paulftw

They genuinely believed they were going to change the world, drank too much of their own kool-aid and eventually ran out of money.

Pretty sure they feel terrible right now and I don't think they slept well for the past 6 months. Could someone reasonable see this coming before KS? Most likely yes. Would they get this far without taking big risks? Most likely no.

You feel angry you didn't get your pebbles, I feel angry I didn't get my two pebbles and a core.

Imagine how they feel - reportedly turned down $750 mil and less than a year later had to apply for a job at another struggling wearables manufacturer.

So what do you actually want them to do?

They wouldn't just start throwing money at every project that has reached 1000 stars on github.

Open source projects are always about social credits or doing something for the fun of doing it. In rare cases when they aren't it's always responsibility of the author to find funding or come up with a business model.

How do we know if the solution they chose to achieve that goal is the most efficient one? How did that notation evolve? Has it evolved at all? What if it's just a design by committee, with decisions made in the 17th century still affecting how modern papers are written? What if we think of the rulebook on "how to write math" as a codebase? Would it be a 3-4 centuries old codebase without any major refactorings done, ever?

Stupid question: when they say 8 languages including Chinese - do they mean Mandarin or Cantonese? Or is that the same thing (for them)?

Isn't Facebook for Android built in React Native? Doesn't seem to be lacking for them. Airbnb and Instagram [1] are also doing alright.

https://facebook.github.io/react-native/showcase.html

I'm going to get downvoted for my "elitist" opinion but have to say this, to warn those few who'll listen.

Recently I was hiring on a tight budget. I've interviewed a dozen people from various coding boot camps, self taught web developers, etc. None of them could solve a Fizzbuzz level problem on a whiteboard.

(One thing I've learned after 15 years in industry, 8 jobs, 2 continents - a person who can't do fizzbuzz-type problem is not worth having onboard even for free).

It seems to me that even with best training in the world and a ton of prior IT experience it always takes people at least 2-3 years to start thinking in code in a way where you don't waste everyone's time. Learning to code is not about a bunch of syntax rules. It's about retraining your brain to use different mental models, developing intuition about where a bug might be, finding your way around a large and hostile codebase, anticipating how your today's decision will interact with all the features you'll implement over next 6 months, and so on.

Basic rules of programming are simple, but so are the rules of golf or snooker, or making bespoke suits, or wine tasting.

If you are prepared to spend next 3 years aimlessly poking around the debugger struggling to figure out the simplest thing only to realize at 11pm you were looking in a wrong place - go for it. It's frustrating but also rewarding.

If you think in 6 months you'll be able to build the next facebook with AI - only thing you'll learn in that time is how much there's still to learn.

They use stepper motors - same hardware that allows a budget 3D printer archive sub-mm movement without any feedback loops. Pretty sure they don't need to look at the cube again after scanning the starting position.

It is a bug, it should be fixed, it's unacceptable that it's taking so long. But tone of the discussion would be very different if this was simply "app is slow and drains battery". This is big news only because most people think Spotify will kill their SSD like by Christmas or earlier. When in fact it probably doesn't matter at all, because most computers get replaced due to natural causes in less than 8 years.

While I get the overall message I'm not sure last question is that unpredictable: I++ + ++I If postfix is executed first it returns 0 but prefix returns 2 and the result is 2. If prefix is executed first it returns 1 and then postfix also returns 1, result of the addition is again 2. What else is ambiguous about this snippet? I can't think of a parse tree that'd evaluate addition before any of the increments - that'd be a syntax error. If the code were (++i + i++) there could be alternative interpretations, but again ++ requires lvalue...

While really awesome on specs and price, downside of these boards is dev tools and community support. They are getting better at it and very fast, but living on the cutting edge is not pleasant.

I know measuring power in amps is against everything high school physics told us, but it's a really common approach in electronics engineering. They literally do that all the time.

I think a sentence or two later the official site gives an explanation why: lipo battery sizes are measured in mAh, so dividing battery size by current you get hours of operation.

I'm still a noob when it comes to microelectronics, but my understanding is almost every chip runs on 3.3v, lipo batteries are 3.2-3.7v depending on charge level. When they talk about power in amps they assume everyone knows they mean at 3.3v

Before you start sending couple thousand QPS to any server it's generally not a bad idea to test if that server can handle that much, sometimes it is even worthwhile notifying the other team about the intended change.

