mwfunk

I assume the responses are from people who didn't know that and are now offended that they would've flubbed what the interviewer considered common knowledge in their field. I could see someone thinking it's not a relevant question for certain types of positions, but anyone getting defensive about it is a little bit of a red flag. Anyone doing development relying on location services or navigation systems should have a general baseline intuition for how those things work, even if it's only the broadest strokes. If someone feels angry about not knowing this, well congratulations, you now know this and no longer have anything to get defensive about.

Babbage's eccentricities and loopier thoughts were always more interesting to me than his writing about the things he's better known for. I read this many years ago but for some reason the part that stuck with me the most was a surprisingly long stretch articulating all the different ways in which organ grinder monkeys were public menaces. His loathing of street musicians was comical but the degree of spite specifically reserved for organ grinder monkeys took it to the next level.

It's been a while since I read it, but I definitely got the sense that that was very much how he felt and he wasn't playing it up for comedy. He wasn't the most likable or relatable guy but he certainly was passionate.

Agreed. It's only broken if there were some ideal Utopian open source world that we were falling short of, where if only everyone can work out some issues, then that world will come into existence.

When people are growing up it's easy to get swept up in ideas like, "if only everyone saw things the way I did, everything would be perfect and so much better than it is right now".

There will always be lots of conflicting ideas about how software should be developed and distributed and so far none of them have proven so effective that all of the others have fallen by the wayside. IMO the best anyone can do is advocate for whatever makes the most sense to them, but not make the mistake of thinking that anyone has all the answers.

I think another big part of it is, the conspiracy theorists only need one paper that agrees with them to instantly say the gazillions of papers that disagree with them are wrong. So even one redacted paper is more important to them than all other scholarship.

Fun fact: in the UK they call it marhs!

Yeah there was no one even remotely credible up against him. If some insane radio host is the best anyone can come up with, I'll take the possibly shady professional politician any day. Whatever his other issues, Newsom isn't a nutjob and increasing the dysfunction of local government even more by electing a nutjob isn't going to help anyone.

Literally the worst thing I've ever heard about Newsom is that he used to date Kimberly Gilfoyle, an actual complete and total nutjob. Newsom's competition in the election were the kind of people who think Gilfoyle is a totally normal and sane human being and enjoyed her speech at the GOP convention last year.

Really the entire personal computer industry's early success was due to VisiCalc, followed by Lotus 1-2-3. Likewise for WordStar, then WordPerfect. It was the first thing I ever heard referred to in the press as a "killer app", which I think of every time someone here makes the claim that nobody called applications "apps" before the iOS App Store.

People need to be absolutely fearless about looking stupid. Whether or not you look stupid at any given moment is an imponderable, an unanswerable question. The fear of looking stupid is more paranoia and insecurity than anything else. As long as you do your absolute very best to communicate to other people, even when that's difficult or impossible, that's the only thing that matters. If someone else decides you're an idiot you have no control over it, and if you're truly doing your best to communicate then someone else dismissing you as stupid is on them.

What's much more self-destructive than being afraid of looking stupid is feeling like you need to look like you know 100% of what is going on at all times- this inevitably leads to bullshitting and half-truths and weird circuitous conversations where it's unclear who actually knows what. Never try to conceal ignorance. People who matter and people who you actually would want to work with and work for would never judge someone for admitting ignorance or asking questions. People who don't matter, and people no one would want to work with or for are the ones who get on someone's case for asking what they think is a stupid question.

You don't search for locations with HTTP, any more than a shipping company searches for addresses to deliver to. The problem with bad metaphors is it derails discussion, which I am arguably doing with this comment.

Yeah it's literally just a short list of companies that people see as being the big kahunas of the tech industry. In the '80s it would've been Intel, Microsoft, IBM, and maybe even companies like Lotus or WordPerfect. In the '90s it would've been more like, Intel, Microsoft, AOL, Sun, maybe Oracle, maybe still IBM? Hell maybe even Ebay. Lots of those companies are still around but the ones that are tend to be more mature, less volatile, and less influential on the rest of the industry now, and get correspondingly less press.

But yeah, that's all FAANG is and I'm amazed anyone thinks it's anything more standardized or meaningful or precisely defined. It's shorthand for the biggest and most influential companies in the tech industry at the moment, at least from the perspective of people on the outside looking in. If someone wants to the throw an M into FAANG I totally get it.

As long as "money" means "everyone's money" and not "money for oligarchs", then that's infinitely better than what nations and empires have historically been built on: ethnicity, religion, geography, tribal identity, etc. You basically described every modern nation since 1776, and explained the purpose of international trade agreements. Governments (ideally) exist to allow everyone to coexist and peacefully do business with each other and not hurt each other, and ideally the only points of contention are drawing the lines at which people are considering to be hurting one another. Ideally. In practice everyone falls short of course, but that's why ideals exist, to have goals to try to live up to.

Exactly. People can't do anything to ensure success, but they can definitely ensure failure. All anyone can do is the best they can, so that when and if lucky opportunities arise, they can capitalize on those opportunities.

