The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer
But the industry had changed. The days of the solitary, brilliant, auteur developer had passed like rain on the mountain.
Hasnain says:
" When I was in college they told us there would always be a demand for software developers. In general that’s still true.
I always wondered what it would look like when it stopped being true, when the need for developers dwindled, and programming stopped paying the bills.
Now I know.
For the lone game programmer that day has already arrived.
Twice."
Posted on 2015-01-14T02:16:57+0000
Hotter Than Lava
Every day, cops toss dangerous military-style grenades during raids, with little oversight and horrifying results.
Hasnain says:
Flashbangs are really scary.
"Sometimes loud noises trigger memories of the event. One summer night after the accident, Dukes woke up in a panic. A storm was raging outside and, in her sleepy state, she confused the thunder and lightning for flashbang explosions. She ran into the bathroom once again and curled up on the floor, rocking and saying, “They’re coming, they’re coming.” Her mother found her and asked who was coming. “I said, ‘Them. Please don’t burn me again.’”"
Posted on 2015-01-14T02:12:05+0000
Disproportionately Common Names By Profession
verdantlabs.com
Why do all records sound the same?
No, it’s not you — records do all sound the same these days. Desperate to get their music on the radio at all costs, rec…
Hasnain says:
"Why does most music sound the same these days? Because record companies are scared, they don’t want to take risks, and they’re doing the best they can to generate mainstream radio hits. That is their job, after all. And as the skies continue to darken over the poor benighted business of selling music, labels are going to cling to what they know more fiercely than ever."
Posted on 2015-01-13T02:41:17+0000
The Stunning Scale of AWS and What it Means for the Future of the Cloud - High Scalability -
James Hamilton , VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, and long time blogger of interesting ...
Hasnain says:
"All 14 other cloud providers combined have 1/5th the aggregate capacity of AWS (estimate by Gartner)
Every day, AWS adds enough new server capacity to support all of Amazon’s global infrastructure when it was a $7B annual revenue enterprise (in 2004).
Amazon has designed and built their own power substations. It only saves a little money, but they can build them much faster. Utility companies are not used to dealing with the rate AWS is growing at, so they had to build their own."
Posted on 2015-01-13T02:32:43+0000
How to raise successful children — advice from parents lucky enough to know
Tips from Washington-area parents lucky enough to know.
KeySweeper
KeySweeper is a stealthy Arduino-based device, camouflaged as a functioning USB wall charger, that wirelessly and passively sniffs, decrypts, logs and reports back (over GSM) all keystrokes from any Microsoft wireless keyboard in the vicinity.
Gotham 7.5K by Vincent Laforet (Storehouse)
A Rare High Altitude Night Flight Above NYC
What's new in CPUs since the 80s and how does it affect programmers?
This is a response to the following question from David Albert: My mental model of CPUs is stuck in the 1980s: basically boxes that do arithmetic, …
Nothing you can do impresses me.
Because of the urgent need for new blood / ideas in the tech world, our lack of ability to reward new developers is a particularly profound example of shooting oneself in the foot.
Hasnain says:
" Seriously, is “Is it responsive?” really the first words you want to come out of your mouth, before you’ve even seen the product? Can you step back, suspend your criticism for just one second, and realize that someone has just completed a shit-ton of work?"
Yup, developers are pretty mean
Posted on 2015-01-10T02:36:10+0000