motogpjimbo

Same. Our Node applications can take up to 10 minutes to build and deploy from a pipeline, but our PHP applications are deployed in <2 seconds by executing `git pull` on a VM.

I'd be interested to know what you think PHP got wrong with respect to web development? The majority of the web is running on PHP to this day, so at least in terms of popularity it seems people don't feel this way generally. Furthermore, if one were philosophically-minded, it could be argued that PHP's "shared nothing/one thread per page" execution model is the very quintessence of HTTP.

Based on my experience, I think you may be underestimating the problems with arranging returns for unwanted items. I don't work at Amazon but I did used to work for an online retailer that shipped luxury items (think several hundred UK pounds) direct to the customer.

Getting misdelivered items back to our warehouse and sorted back into stock was a nightmare, and generally we tried not to if at all possible. Whenever a member of the public called us to report they had received a package intended for one of our customers, we would generally ask the caller if they wanted to buy it from us for a large discount. If they declined, we would either let them keep it for free, or if we felt the value of the item justified it we would make an attempt to get it brought back to us. However, between couriers not turning up to collect it on multiple occasions (presumably because there was no real incentive for them to turn up), the homeowner not being at home when the courier arrived, the item being stolen from the homeowner's driveway before the courier getting to it and the courier "losing" the item in transit, the percentage of items that actually came back to us was quite low. In addition, it was then all but impossible to put the item back into stock, since the product line may have come to an end, the package may not be complete, etc. Generally the item would be sold off at a massive discount to staff members. The admin costs through this process would be considerable.

Oh yeah, Royal Mail are annoying for that, especially since the sorting office around here is in the middle of nowhere. Every other courier will try a neighbour though.

My wife and I used to live in a street where we were usually the only people at home during the day. All the delivery companies quickly realised we would take in anyone's parcels, so our living room was often like a mini sorting office!

In the UK, delivering to neighbours is standard if the parcel doesn't fit through the mailbox. I'm surprised to hear that's not the case elsewhere?

For anyone interested in this genre, there is a very large collection of 60s/70s library music available on Spotify. Searching for "KPM 1000" will get you started.

There is also a documentary on the subject:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Library-Music-Film-Shawn-Lee/dp/B08...

How does this work for deaf or hearing impaired users? Surely even in the US there must be a way to cancel a subscription without having to speak to someone on the phone?

> It's deliberately so [confusing]

This is not true. Public schools pre-date modern state schools and what made them "public", by the original definition, was that they were open to any child - provided that their parents could afford the fees.

Other private schools at the time were open only to the children of parents who met certain criteria, and hence were not "public".

I've never worked with a Javascript developer who was responsible in any way for their employer's adtech and dark UX patterns strategy. In my experience, those decisions are always made by PMs and approved by the board.

Your comment seems like an opportunistic attack on a type of developer you don't personally like rather than something that is rooted in reality.

For precisely the reason being discussed here: GET requests can be performed automatically for many reasons. For example, if you've ever pasted a URL into a Slack channel (or similar) and seen the link converted into a thumbnail of the page a few moments later, you've seen a piece of software issue a GET request on your behalf. Now imagine that wasn't a link to a page but a link to an something that modified your account - resetting your password, for example.

I've been thinking about getting one since they first came out because while I enjoy the tracker workflow, I don't enjoy making music at the computer these days, especially since working from home during the pandemic.

Like you though, I worry about the channel limit. While 8 channels would be plenty for sequencing monophonic parts, as soon as you start throwing chords in there, or even just mono parts where you want the notes to overlap and decay naturally, 8 channels seems a drastic limitation. The hardware in there must surely be able to handle 32 channels? An internal battery would also have been a useful feature.

By way of compensation however, a few years later PC gamers could enjoy the FM synthesis of the Sound Blaster card or the PCM-based sounds of sound modules like the Roland Sound Canvas. A lot of PC game soundtracks from that era have aged very well and have become classics in their own right.

It was possible for a TV channel to encode a small amount of data in the vertical blanking period between video frames - this is how subtitles were transmitted, for example. Teletext exploited this feature by encoding entire pages of text into that interval, each with a three digit page number. When the user requested a particular page number through the remote control, the TV set would wait a few seconds until the corresponding page was transmitted, then render it. More expensive TVs would have enough RAM to cache the pages ahead of time, so page access would be instant.

