foobarrio

Youngsters have access to those kinds of experiences but they will never be the same as your experiences. For you those experiences were in access to hardware internals but for youngsters perhaps these experiences are more in software internals. For people older than you, they probably lament VLSI and youngsters not having to access to lower scale integration chips and being able to actually "see" the transistors.

I can go online and see the source code of fully working games and even some older AAA games by just right clicking and "View Source" for html5 games or code dumps of older AAA games. Being able to access the source code for Super Mario Bros. was something of a dream to me when I was little! If you want to see what a full scale production 3D modeling/rendering package looks like you can go and look Blender's. I had to learn my 3D game programming concepts from books full of code that never linked or even compiled and hacked copies of POV Ray that never compiled or ran. Forget about even seeing the source for commercial packages like 3D Studio or Lightwave. For database stuff there is PostgreSQL and together with NodeJS, NginX can be set up in an evening to play with. I learned database stuff in a computer lab and some academic version of Oracle. Unfortunately I can imagine a future where software is much less accessible than it is now.

Even in hardware there are things like Arduino and Pi that make prototyping a lot more accessible than before.

Off topic: I love VLC but can't get it to use hardware acceleration on my late 2015 mac. 4k 60fps @ 40mbps consume all CPU if I try to play a lower compression 150mbps video it studders and all my fans turn on. mpv and quicktime play the same videos with 15-20% CPU. The poor performance of VLC on my macOS makes it a no go for me.

I have encountered this too. Some of most useful personal coding time is spent to exploring something new or solving a real problem with a quick and dirty solution. At no point do I set out to create a full polished, deliverable thing. I don't even know if I will solve my problem or understand the new thing! Why publish such code? A carpenter doesn't varnish and sell every single bit of wood that is practiced or worked on nor an artist present every single sketch.

Ha! Why in the world did I type that? A good car to see the progression of weight is a that hasn't changed market segment like a Porsche 911. Car&Driver did this up through 2011:

http://blog.caranddriver.com/porsche-911-generations-the-leg...

Car models move upscale as they get older and newer models slide in under it. The old 80's Honda Accord is physically smaller than today's Toyota Civic. The spot that was occupied by the Civic is now occupied by the Fit. A 1996 Honda Civic hatchback was about 2600lbs which is the same as a 2016 Honda Fit.

I am not talking about the app I am talking about the environment the app is running in. Of course there are crappy apps (I've made a bunch of them!) I remember IIS doing funky things with non-200 return codes. 5xx codes would have some default handler. I am certain this was an issue with configuration and a dysfunctional development process. In the shop I was in, in the mid 2000's, we the devs didn't have direct access to the web server and having the IT guys make any update took on the order of weeks. Instead of fixing the IIS config we just returned 2xx and handled the error in the app layer. We also had a couple SOAP(shudder) services that always returned code 200 with error codes in the response XML body. Much of our app code used this pattern for consistency. We also would deploy our services on various other web servers we didn't have full control over so it was just easier to use this pattern.

I remember reading that ISP's and browsers can do interesting things to non-2xx responses. In that case applications do not even have a chance to handle the error. IIRC Facebook's API does this because they encountered problems with mobile browsers deciding to do weird things with non-2xx responses.

If a bank is making loans at rates that do not cover defaults they should go out of business because they are crappy at their job.

If I take my car to a mechanic am I expected to know as much about my car as the mechanic? Do I tear down and redo/inspect any work they do to my car? If I go to a mechanic and ask them if it's okay to do something dangerous to my car and they go ahead and do it, I'd say the mechanic is way more on the hook morally than the idiot driver.

Similarly if I go and ask for a 1,000,000 USD mortgage when I'm only making $20,000 USD a year and have no savings or investments and the bank gives it me... You're saying both me and bank are on equal moral footing? You would then have to ask what incentive the bank had to give me the money. Either they are greedy and wanted to charge a super high rate or they intended to pass the buck and sell the loan which can be fraud if they lie about my credit worthiness to the next buyer of the loan.

Any change in equilibrium will be expressed as "higher risk to default" and will make interest rates higher no? Seems like everything will continue to work as intended.

I love how the shape of that new Jaguar calls back to the XJ220! Japan would be the place to field a series that's crazy without being a circus. I too would love to see an all out series but I wonder the extent that humans will be in the car. F1 cars are already pushing 5-6G's in the corners. Perhaps drone-style racing will be where we see insane race track tech. However that tech might quickly diverge from anything that can be applied to road going cars.

If it's the hypercar I'm thinking of, it's target performance is that of LMP1 car. LMP1 cars are consistently 5-10 seconds slower around the tracks where they both compete. Impressive that it can come so close to an F1 but no where near "shaming" an F1. That being said, I find events where LMP cars race much more exciting due to all the different classes being on the same track at the same time. I love seeing the GT cars race even though I don't follow any of the series.

Heh heh This is a clearer picture:

* http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1258/1355972123_12a28bd3b6.jp...

Seeing that the peehole is forward would make it male no? This little toy also seems male:

* https://img0.etsystatic.com/110/0/11763563/il_570xN.88580129...

