LameRubberDucky

After reading through the patent and the suit, their comparison to Shotwell is ridiculous. In the patent, they even describe how Shotwell and other similar photo gallery programs that can share to social medial work and further go on to explain how their patent is different from these. The patent essentially is for a group of wireless devices to be linked together at say a wedding, when one person takes a picture, the picture is transmitted wirelessly and automatically to the paired devices, digital cameras, smartphones, computers, etc.

So, everyone's smartphones or digital cameras pair together and anyone that takes a photo has that photo distributed to the other devices. How is that anything like Shotwell?

No doubt, it does occur. Do I feel as sharp at 51 as I did at 25? No. It seems to take longer to pick-up new things. I'm struggling a bit with Rust but I picked up Python the last few weeks with no problem. Clojure, I still can't grok the functional paradigm. Maybe BASIC did ruin me. Programming a PIC in assembly, no problem. I learned early in my career that you must continually study. I take online training a couple of times a month and read and practice a lot. That is key I think, if you wish to stay in programming, and not move into the management track.

I think that many people you seem to think are tech savvy are really not. I'm 51 and I've been programming since 13, getting paid for it since around 20 years old. My kids are 21 and 19, they both use smartphones, so do my wife and I, I just picked up a OnePlus 7 Pro 5G.

My kids know how to use the latest social media apps sure, but they don't know how anything behind that phone and computer work at all. I can write Android apps all day long but they wouldn't even know where to start.

I had to teach my son how to punch a hole through the firewall to run a Minecraft server for his friends 5 or 6 years ago. After watching me build a few computers, he has now built his own top of the line rig. But he didn't just "know" that stuff because he's young, he had to have an interest and learn, from an old dude no less. It's just like people that drive cars, most of them do not know how cars work but they can still drive. I can also take a car apart and put it back together. I can do a ton of other technical things as well. It's not age, but interest in my opinion, that makes a person tech savvy.

Please don't lump all people over 50 together. Many of us designed and built the tech that you are so proud of now. We stood on the shoulders of giants and so do you. Your time is coming as and "old person." Always remember that.

Restricting your calories and causing lower metabolism only works for so long. Otherwise a person would not be able to starve to death, which is obviously not the case.

I think it's related to what my wife always says to me when I get concerned after listening to too much news. "News is news because it's different from the norm. No one wants to read that nothing different happened." She worked for a newspaper for 10 years, so I respect her explanation.

Citymapper uses Google Maps. In what way is it competition?

If you were on Windows, you could try RegexBuddy. It supports regex dialects for: .NET, Boost (C++), Delphi, Groovy, Oracle Database, PowerShell, R, std::regex, VB6, wxWidgets, C#, MySQL, PHP, PostgreSQL, VBScript, Java, Perl, PCRE, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Tcl ARE, POSIX BRE, POSIX ERE, GNU BRE, GNU ERE, XML Schema, and XPath. It will even generate code snippets for you based on the regex you create with the tool. It can also convert between these dialects and lets you know if features in the target dialect are not available.

I am not associated with this company in any way, just a long time user.

If I remember correctly, they dredged out the area near the docks so the deeper water could allow the larger ships.

I think I have at least one of every variant. I had fun playing with all of them. But in the end, I wanted to use one for a Linux development machine and it was always just a bit too slow to be useful. This one sounds like it might have just crossed into the lower realm for laptops so I'll give it a try. And yes, I know, using it as a development machine was not really the intended purpose, but a $55 machine is so tantalizing.

It looks like you got your account back? How did that happen?

Awesome! Thanks for giving instructions for Opera, I've been using it for my daily work for a few weeks now.

Wow. Are you Albert mentioned in the man page? Seems like some unneeded snark after your entry. I think I would have left too.

"Albert rewrote ps for full Unix98 and BSD support, along with some ugly hacks for obsolete and foreign syntax."

There have been anecdotes on HN about companies using this type of process to get free work out of people. If your code solved the problem they needed solved, they may have taken your code/ideas and used it and left you by the wayside. I hope that's not the case but it's possible.

Your appeal to authority notwithstanding, yes I do realize that. I was not referring to, nor condemning the authors of WebAssembly for their work. I was proposing an answer to the question above, about why it seems like a lot of software development is re-inventing the wheel.

I feel like the world of computer programming is caught in a very fast iteration of the old adage, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Which oddly, I was curious about that quote's origins, so I just went and looked it up. The full quote in context is:

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana (1863 - 1952) [The Life of Reason (1905-1906) Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense]

This neatly dovetails with the thoughts that were floating in my head. This part, is the explanation I believe, for the current state of programming, "when experience is not retained, infancy is perpetual."

Well that's great to know. I just bought the dragon book. Is there a better book out there?

I would agree with this, if you're using Google's personal free products for running a business. Get locked and you're in real trouble.

But Fi is a service that the customer is paying for, they should not be subject to automatic lockouts without any way to get it resolved other than to "start fresh."