VonGuard

I mean, the Bay Area can read a graph and understand math. It's the dominant industry here, math and data. I don't think the same can be said of the LA region...

Correct, it is not their fault. But they ended up spending all their time on it, and in an unproductive manner, I feel.

This is a good thing. When they were independent, NPM was a disaster area. The company spent 100% of its time chasing down social issues and insanity in the community and never figured out how to make money, or at least, it took them FOREVER to figure that out.

Years ago, they introduced "orgs" which they sat there and explained to me with slides and pictures and concepts and business bullshit for an hour. I did not understand a thing they'd said. Finally, they were like "We're selling private namespace in the npm registry for blessed packages for groups or businesses." I understood that. If they'd just said that up front....

They had some great people, some very smart folks like CJ, but they completely biffed every business decision they ever made, and when you'd go in and talk to the leadership, they were always acting as if they had some sort of PTSD from the community. I mean, people were putting spam packages in NPM just to get SEO on some outside webpage through the default NPM package webpages. People were squatting and stealing package names. Leftpad... the community management here is nightmarishly hard, and I was never convinced they'd ever make money on it. MS doesn't NEED to make money on it. They can just pump in cash and have a brilliant tool for reaching UX developers around the world, regardless of whether they use Windows or not.

I feel like the GitHub group at Microsoft is now some sort of orphanage for mistreated developer tool startups. GitHub had similar management issues: they refused to build enterprise features at all for years unless they were useful to regular GitHub.com. And there were other people issues at the top for years. Chris seemed more interested in working with the Obama administration on digital learning initiatives than with running GitHub, for example.

It's still here, but people were so excited about it when it came out, and some folks actually thought it'd be usable on other platforms. Here were are years later and it's just a niche language for iPhones. Everyone who was excited about it seems to have stopped being excited because it's 100% Apple only. Like all their stuff. I mean, is there anything better than a completely closed source programming language?

Apple's been like this forever, it's only gotten much worse since the late 2000's and the launch of the iTunes App store. Even in the old days, when Mac Classic existed, Apple would change its mind about stuff for developers all the time. Anyone remember OpenDoc and how that was gonna change the world? Apple's favorite thing to do is tell developers it's got the next big thing (Newton), next big language (remember Swift?), or the next big tool (AR). They hand this out to devs, devs eat it up, and like 1 or 2 years later, they either spring said thing like a trap no one can escape from, or they just give up on it and act like it never happened and move on, leaving developers with useless new skills.

Because gameplay matters 10X as much as graphics.

I'm sure they will. We have a lot of Canadians in our midst. My HR lady is a Canadian!

Technical Marketing Manager 4 is my job title. Thanks!

Red Hat | All Positions Remote | Everything | https://www.redhat.com/en/jobs

Red Hat. You know who we are. We're also the world's top Kubernetes provider with OpenShift (well over 1000 customers). We're Ansible. We're OpneShift Dedicated and OpenShift Online (Hosted services). We're a huge company with openings in marketing, management, VPs also! We're worldwide. We have offices around the globe. We're all remote: the location listed in a job posting is where the manager is located. 90% of the time the job can be performed remotely.

Red Hat is still Red Hat. In fact, even more so, now that our CEO is also President of IBM. Think Pixar and Disney, NeXT and Apple. We sell absolutely no software that is not 100% open source, unless we're in the process of open sourcing it. Even our acquired companies' software, we eventually open source. Have you contributed to an open source project? Ooooooooooo, we LOVE that! Come join us! I currently spend work hours helping the CNCF, for example!

I've been here 18 months now, and they will have to drag me out the door. I'll probably never leave willingly. It's a spectacular place to work. You can even use me as your reference in your application: vonguard@redhat.com They even gave me my nick as an email alias!

https://www.redhat.com/en/jobs

Senior Front end developer: https://us-redhat.icims.com/jobs/77709/senior-front-end-deve...

Technical Operations Lead https://us-redhat.icims.com/jobs/78616/it-support-engineer/j...

Enterprise Data Catalog Program Manager https://us-redhat.icims.com/jobs/78495/enterprise-data-catal...

This post is totally accurate. I am a corporate blogger, and when I started at this company, we had a ridiculous approval process involving legal. Now, we just don't do that process, and focus on getting the engineering stuff right and doing absolutely no other content: engineering only, no marketing crap. By removing legal approvals, we went from publishing once a week to publishing once a day, and our hits have doubled in a year. Approval processes that extend past engineering are evil.

Terry Cavanagh is one of the greatest game designers of our time. His simple mechanics and designs often remind me of something like Chess or Go, where a simple ruleset covers a massively deep game, or is used to communicate a story in a very minimalist fashion. Don't Look Back is one of my favorites: https://terrycavanaghgames.com/dontlookback/

A few years back, he did a beta of a game called Four Letter Word... Though that's not the real title: http://distractionware.com/blog/2011/11/the-four-letter-word... The real title is a set of cryptic non-alphabet characters.