Same thing with dating. There are no magic words or social skills to ensure that the person someone likes, will like them back. There are lots of ways to ensure failure, but no way to ensure success. Ultimately we're all at the mercy of other people to a degree, and that's the way it should be because we're all in it together. All we can do is make reasonable efforts to be the best versions of ourselves we can be, and accept that many things are beyond our control but we'll do our best anyway.

If someone's going to whip out ancient slang like 'sweathog', at least use it right. It's either an overpaid/underworked caricature of a union worker used in anti-union propaganda, or it's the gang from Welcome Back Kotter. That's pretty much it.

Correction: also a band from 1971.

I would imagine that many or most (or all?) OpenBSD developers consider the Apache license less than ideal but GPLv3 counterproductive or even malicious. Not a tough choice from that perspective. I'm not advocating for or against anything, just stating common reasoning amongst BSD folks.

If those are the only things that makes someone happy (it's not necessarily; all people are different, but let's say those are the basic needs at work here), and they aren't getting either of those things, then they can either give up become shut-ins and stay on that trajectory, or they can do everything they can to figure out how become the kind of person they want to be, or at least become a happier or wiser person. Those are the options, perpetually keep trying to become a better version of one's self more capable of happiness (and maybe failing, and probably having some miserable experiences on the way), or give up (and definitely fail, 100% of the time, right out of the gate). Or suicide I guess, but giving up is basically suicide with an exceptionally long and pointless epilogue.

Once somebody gives up, from that point on they are no longer victims but the cause of their own problems. It sucks and it's not fair, but adult life can really suck and is definitely not fair. We only get one shot at it so might as well go out trying to do best we can.

That seems unfortunate but reasonable. I don’t begrudge anyone making that choice, and I don’t begrudge anyone thinking their prices are too high (and I don’t begrudge anyone buying their stuff anyway because they think something’s cool). I was way more concerned about the claim that they lied about it and were scamming their customers somehow, but so far there’s no evidence of that.

I haven't heard about this. Were they busted lying about supply chain issues as an excuse to raise prices? Their stuff is pricey but cool, but if it's documented that they lied about that, that would be hard to get past.

My day-to-day Linux usage was mostly in the '90s and 2000s, but back then anything related to power management was just like that. Like, power management stuff was generally implemented and available, but often disabled by default because it was only 99% reliable when it needed to be 99.99999% reliable.

Back then the consensus was that it's a really hard problem for all sorts of reasons (including but not limited to proprietary hardware, crappy hardware, etc.), which of course it is, but that given a few years and the shallowness of all bugs under the collective eyeballs of the entire Linux community it was inevitable that it would eventually become rock solid. I just remember a lot of people being really really really insistent about it, and when sophomore CS undergrads on Slashdot are really insistent about things being true then you know it must be true. I'm seeing the same advice here today, so you're in luck! Give it a couple years, it'll be fine. Either that or "Windows doesn't do it that great either". Either that or "nobody actually needs to use power management features and if you do you are computering wrong". Either that or "I've never had a single problem with power management on Linux but I've had tons of problems with it on macOS and Windows so there!" Aren't you glad you asked?!?

I"m sure it was matching funds for an employee donation.

Yuppies? Is this 1982? I wonder what the Reagan Democrats or the Moral Majority think. Or the preps or the goths, why not just go straight to high school cliques. I heard the varsity kids were sticking their nose up at cryptocurrency but the A-kids and the theater kids were totally into it, maybe they're on to something. Don't listen to the conformists, sheeple!

I don't understand anyone complaining about the UN not having teeth. The purpose of the UN was never to be a 'one world government', that's just propaganda from the black helicopter people. The purpose of the UN is to provide a forum for the member nations. That's it.

Unrelated, but anecdotally whenever I hear someone going off on the UN for being toothless, they're usually the same people would be first in line to push back on giving it teeth.

For example, I've personally known many people from a certain country (not America, although that probably applies too) that has a terrible human rights record, that has frequently gotten called out in the UN by fellow members. They'll roll their eyes and talk about how useless and toothless the UN is. But they don't want it to be more effective; in their case they have bad feelings towards the UN because of its complaints about their own country's human rights record. They can't or don't want to defend their country against those complaints, so their nationalism requires them to instead attack the messenger (the UN). And ironically, the very thing they attack it for is its inability to enforce its will on their own country.

Long story short, there's a lot of stuff to complain about when it comes to the UN, but anecdotally it sure seems like most of the complaints about its toothlessness comes from people who want it to go away altogether, not people who want to give it more teeth. I don't think I've ever heard anyone (including pro-UN people) argue that it should have more teeth or evolve into a supergovernment or anything. It always has been a forum and a means for governments to cooperate on shared interests, which is fine and is surely a good thing.

It's been said many times here over the past few years, and it'll get said a lot right here today, but rule of thumb: never enable WiFi on a TV except maybe temporarily to do an update or something. And even then only if it's absolutely necessary. Get a Roku or an Apple TV or a game console or whatever you want for watching streaming services. Never use what's built in to the TV, not just for privacy reasons but because it always seems to be a terrible experience compared to running Hulu, Netflix, etc. on anything else. But for privacy too- the TV companies were incredibly egregious about privacy years ago and AFAICT it's only gotten worse since then.

