MikeTaylor

How tragic that the goal of startups isn't to make something useful but to get acquired (with consequent inevitable dismemberment and shuttering). Well done on the $200M, I guess.

Just dropping in to say that The Elements of Programming Style is worth reading three times — and I have read it many more times than that, and benefitted from it. Here's my review (from 2010) if you're interested: https://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/programming-books-pa...

It's amazing how much science just gets no funding to speak of. There are maybe half a dozen museums in the world whose palaeontology departments are not in a permanent budget crunch. There is no money to fund digs, to find new fossils. There is, critically, no money to prepare fossils out of the rocks. One very major natural history known to me had only a single preparator on staff: and the last I heard, that one preparator had been let go so that no fossil preparation at all was taking place, at least officially. And of course there is no money to fund actual research into the fossils that should be coming out of those rocks -- for example, dinosaurs, which you'd think would be a big win for any ambitious museum.

The part of this that baffles me is that there always seem to be untold billions to build particle accelerators. Spread the wealth, high-energy physicists!

And yet, it's what a lot of old-timey software engineers consistently did. Yes, we work in a more complex ecosystem than they did, but I can't shake my sense that 90% of the reason is that they held themselves to a higher standard. Heck, they still do in the Go community, where major versions are still a big deal.

I did wonder how much to soften this message, because yes, of course, there really ARE times when a breaking change is necessary. But I think those account for maybe 1% of the major releases we see these days. The rest are down to laziness, carelessness, or just not having thought about it at all.

Usually the best solution is not to ask for date of birth. I guess about one in ten of websites that ask me that actually have a legitimate reason for needing to know.

(In the present case, a UK Government website might well have a legitimate reason.)

Consistent for someone who uses the same site on lots of different devices and browsers. I wonder how many of those there are?

Not consistent for someone who uses lots of different sites on one device. There are about seven billion of those.

"Consistent experience across devices" is not just a waste of time, it's actively harmful.

Gee, it's a real head-scratcher, isn't it?

I love Wikipedia to pieces, but I have given up trying to contribute to it, because only about a third of what I contribute survives the Reversion Police. I assume these are many of the same people as the Deletion Police. A pox on all their houses.

What kind of thing have I had reverted? For example, often when I have just watched a film, I like to read its Wikipedia page. Often I spot minor errors in the plot synopsis while the details are fresh in my mind, and make minor edits to fix those errors. Often, they get reverted. So now I don't bother.

Reverters and deleters may achieve what Big Content longed to do but couldn't -- kill Wikipedia.

I wonder what he would make of _I Am The Walrus_, which uses every note-named major chord (A, B, C, D, E, F and G major).

Striking that there were more shoemakers than tailors.

This is the subject of Blue Öyster Cult's song _Magna of Illusion_.

SIDE-ISSUE ALERT!

The article ends with the statement "The author declares no competing interests". I think this is very poor phrasing, as it's ambiguous: does it mean "The author has not declared any competing interests", or "The author has positively declared that there are no competing interests"?

(To be clear, I am not for a moment suggesting any hidden interests on the part of the author, and I think his point is both correct and important. It's only the wording that I dislike.)

I would trade all these things, in a heartbeat, for the ability to keep other tabs/windows working when one tab is in a hard loop. That one facility is the thing that means I can't let go of Chrome, even though Firefox is prefereable in so many other way.

> When peaceful Occupie Wall Street protestors were brutalized at scale, I think the whole world noticed, and this kind of peaceful mass protest is probably what the world elites fear the most.

Yes, it was great how that incident ushered in a new age of shared economic prosperity and political rationality.

Strange that this paper doesn't even _mention_ GraphQL.

> In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent

... writes a man who was evidently not paying attention to the US presidential election of 2016 or the UK Conservative Party leadership election of 2019.

I have to say this kind of announcement sticks in the craw. I get that Mikael Cho and colleagues created Unsplash and it's theirs to do with as they please: they don't owe us anything. But really, couldn't they just come right out and say "They offered us too much money, we couldn't resist, So long, suckers"?

Has anyone made a complete archive of Unsplash, so that at least when Getty shut it down ("in order to serve customers metter by focusing on our core business") the images that have already been uploaded there will remain available?

Richard Stallman's got your back: see http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.en.html and skip down to the "Challenges in our future" heading.

I understand why people find Stallman irritating, but my word, he does tend to be right with terrifying frequency. (Come to think of it, that's probably part of _why_ people find him irritating.)

The classic answer is that commenters on a blog become a community, and that much of the value of a blog-post is in the discussion. No doubt that if often not true; but on both of my own main blogs it absolutely is. I'll point you at one of them: Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week is a palaeontology blog with a knowledgeable and thoughtful readership that often thinks of things that I and my co-author did not. See for example https://svpow.com/2021/02/01/what-a-cervical-vertebra-of-an-...

This site seems overwhelmed with traffic. If you can't get through, luckily the Internet Archive made a copy this morning: https://web.archive.org/web/20200924101441/https://wagingnon...

Who else saw the title of this and immediately thought Hackers and Painters?

Side issue, but I have cause to mention Chesterton's Fence so often that it's become a real frustration that there is no Wikipedia article about it — only this essay about why Wikipedia contributors should honour it. I wish there was an actual article I could point to when I want people to know about it.

(Why don't I just make one? I have basically given up on making substantial contributons to Wikipedia since the Deletion Police took over the asylum. There's a 90% probability that if I did spend a couple of hours writing a good article, someone would come along within a week and spend a couple seconds deleting it. It's out of control.)

Stewart Lee nailed it in this 90-second video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyGND49CBYk

Did @pg respond to any part of this thread?

Exactly! Exactly!

One of the killers for me is the dropped support for 32-bit binaries. I don't have a gaming box, so I play Steam games on my MacBook. Lots of the games I want to play (e.g. all the BioShocks) are 32-bit.

Did the FireFox people ever explain why they abandoned a more typical version numbering system and instead started releasing a new major version every couple of weeks?

The article addresses this. Ships are restricted to docking where there are ports, which are expensive and potentially fragile infrastructure (e.g. after a big storm), and can only be situated at the water's edge; while airships can pick up put down essentially anywhere.