if you're interested in this kind of thing, The Mexican Runner beat every NES game (over 700 of them [1]) including such gems as Miracle Piano Teaching System, which took 91 hours to beat and required him to become quite proficient at actual piano playing [2]
Having built a similar website focused on channel level search, I like reading these comments, having the same data as OP and filmot, and realizing they all hit different niches.
I took the website down as "postgres is in fact not all you need", then life hit me, but I credit building it to getting me my current job.
>In 1997, Werner Herzog was in Tokyo to direct an opera. His hosts asked him, Whom would you like to meet? He replied instantly: Hiroo Onoda. Onoda was a former solider famous for having quixotically defended an island in the Philippines for decades after World War II, unaware the fighting was over. Herzog and Onoda developed an instant rapport and would meet many times, talking for hours and together unraveling the story of Onoda’s long war.
i know nothing about this beyond watching food network - i dont even know the meaning of discipline in a kitchen - but can someone explain why it has to be so tough?
why do they work for such long hours in such shitty conditions for such poor pay? for the love? and what makes it so impossible for a good kitchen to work 8 hour shifts with a lunch break?
it doesn't seem like it gets any cushier late career either, so you aren't really working towards much except status.
Seems like you could make about as much over the course of a career working at a wal mart and have much better hours and health coverage to go along with it
I once had a partner that was a serious orchestra player. She had a technical degree but chose to work in an industry that was exceptionally stressful and paid poorly. She once asked a New York Philharmonic player what would happen if he missed a note and he replied that you could lose your job. I couldn't really understand her choice of career until I was hanging around after a performance, and I saw the camaraderie and the fun that the musicians had back stage. They loved music and loved making it. I imagine, that for some people, being a chef is just a job but for others it's the camaraderie and the pleasure of creating.
I have one good story about the kitchens of top restaurants. I have a friend, charming, smart and funny. When she was younger she attended a one of the world's most famous cooking schools and was happy to land a job in the kitchen in a Michelin rated New York restaurant. There was a chef and many sous chefs, but she was assigned a workspace with a small oven where new recipes were tested. She would have to prove herself before she would allowed to work on food for the patrons.
At some point, the head chef approached her and told her that she might be ready to move to the main kitchen, but first, one special test. She was supposed to prepare a kettle of stock, made from all sorts of unusual ingredients. She even had to visit other restaurants to ask for some of the ingredients. After running around town and cooking for hours, she told the chef that her carefully produced result was ready. She brought it to the main kitchen; everyone stopped working and watched as she brought it over to the head chef. He took one look and said sternly, "But where are the vegetables?" With alarm she realized she was supposed to keep the vegetables and not the stock!!! She was so surprised it left her speechless. A few seconds passed, and then the audience of under-chefs couldn't keep quiet and burst out in applause and laughter--it was just a silly initiation ritual that marked her promotion.
> Seems like you could make about as much over the course of a career working at a wal mart and have much better hours and health coverage to go along with it
There’s a lot of camaraderie in the chaotic grind and anyone who thrives in that environment would probably not fare well in the Walmart environment.
AB mentions it some in the OP article, certain types of people find fulfillment in the kitchen and would wither into a depressive/destructive mess without it.
It doesn't have to be as bad as Bourdain makes it. He had a combative, machismo style and it's no surprise that he found himself surrounded with similar people.
There are a lot of real, inherent difficulties. A kitchen is an enormous amount of work to do, and customers are very price sensitive. There is an enormous amount of overhead cost, and all of that makes the margins very thin.
During service, discipline is paramount, because each table has a lot of things coming together at once, and any mistake makes for a less pleasant experience for the diner. Which is, after all, your job. It's a hospitality industry, not just a food industry.
That makes it hard, but it doesn't have to be horrific. Unfortunately, the culture often makes it horrific: a staff expecting to be treated like Bourdain does creates hostility. They expect to change jobs often. That creates distance, and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A better-run kitchen pays well, keeps staff, enforces discipline fairly, and ends up costing a bit more for a much better service. And then goes out of business, much of the time.
