Certainly not an advertising apologist, but sometimes advertising attempts to provide information to alter consumer behavior in a way that is more optimal for the consumer and the advertisng vendor than it is pessimal for the original vendor. From a mpg(society) perspective, some urban commuter might do far better in a Prius than in, say, a Suburban. This might be the result of advertising and also a net gain for society. Also, sometimes really good things get underwritten NPR, Podcasts, etc (which might be like advertising).
>From a mpg(society) perspective, some urban commuter might do far better in a Prius than in, say, a Suburban. This might be the result of advertising and also a net gain for society.
Yes, but advertising is neutral to that. It will advertise a low-mpg smog-emitting monster just as well as a Prius.
And it will prioritise advertising cars (which make them more money) over public transit or bicycles and so on.
> But if you insert a random branch instruction into the object code of a working program, the results are somewhat different.
Maybe, maybe not. I've observed lots of dead code in my time developing, where inserting random instructions would have no impact whatsoever. Inserting random instructions into a give program may have negative side effects, it may not. But (without having read your reference, though I might, or the linked article here), most of the source and object code that exists is highly specified and functionally dense. These are the ways we code when we want something very optimized and not broadly adaptive. Essentially you could say that almost all of the code we are writing is rain man style code. Good at some few sets of things in specific conditions. I think it is possible that there will exist (although perhaps not written in the same way) code where less of the genome is lethal, and there is more "wiggle room" for code to expand and change as a system. The stillborn offspring we might encounter if todays systems were "genetically evolved" are the equivalent of disseminated haploid genetic material. I think the conditions for conception (if you'll ride with me on my beaten metaphor) are not so far off as you may think, even if they are very different in terms of compilation/process execution/parallelism. While much of the code we write still mirrors the serial logic we often apply in the sciences, it is neither a foregone conclusion that software will continue exclusively in that way, nor a lack of capabilities of modern infrastructure to achieve parallelism comparable to some biological systems.
Actually, a lot of times I think IC's have the fullest story. If you are a backend dev at a smallish company, you probably know how the stuff works. Also, warning people against "waking up to a bad day" is spoken as someone who really values their place as a cog in a machine. If your co-workers are not being frank with you, in my opinion that company is probably not a really healthy environment, and best to move to greener pastures. I think HN is about frank talk, and let the PR people send canned releases to ars.
You could call Inter Library Loans a version of this, but it's free. If my library doesn't have a piece of media, it is very possible that I could get that piece of media from another library across the country. I might pay postage, but depending on the library, it might still be free. Like the non-brit who has not paid the licensing fee, I paid no taxes to the other library, but in this case I can still take advantage of that resource. This sort-of already happens with BBC and US Public Broadcasting, but I don't think BBC probably licenses anything back from WABE here.
But the library that you re borrowing from probably also borrows books from your library. So you have "paid" by sharing the books that your taxes have paid for with that library.
Is designing 10-year products really a thing any more? I can't think of any device that I use practically that is that old. I think the only places that you will want 10-year products anymore are space, implant, and undersea/underground/tracking applications.
I'm not saying it is a good thing, as it leads to this "disposable tech" mindset, but it seems like that may be the reality of it.
OTOH +1 wandboard and iMX in general. I wish the Novena were a little less expensive, but I can't blame bunnie for wanting to err on the side of making quality hackable goods.
Everything that isn't consumer electronics has longer lifecycles. B2B customers aren't as flexible: it's not a question of throwing out your smartphone every 2 years and buying a new one, as soon as your action is multiplied across 1000+ devices everything takes much longer. You might spend an entire year doing the national rollout, and once you've done that you don't want to do it again if at all possible.
If there's any kind of qualification, tracking, auditing, or compliance issue everything will take much longer again.
I'm not sure this is true. I see plenty of products that have 1k+ rollouts more frequently. Maybe some businesses aren't sophisticated enough to do that, but those are the large, slow businesses of the herd that will get picked off by faster movers. That's why healthcare, defense & education are popular industries to enter right now, because many of the entrenched players can't keep up with the game. There is _no_ intrinsic reason that b2b should be different from b2c. I bet the old guard's lobbyists and capital can only last for so long.
Yes. Not everything is a consumer appliance. Even some consumer appliances need to last ten years (lawn sprinkler controller, home automation, factory automation, etc). While those products may not actually be produced for ten years without an update, they will have to be supported in a lot of cases.
It's better than the opposite, which is designing to some random processor with completely opaque information about it. No datasheets or TRMs, no idea of production schedules, no idea of lifespan.
And I'd classify Samsung Exynos and the Broadcom BCM2835 in Raspberry Pi in that group.
Well, I hate the opaque bits of both those, but that doesn't mean an upgradable board can't be designed around the specs they implement, and those chips are just the commodities that populate them. Write your code for ARM, make a good pin-compatible interface that can allow for replacement with other components if necessary.
It is absolutely a thing, but it's a very quiet thing. There's an awful lot out there that could use the boost in CPU, I/O and RAM in this form factor but the fruit-fly lifespan of these things scares people. I'm fighting that battle right now.
< Iceland_jack> xQuasar: We are cooperating with you, you're just not aware that your goal is learning Haskell
Hilarious with 1984 undertones. I love it!
Is this supposed to be serious, because we want javascript to be better, or sarcastic, because most people DO live behind locks that are broken and can be bypassed trivially with relatively unsophisticated tools? Everybody break out your bobby pins!
> I'm sorry but a year+ at those companies proves you've provided at least something of worth to them.
Not sure about that. I think there are lots of "well known companies" where a good bluffer can relabel themselves and bounce around enough that nobody realizes they haven't got anything to offer.
>We wax poetic about DRY yet you're gonna ask me to repeat myself?
Some people can wax poetic pretty effectively without being effective at implementation. I've written a 1 line fizzbuzz python generator in less than 2 minutes. If one is too arrogant/uncompromising to take the two minutes to satisfy this (if asked), or unable to turn it into something interesting ("This is done with generators. I might never do it this way in practice, but the question you asked me was so mind-numbingly boring I had to do it this way to entertain myself"), then one probably won't work that well on an effective team.
I forget that in most "well known companies" they are much larger in size and people can easily hide behind others in such a place. That's where my ignorance comes in. I've been only part of smaller shops where if you aren't producing, you absolutely do not last.
Yet I easily forgot the person with a masters degree that could not pass, was hired anyway, and subsequently fired 3 days later for not improving an iota. I think my frustration is that people like this exist, forcing companies to give the same test to weed them out with no way to skip the question if you can faithfully prove you're not that person.
I think this is pretty perceptive. I wish that there were more active development for the portage tree community, but the truth is, there is just so much _there_, and as I see it, gentoo hasn't been commodified by an enterprise (canonical, red hat, etc), which is both a blessing and a curse. Also, I think nobody really runs "stable" gentoo, because stable things on single systems are naive. This is part of the reason for the explosion of distributed systems (cassandra, hadoop, hbase, etc). I think most people who run gentoo (correctly) don't actually rely on one single system being stable.
Haha, as if we didn't get enough folks coming around wanting to hack the gibson! But really, the challenges around retaking the hacker term to mean tinkerer/maker/understander-or-things is enough without us getting cease & desist/DMCA/strike letters.