tomca32

Wing Commander II was just amazing. Had a long, fairly well thought out story with meaningful twists, emotional moments, tension and accompanies by a great soundtrack.

I will see you in heaven.

Some remastered bits of soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJD6YpHD5O0&list=PLFB7GcAB-z...

The problem is that if anything can be undefined, then you don't really have a big typing advantage over regular JavaScript.

It's just like being in Java land where typing adds a lot of boilerplate to the code, but you still have to do null checks everywhere.

Oh I’m not sure what you mean but certainly sounds interesting. Can you expand a bit on Atwood and Spolsky’s influence on hiring?

> but you can bet lots of people will be more attracted to someone who looks young with a full head of hair compared to someone who has typical male pattern baldness

I think there are just as many people who are attracted to a guy with a shaved head.

I don't have personal experiences with it, but from observing a couple of friends who shave their head, it doesn't seem to me that they are less successful sexually/romantically.

I disagree. When you jump ship you don’t need to build track record to get a promotion but instead join at a higher level right away.

I’m a staff engineer at my current company. In my whole career I never once got a promotion.

Oh man, it warms my heart to see this here. I grew up reading Alan Ford and had a collection of over 200 comics.

These comics were so massively influential in old Yugoslavia that it's common to hear people quote them all the time. Something about the dark, cynical humor just made them perfect for the Balkans mentality.

I moved to the US around 10 years ago. Seeing this just made me feel so incredibly nostalgic.

I really don't have a feeling design systems are a hard sell unlike almost all other internal tools. It's the only internal tool I have seen that is consistently present at the vast majority of companies I have worked at.

I also don't think they are ever worth the investment.

That's a great discussion, thanks for the link.

Yeah I guess the calling it a cultural continuation of Rome is wrong.

It's kind of hard to describe this in words because "culture" implies so many things like language, customs, and religion. The "Turkish Rome" didn't really inherit any of those traits.

However, while this probably originated just as a manufactured claim, a casus belli for the Roman lands, over time it seems to have still evolved into something a bit more. Owning Constantinople didn't make people Roman in terms of culture, but it did make them an empire. Sulatane of Rum existed next to Rome for many years and seems to have considered itself a "better Rome than existing Rome".

Makes me think of a parallel with the Holy Roman Empire, which similarly clung on to the title, but not the culture of Rome.

I think “Islamic Invasions” is a bit too broad of a term. You are referencing the Ottoman Turks specifically.

The funny thing is that Ottomans saw this whole event through a very different lens. They didn’t call themselves the Ottomans or Turks. They, along with their predecessors The Sultanate of Rum (Rome), and the Seljuks, considered themselves the continuation of the Roman Empire.

After the conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II crowned himself the Caesar of the Roman Empire.

Turks waged a war of expansion to reclaim the Roman Empire for themselves. The religion was just a side effect.

I don't know. I never tried doing that. Amazon is pretty useless in Croatia so that probably wouldn't work, but there might be some prepaid cards that would.

I don't know, haven't explored that option honestly.

That's a fair comment. I don't use Transferwise, rather just wire money via Chase Bank to an IBAN account. You are right that there is an intermediary bank involved in the process.

Also yes, within Europe, an IBAN to IBAN transfer is pretty much instantaneous. However US is not in the IBAN system, so that's a different story.

There are probably multiple reasons why the transfer takes a week, but the spirit of my comment was that an hour long (at worst) transaction time for BTC is actually very fast if you look at it through the international money transfer lens.

I live and work in the US, but originally I'm from Croatia. I wire money every month to my family back there.

It takes 5 work days for the wire to fully clear. Since 5 days is a full work week, it almost always bleeds over to the weekend and in reality takes 7 days.

BTC might still be a terrible system for international transactions but it's still 168 times faster than the one that exists now.

> Maybe only those who lived in his era can understand who he was and that's about it. Everything else is a nice story created by professionals.

This seems to imply that the myth of Senna's greatness was created after his death, which I don't think is true. The myth was already there while he was alive. People worshipped Senna and many considered him the best driver in history of F1. A lot of this is due to his natural character as a good showman, high charisma and a sense of what people would like.

However, a part of that myth was true. He did have an incredible ability to turn a certain loss into a win: - Winning a race after his gears failed. Once, his car got stuck in the highest gear, couldn't switch to a lower one and still won - Consistently winning in Monaco, one of the most difficult racing track - Consistently winning in shitty, rainy conditions

I'd say it's more those things that created a legend out of him. Always being perceived as an underdog, and he often was, and still managing to win.

I've been involved with some non-profit organizations that do work in post conflict countries, mostly Africa.

From my experience, these organizations throw parties because they have to. This is how non-profits fundraise. I don't think there is a non-profit organization on the planet that has a significant impact and is funded only by small individual donations. Money is raised by throwing a party, presenting all the great work you're doing, and getting rich people drunk so they either give you right there and then or secure you a meeting with someone who will on the spot.