It was like an Atari 2600 cartridge from a space alien. It featured 2600-style graphics, a hidden hard-as-nails FPS game, and a buncha hidden 2d content that seems simple at first, but was super intriguing. So crazy non-traditional, and with some obscure mechanics, it was one of my favorite things I've ever played, and he never finished it, sadly. I love cryptic games, and I love simple mechanics taken to extreme conclusions. That's why I adore Terry.

Ethiopia is on a real tear right now! The prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, came into power about 2 years ago and the first thing he did was release 100% of political prisoners in the country. It's the first time the country has had no political prisoners in decades. He then grabbed all his opposition together and worked with them. The reforms he's introduced are incredible, and show how things can be fixed in a nation that's torn apart for years by dictatorship and war. Abiy is definitely the greatest leader of our modern era. The man took a totalitarian country at war with its neighbors and flipped it 180 degrees in 18 months. He ended the war, removed totalitarian policies, and the country's people can even admit that there were government funded murder campaigns, something that if you'd talked about previously, you'd have been murdered. A great story all around. He heartily deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.

Hey Snide! I used to contract at GameSpot, and was even at Ziff when it was spun off into it's own thing. I'd just like to say I was fired in 2001 for pissing off an advertiser. Game journalism was already dead by '08. It never really had much of a foothold outside a few outlets, all of which are either gone or no longer trustworthy. Also, game journalists get shit pay, so there is little incentive to do it right.

In 2008 I found a parcel of bare EPROMs at a flea market container 27 games. 1 of those games was Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park, and it was spread across 12 chips, each one showing a progressive state of development across 9 months.

To my mind, this was the only known find of a vintage Atari 2600 game and its iterative development process. So, 30 years later, the only reason we had this snapshot is because someone found these chips and sold them at the flea.

The current state of digital preservation is abhorrent. Those roms would have taken up less than 1/4 of a 5.25" floppy, but the company behind them never thought to preserve that information or data.

Take2 Interactive republished BioShock in 2012. They couldn't find their source code. They didn't save it. They had to go machine to machine looking for it. The reissued game is not the same as the original.

As a society, we don't place any value on this stuff, but the potential value of it cannot be understood until the future has occurred. Letting it vanish is a disservice to the future. In the past, if a book was published, it wasn't going to vanish if the publisher went out of business, there would simply be no new copies.

In our digital online age, things vanish in seconds, days and hours. This is also a very different state of affairs. In the past we could not save everything, but everything didn't have a clock counting down from the end of the quarter over its head, counting the seconds until it is deleted.

The Library of Congress tries to save everything. Yes, libraries weed the stacks and choose items to host. This is due to space concerns: they can't host everything ever. Digitally, they can, and many host reams of microfilm and old newspapers because they can.

Libraries can, thanks to tech, now host every book ever, digitally, for very low costs. Copyright prevents that.

This is an unabated good. Leaving things behind and forgetting them is how you get Tulsa Oaklahoma, or the Armenian Genocide denials. We don't get to choose what the future finds interesting, and for the first time in history, we do not have to. Why in the every loving fuck would you worry about that?

Most likely, only for personal reasons. This is a humanity level problem. Your personal worries are irrelevant in 100 years when everyone who ever knew you is dead anyway. Geocities would be more interesting at that time, as a subject of study.

You're right, let's burn the library down because one book has a liable chapter in it.

This argument is so horrible as to be actively harmful to Archive's work. Jason Scott is a god, and if we didn't have him, we'd have to invent him.

WE DO NOT GET TO CHOOSE WHAT THE FUTURE FINDS INTERESTING.

We live in the only point in human history where we can actually save all of humanity's knowledge and culture, and we can do so without having to worry about physical space or staff to work the "library." It's a remarkable time we live in, and yet, 99% of our society either doesn't care, thinks this work is stupid, or actively works against it through horrific copyright laws.

We know more about how Rembrandt painted and lived than we do about how Atari 2600 programmers worked and lived. I can go to Rembrandt's house and see where he lived, where he painted, how he worked, where he slept and ate and mixed his paints and taught his classes.

Atari's old HQ is just another office building. The source code to those games is mostly gone (thankfully, it's assembly and easier to disassemble). We need to save our culture and digital heritage, else we forget where we come from.

Deleting some old tweets is one thing, but actively worrying about Archive's work is just harmful to us all. We need 10,000 more Archives, dammit. It's supremely important work that is helping stem the tide of lost culture due to stock market forces. Geocities is gone forever because Yahoo! didn't find it profitable. This cannot keep happening.

Just FYI, cracking the game now that the DRM is expired is 100% Fair Use in the USA under the DMCA 1201 exemptions. Thanks EFF!

This article doesn't seem to take into account that Helium is becoming scarce, and when used in airships, it's eventually just released and lost forever. NYT Article on the shortage: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/science/helium-shortage-p...

We used to have a strategic Helium reserve in the US for zepplins and so forth, then it was just kept for chemistry and other purposes. I think we started selling it down under GW. Helium seems like it's more valuable as a component in chemistry, super cooling, etc, rather than just using it for lift.

