This generation will never experience the joy of flipping on network tv on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, seeing Shawshank on, sitting down and just watching it, even though you’ve seen it countless times and it’s the tv-edited commercial filled version.
I lived in Germany, and movies are dubbed there, so the TV stayed mostly off. I did turn on the TV once. There was a movie that looked half interesting, so I focused on it. The scene was two guys at the airport to pick up a girl who they had a crush on in highschool. They're waiting for her at the arrivals. "There she is!", cut to... not the girl walking in looking all glorius, but a beer ad. I turned it off and looked for the movie on Torrent.
I feel like a lot of the pro-spider replies have never accidentally disturbed or stepped on a momma wolf spider carrying her babies on back and witnessed the pure terror that ensues as hundreds of babies swarm out across your floor.
I view this largely as a symptom of the widescale “success” of the bloated J2EE app servers in the early 2000s to mid 2010s. Your Java version and dependencies were locked in and upgrading was a massive effort. A large group of developers stagnated on Java 1.4.2 and 5 and seemingly never updated their use of the language, even when moving to Java 8 and beyond. The legacy stuff keeps ticking along.
I kind of think thats backwards. I think the success of the abomination that we have decided to label as J2EE or Jakarta was attractive to intellectually unambitious Java engineers because it progressed so slowly.
I think people here are really underestimating how intellectually lazy most people are at their jobs. HN selection-biased for a geekier crowd so a lot of my criticisms don’t apply to readers of this forum.
Sorry, but I don't think a preference for slow evolution is always because of laziness. What's wrong with wanting to keep improving on a skill instead of having to waste time relearning things every six months?
Software is rare among arts/crafts/whatever in that it is difficult to find nice areas of software to keep digging deeper into (as curious people do!) rather than having to move on to something new just when you start to be good something.
It's not even wanting to focus on depth instead of breadth, as the constant changes means you are barely able to keep using your older skills, so there is little actual breadth more like constantly moving between shallow pools of knowledge. Maybe it feels great to constantly be moving, but I do not see how it is productive or positive in any way for us.
I am arguing that they aren’t improving their skills in any regard, including how to properly use the tools they already pretend to know. They don’t go “deep” or “broad”, they don’t learn anything more than what they were taught in university.
I have had to debug a lot of concurrent Java, so my opinions are skewed towards that, but I have seen cases where “staff engineers” label every single function as `synchronized`, who genuinely don’t know why you would use a queue, have no concept of thread starvation or fairness, when to use an atomic instead of a mutex, and genuinely do not seem to understand that for network applications it’s generally more important to figure out how to reduce latency than trying to choose the optimal hashmap or sort implementation. These aren’t arcane details that require a PhD in category theory or require being constantly plugged into hacker news, these are extremely basic things that these Java engineers do not know.
I think most Java engineers, like more professionals in general, are very bad at their jobs. I think Java just selection-biases higher than other languages for people who are bad at their jobs.
I'm going to guess the person suffers from vertigo, as have I to a small degree - particularly on the metro escalator in Rosslyn, VA (across the river from DC). The sensation occurs going down or up very tall escalators in a tunnel. When it hits, you feel like you are traveling horizontally with some weird tunnel vision. This is terrifying and can cause you to feel like you're falling - even when you know you are going down or up, your eyes are telling you you're traveling horizontally.
I've also gotten this driving a car through long tunnels as well, going down or up (Baltimore 895 harbor tunnel can do this).
As a pool owner (3 feet in the shallow end and eight feet in the deep end) and parent of a three year old plus older kids that grew up with the pool — I can not fathom allowing a four year old to explore the yard on their own when this was there. Even if just two feet deep. A body of water that goes down into the ground (which this fountain appears to be) is dangerous to young children, period. I respect other peoples’ parenting styles but I personally don’t understand.
I let my four year old do this because I didn't realize how dangerous it was. I've since learned more about the risks, both through personal experience and from reading more after, and I most certainly wouldn't make the same choice now.
Most of US government runs significant workloads on AWS now and that’s only increasing. They’ve cornered govt cloud infrastructure (with Azure, GCP, etc. very far behind) so not sure this matters in grand scheme of things.
Anecdotal based on industry experience, no citations.
I figure whatever they are trying to achieve probably doesn’t work. Otherwise Cash App would do it. But important decision makers are in too deep to admit they were wrong. Smells of turning the Magic Mouse upside down to charge it.
