I'm curious about this. How many years ago was this, and would you be willing to divulge the general vicinity of the neighbourhood you rented or lived in?
MkI was the absolute best tool to do that one thing. Respectfully, MkII compromises on manual control to an unacceptable degree for my usage and an investment in education for beginners along with dumbing down the UI with explicit text labels (the font is indeed nice, but why do things with clean and clear iconography need these additional labels?) is not what I'd consider part of "that one thing". Of course, these issues could be fixed in the future, at which point I'd gladly eat my words.
"Full manual control" is somewhat crippled in Mk II (it switches back to Auto every time I switch back cameras) as well as removing the ability to pin ISO down when making use of tap autoexposure (there is no option but to have both exposure length and ISO adjusted now). Manually adjusting exposure length also sometimes leads to it getting "stuck" on long values like 1/2 or 1/1 far longer than Mk I ever did. I get that they think their new Auto mode is better, but in general this was a bug-infested and unwelcome surprise update for my usage of the app (getting maximum quality raw images out of my phone mounted to a small tripod.) None of this would be an issue if I had any way of opting out of this generous "upgrade" I couldn't refuse. UI fit and finish has also degraded significantly from my subjective POV and the large potential scope of future feature updates make me pessimistically assume that the app will continue to fail to be particularly well tested. If the devs are still listening I'd gladly pay (again) just to have the MkI app back, if money is what they want.
You clearly don't work for one of the ones that grant 7 figure salaries. I'm not saying they're common or that any engineer can aspire to achieve one, I'm saying they exist, I've seen it first hand, and I don't understand why it's so hard for you to accept they exist. Nothing in your comment constitutes novel insight to me, and neither of us have a good measure as to which of us have more credibility than the other, but I suspect you're just judging based on your own narrow experience.
Edit, just for more context I'm speaking of FAANG level companies here and very rare individual unicorn engineers who have been specifically hired into these kinds of positions for past achievements that have impact across the whole industry. I would agree with your general skepticism in any other context.
Yes, but if this engineer's achievements are well known, competition between companies is what drives crazy comp because they are seen more like a strategic asset rather than another engineer. They wouldn't quite be a low-level employee, these unicorn ICs often report directly to middle management or above. I'm surprised how little industry experience some of these commenters seem to have given that it's HN.
People who see it happen don't even have enough hard details to confirm it to themselves aside from the fact that they're witnessing it firsthand. The best I can do, for example, is to say that at FB I worked with someone who was very well known as a very highly ranked IC, and that the comp in the band he was known to be in is astronomical (1m+ annually). Another factor is that we don't want to dox ourselves by giving out biographical details that would otherwise have built a case. This particular engineer had built foundations of particular unprecedented things within industry with enormous current relevance, even to laymen, before acquiring their current rank. I can't get more specific than that, but $1m is absolute peanuts compared to the size of the market sectors these engineers have a hand in shaping.
For me it involves scrounging around for anything related as a jumping off point, and sniffing for important keywords and concepts to look up and branch out into learning. Usually it takes me a few days of exploration before I stumble upon a really good or authoritative resource of some sort, and I end up mapping out the internet locations of related communities and resources in the process.
Of course, it's much faster when having experienced friends or acquaintances to help you navigate.
I remember at some point on HN those sorts of comments were reasonably well-voted, and now they litter the bottom of any thread they appear in. I wonder when that changed.
Thanks for pointing that out, I would have missed that important detail otherwise. The majority of his games are indeed in HTML5, so I do wonder what made him choose Flash as an export target for the one or two such games I've seen.
I noticed that some of these 2014 games (in particular the first one) are created in Flash, which to me suggests that there are still some purposes within rich web media it suits better than the plain web html5/css/js stack everyone is trying to kill it with. I really hope support for Flash isn't widely dropped before we can replicate its utility for richly interactive media in our new standards. (The web seems now just for websites and web applications rather than more rich games and animations.)
I don't know how much time it really saves me, but in addition to the convenience I find it much less intrusive (e.g. in meetings or other social situations, or when walking) to quickly glance at my watch to read an incoming notification rather than pulling my phone out.
Little-known tip (I think): messenger.com offers a web UI for Facebook chat similar to their iOS/Android apps, also ad-free and significantly cleaner than the actual Facebook UI. No idea whether it's actually better on power consumption though.
The video quality probably doesn't compare but I've used an old iPhone with iPCamera (i'm sure Android equivalents exist) installed for this purpose, which simply hosts an mjpeg stream at a local IP address. It should be simple to start or stop recording the stream on any device that's connected.
I use Chrome's Add to Desktop feature for SoundCloud and other webapps, which adds a shortcut to launch the webpage in a dedicated window (without the browser chrome, etc.) The window is managed separately from your normal browser windows (if any) and acts like a first-class native app.
I noticed a very similar contrast watching the UK and US police responses to these Twitch streamers who were swatted. American SWAT team bursts in and arrests streamer at gunpoint even after they've established there's no threat, while UK police knock on door, ask a few questions and leave ("We got a call saying someone killed their family here." "Oh, no, do you want to speak with my mom?" "No, that's alright").