MarkLowenstein

It is not you; it is the landscape of the programming world that has changed. Programmers get hooked on the craft because they can make stuff that scratches their own itches in a way that they are proud of. You could do that back when you thought it was adequate to make an adventure game that combined text with graphic images at a specific resolution that worked on your computer.

But then you became a student of the "right" way of doing things, and learned that it was suboptimal to just hard-code your strings into stacks of if/else blocks and had to figure out how to work them into a resource segment of your binary, and then along the way oh if you access them using the generated code functions that some IDEs will give you for those, then you get the ability to access them for different languages depending on...oh how DOES the runtime determine what language the user prefers? Hmmm let's look that up, so for versions 1.0-2.x it will look at the thread's current culture, hmmm how does THAT get set, and then what about 3.0+ okay let's just forget stupid translations for now, let's just make these graphics ready to work on different screen resolutions and retina displays so time to find out how to make SVGs and a UX library that will let you easily insert those when needed but oh the only good one is a full framework so you've got to refactor your whole code and provide a manifest file and hey what happens if I set this "Resolution" property to "UseNative" vs. "UseScreen"? What does that mean? Oh hello StackOverflow thank you and uh oh...I CAN use UseScreen but I will need to provide my own custom implementation of IScreenProvider which is almost as long as my original adventure game code, but thank you contributor, I can just copy your whole page of code into my own project. Since none of the names match my convention, I'll just spend the next hour renaming, retesting, and experimenting with which chaff I can cut out of this pretty-suspiciously-complicated class I just copied.

There is a certain class of programmer whom this kind of experience absolutely does not bother. I call them "zombies", but in the modern programming world, they are called "successful". They will tell you that they can easily do their job in a reasonable-length day, and have no desire to do programming projects at home.

But Excel, Doom, Linux, Mosaic...all these were not made by zombies. They were made by people like you, but in a time when there was no programming culture that made you worry that everything you were doing was wrong. It's just different now. That's probably why the world supplies 1000x as many programmers as back then, but contributes about 1/1000th the old output of really good stuff. Mostly we just provide the same stuff that was available 25 years ago, but on top of a different and more complicated set of foundational services.

I like the cut of your jib. Also a never-user, but I've always thought that criminalizing the manufacture and distribution of drugs was the lazy way to combat the problem: fewer people to catch, bigger effect on the problem per arrest. It misses the mark of who's doing something really wrong though. I like to refer to dealers as "legitimate businessmen" for fun, because it's largely true. Of course dealers enforcing territory via violence are real criminals, but those problems would evaporate if the trade were no longer illegal.

How do we combat the real toll of drugs on people's personal well-being then? A lot of them lead to broken lives. You could ban use, but that's hard to enforce and infringes on liberty. Instead, I would like to see a policy where your access to social safety nets is taken away when you're a user. You want to risk it all to get high? Go for it but don't leave us with the bill and having to wring our hands that you ended up homeless.

Perfect! The wealthy world has ascended the Maslow pyramid to the point that our itches are no longer scratched by material stuff. Isn't this the situation that spiritual people have been begging for for millenia?

Now it's time to move onto people's real problems: loneliness, hopelessness, etc.

For those people saying it's an American thing: yes, you're right--we've been on the wealth train for long enough that we've lost that urge to maximize everything. Do we need yet another item that becomes trash? No, we'd rather not waste the money and resources because it's no big deal to have yet another trinket around. And I'm sure the rest of the wealthy world will be with us on this before too long--maybe when a majority of their population didn't grow up combatting scarcity as kids.

Shortly after the 2016 election the WaPo added a black banner proclaiming "Democracy dies in darkness." I have always thought that that was more of a rallying cry for them - hoisting their pirate flag as they took on Trump - rather than something they feared. HN readers, you are witnessing the dark curtain of totalitarianism falling on us. I hope you will not be acquiescent. I won't be.

K. Eric Drexler - Engines of Creation https://www.amazon.com/Engines-Creation-Nanotechnology-Libra...

Randomly chose this off the bookshelf at a Borders in 1990 or so...turned out to be the most exciting book I've ever read. Then Terminator 2 came out and was 10x as amazing because I saw how it COULD really happen.

Gorgeous! Would absolutely pay for most of these. Best thing though: this is the first software I've ever seen that advertises "in one click" yet really requires only ONE CLICK.

Excellent logic vsareto. It's hard to verbalize what you have done here so well...which is why they choose this weird phraseology to begin with. Netflix told me that I was complicit in this same way yesterday--so I canceled my subscription. Goodbye Netflix!

I'd like to see a system like this: if your tweet is blocked for a reason, all you have to do is find a tweet that's worse than it is for that same reason, that is not already blocked. If the moderators agree then yours is unblocked and the other's is. Maybe disputes with the moderators' decision can be public, so people can see which way the wind blows with the particular social media platform.

Lots of people here will propose ways of gaming this system, such as setting up fake accounts where they make worse tweets. I don't want to pre-argue with them by making this post really long though. I think that starting with this design it's probably possible to tweak it to encourage honesty.

Macrolides appear to be antibiotics like the azithromycin part of the very well-known trio HCQ + azithromycin "ZPac" + zinc. People have been discussing this trio for two or three full months now and there is no excuse for these scientists not to be aware of that. Even President Trump's famous statement a few days ago that he is taking HCQ mentions all three together. From their paper, these scientists appear to be skilled, but at the same time they are either disastrously ignorant of the space they are researching, or this paper is yet another propaganda job trying to convince people that HCQ is ineffective in any regimen (which maybe it is, but this paper does not show that).

I got my son's French horn overhauled by Dan. He is one of these inexplicably dedicated craftsmen in a very offbeat art--the kind the world would be poorer without. I believe that people with his kind of obsession with completeness and refinement should be appreciated, studied, and--as a lot of computer programming pursuits can benefit from the same qualities--emulated!

I'm very interested in that gap you refer to. Was there something you were used to as a mechanic that you weren't getting in your new career?

Possibly qualifying double for these same statements: https://youtu.be/dw4aGcmircA?t=2120

Would this be a good example of the kind of corruption he's talking about?

https://www.npr.org/2016/12/10/505079091/lawrence-lessig-off...

A bit late, but I see now that I biffed on expressing myself here, and I don't blame you all for thinking I'm wrong. What I meant was that one out of 50 people's life stories are interesting, not that only one out of 50 people find life stories interesting.

Yeah, people keep saying they do this because of some "research" but I suspect that whatever research that was is very wrong. Here's what doesn't add up: the story of someone's life and activities is only truly interesting for a small fraction of the population, maybe one out of 50 people. So if you're going to write an article about a newsworthy scientific accomplishment, what are the chances that the people involved also happen to have a compelling life story? Pretty low. It's obvious to a numerate person that the first several paragraphs are there for no good reason, yet the author insists on wasting our time anyway, so we get annoyed and find something else to do.

I second this. I have this EIZO square monitor and it is a joy to work in. Just think of "wide" screens as actually being "short" screens, and you can see why you'd feel cramped and constricted when using one, like living in a house with 7-foot ceilings.

Oh, was that E_NOTIMPL, E_NOT_IMPLEMENTED, E_NOIMPL...? I forgot again. Google sets to the rescue! S_OK, E_FAIL, submit. I did that particular one at least 20 times.

I worry that a truly great technology has died with Sets: the way it would correctly intuit the scope of your set. Give it cities in Ohio, it spits out other Ohio cities. But give it London and Tokyo and you get all the major metropolises across the globe. Kudos to those who made it, and I hope they can do it again when applications for it arise.

Alternate title: Why people who pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa are poor