I worked at a company in the early 1990s that ran its business on an IBM System/36. It was basically a System/360 but one tenth of the size and expense! This was the only minicomputer I ever encountered, and I was not responsible for it. I was there to work on the "micros" (Windows PCs). I remember the System/36 programmer making comments about PC techs not being "real" computer operators or programmers. She was nearing retirement at that time, and if she is still alive I imagine she is enjoying a comfortable pension.
Unpopular opinion(?): online medical information should be inaccessible to the common person. It should be journal papers full of jargon, behind paywalls, and otherwise restricted. Laymen can't handle medical information. They use it to self-diagnose, or worse, diagnose others. They use it to question doctors because the doctor's advice doesn't match their Google-fu. Ridiculous sites like WebMD make it worse. WebMD will tell you that you have cancer no matter what you search. I sympathize with those in the health care system who are too busy, and those who are waiting for care. But giving the public a bunch of misinformation with which to shoot their feet seems like the wrong approach. (Anecdotal: I live with a Google warrior who distrusts all doctors because they think their understanding of medicine is superior.)
It was a time of, frankly, reckless engineering and hubris, though with great results. Challenger taught us a lesson. They pushed ahead into disaster due to ego. NASA won't do that again.
> Everything is crypto "web 3" bubble, fintech, or recruiters being very vague about "unicorn" startups
Everything? No, you're looking in the shiny techy places. Counterintuitively, interesting tech jobs are found in boring, established sectors. Get on the boring, common sites like LinkedIn and Indeed. Consider healthcare, automotive (not Tesla, but Ford), or even higher ed. If you want interesting, and not just a big fat paycheck, these are the kinds of places you will find interesting work, make a difference, and see an impact.
ping and traceroute used to be very useful tools. Then for a period of time -- maybe still ongoing -- sysadmins and some network security folks decided that by blocking ALL ICMP at their network edge, they were increasing security. (Wrong!) As a result, you get hanging traceroutes with one or two hops left and you can't use ping to verify a host is online. Worse, blocking all ICMP breaks things like MTU discovery along the path. Recently I have seen admins coming to their senses and unblocking ICMP, but it's still an old rule-of-thumb held by many.
I found blogging to be too open-ended. I need some prompting, and I found that by participating in topical forums related to my interests and expertise. When someone would pose a problem or ask a question, I would dig into the threads that interested me a lot and found great satisfaction in working with anyone to solve an interesting problem.
After a few years of this I have become known in some of these communities as an expert, have received requests for paid work, have been referred for paid work, and have absolutely learned a lot.
My only tip if you take this direction is to find community forums that are specific -- not Reddit. Reddit has too many casual browsers and commenters and is not well-regulated. Participate in forums that are more professionally oriented or have a professional feel. If you see a lot of troll posts, don't waste your time.
I think there's a finesse to it where the bigger company can in many ways adopt the smaller company culture, leave it alone, or bring in their own unique and not bad culture. Big != sucks, necessarily. Some of the other comments have insightful examples.
I'm sorry I wrote it in such a way to give you that idea. I fully agree with "explicitly nurture [growth and expertise] in the environment you create."
> HTG: So let’s go the opposite way now. What did you do “wrong” at Atari that people could learn from today?
> Bushnell: I think that I—how do I put this without sounding like an asshole? I put up with incompetence more than I should have. I should have been quicker to fire.
I feel two ways about this. You need to give people time to grow into a role and time to get really good at it. But you also need to watch closely and make sure that growth and expertise are occurring, and if not, get better people in. This is delicate. I think most orgs err on the side of grace. And the ones that err on the side of "asshole" and just do a lot of firing are also doing it wrong.
CF is the only company I have ever seen that can have an outage and get pages of praise for it. I don't have any (current) use for CloudFlare's products but I would love to see the culture that makes them praiseworthy spread to other companies.
In my state, annual automobile safety inspections are required. I have always been suspicious of this because naturally the auto shop doing the inspection offers to repair any flaws they discover. In most cases, the safety issues are obvious (thin tire treads, worn brakes, rust damage) so if you have a little bit of understanding you can verify the shop's claims and seek repairs elsewhere if the cost is too high.