I'll be sure to ask the opinion of my friends next time I play with their cats! Btw I am not trying to argue. I'm just curious.

Catbus has balls:

* http://i.imgur.com/gySIZ.png

Then why build roads at all? If N + 1 means more traffic than surely N - 1 means less? So 0 roads, no traffic! Seriously though isn't this a related rates problem? Adding roads adds capacity and also induces demand. Are the two in lockstep? Can the capacity added be greater than the demand induced?

I agree with this sentiment of weighing short vs long terms needs. However, if you are working in a medium to large place not everyone is benevolently doing things just for the sake of the company. Many times managers demand to sacrifice software quality for their own career climbing even if it will be a liability to the company as a whole.

This is where experience comes into play though. Not every bit of software is totally unique and built on first principals. If you're working at some place and built similar software at a previous place, part of the up-front design is going to be driven by retrospection on previous projects.

What about all the people that work hard but are not successful? I know people that no matter how hard they try they won't be software developers (not that this is the only well paying job). They do all those things you are talking about but they have to pick much less lucrative work. There is no big promise of high paying job. Those people are essentially being rewarded less for the same effort no? One of my close friends is in this position. He is working towards being a small business owner. He puts in so much more effort than I do. There is no doubt he'll eventually make it... but I still will get paid more because my skill-set is currently in much higher demand.

Running isn't easy for everyone. Runners seem to be a self-selecting group of people who have good biomechanics or a naturally good running form.

I had to teach myself how to run. Even though I was careful with my mileage ramp up, stretched, and worked on technique I still had to deal with all kinds of nagging injuries and still have runner's knee (patella femoral syndrome). I got my 5k down into the 23 minute range and could run 8-9 miles at a pop without getting winded. Still the nagging injuries persist. For people can "just" run it's to understand that running is really hard for some people(and not just overweight people).

That being said, running is the best. I actually enjoy doing it even with all the nagging injuries.

Humboldt squid are considered to be as intelligent as octopuses. They're also pretty huge.

+1 For Ghost in the Shell. Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig was great.

I'd recommend Diamond Age. The shows shows almost the death of Cyberpunk (poor people) into Victorian Style Steampunk (rich people).

Some European swords do show a degree of differential tempering and differential hardening. I don't know what technique they used though. IIRC correctly if you polish some of the swords the same way you do a JP blade, you get hamon-esque patterns:

http://www.archaeologie-online.de/magazin/fundpunkt/forschun...

Also remember that JP swords are a few hundred years more modern than what we typically think of when we think EU swords. However the Vikings had some knowledge of carbon/crucible steel making as early as 9th-10th century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulfberht_swords

Masamune was like 14th century with the famous Maramasa and Kotestu being 16th century onward.

If you could somehow graph the amount of work it takes to program something on a line, that line would be very rugged like a coastline. These "big picture" views and estimating programming work is like trying to estimate the length of a coast line:

   * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox

I think there are two situations here that account for this.

[1] Technical barriers to entry. Photography had huge barrier to entries when it first started. With wet-plate exposures you had to be at a high level of technical ability in multiple disciplines to even take a picture. Only the people deeply interested in the subject participated. Also the high cost (in time and money) to take a single photo meant that a lot of effort was put into a single frame. Today it's trivial to snap a photo on my phone. However there is still great photography being today! It's just that there is a bunch more crap photos being taken. This is similar to developing a game (there were still plenty of crap games being made then too!). Personally, I think it's all awesome.

Ignore the crap and enjoy the awesome. No one judges a guitar based on how bad players sound. People listen to the players they like.

I don't know if this is what GP means but for one, Disney is one of the driving forces behind extending copyright periods:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

Yes. Shazam has a bunch of patents and has sued people before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(service)#Patent_infrin...

The core algorithm is well known and fun to implement:

https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf

A blog had a simple implementation of it and were contacted by Shazam's lawyers:

http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/07/patent-infringement/

GUIs allow things to be done by people who otherwise would not be interacting with a computer. They are huge enablers! This is true of the arts with computer graphics, music software. Granted really advanced users of computer graphics packages often end up doing some kind of programming via Python scripting or even Action Script back in the days of Flash. However there are plenty of people that are pure artists and just digitally paint of sculpt.

Such a small code snippet! I wrote coloring using the triangle inequality in JS a couple years ago for someone on reddit:

http://codepen.io/anon/pen/Ircav

Amazing that we can write these things up so quickly in a browser.

I thought it "not obvious to a practitioner of the craft" was a requirement for a patent no? Give 10 programmers the task to write "rangeCheck()" and you'll end up with very similar looking code.

Isn't that exactly the point that Tesla made electric cars desirable (not practical)? Not sure that can be easily dismissed. They took a class of car that usually seen as weak and put into the same class as Porsche. That is no small feat IMHO.

I make my own post cards by printing out a photo that I took on the trip. This lets me practice my local language skills trying to find a printshop and getting a photo printed and mailed. It is definitely loads of fun.