coldcode

My employer did some work early in Dotcom for a company that owned the domain name "manufacturersexchange", when I pointed out that was a terrible name for a business they said "no business person would notice that". Business never got off the ground.

I wish I had had that opportunity back in 1985 when I founded my first one, but being outside of the Bay Area (as in 1500 miles away) there were basically no software startups at all, and with no internet/web/ycombinator etc, no way to learn anything except by trying and failing. We did ship our product, do marketing, make some sales but not enough so we had to sell the product and close down. Today I know all things I did wrong but back then you were working in a world unlike today, and not even one person to ask as everyone starting software companies back then was just as clueless unless you were in a few places in the country. It's hard to explain to people today just how hard this was (for example I tried to borrow some money at a local bank to buy computers, and when told we were a software company, the loan officer assumed we were making ladies undergarments).

I also prefer information from the NHS even though I live in the US. Here medical information online is all about making money from ads and who knows what else they sell. There is actually little money to make from providing relevant information, unlike a national heath care system (which despite its terrible current state politically in the UK, where it seems they want to move to the US model) has an incentive to provide good information.

It's a great idea but not fully baked yet. My former colleague is using it for internal apps and it seems to work fairly well (UI is not fancy), but not for anything going into the high volume apps, which has much more complex behavior (designers are asking for stupidly complex UI). It's much better in the upcoming OS since they added better navigation, but requires the latest OS, which is not supportive for many companies who try to support back at least 1 year.

Will it ever be mainstream for iOS/MacOS? Maybe, if Apple would use it way more than they have so far, thus improvement by dogfooding. It is nice to build apps this way, but there are way too many bizarre gotchas still for most people unless you can live with more flexible designs.

I need a 4K TV since mine is only 2K but the only non smart TV I've found are at Walmart, the Sceptre brand. Does anyone know of any other?

I can never read anything by nytimes, even with removing cookies, it's basically a black hole of non-content.

With all the technology at our disposal, why can no one build a system whereby people can read occasional articles at most websites by paying a penny or something reasonable? I can't subscribe to 100,000 different newspapers.

It's fun to play around with it, but like the author found, what you get is often strange or useless. I also find 1k images too small to do much with but I realize making 4k images would be cost prohibitive. I also wish it could generate vector images as well as pixel images. That would be fun to use.

My friend flew every plane they delivered, sort of a functional test, in addition to practicing/planning for airshows, as well as sometimes showing off for employees at lunchtime.

Although I retired last year, that year I worked at home during the pandemic was just fine productivity-wise, but I did miss the social interaction, the ability to hear discussions around me (sometimes too loud of course) where I learned things I would otherwise not know about projects, and I had lunch with my team and other teams almost every day, talking about all sorts of things and sometimes even work. That's what I missed. Slack is fine for communication (I probably read/wrote hundreds of messages every day) but you miss the human interaction.

If I had a family, probably would not have missed the work folks as much, but spending time talking with other programmers every day in casual conversation is a learning experience you won't get just slacking people as part of work. Junior engineers can learn by doing, but being able to have impromptu whiteboard sessions to explain things in detail helps them move forward faster. Sure you could use Zoom, but it becomes just formal meetings instead of a 5 min quick lesson.

A friend of mine in the 90s was there as an F-16 test pilot and saw the accident. He said this sort of problem is a well known risk of being a test pilot so they spend a lot of time on planning how to deal with something bad. He also said they usually left much more daring things to safer places and preferred to keep the air show maneuvers less risky since crashes are not a good marketing plan.

As a (right handed) guitarist I can't even imagine playing upside down guitar. It shows you that the brain can do amazing things, if you do it for long enough, and are dedicated enough. Plus she stopped playing for decades and then just went back to this like nothing was lost.

With the pressure coming from the inside of the star from burning fuel, I think this meat-star would implode since it is just meat. Unless of course sausages under pressure emit energy. How much sausage would it take to start a thermonuclear process?

As a guitar player I can't even imagine relearning a lifetime of experience from scratch again, much less learning to walk and do ordinary things you take for granted. Brains are amazingly plastic, but usually not at age 75. It take incredible will power to get back to this point.

Without video it might have been impossible to recreate her unusual technique.

Funny I worked there in 95-96 for half a year as a contractor (DTS), and the interviews were fairly simple, the hardest thing was looking at a page of source code and finding all the bugs. Otherwise most people knew the Mac software I had lead or worked on, so it wasn't a big deal. I left because I didn't want to be there when Apple crapped out as seemed likely.

Steve came back a year after I left. Oh well, I might have stayed there for 25 years too.

I spent half of my iOS experience of a decade in ObjC and the last half in Swift. I also used ObjC way back when it was in NeXT. No comparison, you'd have to have your head examined to start something in ObjC today. The only reason to do it is maintain an old codebase; in my last job we replaced a huge ObjC codebase (written before I got there) entirely in Swift with higher quality and no issues (reason why was not just to convert it, it was part of a large new invasive project that was canceled but we shipped the Swift rewrite anyway).

In 1970 my parents, sister and I went on a cruise which had a stop in Haiti; we rented a cab to drive through the town (I think Port-au-Prince) and I can admit I have never seen such poverty, as a child it was beyond shocking. There were also AK-47 toting men everywhere. My parents had no idea what they had gotten us into (no way to know much ahead of time back then). We eventually got outside town, and found a culture of mahogany carving and really amazing people. Sad to think that despite how depressing the town was (garbage dumped in streets for people to pick over, cardboard box houses) it's only gotten worse, and most of the trees are gone. The countryside was very beautiful but the poverty and terrible leadership and disasters eventually destroyed it all. As a child it made a powerful impression on me as to what people are capable of doing (or not doing) to each other.