Also, we tend to think of Zepplins as rare things, like singular one-off vessels like the Hindenburg. In actuality, the Germans produced 131 of them! Most were used in World War 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Zeppelins

What has been digitized is fully text searchable!

Can confirm. Spent 12 years at a tech magazine and was making $70K at the end. Was laid off for being too expensive. Now I work at a large tech company and make double that. Oh, and no one threatens my life if I get a detail wrong anymore, so that's an improvement. Honestly, being a journalist is like working in a kitchen. Super high stakes and everyone is always 1 step away from complete panic and super stressed out, yet no one is paid enough to make that kind of pressure worth while. At least in journalism, you get access, a modicum of power, and the ability to change the world around you. As a chef, it's just insane pressure for no real world-changing reason.

It's a lot like Sun Microsystems and Java. That was a big improvement in the lives of developers, but the company behind it never really figured out how to make money on it.

This also happens on TV, and you probably have no idea. There are applications on iPads and phones that work with ratings firms, like Nielsen and so forth. These firms work with content producers, and they embed inaudible tones into TV shows and even advertisements. The phones and iPads pick up this tone and report back that the user is, indeed, watching said TV show or ad. It's a way of confirmed tracking of views.

First time I saw one of these 4 years ago was when it popped into a Steam sale advertising window. Really creeped me out. A sure sign Comcast is pretty much 100% infected with Bovine Spongiform Encephelopathy. Still they offer Internet that is 10 times faster than the competition. Ah, the tyranny of the last mile. I went with Comcast Business, and they don't have data caps...

Maybe. But I blame the work for the death because he only took sick leave a few months back, then suddenly died. That to me says he worked right up until he couldn't anymore. A normal person would be retiring at 65 or so. And while the job may have seemed important, in the grand scheme of things, I don't think it's all that important when compared to family and personal enjoyment. It's not like he worked for a company that regularly saved lives or made a difference in the human experience for anyone. They just sold a database you couldn't ever get off of. And some other stuff they acquired, and also made sure you couldn't get off of. When you get down to it, his life was spent 100% in the pursuit of money, and little else. If it was about changing the world, he'd have worked at a startup.

I feel really bad for Hurd and his family. Why work that hard? The 24/7 CEO lifestyle seems like such a waste of time if you end up working it to the day you die. Like, why work that hard? For the family you never see? The vacation home you can visit for 5 days a year? The yacht you leave parked 360 days a year? The job is so demanding and so hard it seems like Mark worked himself to death, literally. He probably could have retired happy and rich at like 40 years old...

I understand when an artist or someone creative gives their life to their work: it's an obsession that is personal. But giving your life to Oracle just for the money seems like a life wasted at that level. Even the day to day workers over there get to go home and see their families every night. At the C-level, you basically live in a private jet and never see your family... Very sad.

Because Portugal decriminalized everything.

Everyone in this thread below is assuming after the 30 minutes I just fuck off and do nothing. LOL, why would anyone pay me if I did that? Obviously, there's always a ton of stuff to do. But, again, it's about results, not hours worked. There's times when you have to put in almost 48 hours non-stop, others where you don't have to work all week. The point is that if your employees have tasks to do and they're doing them, who gives a fuck about how long it takes them? The 40 hour work week is fucking horrible, anyway, and as is pointed out later in this thread, creative work like coding goes on in your mind pretty much 24/7. If I come up with the solution to a problem Saturday night you can damn well be sure I'm taking some time off to compensate for that. Otherwise I'll burn the fuck out.

Sure, some unknown quantity of people can just fuck around and hide from work, but again, you're not paying me because I'm a fuck off person, yer paying me because I have the decades of experience, and because you know with certainty I'll do the damn work, find more work when I need more, and will never miss a deadline on my own fault. Everyone on HN just assumes bad faith all the time, geez....

Reminds me of an old adage about tech work and other skilled labors: If you give me a task that takes a normal perosn 8 hours, and I finish it in 30 minutes, you're paying me for the skill, knowledge and experience that allows me to do it in 30 minutes. I do not owe you another 7.5 hours of work. I owe you the job being done, not the hours it should take to do it.

Seems like this https://phys.org/news/2005-09-world-built-in-wi-fi-enabled-d.... invalidates the patent.

Nikonn CoolPix had wifi support in 2005. I'd imagine if you could select specific pictures to upload wherever from the device, that's the whole patent claim invalidated by 4 years. Hell, this article even references a device that Nikon offered to wirelessly transmit images as early as 2003. Find one of these, bring it to the law firm defending Gnome and that should invalidate the patent.

Lamo was a twitchy little fuck with lots of enemies. He was a miserable person, always unhappy, plagued with mental illness, and a past spotted with fucked up relationships. The only people I have ever heard speak kindly of him are the press.

I'd known the guy since 1999, and even back then, in the hacker circles, he was making enemies and pissing people off just by being a bad person in general... Seems like a text book suicide candidate, or at least, a self-abuse through substances type. I mean, his parents threw him out in his teens...

Last time I posted this here I got downvoted to hell and back. Feel free to do the same.

The original works great in Wine!