It is definitely odd. I think it started off as a KYC-kind of check. If there’s some weird, possibly illegal reason you type into the “what is this payment for?” input, I read that someone on behalf of Venmo will contact you to have you explain it further and to investigate if it should lead to the closure of your account.
It is unsurprising that Venmo has a log of transactions, right? That’s a necessary part of the job. Having it as something that can be presented as a social feed is the weird thing…
It almost seems like a radical art project, philosophical statement, or social experiment around transparency. Like, hypothetically in some alternate universe if they did no KYC, and just published everybody’s transactions, your peers could inspect your transactions, the police could just look and see if you were transacting with criminals… sort of like open source transactions. Maybe that was the original idea? And then eventually they got some actual customers and said “shit we’re a real company now, let’s put the social experiment on the back burner, add an opt-out, and start doing in-house kyc.”
I had no idea this was true until a buddy of mine who I play hockey with started putting super offensive notes on the payment, trying to trigger someone since it was a hot debate after one of our games if this actually occurred. After about five or six of these, someone did in fact contact him first via email, then actually called him and asked him to explain the notes and yes they do monitor these and yes, if its really suspect, the feds will be notified.
Which then begs the obvious - if you're buying drugs, then don't put you're buying drugs or paying off your bookie.
I guess it's law enforcement on the honor system - when you do something illegal, you're expected tell the police-monitored feed that you did it. We assume that no one is so unethical that they keep their illegal acts secret.
For extra credit, let's put this stuff on the blockchain. Crime is solved!
Engagement. It's part of a dark pattern that triggers that little neuron tie our tendency to compare ourselves to others, a sort of "keeping up with the Joneses" type thing. It is also billed as a free advertising for businesses (e.g. hey, look where your friends shop!) which encourages more businesses to accept Venmo as a payment method.
Anything for the sake of growth or perceived growth, up to and including privacy violations.
If i put your information in a feed, you'll look really stupid when you cry privacy violation down the road as you realize what I've been doing with your information.
In high school physics I procrastinated until the night before our egg drop competition to finally address what I was going to do. I got a medium/large size plastic tupperware container (rigid plastic body with a rigid lid). I took a bag of cotton balls, stuffed them in there as tight as I could, put an empty cardboard toilet paper roll vertically in the center, with more cotton balls designed to go in said cardboard below and above the egg. Taped the lid shut. People laughed at my concoction, especially those that went to great efforts to design theirs. I even tossed mine in the air beforehand to test it, which gave me extreme confidence going into the 30 ft drop that I'd be fine. I was. I do not recall what side it landed on but obviously it bounced several hard times after hitting the ground.
i've done this experiment 2 years in a row with my youngest kiddo as a STEM challenge in elementary school. i thought we got pretty close this year with using heavy duty sponges, paper plates, and a parachute, but was always operating under the assumption that the egg needs to be vertical. i'm excited to try again next year after reading this.
oh and at our school, they bring in a big bucket truck from the local power company and send the teachers up to the top with the devices and let them drop them :)
Get a block of styrofoam, slice it in two, and carve out a hole between the blocks exactly the size and shape of your egg. Tape the blocks together with the egg in the centre.
It is incredibly effective to have a solid surface in contact with the whole shell. And, the outer styrofoam will absorb the worst of the landing. It's also very light, so it minimizes the energy that must be dissipated.
Lesson learned from my failed attempt at the egg drop in high school. The guy with the styrofoam absolutely destroyed everyone at that challenge.
That was the solution employed in the ActionLabs video linked in another comment, but you'll note that their first attempt failed with that approach.
It's difficult to prevent any container that heavy from breaking open when hitting concrete at terminal velocity. I'd bet that the styrofoam block could be dropped from any height and survive landing on any surface, no matter how unyielding.
The one time I did it in highschool I suspended the egg in a small cloth bag within a box. No padding just the secure cloth bag attached to the inside corners of the box with taut twine. Egg survived the 3 story drop easily, even was fine when we kicked it around afterwards.
Yeah, I carefully followed the rules on that competition and made a cage that had the egg suspended with rubber bands. Worked pretty well in home testing. Lost to the kids that shoved wadded up paper towels into Tupperware containers.
Proud to say that in the early-mid 2000s I was a consultant dev at NSF and worked on the research proposal submission and eval website called Fastlane. They’ve since moved the functionality to research.gov, but my code ran in production for 20ish? years? It was old school Java Struts, JSPs, EJB’s..typical J2EE of the time. Lots of people I worked with decided to leave consulting and became NSF employees. They were good and smart people.
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