cubano

Being lonely sucks yeah...but take at least a bit of responsibility for it and realize that people make major changes in their lives every-damn-day.

Heroin addicts get clean EVERYDAY...you think being lonely is worse than kicking that shit? Guess what...you're wrong if you do.

Take small steps. Smile more. Be interested in others. You can do it for sure.

So Astronomy, as a "hard science", is around 100 years behind...what's the big deal with that?

It's not like writing a basic cache is very hard...or just "borrow" one from an OS implementation.

Let's face facts...AJAX is the real secret sauce with JS and what makes it truly useful.

Indeed, your absolutely correct in saying it was obvious where webapps had to go, and that HTML and CSS just wasn't going to get us there.

Of course we are Nature. We came to being the exact same way every other current living species did, thru natural selection. So then how can we be living, as you say, somehow outside this "Nature" you speak of?

Hell, I know I may be in a small minority who says, by definition, nothing that we do is "wrong" because we are simply doing what our brains, which are 100% a product of this Nature, are telling us to do.

Post-modernism is quick to tell us there are no absolute rights and wrongs...that only culture makes it so. So why then can some say that its immoral to create and study these creatures that our nature-created brains have led us to create?

As a corporate contractor who had to use CORBA back in the iInterface days of Win95, just the mention of it spins me into a semi-PTSD fit.

Please...REST is a solid, simple, and powerful transport method and let's maybe do without CORBA moving forward.

While you are close to being 100% correct with this advice, don't you think you are being a bit harsh on the OP as it's obvious that's exactly what he has done by posting his job seeking issues here on HN?

I mean...if this is how you feel, why bother even replying to him? Obviously, it's too late for your advice to be of any help to him now in his current situation, right?

I'll come clean and add that I, too, am in a very similar boat as the OP...I'm a 55yo software developer with 35 years in the industry, and due to my lifelong passion with a side-career as a semi-professional musician and other introvert-type issues, I literally have a non-existent network of people who will help me find work.

In no way am I feeling "sorry for myself" with my job hunt...I'm just trying to keep from being homeless and hungry.

It's probable that the OP is facing the same things.

I can easily say that in the 100's of rock songs that are tuned a half-step down (the entire Guns N Roses catalog for one quick example) and thus lend themselves to keys like G# and D# instead of A and E, that I have almost never encountered a song in G# or D# that were not using half-step down tuning.

1. help the singer hit "higher notes".

2. sound "heavier" and just that "bit off" that half-step down tuning gives.

In conjunction with "drop-D" tuning (pulling the low E-string down a full step in order to give a "deeper", more heavy tonality), this gives much of modern "heavy rock" heavier feel.

My first encounter with half-step down tuning was, I believe, Motley Crue's Too Fast For Love album, where I beleive Mick Mars used both tunings in order to use a beer bottle for full chord slides (dropping the low-E allows barre chords, the staple of rock music, to be played using just one finger or, in Mick's case, one beer bottle) and that exceptionally low "drop-C#" (remember, we dropped the low-E down a step and a half to C#) drone growl that gave that album an exceptionally hard feel.

[edited]

I have war stories for days about all times companies I worked for had to have customers pull DLLs from 3rd party sites in order to comply with completely political mandates.

But I have a return volley for you...who on the Facebook/Oculas graphics programming team, knowing that jcarmack was your boss, wouldn't go full nuts on trying to create some slick tech to impress him with? I'm sure FB has the pick of the crop when it comes to hiring talent, and at least of few of those guys would have to be his fanboys and come up with very useful optimizations and enhancements to add to the Quest graphical stack, right?

It would just negate a reputation that he has worked his ass off his entire life to build if he hasn't done valuable targeted work on the visuals of the device.

Also, FB's core business is ads sold to businesses trying to reach users doing social networking stuff...how does this even touch that revenue?

At this point, I don't think FB will ever be put out of business given how old their core user base is, knowing that older people loath tech changes.

Many very smart professionals literally look to Twitter for feedback and even emotional support for their work, and literally have meltdowns if the Twitverse takes them to task over some unforgivable transgression.

