emilsedgh

> money was being thrown around

Im not really educated about the GNOME world, but I was involved on KDE side of things (very minor contributor). Money was _never_ thrown around. At best, a handful of engineers from a few different companies (TrollTech/Nokia, Novell/SUSE, Red Hat, Canonical) were hired to work full time and that was pretty much it. I don't think more than 10-15 engineers have done paid worked on KDE at any given time. Most of the contributions were volunteers.

There was a few attempts on KDE side to get paid by Intel to develop an office suite for mobile but it was also pretty small.

And to this date that is still the case with KDE. Very few engineers paid to work on it hired by entirely different set of companies like Blue Systems or Krita trying to make a living with very modest donations and contributions.

KDE is one of the biggest softwares out there. It was the first SVN repository to reach 1 million commits, etc etc and most of it has been volunteer work. Any claim that money was thrown at KDE really upsets me because it would be a complete mischaracterization of the nature of the project and motivations of people behind it.

Your main point is valid though. FAT and SMB patents were more serious threats.

> Social media seems to be filling the gaps,

It's like we went from having town hall meetings/debates to bar fights.

Well if you are a fan, that is _not_ the least important bit in your comment ;)

I never understood why Pirelli was Inter Milan's sponsor for more than 2 decades. I always thought to myself: What's the return of investment there?

But then I realized I only know Pirelli because of that sponsorship.

Now I have never bought a tyre in my entire life and I couldn't care less about tyres but as far as brand recognition is considered that investment has worked.

I honestly don't understand this movie franchise and all the praise it gets. It is as if the creators were _the hell with story, who cares, we just need action sequences_.

There's absolutely no story. Zilch. Nil. Why is this movie praised?

Compare this to bank wire transfers and it's much faster, cheaper and anonymized.

If you want to send big money from an account to another, or from a country to another, Bitcoin is really cheap, secure and anonymized.

Crypto does solve a few real world issues (fast, global, cheap, secure, anonymized transfer of value).

But it seems that some people thought it fixes the "i want to get rich fast" problem, and was bloated as a result. It was never meant for that problem.

What enabled this is large populations who voted republican purely for this cause due to religious reasons.

> a giant mud-ball of for-loops, while-loops, variable assignments, and other wonderful side effects. Instead of addressing complexity head-on with abstraction

I very much prefer to work in a codebase of poorly written loops and variable assignments rather than one with poor abstractions.

Poor abstractions can harm way, way more than spaghetti code. Their harm usually spreads out through system.

Imagine this:

* 1 single poorly written function which takes a number of inputs and has an output, but internally it's long and messy.

* A bunch of abstracted entities, which interact throughout the system, but are poorly designed.

The complexity of 1 is isolated to the implementation. There's a nice encapsulation. Removing/Rewriting is easy.

But 2 becomes a complete mess which is not isolated. You'd have to skin it layer by layer. Thats way more scary to me.

Would you mind providing some supporting arguments?

What makes node _fantastic_ is actually a huge ecosystem of packages, tooling, cloud providers, talent pool, shared knowledge. etc. There's a massive network effect here.

As far as I'm concerned, as of right now Deno is _not_ better that node due to reasons above. It has the potential to be, and I wish the authors massive success and root for them. But I'm not gonna start a project on Deno due to lack of a proper ecosystem yet.

The victim of crypto crimes are normal clueless people.

I absolutely loved and adored bitcoin as a technology from a technical perspective and all the ways it could change things for better. But what it had become is an abomination.

Also, “engineers hacking on finance” would've been very noble 20 years ago in a world where engineer/hacker was reminiscent of free software, mozilla, gnu, linux, wikipedia, etc.

> It's not worse, aside from chats being unencrypted by default.

That is not a side point though. It's a major, major difference.

Konqueror/KHTML was more than "acceptable". It was a fine web browsing experience. You'd barely notice anything wrong with it and it was the first browser to pass ACID 2 tests I think.

Saying KHTML wasn't viable/acceptable experience is more misleading to be honest.

Every time the Single Payer option is this discussed, you hear people say how care in Canada and UK is broken, indicating that it's fine in US, which is not the case.

Most probably because United States influences them so much.

As an Iranian, United States politics have brought so much misery upon my country, I feel like we should get a vote in U.S elections at this point. Or I don't know like half a vote. Or 1/10 of a vote. I don't know somehow let us be heard our country which once was on the path of reforms and whatnot is being crushed under the weight of senseless sanctions!

Disclaimer: Current U.S. resident, rant over!

In another HN thread last week a former employee also posted this, which I think was mostly missed as he was pretty late to the thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31356546

Which may be interesting since the Heroku conversation is hot right now.

I appreciate you letting us know what happened exactly. This just confirms the basis of my previous comment that this is exactly SalesForce's strategy regarding Heroku: Milk it until it dies.

Fly.io, Porter, Render, Google Cloud Run, DO Droplets and probably a bunch I'm forgetting.

I think Heroku's aggressive pricing is the main driver behind making them obsolete. I honestly cannot believe Salesforce is so short-sighted with Heroku. Their approach is "Milk it as much as we can until everyone just abandons it for cheaper solutions/clones".

Had they become more competitive in terms of pricing, a large, large chunk of companies would've used them rather than moving to solutions like Kube, etc, or a bunch of Heroku clones which are now taking off as it's being considered a "Sinking Ship".

Just see this:

https://blog.porter.run/why-companies-move-off-heroku/

The reasons they are suggesting [that companies leave Heroku for] (besides the costs) are a bunch of non-reasons and small nuisances. The main reason is the cost, and the cost issue will become bigger and bigger of an issue as competing solutions get cheaper and cheaper, until Heroku is completely sunk and abandoned.

We are still using Heroku and I really hope they would fix the pricing before we bite the bullet and just spend a couple of weeks moving to a cheaper alternative. There's no vendor lock in on 12 Factor Apps you see.

Why? I think it's pretty evident that there's no reason to believe there's been a security breach there as far as they understand as of now.

So when they formed OpenAI and thought "we are gonna hire the most brilliant scientists in the field" they forgot to account for hardware costs?

At this point it's more like doublespeak.

The guy drawing funny memes for John Oliver's Last Week Tonight (Like the following) can be replaced by this!

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WhMGcp9xIhY/maxresdefault.jpg

I grew up in Iran and these were very common back in the day. I personally had a very bad reaction to the sound of pencil on a paper and i could only write using these.

Im amazed these aren't common here.

Do you mean the response to a Russian nuclear aggression would be nuclear?

> What were we (technologists) thinking when we built these toxic social media platforms and algorithms?

If OKR A reaches B, we'd be valued at C, which would mean my stock option would be worth D.

That's what everyone was, is, and will be thinking.

I have always wondered how they are managing all the complexity in Dota. It just is a humongous amount of complexity around all the items and abilities and how they affect each other.

When I saw there is a directory structure, for a second I thought it might be the source code to these games and I thought I can finally take a look at Dota's source.

Haven't had such a laugh for a while. Thanks!

If what you have is a static site I don't think Cloud Run is the ideal service for that. Cloud Run is about a model of compute, which static sites don't need.