Seen this way too many times to recount in a comment. Stupid company hires stupid company to do massive project, neither side is competent to do anything but waste/collect money.

I talked once with an airline who had outsourced their entire dev and dev management to some foreign companies; they wanted to hire a mobile dev to go to where the team was and try to figure out why nothing was getting done, as they had no in house knowledge about mobile at all. I said hell no. Nothing ever shipped that I saw and I think they gave up and went back to in house again eventually. Just because you are a big company doesn't mean you have a clue.

Would such a thing be possible in Android world? I wonder since there are so many phone manufacturer and ISP mods that might not be under Google's control.

I worked at a place in the 2000's where our main application leaked like a sieve due to not releasing memory from a C++ framework, and two people had to take turns every other night restarting the app (actually it was chopped up into 20 different apps that had to be started in order by hand) every two hours or so. I can't imagine they got much sleep on their night.

He might not have sold many paintings, but after he died by suicide Monet saw Irises (I think) and remarked something like "How can someone who paints with such joy be so sad". Selling art requires the right contacts, even today, and Vincent was unable to attract the right connections. If he had not shot himself, I think within a few years he would have been as famous as Monet.

Having worked in the OTA space, every time I see their (sometimes funny) ads, I want to call them Booking.Nope

OTA make comparisons a bit easier, but everything is negotiated and contractually controlled to keep people from just going to the hotel directly. Secret hotel prices (like HotWire if that still exists (Expedia) or Travelocity's Top Secret hotels if that still exists (also Expedia)) are an even more crazy negotiation. Hotel Tonight at least used to contact the hotel chains every day for that day's options, though since they were bought by AirBnB who knows what they do.

These days I just find a nice hotel and book with them/their system directly. Airlines too, since airlines fail to give all their options to the OTAs.

In some ways its sad that aggregators don't work all that well in the main travel industry (Flight/Hotel/Car) but travel is extremely complicated, highly competitive and still very fractured except for airlines. Pricing comparisons are not very useful since they are so mangled and obfuscated that you may as well just go to several sites and do it yourself by hand. For example Spirit Airlines used to give us prices for their tickets at $X and were always cheaper than everyone else; yet once you booked at that price they hit you for everything extra (bags, res, for all I know oxygen) then our customers complained we were fooling them and the real cost was higher.

Hmm I wonder if you could register a new account for the CEO of Experian and take his identity? That perhaps would create some incentive for them to change to better security. As long as its just grubby peons like us, why should they care?

Too bad our elite senators and congress folks have no interest in keeping people's identity safe.

Pretty cool, but it costs like $100K per mm.

Think of it as art, not a tool.

I just sold my house for a ridiculous number. My realtor got 50 people to tour the house in a single weekend, and 5 places offers and I took the one 10% over the asking price. It's not a mansion or anything, and not in some high tech city, but nice area and a bit of land. The 6% commission is not really that much. Just prepping the house took all of my energy; trying to do marketing as well would have been too much.

Like many things you can do everything yourself, or contract to others to do the things you are not good at, or don't have time for. Arguing realtors are useless is like saying accountants are useless, or lawyers are useless. I also did not re-roof my house. But of course you could get terrible accountants, lawyers or roofers, and you could possibly be terrible at stuff yourself. Some people think programmers are useless and some are, but that's not sufficient to try writing it yourself if you aren't one.

My parents/ancestors small town in Germany wasn't bombed (except a few accidents) but after the war they decide to destroy many of the charming ancient buildings and replace them with 70's style ugly. It still has some character, but you have to look harder.

I went to work for a company that built web apps in 1997, we used WebObjects/EnterpriseObjects (NeXT still at the time) which I still remember fondly as being head and shoulders better than anything else people were using at the time. But Javascript was a horror show, I worked on a web app for the USPS that was required to use IE 2 (!) because they had paid for a site license and they damned well were going to use it, even though Netscape was better at the time.

It was fun work in that everything was so new, it was almost an entirely new industry. Today many people claim to know how to do everything (even though that's pretty foolish), but then you were learning on the fly. When I started at the beginning of the personal computer era (80's) it was a similar kind of wild experimentation era.

As soon as side loading or their own app stores are allowed, all sorts of companies may require that. Maybe most big companies will stick with Apple's.

As an iOS developer, hardening the 10k-ish apis that exist in iOS will be mostly impossible to do in a short term given the attack vectors would now be outside of Apple's control, probably resulting in incompatibilities and bugs. Android is a horrible platform already given the myriad of different OS versions that exist (and often are not updated by the users) that you have to support.

I also wonder what the law requires as to switchover to the new rules, new OS releases or going back X versions or something? Is there are time frame?

Imagine also being an app developer and having to build/test releases for multiple app stores that include different payment gateways. Without a solid and secure API environment in the OS, how do you manage that with screwing up? iOS has always been easy to do since you only have to support one major OS back. A couple jobs (like 7 years) back our Android app was a nightmare to manage, as we had multiple OS release/phone suppliers that rarely got bug fixes in at all and never at the same time, making fixing/testing some things a nightmare. Might be better today, but I remember how much of a pain it was.

Physics is not my thing, but I love that the more is discovered, the more is discovered that there is more to discover.

While its not averages, it is nonetheless interesting view of misleading statistical analysis: https://www.trevorbragdon.com/when-data-gives-the-wrong-solu... about WW2 airplane design.

While I have no interest in weed, I never understood why people are against it, since cigarettes are also a drug and are far more damaging to heath and the economy, and in the US kills a couple hundred thousand folks a year, or alcohol, which is a drug, and kills tens of thousands of people a year. Eliminating illegality would save in so many ways, and taxes could help offset other taxes. But no, weed is somehow more terrible...