It basically ended up with me learning that what is mostly pursued is the sharing part of piracy, and not doing that.
I got in a bit of trouble by my parents at the time and probably just stopped pirating stuff for a bit. No more issues from the ISP as we complied with the C&D and I stopped seeding stuff or uploading to shared FTPs (I can't really recall which was the issue at the time)
I feel like there's a responsibility to go into VPNs a bit more. My parents got a mean sounding legal letter from our ISP when I was younger for seeding Scooby Doo. It was both terrifying for me and my parents thought it was much more serious than it was, so I got in quite a bit of trouble.
Even before SO most of the forums were the same way. You had grumpy ass holier-than-thou guys with 10,000 posts shutting down your questions before anyone else could answer.
The whole damn business model of a forum was to provide a solution to people that didn't want to / didn't know how to RTFM, but everyone was toxic as hell toward one for not wanting to do that.
Tale as old as time. When I was coming up it took a $20-40/m investment to get a "dedicated" server that you could start tinkering around on. When you couldn't afford that, you bricked the family PC trying to figure out how to configure your own LAMP stack.
Nowadays you just have to risk accidentally billing your parents CC the tune of multi-generation wealth to get that real-world experience.
I never made it to any hackercons, and haven't kept up with many of the folks I "ran" with back in the day (before social media). And I'm not really sure if I would even remember their handles and such if I saw them today. I remember a fella that went by "proph3t," I believe he was in a band or at least helped with George Smith's website End Effect (looks like it is still up). That guy was a bit older than I was but I remember him being extremely patient and gracious with his time helping me when I was learning PHP.
I guess I'm just an old man pumping my fist and yelling at the clouds at this point, but I think compartmentalizing every possible aspect of development and then making each one of those as complex as possible lead AI in the bureaucratic deterioration of the trade.
> The layer of builders and hackers is still there.
Further underground indeed. It's obvious dev for a career and dev as historical dev are already two wildly different things. My fire was certainly extinguished quite a while ago.
I used to pride myself on being the first redneck in our neighborhood to have high-speed interwebs. Sweet sweet DSL, baby. No more disconnection from my Delta Force 2 game when my sister picked up the phone to call her boyfriend. The days of waiting 4 days for Limewire to download that new
*.mp3.exe? Over! When I drag and drop the index.shtml into CuteFTP, it's INSTANT! Couldn't wait to tell the boys in IRC.
I really am nostalgic of the "old" internet. You really used to be able to dig in and explore. Other than the image counter at the bottom center of the screen, most people weren't keeping or watching the analytics. We shared buttons to support each others websites and just built things to build them. When a few of us in what was called the E&N "scene" at the time started building what we called "user systems" (authentication with some social aspects to the site such as comments / etc) it was a revolutionary time. The systems were built absolutely terrible, of course, looking back now. I found a niche by building a flat-file "usersystem" in PHP and sold it in a zip file for $300. It stored all of the users sensitive information in a *.php file in variables and site owners LOVED it- MySQL databases were quite the extra add-on expense at the time. Ah, the glory. The rest is history.
I think it'd be an outstanding feature on the iPhone to turn off audiobooks/podcasts at ~5 min into sleep or whatever. Seems like they already have the data via the Watch...
Thanks for this. I've been dabbling with code for ~20 years, have the diploma and the t-shirt, but I lack the mentorship. I feel like it would be even more helpful in this time as I attempt to pivot from my general-IT career with dev as one tool into solely development. So, anyways, thanks for sharing additional resources.
I've (mostly quietly) enjoyed the "vibe" of HN for well over a decade now. It's certainly a major contribution to maintaining enjoyment in the crazy world of tech. Thank you for your contributions to this community which remains so special to an entire industry.
Hard to say - but giving without the expectation of return can certainly lead to future gain. I highly respect the company that did schedule a feedback session and it certainly made them one that I will continue to watch for opportunities rather than just a position opening that popped up on a stream of jobs that I happened to find.
I'd be willing to bet they at least think there is some metric being improved there. Possibly assuming it might garner more interest as a desirable workplace during an staffer's market.
That makes sense. I guess I was only considering what my own response would be to receiving feedback. I think I'll just change my approach to just trying to articulate genuine appreciation for the opportunity to interview in the first place, and see if that sparks any love my way.
I got in a bit of trouble by my parents at the time and probably just stopped pirating stuff for a bit. No more issues from the ISP as we complied with the C&D and I stopped seeding stuff or uploading to shared FTPs (I can't really recall which was the issue at the time)