These events are funded by your small donations.

This sounds like a horrible amount of overhead, and it is, but that's how the world works. Most NGOs will say they have very small overhead, something silly like 5%, but that's because they don't count fundraising as overhead, or they put fundraising events into "programming" which again doesn't count as overhead.

That’s a great piece thanks!

You're right. After doing some research I could actually pull it off, but it would be pretty tight.

There's some decent insurance options for ~$700/mo. That's still $8400/yr. With $60k/yr income, that might still be doable but I don't think it's realistic on a $30k budget.

I wish this was true but it isn’t. The main reason I cannot do this is because health insurance is prohibitively expensive. The main reason I have to continue working is because I’m a T1 diabetic and I need to have health coverage.

Although, even without diabetes I still would want to have health coverage.

> Lots of good stuff in here, including much more support for using UUIDs as PKs.

I missed this. Going through the changelogs the only thing I found is support case-insensitivity for pg UUID types. Is that what you meant?

I really think that not supporting UUID PKs is one of biggest issues with Rails. You can go around it and maybe even use a gem for it, but that's still a bit risky.

Interesting, I never connected "viteaz" with viking. "Vitez" is a word that in many Slavic languages means "knight". In Hungarian it's "Vitéz".

A short trip down wikipedia and wiktionary leads me to Proto Slavic word vitędzь https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/v...

And indeed, there it is: > Based on the ethnonym Proto-Germanic *wīkingaz (whence Old Norse víkingr (“bay's dweller”)).

I was a bit skeptical about your claim, but you were indeed right. Thanks for the little history and etymology lesson.

This is such a common scam that I really think it should be taught in schools.

Whenever you hear someone propose to give you a check in return for you depositing your cash directly somewhere, it is always a scam, always. There is no legitimate reason anyone would ever do this, and I've seen it happen multiple times to multiple people, and even to small charity organizations that almost went bankrupt because of this.

We need some sort of anti-scam class in like high school or something. Just the ability to recognize the most common scams in the world would protect a lot of people.

I was very skeptical about Stadia until a friend made me try it so we could play Destiny together.

Totally blew me away. I still can't believe I'm streaming a fast paced shooter game in multiplayer and it works without a hitch.

Makes sense it's taken for granted since health care is expensive as hell so people expect the service to be good if they pay for it.

Same thing happened in Croatia in the 90s. Silly words were introduced and then people made up even sillier words to make fun of it leading to insanities like:

- čigrasto pamtilo "peg-top-like memorizer" for a floppy disk

- čigrasto velepamtilo "peg-top-like big memorizer" for a hard disk

- stolno potezalo - "tabletop pull-arounder" for a mouse

After a while, nobody was certain what was a real term and what was a joke one, so most of it is abandoned now and mostly English terms are used.

Great job!

People often insist that JS is necessary for interactivity, and it really, really isn't. You can create interactive web experiences without JS, and just add sprinkles of it when it makes sense.

"Basics" are more than enough for the vast majority of web content.

I have some personal experience on this subject.

When I was growing up, my country got engulfed into a pretty rough war. We went through air raids, bombings, artillery strikes, and a bunch of people died. I'm sure all the adults were freaking out and just spent all the day thinking how best to survive. My city wasn't hit that hard, but we still had some rough moments.

However, during the was I was young enough to not understand the seriousness of the situation. I liked Rambo movies, and for me running to a shelter, while the air raid sirens were blasting, was just an incredibly exciting experience. I had absolutely zero fear, and didn't truly understand why were my parents freaking out.

Kids are stupid.

Oh yes. My father had a massive collection of those magazines. He was a hobbyist programmer at that time and I think in one of Svet Kompjutera, he got a review of his software: https://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0008074

Interesting. I have no way of knowing, but my guess would be that your experience is a consequence of Yugoslavia starting to break apart. All out war started just 2 years after your trip.

A big part of Yugoslavia's budget came from tourism, so I don't think your experience was common in the years before the breakup.

Thanks for sharing though. I love hearing stories from Yugo history.

Keep in mind that Yugoslavia was a completely different thing during the cold war. It was a communist country that was not part of the Comintern, or the Warsaw pact. It, in fact, had open borders with the west.

This caused it to be in a much better place economically than the rest of the communist world.

There's an old nostalgic american tourist piece about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRnCnO1Y2c&has_verified=1

Funny to see those are referred to in English as "Spomeniks". After living in the US for a decade, looking at this definitely brings an incredible feeling of nostalgia.

Damn it. I want to go back in time, and back to Sarajevo.

Hey Mary, Tomislav here from the 2013 summer batch. Just wanted to let you know it was an absolute pleasure learning from you at HS. You're a wonderful teacher and I learned a ton. Thanks!