ToddWBurgess

No offence taken.

We do have a fairly regular group of core users that are usually there. Of course this core group will change with time given life commitments and other things that come up. Not uncommon for regulars to disappear for a while and show up later when life permits.

Something we have discussed about our longevity is early on we decided against using webcam meetups. All our meetups are voice only. I had a lot of feedback from people early on they preferred the voice only meetup. Now almost 2 years later, we question if this decision allowed us to avoid the webcam fatigue that most other groups seemed to suffer. It probably doesn't hurt we are in Canada's biggest and hottest tech hub.

I one of the organizers of a meetup called Coffee and Code in Toronto, Canada. We used to be a bi-weekly meetup in cafes pre-pandemic. After the pandemic started we moved online to a weekly Discord. We still posted the meetups on Meetup and now attract an international audience. 2 years later we are still going.

Now that restrictions are lifted in Ontario we will be going back to in-person meetups and probably by the end of the month we will be posting them on Meetup. I am optimistic that we will be able to bring people back.

Flutter release code compiles to AOT code which speeds up execution. React Native has the Javascript engine which can slow things down. For most of us here on HN, who are using flagship phones none of this really matters, however for other parts of the world that have less capable phones, the ability to run AOT compiled apps is a big deal. Flutter is a huge in Africa, mostly because it runs well on a lot of the popular phones there.

My first Linux install was in 1994, on a 486DX/2-66 with 8MB of RAM. At the time it was considered standard hardware and Linux ran really well on it.

You will end up writing less code. You won't have to tackle advanced subjects like managing app state in Android and iOS. You can use a Flutter state management solution that works on both platforms. You won't have to feature match your two apps because they will all use the same code base.

If you are a small teams looking to get something out the door, all of these are points in favour of Flutter. It works better for teams will constraints such as team size, budget and time.

My theory on why Flutter is popular in developing countries is a Flutter app compiled in release mode is turned into AOT code. This gives it a performance boost on apps that are constrained by low CPU and memory resources.

I expect that that most HN users probably have a flagship mobile phone with lots of CPU, RAM and reliable mobile data options. The other 90% of the world can not say that and a lot more sensitive to apps that require advanced phones and operating environments to function.

I work on a Flutter app with a small team that does both iOS and Android from the same code base. It works really well for our use case given the size of our team. I also have experience with both native Android and iOS. The way Android and iOS handle apps is completely different and jumping between the two requires a lot of mental context switching.

Something to think about is all mobile apps come with the typical boilerplate. Think about a screen that displays the results from a REST call. You will need to create the screen for the Android app using either XML or Jetpack Compose frameworks. The iOS will need to create a screen using storyboards or SwiftUI frameworks. That is a lot to maintain. With Flutter you create the screens just once in Flutter and the only framework choice is Flutter. Now at some point in the future when the REST call adds a new field you have twice the work to do with native solutions then you do with Flutter to add it to your screen.

I would also like to correct misconception about Flutter. Flutter doesn't eliminate the need to do cross platform development. You still need to know the native tooling, native build cycles and native programming languages if you want to get a Flutter app out the door.

Flutter dev here.

The Flutter webview is basically a wrapper for the native iOS and Android implementations. A native Android app using a webview and a Flutter app running on Android using a webview is using the same native webview.

It is like that for a lot of the Flutter libraries. They basically implement native versions of the functionality and make it available to Flutter. The Dart language has FFI so if you want to get "even more native" you can do Android and iOS system calls in your Flutter app using languages like C, C++, Rust or even Assembly.

I think you misunderstood. If you fire up a mail server on your Linux box today and try using it for mail the big mail servers are sending your mail to spam due to a bunch of spam rules. These days, you need an organization with a known reputation for sending good e-mail to handle your e-mail so you don't end up in a spam folder. It's how the big players stay big.

I have a lot of fond memories of working with LaTeX in the 90s in my undergrad. These days I wouldn't use LaTeX because I want something quick and dirty.I am not investing a lot of time in writing documents that people are not going to spend a lot of time reading.

That said, The Lamport book I used heavily in my undergrad still has a place on my bookshelf.

It it my understanding from talking to the same neurologist that ALS is a diagnosis of exclusion. When everything is ruled out the last diagnosis is ALS.

I think I am showing my age when I say, I remember when Linux by default came with sendmail enabled by default. You could use your Linux box to send e-mail anywhere without it getting caught up in spam filters. Fun times.

I asked a neurologist I know about ALS drugs and he doesn't have a lot of faith in any of them.