I would say fierce competition from local and immigrant labor, low barrier to entry, a profession where hard work is seen as meritorious, and a very high ceiling of prestige and monetary reward. It’s one of the few remaining industries where a poor immigrant kid on the street can work his way up from nothing via grit and determination.
lots of prep time and when service kicks in you're at full speed until its over.
shitty conditions because of capitalism. won't work for chump change? well there's a line out the door of people that will. and you need to pay the bills.
worked in hospitality for over a decade, ran some restaurants in melbourne, australia as head chef. got out of the game at 27 and am working towards a career in environmental science.
i had a wild time, lots of parties and fun, lots of stress-related breakdowns, failed relationships, unbelievable nights out, travelled the country, ate like a king sometimes and ate hunch over a bin covered in sweat other times. more burns and cuts than i could ever remember.
edit: as for why, i fell into hospitality during school. i lived in a small town and that's how you made enough money to move elsewhere. that industry is a double-edge sword. you can walk into a job almost anywhere once you have experience, but trying to jump ship is like pulling teeth. i'm currently doing volunteer work in my current field just so i can gain relevant experience.
As a web developer working primarily in JS, what should I be learning now to stay relevant/up-to-date once WebAssembly is more common? Are we going to see more web stuff built with c++, like the dsp example in this blog post?
I don't think WebAssembly will become more common than JavaScript anytime soon. And even when it will be, it means the tooling will have become so good that you won't even have to think about WebAssembly. That will be left to the people who create compilers to WebAssembly.
Hopefully you'll just use whatever language your org/team/etc. uses, and have it compiled to JS or WebAssembly as is most appropriate for said language.
To answer your other question, I most certainly hope we won't see "more Web stuff" built with C++. C++ is a terrible language for that. It's a very good language to do stuff that needs predictable high performance such as games. And games is a good market for C++ in the browser through WebAssembly. But other than that I hope other, more high level languages will pick up.
I guess the first ones jumping on the WebAssembly wagon will be Web developers, so we will probably get WASM modules written in languages they see appropriate, when JS doesn't cut it anymore.
I guess it will be Rust or Go.
Rust because of Cargo (for npm users a big +) and Mozilla (good marketing of Rust).
Go because of Google (also a Web company with good marketing) and because I read some Node.js developers already switched to Go before WASM.
A lot of current experiments seem to be the other way around. People with C/C++ projects porting them to WebAssembly. This is partly due to the initial limitations in the current version though.
I'm not a web developer but this has definitely peaked my interest to the point I've been dabbling with WebAssembly. It's really easy to get going so I could see a lot of people with other than WebDev backgrounds getting into application development in the browser.
Incredibly interested in the answer to that question as well. Go will not have a future in regards to web development if they don't find a solution for the GC issue in wasm. I assume (and hope) that's a bigger topic compiler-team internally as well currently.
I think if the web assembly experiment succeeds it will spawn new languages that become wildly popular. The web is huge, and client side programming is just a different animal.
You shouldn't have to deal with C++ directly unless you really want to, it's more likely that there will be 'precompiled' WebAssembly modules of existing C/C++ libs which solve computation-heavy tasks (like physics engines, image manipulation, 3d rendering frameworks etc)... and which would offer a Javascript API. The workflow for JS devs would be the same as using a minified Javascript framework now, but instead of a minimifed JS blob you'll load a WebAssembly blob.
Without finalizers in JavaScript, WASM Libraries don't work out well, as you need to do manual memory management in your JavaScript code then, as you won't be able to hook the native destructors into the Garbage Collector of JavaScript. So until those are a thing, it'll be extremely ugly to work with WASM Libraries in JavaScript.
I think emscripten does this by keeping dictionaries on the Javascript side which map numeric "ids" (used on the asm.js/wasm side) to JS objects. This is how mapping a GLuint 'texture id' to WebGL objects works for instance. The JS object won't be garbage collected as long as it 'pinned' in the lookup dictionary, but as soon as the asm.js/wasm side manually release the handle, the JS object will be GC'd. Future APIs (like the a WebGL successor) will hopefully provide 'garbage free' APIs so that they don't require keeping such helper structures around.
It seems too soon to worry about it, unless you like to work on compilers in which case have fun! If you don't, you have to guess what compile-to-WebAssembly language will become popular. So maybe just learn new languages if you enjoy that?
If a popular web library uses it for something real, they will probably provide a JavaScript API to call into it.
To your second question, WebAssembly shouldn't be affecting your day-to-day standard frontend development, unless you're developing very performant applications like games, simulations, etc.
For resources, MDN has a great introduction. Pretty up-to-date too. [1].
Right now, that's probably the best way to go if you're keen to build non-trivial wasm stuff, but I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that it'll stay that way. There's a Rust implementation now, for instance. And some talk of better support for garbage collected languages.
You can program in wasm's text format (the actual assembly language) directly, if you want, and you can program in anything that compiles to wasm. C/C++ have the most developed toolchains for higher (than wasm itself) level languages, for now, but that should open up.
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KDNGI76HoMNyYLL6RqWu... [2] https://youtu.be/PB_LMW72crY?t=3997