Overall when you "tested" something, but it still breaks in production and requires a rollback it's usually a sign that your testing strategy isn't could use some improvement - what is the point of testing if it doesn't prevent failures from happening

So one day they switched their entire user base to rely on a 3rd party free service without any load testing or heads up? What could possibly go wrong?

That's what I thought, and there are lodash & underscore to do twenty different flavours of debounce. However, stuff like @killEvent and @stopPropagation does make sense.

Testing is needed at the point where risk is. If something comes from a farm and your job is to decontaminate it - there's point in testing output. If you're running a restaurant you probably don't need your dishwasher to test tap water quality and post results on the website.

Soylent is simply mixing a number of standard powders, most of those already heavily processed.

I think it's quite clear that an ingredient they actually wanted in the formula is causing drama, not that something got contaminated or not up to spec. Testing you suggest would show that "yeah bag contains exactly what we want". But that wouldn't catch the issue of "what we've put in the bag isn't compatible with (some?) human bodies".

Comment I replied to was describing the troubles caused by dev machine and server going out-of-sync.

Aren't static site generators supposed to umm, generate a static site, so one wouldn't have to maintain any binaries?

I'm referring to promises of reliable, cheap and zero waste cold fusion or plasma or whatever reactors that were promised to 100% replace fossil fuels.

A handful of reactors here and there while an awesome achievement in itself doesn't really meet the expectations people of the sixties had for the year 2000.

Other analogies I considered using but was too lazy to mention in my comment were jet packs, space tourism, cure for cancer and HIV. (and you could say all of these have also been delivered... to some extent)

"AI will replace all jobs" is the new "safe nuclear energy is only 10 years away"

Author seems to express a deep understanding of JS quirks and outlines specific places (often rare corner cases) that'd trip a JS beginner.

Frontend always was and always will be harder than backend, regardless of the platform/framework etc. Yes, the fact that HTML / CSS is a technology designed in a different era (slow keyboard+mouse desktops) for a different purpose (displaying static hyperlinked documents) doesn't make life any easier.

Helicopters use complex and expensive mechanisms to articulate rotor blades. If plasma can eliminate hinges on wings hopefully it can also be used to dramatically simplify the helicopter design. That'll be a real breakthrough.

A guy at our makerspace in Sydney built a couple times larger system with working seven segment speed & fuel indicators, two joysticks, etc. That was last year, I think the project kept growing since.

Here's a demo video from last year's Makerfaire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCuNyiseJ5g&feature=youtu.be...

edit: grammar

My guess it's an independent team inside Google decided "let's make a better facetime" and starting from scratch was easier than wrapping their heads around a several years old codebase.

Moore law != progress

This is based on the assumption that server without those optimizations is not fast enough. That used to be definitely true in the nineties, but hardware is getting faster while human reaction time stays relatively flat. Hardware is also getting cheaper, so throwing a beefier server is a much easier and better solution than investing months of error prone and non-scalable human labor.

Everyone is ditching those beautiful and smart CS principles on FE by switching to hybrid apps, walking entire DOM on every update, etc.

There's no reason same wouldn't happen on backend. In fact it already has - interpreted languages, GC, micro services.

For better or worse progress in software always meant worse efficiency, because hardware was always forgiving that.

People host their blogs on AWS lambda for less than dollar per month [1] compared to "standard" $5 or so for VPS. How's that a waste of money? Docker and containers are also a paradigm change, but the world seem to have adopted it just fine.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11644042

Ironically, in another "universe", StackOverflow doesn't have either part of this problem - they use the DB recommended by Microsoft and the OS recommended by Microsoft :)

http://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-arc...

Before you aim to become great by reducing your code please become competent in absolutely necessary basics: DRY, separation of concerns, basic patterns, security, etc.

Bittorrent uploaders in general don't have a "business model" but are still a threat and a "competitor" to copyright holders. And are still breaking the law.

The point Comodo guy is trying to make is they invented/own the 90-day certificate, or specifically the magic number 90. If they actually do he has the moral right to be upset (but of course that doesn't mean trademark law or common sense stop being applicable to the words "Let's encrypt")