mwfunk · HackerTrans

mwfunk

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5 年前議論

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.

5 年前議論

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.

5 年前議論

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.

5 年前議論

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.

5 年前議論

Fun fact: in the UK they call it marhs!

5 年前議論

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.

5 年前議論

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.

5 年前議論

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.

5 年前議論

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.

5 年前議論

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.

5 年前議論

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.

5 年前議論

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.

5 年前議論

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.

5 年前議論

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.

5 年前議論

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.

5 年前議論

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.

5 年前議論

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.

5 年前議論

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?!?

5 年前議論

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

5 年前議論

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!