On a personal note, my mother had ALS. I can tell you it is a terrible disease and a terrible way to go. I really do hope they find something for it.

Lived off the Canadian version of MREs for 2 weeks when I was in Haiti after the earthquake. Definitely not a fan. One of the things that always impressed me about the Canadian lunch ones is they had a chocolate bar (candy bar for the Americans) in them. It was 30+ C degrees during the day and as long as the chocolate bars stayed in the sealed packaging they were solid but but the moment you opened the packaging the chocolate would melt in 5 minutes. Not sure, what black magic made it possible to chocolate solid in 30 degree C weather.

I know from talking to an IP lawyer, IP law has less to do with who is right and more about who has the deep pockets to afford an IP dispute.

I was on call for 5 years at an old job (non IT). Getting paged and yanked out of bed at all hours messes with you in so many ways. Being sleep deprived you turn to high sugar drinks and foods to keep you awake. The sleep deprivation and bad diets causes you to put on weight. Going to bed with the idea you could get paged does terrible things for your anxiety. On top of that all the sleep deprivation changes your personality.

You become highly irritable and it really brings down your mood. Eventually I couldn't deal with it after 5 years and I pretty much walked off the job. I didn't realize the toll it was taking on me and what being on call was doing to me until I was no longer on call.

See the Intel math coprocessor was a blast from the past. I sold a few of them and installed a few of them when I used to work in computer stores.

I am an extrovert which usually makes me stand out in a group of developers. I find being tuned into the needs of how introverts function has helped get along better with my peers.

sysop breaking in for chat:

As a mobile dev (and former Second Life player), I am skeptical about the metaverse due to limitations of current mobile hardware. Using the metaverse is going to require the screen to always be on and will consume the CPU which leads to a huge battery suck. We already saw this play out with Pokemon Go leading to lots of players to carry around external battery packs.

Unless mobile technology has some major revolution with battery life or Facebook/Meta can find a way to use the metaverse without a screen or sucking battery life, I think mobile tech will severely hinder users from using the metaverse.

Now to bring things back to the original quesion, when Second Life was a thing, mobile tech was mostly flip phones and Blackberries so mobile wasn't an option. Users could only use the desktop and were fine with it because it is all we knew at the time. Being a desktop only application was never an issue for the users. The current demand to support multiple platforms when many of those platforms are not capable of supporting the metaverse is what makes the current metaverse different than Second Life.

Depends where you live. In Canada and a lot of other parts of the world intellectual property also has something called moral rights. What is being done here is well within the copyright holder's moral rights in many parts of the world. If your name is associated with a project you have the right to assert how your project is used because it could reflect on the copyright holder's name and reputation.

Like all things intellectual property rights, the copyright's moral rights would have to be determined by a court of law in the copyright holder's legal jurisdiction.

And this is why you need ad blockers and privacy protection plugins for your web browser. If you can't stop Facebook snooping on you at least make it hard for them. As my grandfather taught me, "if you can't win then make it hard for the other guy to win."

I own a fully functional NeXT Cube. They were always a joy to use

I did try NetBSD first on the Pi but the install wasn't working for me. Getting FreeBSD up and running on the Raspberry Pi was a lot less painful. If I really want to kick around NetBSD I can run an instance of it in GNU Boxes on one of my Linux boxes.

This. I know an intellectual property lawyer and was told without a legal contract in place there is no way to assert your property rights in a court of law. Legally speaking, you own nothing.

Theo de Raadt wanted to make security the number one priority and the NetBSD team did not. So Theo de Raadt forked NetBSD in order to create OpenBSD which would become security first. It was a political decision. My source on that is a NetBSD kernel dev.

I got FreeBSD running on a Raspberry PI. It isn't too hard to install and get up and running. I primarily use FreeBSD on the Pi for ARM assembly programming. All BSDs are great for devs.

In the end COUNTRY1 was the United States government. They were selling secrets to the FBI and it went about as well as could be expected.

Back in the day, Usenet servers were very difficult to setup. They came with a lot of demands and a lot of machines fell over under the load. Usenet servers also consumed a lot of bandwidth to stay synced. Another problem that crept up is a lot of file systems would fill up prematurely because when the file system was created the block sizes were too large.

In the end, Usenet really taxed the resources of an organization and I think many sys admins just decided all the time and energy required to keep the server up was not worth it.

People keep talking about OS/2 in the past tense. It is still very much alive. It never really died. There are still a lot of mission critical apps out there that are still running on OS/2. OS/2 is still being supported and getting modern updates except it is not known as OS/2 anymore. It is now called ArcaOS.