If you lived in a big city there'd be a gazillion places within 10-15 minutes that you could drive to without dealing with traffic or parking issues, assuming you're not talking about SF or Manhattan. Even with high-density places like those, depending on where you lived there might be a gazillion places within a 10-15 minute walk. The people that live in those cities still enjoy getting stuff delivered though, for the same reason that people in small towns do (time is money and convenience is time, so if you have more money than time, it can be totally worth it).

Agreed, marketing (and everyone, really) needs at least rough estimates. Software is notoriously hard to predict. As time goes on, estimates get updated as more is known about the problem and the org's ability to solve it. So, by definition the first estimate anyone makes at the beginning is the least reliable one, by a long shot, but it's something to start with that gets refined as time goes on.

I think where companies can get in trouble with software is when the initial rough estimate somehow gets blessed as the plan of record to cement in everyone else's critical path, and subsequent estimates are treated as engineering screwups rather than more informed predictions. I don't know what the solution is, because stuff like this can happen with everyone involved being super competent and having the best intentions. And sometimes there are engineering screwups, neither side is always blameless.

Power imbalances between organizations are where natural creative conflicts go bad. In a less healthy company, whichever org is on top politically tends to be blameless, whether it's fair or not, which ultimately hurts everyone's ability to do their best work because conflicts between orgs are less likely to be resolved based on what's best for the company or project as a whole. In ideal companies, orgs are balanced such that they can push back on each other for good reasons, but not for zero-sum, shit-rolling-downhill reasons. I'm pretty sure ideal companies only exist briefly or never though.

This is the thing: you can always tell when people come from utterly useless propaganda bubbles by 2 huge red flags:

(1) They don't understand the difference between editorial content and reporting, because the media outlets they follow do their best to blur the distinction, all the way down to not even making a distinction organizationally or professionally, and making it seem like more legitimate sources of information don't make that distinction either. So the biggest red flag is that they don't even realize that there are professional standards and practices for keeping those things separate, and they don't understand things like fact checking or there being burdens of proof applied before something considered news reporting is published. To them, editorial content and news reporting are the same thing, with the same minimal burden of proof, because those are the nonexistent standards of literally every source of "information" they have.

(2) They think that when a media outlet voluntarily issues corrections (not from a lawsuit or threat of a lawsuit), that it's a sign that that outlet is less reliable than the places they go that never ever issue corrections unless legally forced to. The reality is completely flipped around, but that's their mentality. Culturally, that dovetails with "never admit being wrong" and "never apologize", which are ideals that resonate REALLY REALLY hard with people in these propaganda bubbles. The lack of accountability makes them trust untrustworthy sources even more, not less. Accountability makes them trust trustworthy sources less, not more.

I would add (3), how they react if they find out that something they themselves put out there isn't true. Watch what happens if they find out something they posted objectively isn't true. Instead of retracting it, they'll say something like, "well it doesn't matter, the meaning of the message is the same", or "well it doesn't matter the fake news media does it all the time". Which is the exact same thing that pathological liars and con artists say when their lies are exposed- that everyone does it, and maybe even that they are victims of hypocrites for being called out on it, because they assume the people calling them out surely lie about stuff all the time too. They're always looking for excuses to do worse, not better, and for excuses to think of themselves as victims, and for any possible reason to lower the bar for themselves rather than raise it for everyone.

There's gobs of intelligence on what was about to happen, what was happening, and what might yet be about to happen, all out there in the open on social media. I'm way more worried about the complete and utter lack of using existing intelligence that was served up on a silver platter and continues to be. That completely destroys any argument for expanding surveillance right there, without even considering human rights or legal angles. If they can't even act on what's given to them, or what they already know, maybe that should get the laser focus for the indefinite future.

It's absolutely framebuffer here. Games that draw directly to the framebuffer. I assume they meant sprite-based games that don't require 3D drivers, for example.

No, there are not disparagement clauses in the US tech industry, and if any company has them then they deserve to be utterly roasted from now until the end of time. Please make HN posts about each company with a disparagement clause so everyone here knows which companies to avoid. It'll be the easiest Internet points you'll ever make, and you'll be doing a public service.

They're in the premium market segment, not the luxury segment. They're analogous to BMW or Audi, whereas the luxury segment of the auto world (for example) is more the Bentleys and Rolls Royces. It's an important distinction because premium markets are very different from luxury markets.

Premium products are more expensive than mass market products, typically with higher margins, but at the same time they tend to have greater value for the price than mass market products, provided the price isn't out of reach. Luxury products are much more exotic than premium, with much lower sales numbers, and their price is often almost entirely based on things like scarcity, manually intensive assembly, use of precious metals, etc.

A well-designed premium product should be as good or better than the equivalent mass market product in terms of getting what you pay for, but in the luxury world there's really no concept of value. It's expensive because it has to be and because the vendor wants it to be, but the value proposition is often nonexistent.

This is a well known phenomenon :) The best way to get closer to family is to move away, absence makes the heart grow fonder. If you want to have positive and constructive and long-lasting relationships with your family, move away from them, even if it's just an hour (whether that means an hour drive or a different time zone depends on the family).