> I'm pretty sure nifty-fiftys have been top recommendation always for people wanting to explore beyond the kit zoom.
His article isn't addressed to "people wanting to explore beyond the kit zoom". It's addressed to people who just finished unwrapping "that new 35mm camera kit you bought to document your child’s early years", who accepted the default lens and have only a foggy awareness of the pros and cons of different lenses. His article is meant to turn these people into "people wanting to explore beyond the kit zoom".
I came here to say the same thing and was glad to see someone else already did. So I simply upvoted you.
I might add that also he was looking for two more things that some times also are rejuvenating:
(c) physical exercise
(d) a relief from decision fatigue: "I did not want to be asked to make a lot of decisions everyday. . . . I wanted literally to be told what to do every day and I wanted that structure to be rigorous." This can get old after a while too, but routine can be a nice change for a while, if every day you at your old job you had to be a creative or always solve new problems, like if you were a designer, director, etc.
"Once more, with feeling," is a cliche that a conductor might say to an orchestra during rehearsal. Presumably professional orchestras usually play with feeling, even on the first attempt. So the conductor means, somewhat condescendingly, more feeling. It has been said so many times by so many conductors that it has become a running joke. If you were doing a comedic impression of a conductor, you might insert that phrase.
Four-part harmony is the performance of a song by four singers (or four groups of singers): soprano, alto, tenor, bass. You could have just one person sing a song, but if you have a whole chorus sing it, it will sound fuller (though not always better).
It was a funny way to say that the bank not only will require the money from the person who began the transaction but also will impose severe fees.
I'm intrigued by his replacement, the language E. Even though it arose in 1997, I was unfamiliar with it. I like what I have seen so far, http://erights.org/elang/
I'm relieved that Crockford suggests a substantial alternative, and wasn't just bashing JavaScript. In fact I was surprised by the headline, given his history of defending the language. Instead of just suggesting another popular language like Python or Ruby, he is more specific: "It needs to be a minimal capability-based actor language that is designed specifically for secure distributed programming. Nothing less should be considered."
"Ampersand" is like "could of", and yet is not like it.
Ampersand is a change in sounds, for the sake of easier pronunciation:
and per se and # original
andperseand # remove spaces
andpers'and # drop extra vowel, for slightly faster speech
an'pers'and # drop extra consonant, for same reason
anpersand # drop apostrophes
ampersand # transform "n" to its neighbor, "m", because it's easier to say before "p"
These are all merely changes in sounds, the consonants and the vowels, the "phonemes" as linguists call them. The course from "am not" to "ain't" follows a similar pattern.
"Could of", on the other hand, is not phonological but morphological --- a change in meaning, because "of" doesn't mean "have". Or maybe it is merely typographic, because what they could have written is "could've", which sounds the same as "could of" --- and it's probably what they meant but simply made the same mistake as when you accidentally write "there" instead of "their".
And I don't believe your repulsion is "irrational", as you say. There is value in preserving the current state of language, of slowing down its changes, simply for the sake of intelligibility, for now and for posterity. A single instance of one person correcting someone else's "could of" is a like throwing an ice cube atop a melting glacier, but like voting in a general election, but it is no reason to just give up. (Of course the stakes are low, so we must say it only if it will be well received.)
Now there is a class of "corrections" that are misguided, I think, like the rule that you cannot end a sentence with a preposition. That arose from lovers of Latin, which doesn't end sentences in prepositions because it is impossible, and they were trying to make English more like Latin.
spacemanmatt, you joined Hacker News 9 years ago, and you have a lot of upvotes, which means not only that you have been helpful but that you have been here thousands of times.
So I am mystified by your comments. On the first page of Hacker News right now are seven submissions with a year at the end. It is standard practice to tag a submission with the year if it isn't this year. This is regardless of relevance. If it is on Hacker News, it is assumed to be relevant in some way. Else why would someone post it? If someone posted an article from 1888, they must think it relevant in some way.
Putting the year at the end has absolutely zero bearing on whether we think it is relevant. To me it is just another piece of metadata, like tagging videos, PDFs, polls, etc.
The headline uses the words "top" and "talent" in unconventional ways.
When the writer examined Rick's code, it is revealed as messy, buggy, and long-winded --- "a lot of copy pasta", laden with "thousands of hours of technical debt", "bells and whistles", and speculative programming for requirements needed in "five years".
Rick was not a good programmer with a bad personality. He was a bad programmer with a bad personality.
More specifically it sounds like Narcissistic Personality Disorder, with certain telltale signs like gaslighting, the inability to accept fault, and dependency injection of the self into the lives of everyone else. The writer says, "I don’t believe Rick started out this way." I think he's wrong. Narcissistic Personality Disorder starts in childhood. So Rick was like this when he entered the business. In fact it is probably how he became "universally recognized on the team as the top talent" --- not because he was, but because he bullied his way up to that with his own self-aggrandizement, and his coworkers were too timid or inept to suggest that he was never actually a good programmer.