Your absolutely correct about your approach to the game now. Just sit, try to find a friendly dealer and some fun people to play with, and you will have an outstanding time.

The first "real" program I ever wrote was a blackjack simulator, in MS-BASIC, around 30 years ago. My brother and I were getting ready to go with my Dad to Vegas for the first time, and we were keen on not being typical dumb ass gamblers...we wanted an edge.

We quickly learned that the only beatable game in town was card-counting at Blackjack, so I got busy first verifying that card counting wasn't some casino ploy (it wasn't), and then modifying the same simulator code to actually "teach" the systems it was simulating.

I wish I still had this code... I absolutely loved developing it, and eventually it was a very powerful blackjack system. It had configurable everything..system counts, decks, rules, players at the table, etc. I literally spent 7 years plus working on it. Eventually it was ported to Turbo Pascal for speed.

I became a whiz at counting... I eventually settled on "Wong Halves", the most complex but supposedly the most accurate count system there was. Remember, this was in the late 80s early 90s, and back then casinos were wide open to be taken.

I was only a $5 to $25 player though, so I never got any real heat. I used a 1 to 5 bet ratios (1 unit at low counts and 5 as "big bets"), which was very conservative, and looking back, I had a good deal of small-time success. Unlike my brother, I was never banned... I was far better than he at "blending in" and being personable.

Nowadays, I live in Vegas, and they have completely destroyed the chances of winning any real money at the casinos. Hell, I remember my simulations showing me that the primary money advantage was made when you had a large bet out at a high count (favorable to the player), that the fact that blackjacks came at a higher rate WAS THE ONLY REAL MONEY MAKING ADVANTAGE THERE WAS.

This is why, I feel, that the high end strip casinos NO LONGER PAY 3-2 for natural blackjacks...an outrage if ever there is one! Strip casinos now pay 6-5 for a blackjack. I have had heated arguments with pit personnel that the game should no longer be called Blackjack, so "Blackjack" pay 3-2 for naturals.

Unsurprisingly, they never saw it my way. No matter how well you count, you will NEVER win long term with natural blackjacks paying only 6-5, so save your money and your time and just goto Vegas for a good time.

For 3 months, I was charged $11,$23, and finally $4 for 3 days of the 3rd months, where I QUICKLY cancelled the server...this is OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive for a single processor, 1G RAM, 30GB SSD cloud server!

$37 for some 64 days is totally overpriced. You can get high quality low cost cloud servers for less then $5/month, and if you purchase a full year, half that.

Amazon really disappointed me with their FREE bait-n-switch bullshit marketing, and I will NEVER recommend their low end servers again.

I remember being VERY active in that forum, but eventually I quit and sent an email to the owner ( I know I know ), his name was Carl I think?...saying that I could no longer deal with the absolute political polarization (anti-Libertarian) I found on the site.

So yes...you "fix" it by being the change you want to see. There is really nothing else one can do.

If as a side benefit, some execs think twice about pushing addictive pills to people who want them, I suppose that is a good thing as well, but to see this as much more then just a way for the prosecutor to "make hay" I feel misses the point.

The funny thing was...no one told me the secret and I musta spent 5 long hours pulling out my hair.

If I remember right, one of the RAs running the computer center finally had pity on me and showed me what was going on...

I'm not really sure I can call them the "good ole days of programming", but that was how things were done back then.

Overlooked by many (but not all) was its built-in MIDI ports and its abilty to control all those early model beatboxs and synths...unfortunately I forget the name of the rather crappy software that I used to get things talking and synced up, but it did work and the bitmapped color graphics were way ahead of its time.

Too bad Atari self destructed with the cartrage business, and who knows what other poor business decisions it made, but that computer was one of my favorite things of my late teens.

If I remember right it was almost $3k...but that included that blazing fast 300bps Hayes modem for wide-area networking.

And my mind was truly blown when we replaced the 2nd floppy with a more-memory-then-we-will-EVER-need 20MB hard drive...what could we do with all those bits??