The Netflix DVD service were such a boon to my family and I during its heyday.
We're not native English speakers, and often (even now!) streaming sites don't have Spanish subtitles unless it's a blockbuster movie or show. DVDs always had Spanish subtitles, or at least it was easy to check if they did.
As for me, they let me explore all kinds of film before I discovered torrenting (and even after, for convenience). People remember 2010s Netflix for having everything on streaming, but the DVD service actually had everything! Criterion films, foreign films, random compilations of experimental film. A lot of went over my head but shaped who I am now.
And yeah in an age where almost every online delivery took almost a week, watching a Netflix DVD and getting a new one two or three days later was great.
I don't know. There's definitely fewer serious novels of a certain kind being published, and movies that aren't special effect spectacles tend to flop or go straight to streaming (for now).
Films got dramatically cheaper to produce and streaming gave them a platform to be easily distributed outside of the very exclusive cinema market.
Now the problem is quality and production. Studios don't have to be very selective at all any more so median quality has gone way down. Streaming platforms have a ton of content and terrible discovery which means there are huge volumes of mid content and a few gems that unless they are popular are impossible to find.
Publishing had a huge demographic change and is suffering from a different kind of bias than in decades past which has the same kind of diversity-limiting effect, just substituting different groups being promoted and left behind.
Culturally all over media production there's also a problem with a difficult to make distinction – "trying to be diverse" vs "actual diversity" and the imbalance is pushing people into silos: politically, culturally, and in every other way.
He’s just parroting a usual HN-ism of ignoring the topic and talking about themselves. I’ve seen the “I used to tinker but now I don’t” line a hundred times as well as the “this doesn’t apply to me so I don’t care - let me tell you how”.
Isn't that the truth. For a site with the word "hacker" in it there seem to be so few of them. I can't imagine letting all that curiosity die out of me like the parent comment implies.
I don't have the amount of time I used to to do that stuff either but the curiosity of it has never died and if I had more time I'd still do it.
If I ever lost that drive I think I'd rather be dead.
The funny thing about growing older is that we change, and the things that were once "I'd rather be dead than not do this" just naturally fade away, and other new exciting things take their place.
I say thus not to dampen your enthusiasm, but rather to encourage you to enjoy it to the maximum while it lasts.
Everything has a season and in that season it can seem terribly important. Perhaps an activity, or a favorite sports team, or a group of friends.
Some of that remains forever, some of it gets deferred as other things happen. It's part of life, we grow, we change, the world around us changes.
It's not that the drive is lost, it's just that it manifests in different ways, different activities, different challenges.
When you see a post like yours in 30 years time, remember this moment, and raise a glass :)
I’m going to gently pile on to the sibling comment here, and note that the “hacking” we find interesting should and does change over time. I used to spend time hacking PDP-11 assembly code to make games. That got old, and if I play a game now it’s purchased. The stuff I hack on now is more like applied math.
This is all good and natural, if it’s organic and not growing it’s probably not alive.
Ever since blogs have had comments sections, the set of people who are too lazy to make their own blogs, have been holding forth (writing, essentially, their own blog posts) in other people's blogs' comment sections.
Heck, I'm sure people were doing it on Usenet and all-subscribers-can-post mailing lists, too — using the "Reply" button on a message to mean "I want to create a new top-level discussion that quotes/references this existing discussion" rather than "I want to post something that the people already participating in this existing discussion will understand as contributing to that discussion."
In all these cases, the person doing this thinks that a comment/reply is better than a new top-level post, because
the statement they're making requires context, and that context is only provided by reading the posts the statement is replying to / commenting on.
Of course, this being the internet, there is a thing called a hyperlink that could be used to add context just as well... but what there is not, is any kind of established etiquette that encourages people to do that. (Remember at some point in elementary school, learning the etiquette around writing a letter? Why don't schools teach the equivalent for writing a blog post/comment? It'd be far more relevant these days...)
Also, for some reason, social networks all have "reply" / "quote" actions (intended for engaging with the post/comment, and so showing up as "reactions" to the post/comment, or with your reply nested under the post/comment, etc); but no social network AFAIK has a "go off on a tangent" action (which would give you a message composer for a new top-level post, pre-filled with a cited quote of the post you were just looking at, but without your post being linked to that post on the response-tree level.) Instead, you always have to manually dig out the URL of the thing you want to cite, and manually cite it in your new post. I wonder why...
