I've had mine public for years. The spam filters at Fastmail are good enough that it's not an issue.
1,606 karma · joined April 3, 2010
There was no Google, no Wikipedia, no YouTube. Today, the world largely runs on top of TCP/IP, and anyone can read some docs or any number of books and understand how it works. Back then, the world ran over the phone network, and there wasn't any way to really understand it except through phreaking groups and getting yourself into places you weren't supposed to be.
Before Linux, you'd hear about this wonderful, powerful OS called Unix. But you'd be tinkering around at home in MS-DOS unless you went to college or had a really progressive high school. The only way to experience Unix would be to hack or social engineer your way into getting access.
That doesn't justify the entitlement, no, or the ego. And it certainly didn't justify computer crimes. But this manifesto is from a very different age, where those smart kids were understandably frustrated because the world was yet to produce the tools and information we take for granted today.
I finally took a job with a company whose flagship product was a browser front end over a 30 year old Pick database. They hired almost anyone off the street and gave them a two week training course before turning them loose in client code (customizations to the flagship application). They were literally training new hires to program, and I was kind of at a disadvantage because I knew what I was doing and got things done quickly, which is a liability when you bill by the hour.
The twenty year old company re-branded to a dot com and was planning an IPO. We got new business cards and letterhead with the new name and everything. Then the owners saw the writing on the wall. They silently dropped their IPO plans and we got new business cards with the same new name except no ".com" at the end.
With only an associate's degree and with my only professional experience being an outdated database system + programming language, all recruiters wanted to talk to me about was roles with this same outdated system that was apparently running in places all over the world. If I wanted to hitch my wagon to a dying platform, I had a place in France begging for someone like me to one work on site for a couple months.
Even those calls stopped when the bubble burst. I took another job on that outdated platform that paid better and kept sending out resumes. Things eventually got better, but I still couldn't find a role outside Pick systems.
It wasn't until I spent my own cash on a Java certification AND the market improved that I started getting calls again. But then I faced a different challenge, because my Java experience was the wrong KIND. I had worked with Oracle Application Server and their suite, not Websphere or Weblogic. I understand now that a lot of that strict filtering was to prove that nobody local had the skills that offshore developers had. Yep, the early 2000s was all about offshoring!
It's my opinion that starting my career in that time and place set my career back at least five years. That experience is irrelevant now, thankfully, and I'm in a pretty good spot these days managing a devops team.
I don't want to be all "you kids don't know how easy you have it", but it's so easy today to spin up a web application, host it for practically free, and maybe make a business out of it. I would have to fax over code samples, and now you have recruiters and hiring managers cruising GitHub profiles looking for coders to reach out to.
I do worry about the possibility of another bubble. I'd probably be fine, even if I had to do something outside tech for a while. But for young folks outside SV things could get pretty hairy again.
It wasn't binary, but it was fixed length fields, which were surprising common in those days.
Fortunately I had a computer history background and realized I was getting a perfectly sensible response...in EBCDIC.
Analytics. At a minimum, there's going to be Google Analytics but there might be some in-house tracking tool or some kind of audience statistics package too.
Paywalls need to make sure you haven't met the limit.
A/B tests on headlines, content, and even styling mean remembering which test group you fall into.
If you read about the symptoms and recognize more than one in yourself, and you still aren't able to commit to seeing a health care professional, confide in a friend or partner and ask them to help you through the process and hold you accountable, because depression is like a parasite that won't let itself be treated.
A lot stems from the late 18th century concern that filthy immigrants were making unhealthy food in local bakeries. It was better -- so they said -- to eat mass-produced breads baked into identical loaves with small, evenly distributed air holes by clean machines and in a pure, clean white color to make it clear there weren't any bugs or other impurities.
From there it was a process of mass industrialization and tweaking the ingredients to minimize costs and optimize baking times.
It's also a stub where you can add logging or similar along the normal path without touching the conditional and risking introducing bugs by accident.
Depending on the language or runtime the empty clause will likely be factored out by the optimizer so there's no cost for extra readability and flexibility.
There's only two streaming services left that let you do that: Apple and Google. And I'm not letting Apple anywhere near my music collection after what that iTunes Match bug did to my mp3s.
That leaves Google. So now I'll have to upload my music to yet another service until they too decide not to allow uploads anymore and then I'm screwed.
I should switch to Google Music but that doesn't work with my Echo very well.
The state of online music sucks.
It's getting hard to trust both companies.
This Thursday, I signed up for coder.com (featured here on HN) and was able to write some Go code using VS Code in the browser. It was a pretty solid experience.
Performance was fine. I had my email and a podcast player going in the background and, honestly, I could probably do a lot of my day-to-day work with this and an EC2 box for running sites.
But it was glitchy, because Android hasn't really invested in this use case. The Taskbar home screen replacement would close the start menu as soon as it opened 90% of the time. There was a black space at the bottom of the screen which would change height almost randomly. Large windows conflicted with the notification bar and I'd end up opening my notifications when I wanted a new tag in Chrome. Right clicking maps to the back arrow in Chrome for some reason.
But the point is, between modern phone hardware and the cloud, we're not far from a performance perspective. We just have to decide that's where we want to go and commit to it.