731–740 of 1001 posts
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This problem is solved in China. Blame your local incumbents.
Could you give more info please?
Several friends living in China tell me cash is basically embarrassing at this point. You'll be laughed at if you try to use cash (note: I'm taking their word for it)
3D printing. Turns out making little plastic shapes isn't all that useful. Seems obvious in hindsight.
I don't get it. 3D printing is massive, and is shaping our future. How did it not pan out?
F#. Back in 2006 I first stumbled upon it and was amazed. It had so much potential. Everything C# did, and more, better. I was sure we'd see 20% of MS devs moving to it. I underestimated the momentum of MS, the power of embarrassment of hiring a high-profile figure to be shown up by a researcher, the incredible anti-FP and even anti-generics...resentment(?) that MS kept towards them. Plus the insane comments from act…
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Graph search still works surprisingly well if you know what you can search for. Try http://graph.tips/
It respects privacy setting now tho or?
But there is a lot you can still do with it.
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> Their quality is indistinguishable from CDs despite what audiophiles would have you believe Well I blame the system. You needed upgraded headphones or speakers. I have $2000 studio monitors when I was an audio engineer and well I can 100% tell you in a blind test I can tell the difference. 95% of the reason why is people don't care about quality audio. It's something about human brains. MP3 sound horrible compared…
I use a Rowkin Mini for the same sort of stuff, most often while commuting. For spoken content it renders intelligibly, and it is tiny and comfortable to use. It also lasts a few hours on a charge and lives on my keyring. Devices like this exist in a local optimum of convenience, as long as they and their audio sources both do Bluetooth right. (I tried a bunch of the cheap ones off Amazon before settling on the Rowki…
Paypal used to have this feature that allowed you to install a browser add-on and you could generate a CC number on the fly that was good for either one time use or recurring use (for subscription services). This feature served two primary purposes: 1) to be able to pay using PayPal on sites that didn't support it 2) to help prevent against fraud which was becoming a massive problem at the time. If the number was sto…
F#. Back in 2006 I first stumbled upon it and was amazed. It had so much potential. Everything C# did, and more, better. I was sure we'd see 20% of MS devs moving to it. I underestimated the momentum of MS, the power of embarrassment of hiring a high-profile figure to be shown up by a researcher, the incredible anti-FP and even anti-generics...resentment(?) that MS kept towards them. Plus the insane comments from act…
There's two kinds of programs being made. First most common one is the kind you're talking about here: grunt work. It's not about the code, but more about having the code do a straight forward task with very flexible constraints. A web app that talks to a database and does a few simple transformations -- like forum software or a todo app.
The second type is the interesting one: actual difficult code that does something unique and difficult and can take years to write by very experienced developers. Usually the difficult part here is coming up with the correct algorithm and then applying it, often with performance considerations being extremely important as the code is doing a lot of work. An impressive new MMORPG game, a new rendering technique, complex simulations, control code for rockets or advanced batteries.
The big program with functional programming is that it's never been positioned as a solution to the second type. Generally people trying the second type are told to use C, C++ or recently, Rust. Functional programming is marketed as making the first type "better" because trying to market it as being more efficient than C/C++ has not worked as people rely on micro benchmarks for these decisions. But this falls apart with the argument you gave: for the first type, it's better to just hire more junior programmers as there's nothing really difficult involved. And using a functional language makes it extremely difficult to hire junior programmers, because functional languages are aimed at advanced programmers.
It's a massive product-market fit problem.
E-Ink. It is the "correct" choice for display technology, and with enough research money put into it, it could replace these abominable light-emitting displays. But what we already have is "good enough", despite all of the hidden costs, and so we're stuck with it.
Many years ago, I heard a politician give a speech, and he used a phrase there (I am translating from German, so it might sound a little clumsy): The worst enemy of Good is Better. Over time, I have come to believe that the worst enemy of Better is "Good Enough".