I had to switch dentists last year due to my former, excellent dentist closing his practice. I had heard of these kinds of stories. I knew I had a cracked filling (my old dentist had told me so) and his advice on a previous visit was "you should get it fixed some time, but it's not urgent." When my new dentist also identified the cracked filling and said exactly the same thing, I figured he was not out to rip me off, or else he would have said it was an urgent problem requiring a filling or even root canal therapy.
IE may have been problematic from a tech point of view, but I'll eulogize that IE was important in advancing the web. The OS-integrated browser meant that in 1995, users had a full Internet stack readily available on their home PCs -- the widespread launch of Web 1.0. Later, IE was the pioneer of XMLHttpRequest, the beginning of Web 2.0. For these, we can say thanks, Microsoft! (for everything else, see other comments)
Why is industry-driven an issue? And compared to what others? On the contrary, SIP is as readable and understandable as HTTP. Someone who understands HTTP can learn SIP-based VoIP quite easily using their software/web background without needing a telecoms background.
It would have required much forethought to predict, in 2002, that realtime communications would be happening in the browser. Thus WebRTC was born. But a tragedy of WebRTC is that it is not by-default compatible with SIP. WebRTC authors could have specified SIP as the signaling protocol over websocket, but they left the spec open ended. I feel two ways about this: glad for choice, but disappointed that the choice most often made does not allow for interop with the "legacy" realtime communications protocol, SIP.
Many VoIP providers have ordering systems that let you do vanity searches, and some have APIs. Twilio is one. You can put down a few dollars to start an account, buy a number, and then immediately port it away to a mobile carrier if you like.
Sorry, I don't get it. Looking at the source tree, there's a folder of html. So you're compiling it down to a single binary, for what purpose? If you love golang, run caddy and point it to a folder of html.
GNU isn't the only Free (not to mention free) philosophy in town. I believe it to be the only one whose licenses start out in a combative posture, e.g. "The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast,..." (Is this claim even true?)
I believe in Free Software and I also believe in positive, cooperative attitudes, which is not the attitude that GNU puts forth.
I sympathize with the author. At the same time, reading a post like this reminds me how out of touch we in the SV/tech realm are. "Boring" here is quite relative, and folks living more average lives would find this kind of attitude to be crazy. Boring? You're healthy, get out sometimes, have hobbies, have written software, have written more than one-line drivel on the web... this is boring? I would call it an attitude or feeling borne out of tech privilege.
For those of us in the VoIP industry, VoWiFi offers no surprises. The phone establishes an IPSEC tunnel back to the provider for secure calling using the SIP/IMS stack. Much of the time when I am at home and not planning to go out, I turn on airplane mode then enable WiFi. Calling, SMS, MMS, etc. all work fine. It's a battery saver.
Star Trek demonstrates the changing times pretty well.
For the Original Series, the producers were just starting to explore color television and they used the whole pallette.
1990s Star Trek feels more "natural" to me: warm where you expect warmth (ship's crew quarters, hot planets), cool where you expect cool (Borg ship), fairly neutral otherwise, though some of the sets did have an office-park vibe to them.
Current Star Trek, specifically Discovery and Picard, are about as gray-blue and washed-out as ever.
It's not my software. I'm trying it out and actually like it quite a lot for its capabilities. This code of conduct statement is kind of brash but you can see why when you browse their demo site at http://uncensored.citadel.org. I would guess it has been irreverent (but not irrelevant) since the beginning.
In my part of the US, a temporary structure does not require a permit or zoning allowance, while a permanent structure does. When we build sheds to meet the "temporary" definition, they are built on top of cinderblocks and not a poured concrete foundation. In this case, the author built his shed directly on top of his patio, so I am curious whether this would be considered a permanent or temporary installation.
Not only do you do very little work and get rewarded nicely for it, you post about your laziness on HN and get rewarded for it through praise and upvotes. Obviously you are doing well for yourself. But I am glad I do not work with you.