open_bear

For every "wanting a faster horse" I give you "new iPhones every 6 months", "smart bottles that remind you to drink more water" and "Internet-connected $400 juicer that requires special cartridges to make juice".

Paraphrasing Sheldon fron "The Big Bang Theory": "Everything is better with blockchain".

See significant change in 'going to toilet' procedure or blood in stool? Go to the doctor! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQIHJmvnzwg

Subscription is the best way for companies to do software in capitalism. Take Microsoft Word 2003: perfectly good word processor, still works fine. I've spent 60$ 14 years ago and had no intention to switch.

But Microsoft needs money, so they force the upgrade to 2007 by, among other things, inventing the docx format. And then 2010, and then 2013, and then 2017. Logical conclusion is Office 365, where you are forced to pay 100$ every year.

Is it a stable source of income for the company, better, than selling box copies? Yes. Is it in customer's best interests? No.

The hard part about coding for 5-10 y.o. kids is typing without errors. Programming is hard as it is, adding typing errors makes it even harder - 1 mistake and computer is yelling at you and you have no idea what went wrong.

Nice idea! This reminded me of 750words.com. I tried it for a while, but writing 750 words every day was too much. I think 130 characters will better suit my ability to write.

'pytest --lf' reruns only tests that have failed during the previous run. Helps a lot when your test suite is not very fast.

I've been reading the Michael Abrash's Black Book, and it was quite eye opening, especially when working around serious limitations of the old hardware.

Wirth said that program is a combination of data structures and algorithms in 1976, there were no _really_ new ways of constructing programs ever since.

HtDP teaches exactly that: proper construction of abstractions, small functions that operate over these abstractions and how to combine everything into a useful software.

Try Pilot Metropolitan, they are nice entry-level fountain pens.

Starsector is quite performant Java-based 2d space merchant sim. It shows a lot of visual effects and does a lot of processing in the background.

Survivorship bias: because for every Steve Jobs and Bill Gates there are millions of folks, whose business ended without any success (something like 80% of businesses close during the first year).

There is a code of ethics by NSPE (National Society of Professional Engineers): https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics

And as programmers are calling themselves engineers, they should adhere to that code.

Fabien Sanglard's bookshelf has all you need: http://fabiensanglard.net/Computer_Graphics_Principles_and_P...

What makes it worse is that programmers don't have an ethical code, akin to what engineers and doctors have. CEO says we need to track every user? Sure, boss! Show invasive ads up every user's orifice? Can do! Ship it, who cares if we wipe out some poor bloke's photos.

And as long as programmers have very big salaries (compared to the rest) and are in demand - they have no incentive to organize and fight for their rights and rights to not do unethical things.

> The average web developer writing Ruby or Node in Atom on their Macbook Pro

It does not matter who it was designed for, git is the de-facto VCS that almost everyone uses today. And people are having trouble using it because there is no better alternative: it is fast and powerful and used by many companies.

But it's UX is terrible: I use git for 10 years and I have to Google every time I need to make a branch tracking a remote one. git reset does different things based on what type of object you pass.

This has nothing to do with knowing how internals work, it is a question of consistency and providing a small non-overlapping set of tools to do my job.

There is even a science paper showing that "for most people Git is a magic black box they whisper obscure spells into": http://www.ppig.org/sites/default/files/2014-PPIG-25th-Churc...

Airlines have been ripping customers for years. Ever tried to search for tickets while in incognito mode? Prices will most likely be lower, because there is no tracking information that can tell the airline "this person can pay more".

There is a ton of COBOL code out there, and banks are not going to retire those mainframes any time soon :(

Image-based, as Pharo is a close fork of Smalltalk.

I've been thinking about a source control system, that will track functions/classes, instead of bytes. You could track who changed that helper method and not be distracted by moving classes between files.

Take a look at how Smalltalk does this (try Pharo, for example). You don't edit code as a whole: you add classes, methods, fields and edit them separately.

This has several benefits: changes are isolated - easier to reason about and track in version control system, refactoring is easier.

Same story here: used Nikon D40 bought in 2008 is still producing amazing photos.

There was a video of a teacher doing exactly that, made me rethink some approaches I use when teaching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leBEFaVHllE

There is now even a word for that: humblebragging.

First bourgeoisie states/city-states started to appear in 1500-1600s (Italian region). Many countries experienced a periods of reaction and return to feudal state (France and Britain for example). Last traces of feudalism ended somewhere in 1860-s. So full capitalism is less that 150 years old.

Same cycle happened before with transitions to slave labor and feudal system. Formation change is not a single event, but a process, spanning hundreds of years.

GorillaREPL is very nice. There is also a Proto-REPL that looks very promising (https://github.com/jasongilman/proto-repl)

I think that IPython is one of the best tools for scientists. Jupyter Notebooks that allow reproducible results, a lot of data-wrangling libraries, visualizations, distributed computing. I wish more scientists knew of IPython.

Every time I need to use Gimp to make a collage of two screenshots to file a bug report I want to smash my monitor and throw it out of the window.

Gimp workflow/UI just does not stick in my brain. I can get back to using Photoshop after skipping a year and it will feel like I've left yesterday. With Gimp it is always a painful 15-minute struggle to figure out the right combination of controls to press.

IIRC, uranium enrichment centrifuges in Iran were infected by Stuxnet because someone brought an infected USB stick, found in the parking lot, into the facility.

Social engineering is the best way to infiltrate the airgapped infrastructure.

Try Yousician. It's an app for learning the guitar (I think they are working on adding the piano lessons). There are some theory lessons with practice sessions. I tried learning the guitar by tabs and accords of the songs I liked, but did not get too far. Yousician shows a clear skill progression (easy melodies->hard melodies) and provides some foundation for further learning and improvement. If only I had more time to practice :)