"...but no social network AFAIK has a "go off on a tangent" action (which would give you a message composer for a new top-level post, pre-filled with a cited quote of the post you were just looking at, but without your post being linked to that post on the response-tree level.) ... "
On Usenet, if you were altering the general SUBJECT of a post, you'd reply to a comment BY PREPENDING the NEW TITLE/SUMMARY of your post to the PREVIOUS TITLE of the post to indicate that you HAD changed the GENERAL SUBJECT of the post to something else AND end your NEW TITLE with "Was..." to prefix the previous title, e.g. "Hackintosh is Almost Dead" => "My Changing Hobby Habits Was: Hackintosh is Almost Dead"
On the contrary, I was relating the article to my own experience. The thrust of the article was explaining the end of an age.
I was merely saying that we shouldn't see this as bad, it is the natural way of things. Everything that has a beginning has an end. Raise a glass to remember hackintosh, but don't mourn it.
People are asking how the fact that you make more money now is evidence of that. That's your natural ending, but it's not evidence of a natural ending.
HN community selects for these kinds of posts, in the same way that subreddits like /r/amitheasshole love overwrought girlfriend-is-evil stories.
Most often the highest rated posts on HN are from 40+ year olds who don't discuss the post at hand, they'll post a hyper-specific nostalgic story from their youth on something that is tangentially related to the post.
In fact, the older the better. If your childhood anecdote is from the 70s or 80s you're a god.
Apologies for changing the subject, but aside from real world experience (which I have and am getting at work), is there a resource of similar quality for more intermediate/advanced Python programmers? I always feel like there's a big chunk of the language or stdlib I do not know.
Whenever a new version is released, I read its What's New documentation.
Beyond that, I like to read source code, both for the stdlib and popular third-party packages. This advice generally applies when I'm learning any new language or re-familiarizing myself with one, not just Python.
I really enjoyed Fluent Python a while back as an intermediate book.
Python official docs are not completely horrible, but compared to most other popular languages (Kotlin, Scala, Rust, Go at least), the Python official docs are kind of meh.
I suppose Python docs beat C and C++ which do not have official docs besides the spec. (not counting K&R and Bjarne's books).
Also I guess Javascript does not have official docs (ie MDN is not official)
I have bought this book for every friend learning python for work purposes, really fleshes a lot out that's not taught implicitly. The data model stuff is really useful.
Humble Bundle had some nice collections on Python for many uses. For in general, I remember that Serious Python and Automate the Boring Stuff with Python were both good.
* Practices of the Python Pro (https://www.manning.com/books/practices-of-the-python-pro) — learn to design professional-level, clean, easily maintainable software at scale, includes examples for software development best practices
* Advanced Python Mastery (https://github.com/dabeaz-course/python-mastery) — exercise-driven course on Advanced Python Programming that was battle-tested several hundred times on the corporate-training circuit for more than a decade
That's the point. Try it out for a month, get overwhelmed by your expenses, then cut back as you learn about them. After that month, turn the email notifications off and make a habit of checking the website every day or every so often.
This sounds better in theory than practice. When it comes to apps, I'm a privacy maximalist, turning off all the ad tracking and that I can, and a notification minimalist, turning off every notification that is not something that needs immediate attention or at least action within a short timeframe.
But my settings are changed out from under me constantly. So I wouldn't trust being reliant upon them. Which in that case I'd rather have no signal, as this gets categorized differently in my brain where I think we are naturally inclined to believe any signal is stronger than it actually is. So it's harder to lull myself into a false sense of security and the friction is sometimes purposefully self inflicted. I can totally understand how the same explanation and justification can be used in the opposite direction though, to I guess this is a personal thing.
I do still believe that there should be a __legal__ requirement that users must verify and approve any price change to a reoccurring fixed rate subscription. I'm open to not being aware of nuance that needs to be considered or how it can/will be trivially abused, but I have a hard time seeing how this would not be simple basic consumer protection. I do not think it is in the public interest for companies to be able to employ strategies which are intentionally designed to trick the public and/or customers. While I appreciate you laying our your strategy (I just don't think it'll work for me but I'm sure it'll be beneficial to others) I want to make sure that we also do not codify coping mechanisms as solutions to problematic behaviors.
People usually become Senior Engineers in their late 20s, if not mid 20s. It's the fakest job title in the industry. The majority of Senior Engineers are probably age 28-40 - common ages to have young children.
"Senior" really just means "this person is not straight out of college." It doesn't actually mean senior in the same way that Intel and AMD's "2nm process" technology does not actually correspond to any physical dimension on the die. It just means you have some type of experience.
Just too risky in this economy, and doesn't help every company is "AI for X" which isn't that appealing and asks for office time.
I'll stick with my fully remote job.