Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Untitled topic

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–259 of 259 posts

Re: undefined

#251

Post by bigbillheck »

GDC7 wrote: post #152
bigbillheck wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to have to explain what the Manhattan Project had to do with victory in Europe. And after that, please explain why Feynman's contributions to it were so critical. Finally, I'd like to ask for an explanation as to how Feynman's actions starting in 1949 could have had a causal effect on a war that ended in 1945.

> Finally, I'd like to ask for an explanation as to how Feynman's actions starting in 1949 could have had a causal effect on a war that ended in 1945. That's exactly what I mean, thank you! You have stressed the whole point! Society feels comfortable in canceling people because these people already gave their contribution and for sure the person being canceled can't retroactively destroy all their contributions. If t…

> That's exactly what I mean, thank you! You have stressed the whole point!

That aside, please answer my other two questions.

(And for the rest of your post, maybe the movies we'd have had in the absence of Weinstein would have been better)

Re: undefined

#252

Post by diego_moita »

Jetrel wrote: post #215
diego_moita wrote: post #110

What I remember the most about Jobs' death are 2 things: 1) Most of the media did an heavy coverage of his death and legacy. 2) Exactly 1 week after his death one of my personal heroes died too: Dennis MacLister Ritchie. Almost no one paid attention. From computers to micro-controllers, from satellites to abs breaks, Ritchie's legacy goes far deeper and wider than Jobs'. Almost every programmer today touches some of…

The thing that made Jobs consequential was the old Henry Ford-ism of "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have asked for a faster horse." Dennis Ritchie did a damn fine job making what he did, but what he did was essentially just going with the flow; unix and C are like selling sugar to bees. They essentially "sell themselves"; they have qualities that programmers look at and inherently go "I want that!". Wh…

Thanks, that was an interesting read. I disagree on the details (e.g.: Jobs rejected the idea of an app store, it was forced on him by circumstances and even the iPhone was something that other directors on Apple fought hard to convince him).

But your general idea is sound and it does make sense: he swam against the flow. Pixar is probably a better example, he struggled for years to find a sustainable business model for it.

Re: undefined

#253

Post by wheelinsupial »

soperj wrote: post #112
diego_moita wrote: post #110

What I remember the most about Jobs' death are 2 things: 1) Most of the media did an heavy coverage of his death and legacy. 2) Exactly 1 week after his death one of my personal heroes died too: Dennis MacLister Ritchie. Almost no one paid attention. From computers to micro-controllers, from satellites to abs breaks, Ritchie's legacy goes far deeper and wider than Jobs'. Almost every programmer today touches some of…

Dennis Ritchie's book on C is pretty well required reading for anyone going through a computer science program no?

Depends on the instructor. Some profs where I studied will assign K&R C for reading and others will use King's C Programming: A Modern Approach. King is a much more gentle introduction IMO.

Re: undefined

#254

Post by Wowfunhappy »

dwaite wrote: post #218
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mostly on the Mac. iOS 11 and 13 were both pretty crappy, not to mention weird misses like the Podcasts app. I can't see those releasing when Steve Jobs was at the helm, unless the situation was desperate. (An example of a desperate situation would be when you’re current products run Mac OS 9).

Counterexamples: iBooks and the iMovie rewrite that they just shipped with nowhere near feature parity.

iBooks wasn’t replacing a previous offering, and I don’t think it was abjectly terrible, just limited.

iMovie is a better example but I still think it was a decent update for the software’s target audience. And they offered everyone the older version for free! An even better example might be Final Cut X, which I actually think was a great product but for a very different audience for FCX.

The through-line is that these products were good products-they did something well and without bugs—but they weren’t targeted correctly, ignoring the needs of an existing customer base with (completely reasonable) expectations. That’s different in kind from something like iOS 13.

Re: undefined

#255

Post by exBarrelSpoiler »

esyir wrote: post #233
firecall wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved the public person I knew as Steve Jobs! I was genuinely gutted when he died, and suffered from a form of grief! Jony Ive gave an interview recently to the WSJ! “I loved how [Steve] saw the world. The way he thought was profoundly beautiful.”[1] "Perhaps it is a comment on the daily roar of opinion and the ugly rush to judge, but now, above all else, I miss his singular and beautiful clarity. Beyond his ideas…

There has been a growing movement to pave over a person's achievements in light of some discovered sin, as though that immediately invalidates all they have done.

No one invalidates Steve Jobs' achievements. Pointing out that he was not some plaster saint is not diminishing all that he's done. Apple is the most profitable company on Earth, one of the most profitable corporations in history. There is no one persecuting Apple, there is no one persecuting Jobs' legacy. Its bottom line speaks for itself.

Re: undefined

#256

Post by mhh__ »

simonh wrote: post #248
mhh__ wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPad in general screams of directionless product development. I have an M1 iPad Pro. The thing is so fucking fast, just let me do a bit of coding on it. ... or let me rename file extensions.

You can code in Swift Playgrounds, including developing GUI apps using SwiftUI, and the next version will be able to release apps to the store directly from the iPad. That's aside from the third party apps like Codea and Pythonista that have supported coding and app development on the iPad for about a decade. If you've not been coding on your iPad, you've been seriously missing out.

That's great if you're a swift programmer...

When I can build the compiler I work on, on an iPad then I will consider it a coding platform.

Re: undefined

#257

Post by soperj »

Jetrel wrote: post #221
soperj wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems really weird to me. We even did a machine language course even though we will never do any machine language programming. It's good to understand what the hell is going on. C is amazing in explaining how memory management works, since you have to do it all yourself.

Someone beat me to the punch, but yeah, at this point, C barely works the way actual computers work under the hood. It works the way a PDP-11 does, and most modern computers have been forced (even at the CPU level) to basically act as PDP-11 emulators . Take, for example, the entire stack-and-heap thing. That's not a bedrock feature of computing; it's merely a thing that was particularly convenient to do on a PDP-11.…

Screws are a terrible way to build something still though compared to a properly fitted mortise & tenon.

Re: undefined

#258

Post by soperj »

908B64B197 wrote: post #186
sokoloff wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect there are CS programs that don’t even teach C at this point.

The ones that matter do. If a CS/Engineering program doesn't have an OS class with non-trivial labs in C, it's simply not serious and a red flag on a resume.

You are probably my least favourite poster on here, but I agree with you here.
Post reply on HN