I would caution against applying a label like "Narcissistic Personality Disorder". That is a clinical term, only applied after diagnosis by a qualified professional. You have not met "Rick", nor had a chance to examine him. I'm assuming you're not a qualified mental health professional either, or you'd know this.
I see it differently. Rick understood the product. He was not bothered about writing code properly, he wanted to get working product out of the doors.
I am writing that, because once I was maintaining code after similar Rick. In the code were lot of "dumb errors" which turned out to be undocumented edge cases and thanks to those "dumb errors" code performed much better than competitors code. So I would take with a massive grain of a salt an evaluation of a code by a person who took over the code of such Rick when this person also had antipathy towards said Rick.
I had to assume "top talent" and "genius" were used ironically because neither applies to the Rick in this post. He has the megalomaniacal cowboy bit down, though.
You just made me realize that email would look better if it grouped messages by sender instead of just by subject.
It was a huge step forward for me when I switched from Outlook to GMail. Outlook originally did not group emails at all. Each message was a line item on its own, sorted by date sent. So even individual replies back and forth were scattered across my Inbox. Then GMail grouped all replies into a single line item, as a "thread" or "conversation", which I could then expand. Eventually Outlook followed suit, although at first imperfectly. It grouped by Subject instead of the more accurate email header, Message-ID. (Actually I believe this technique predates GMail, at least in one text-based email reader, Mutt.)
I think email should take this one step further, and group messages first of all by sender, then by thread.
sender (or recipient group for emails with more than one recipient, like SMS clients do)
|- thread
|- message
This would help with companies that send you many messages, whether it's spam or just receipts and other notices. But it would still not be bad for emails from individuals too. Even though someone may write you many emails about many different things, each with their own Subject, it still makes sense to group them. That mimics real life, where a real person's many conversations that they have with you are still visually grouped into one person, one organic body, in your mind.
Facebook would also be better this way. Collapse posts by poster, so that people who post 5 times a day don't take up more of your news feed than those who post just once every now and then.
I was a heavy email user before Gmail advent, and was always using folders in my email clients to do just that. For me it turned out that most emails work better the gmail way. I'd benefit from a simple option to group all messages from/to a specific sender into one thread though
I would agree that permission dialogs are not what we want, on page load, as so many websites do.
A web app should wait until it needs Geolocation or whatever, before prompting you. It should always follow a user interaction. When you click to use some feature, then it prompts you for the permission.
Or an app could have some kind of introductory page where it lists the permissions that it will need, and you click each one that you want to give. Again you do this at your leisure, not upon page load.
I find that most people don't understand creativity. If you believe an artist or inventor is some mystic sage who creates works ex nihilo, then you misunderstand creativity and attribute to it far too much. And therefore you might grant an artist a period of copyright that is longer than is really deserved or needed.
Through much of my life, I have been accused of being "creative". In elementary school my class recognized me as the best at drawing. In fifth grade I wrote a book that was checked out so many times from the school library that it filled up the check-out card front and back. In high school, I made dozens of little movies with my friends. After college I was a graphic designer, and both of my employers expressed awe at my work.
It shows what I always knew in the back of my head: that nothing I ever made was from staring at a blank sheet of paper. It was just me ripping off all my favorite things I had seen before. Everyone tries their hand at art, and often it obviously is a copy. My secret was that I would take a little of this, a little of that, copy 5 different things and mix them all together, rather than making a straight copy of just one thing. I wasn't trying to hide anything, it was just how my mind naturally worked. I thought one thing from one movie was cool, so I took part of that. I thought something else from a drawing was cool, so I took some of that. Then I merged it all together, naturally, without really thinking about what I was doing, just trying to make something cool.
Then I saw that video and realized that is what pretty much everyone had been doing, no matter how famous. A great artist is not someone who creates stuff out of nothing. More like someone who comes up with a new recipe based on five previous recipes. I'm sure they deserve something, just not everything, foreverz!
This makes it sound almost as if ideas themselves were "alive", in the sense that they reproduce and undergo natural selection, with the best ideas being "remixed" into new idea babies
But, as someone told me here not long ago (though I knew it already), the fight for ownership of that term is lost: A "meme" nowadays is a .JPG with some "funny" text in block letters on it.
His article isn't addressed to "people wanting to explore beyond the kit zoom". It's addressed to people who just finished unwrapping "that new 35mm camera kit you bought to document your child’s early years", who accepted the default lens and have only a foggy awareness of the pros and cons of different lenses. His article is meant to turn these people into "people wanting to explore beyond the kit zoom".