It was essentially like having a text-only version of the web built into your TV, but back in the 80s. TV channels would broadcast the data for the pages in the gaps between video frames and a TV with the appropriate decoder would cache the data and use it to build up the complete set of pages, which you would then access by pressing the "text" button on your remote control. Each TV channel would broadcast its own Teletext service, with most channels offering a mixture of news, sport, entertainment etc.

It sounds (and looks) primitive by modern standards, but it was actually a wonderful technology that worked perfectly well for its intended purpose and was very information-dense. Sadly, we lost Teletext in the UK during the changeover from analogue to digital TV, but I think it's still alive in a number of countries.

I work in a legacy codebase (in PHP, not Perl) where the previous developer often wrote functions to be excessively flexible with regards to their parameters - many of the parameters are optional, some of them behave differently depending on whether they're passed as strings, integers or booleans, arrays can be passed as either flat or associative arrays, etc.

I'm sure he thought he was making his functions easier to reuse in different contexts but in practice the actual result is that it's impossible to modify any of those functions without considering _every possible_ combination of parameters that could be passed in. Often what should be a simple fix becomes something much more time consuming.

There is a place for flexibility in software design, but the parameter list of a function is not one of those places in my opinion.

I've never written Perl code, but I'm going to make a wild stab in the dark here and guess that the "flexibility" you're talking about involves putting the `shift` keyword half way down the function body, putting it inside `if` statements, putting it inside loops etc?

If so, that's not the kind of flexibility I ever want to see in a programming language.

There are two windowing systems on Linux - the old one and the new one.

GUI toolkits are irrelevant to games.

Just about everyone in the UK defines a billion to be 10^9. I've heard about the 10^12 definition but never encountered anyone who uses it - I think it must have been an older usage that fell out of favour.

But your app reached the point of popularity before you started needing to worry about provisioning and maintaining the infrastructure for it? That sounds like a win to me.

You're ignoring GP's "busting their ass" observation, which is probably key to this. No-one is going to hire someone to write or direct a movie based on their having a degree from some institution. It's either going to be because of their track record in the industry (because they busted their ass at the start of their career and had some lucky breaks) or because they have the right connections (so, nepotism). So I'd say GP's observation is right on the nose. Some successful filmmakers may have an undergraduate or postgraduate degree in a relevant subject, but their success in the industry has almost nothing to do with that qualification. Which raises the question of why anyone in their right mind would pay Columbia six figures to get such a degree, especially since their own faculty appear to be industry failures.

Based on your industry experience, which high-profile filmmakers owe their careers to posessing an MFA degree?

He did edit his comment, but unfortunately didn't acknowledge the edit.

Did you mean to write HAVING in your first query? Otherwise your second query is not equivalent to the first, because the WHERE will not be performed prior to the aggregation.

The biases must be subtle indeed if you are unable to describe one and have to resort instead to an absurd thought experiment.

So is "STEM degree". Perhaps we should stop recruiting anyone with a STEM background?

Node is required for a lot of modern webdev tooling because (a) Node and NPM are usually bundled together and (b) people who write tools for JS development usually like to write the tools in JS too.

You've never inherited a terrible, unmaintainable React or Angular app? I have on multiple occasions, and in fact my team is dealing with one right now. I'd prefer a jQuery mess to an Angular/React mess any day of the week. With old-school jQuery apps, at least I can get them to build and can debug the control flow.

The BBC News website similarly disables comments on any article that's even remotely controversial. While some would undoubtedly consider that a good thing to protect the quality of the conversation, I'm not so sure myself. UK citizens are forced by law to fund the BBC through what is effectively a tax on television ownership. In addition, the BBC's takes on certain issues are known to be quite out of step with the feelings of the majority of the UK population. Allowing the BBC to selectively disable comments on such articles, which are forcibly funded by the people who might like to comment on them, seems wrong on some level. I'd rather the BBC removed commenting across the entire site than have the power to remove comments on specific articles they know are going to result in disagreement.

Trackers allow note data to be annotated with various "effects", triggered via special codes. Some of these effects are things like pitch bends and filter adjustments, which can easily be done in any sequencer. However, effects like retriggering the current sample from an arbitrary offset or rapidly alternating notes in an arpeggio are fairly unique to the tracker workflow. It's not that you can't make those sounds in a conventional DAW, it's just that you probably wouldn't in practice.

It's a terrible thing to say, but many young women today, if judged by the same standards as men, would be considered losers. They have nothing going on in their own lives, yet have sky-high expectations of what men are supposed to provide them. And for the most part, modern dating culture lets them get away with it.