Things that software engineers should have plenty of knowledge on, and would be much more beneficial to society than the next bullshit social app. Why is this not the case?

That is what the author is addressing. Churning out photosharing app #35875 isn't helping anyone. But maybe if people started taking pride in the notion of being a hacker and a computer scientist, and actually solving shit worth solving instead of stamping those phrases on their Twitter pages for social approval, then just maybe the Valley could gain some credibility back.

It's funny, I've heard of the term stoicism in the philosophical regard, but never knew what it was, and yet now I'm reading that it embodies a lot of what I've felt for years.

Growing up, my family never had much, and I always had to make due with simple activities. Luckily enough I got immersed in the Internet at a young age, because I was able to inherit outdated computers, but never had the fancy toys or gadgets or games that my friends did. I had to find ways to entertain myself with very little, and since then my interests have always revolved around a very small subset of simple, low-fidelity activities. Drawing (materials are universal), weightlifting (free-weights only), programming (self explanatory).. Things that I know could never really be taken from me.

As I'm preparing to graduate college, I've told friends and family that I never want to own a car, or a house. I haven't owned a bed in two years. The only major purchases I want are a decent laptop, which I consider a necessity for a software developer, and books. I want the tools I need to live and grow my skills and intellect.

In that sense, I probably take the modern translation of stoicism too far. But then again, I'm easily fulfilled.

It's true. I live in Cleveland and I met a guy on public transit a couple years back that I struck up conversation with because he was wearing a cowboy hat and boots and was clearly out of his element. He told me he was in town for an oil conference and told me all about the Bakken region and the mad rush of companies looking to get a piece of the pie.

Essentially, once the oil basin was discovered, all the major US oil producers stormed the region and immediately began setting up shop. As a result, they also offered massive salaries for anyone willing to come up and work, especially young guys. He told me the major draw at first was truck drivers, who were making six-figures easily (side note: the roads in and out of town were decimated due to the amount of trucking passing through). Obviously the first ones to get established are going to get the most benefit from fracking the region, so it's easy to see why they offered such outrageous salaries.

Likewise, I remember him telling me about how there was absolutely nothing to do up there besides hit the bar, so that also pushes salaries higher.

I know software (and its wages) is the all-powerful blood of the Earth, according to HN, but don't be so skeptical of the power of supply and demand.