I think this is such an important point. I know all about Bellard's main works. I actually have no idea what he looks like, I've also never seen an interview with him, and I've never read about his specific philosophies when it comes to different software engineering topics. In a world of never-ending bloviations from "influencers" and "thought leaders" it's so awesome to see a real example of true excellence.
Being an engineer and coding at this stage/level is just remarkable- sadly this trade craft is missing in most (big?) companies as you get promoted away into oblivion.
The Turing Award is given for breakthroughs in computer science, not for "most productive programmer of all time", and it wouldn't be appropriate for Ballard.
If there were some form of "developed contributions to computing" award, his name is definitely up there. I think there could be a need for such an award - for people who reliably have created the foundations of modern computing. Otherwise it's almost always things from an academic context, which can be a little too abstract.
Between ffmpeg and qemu, I always think of https://xkcd.com/2347/ when I see Fabrice's work. Especially since ffmpeg provides the backbone of almost all video streaming systems today.
That depends on what you mean by "operating". This very website, Hacker News, is not blocked in Russia - does that mean Y Combinator is "operating" there?
Not necessarily. Roblox does not directly receive money from users - nobody sends them a paper check or bank wire from Russia. Technically they get money from payment providers, who are supposedly compliant with all sanctions. I'm pretty sure that any provider that can support Roblox scale is big enough to worry about risks of being non-compliant.
Not all sanctions only require you to validate that the bank isn’t from that country. Usually disbursing money (which Roblox does as a two-sided marketplace) requires actual KYC.
This is an interesting question I wish I knew. Because I play war thunder and it is free to play but once a year I pay about $50 for the annual premium membership because I enjoy the game and worth it to me. But ultimately it is supposedly a Russian game. I know they have offices in other parts of the world but I have really wondered if the money is going back to Russia or if all the developed have just left and get it elsewhere in a different county.
There's a big difference -- when EU/US bans Russians from using Roblox and other things and seeing other culture, (or someone bans Russians or Iranians by IP), it's rightful and thoughtful decision to protect democracy. When Russia does the same, it's dictatorial censorship.
They’re referring to sanctions - persons/businesses residing in Russia, certain specific individuals and those working for specific Russian entities are locked out of much of the Western economy. I think it’s reasonable personally, but I can understand how a Russian 1000km from the Ukrainian frontline who used to sell jewelry on Etsy would be pissed.
The most affected were not those inside, but the emigrants. MasterCard and Visa blocked Russian banks, and the emigrees couldn't pay with their savings anymore. Some people got shadow banned by banks, their accounts closed, or money transfers rejected.
These people were on the Europe's side politically, yet they were targeted by just the passport.
None of the Russian expats I’ve met had this problem: after 2014 they all saw the writing on the wall and moved their money to western banks. I have sympathy for those that didn’t - normal people shouldn’t have to make this kind of calculus - but there’s no alternative to this while having useful sanctions. It’s not the causeless brutality of breaking someone’s window because of their accent.
Well, every expat I know, including me, had this problem and spent days working around. And the sanctions were very poorly designed, because the drones landing in Ukraine still have fresh American and German parts.
I'm not saying they should be lifted, but they punished the most exactly the pro-European Russians, inside our outside.
Your website might want to present a different interface for people using mouse and keyboard than for people using tiny touch screens? Even if the number of pixels in the browser window is otherwise the same.
I think Wikipedia redirected based on user agent, but yes, whatever, point is if you're a developer you can use the browser devtools to simulate whatever you need.
I don't know what native apps they needed Windows for (I wasn't doing IT work by then), but I was still setting up PC's when they said they needed Windows Excel (not Excel on Mac, not Office365) for some forecasting spreadsheet product they purchased - it only ran on native Excel. We gave them Windows in a VM on their Mac at first, but eventually they had more and more apps that ran on Windows and moved from Mac to Windows laptops.
It's an amusing solution, but if this ends up being anything like the missing PHP 6, it's also going to cause confusion for users. It might've been better to just mea culpa and release 3.0 anyway. I can't imagine anybody would really hold it against the author.
What's the confusion around PHP 6? - There would have been a lot more confusion due to articles, talk slides, even printed books, .. talking about PHP 6's Unicode support would have been truly confusing.
There are plenty of people with high INT and low WIS. As the old joke goes, intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put tomatoes in a fruit salad.
From what I know of Carson from his writing and presentations, he probably worded it that way on purpose knowing he'd eventually do a new version, and he didn't want to miss an opportunity to troll everyone a bit.
except developing AI is very much a knowledge exercise with very little dependency on location.
You don't move your manufacturing business out of Shenzhen because the entire hard supply chain from mining, refining, manufacturing, test, ship and trade are all there. You can't move a refinery that easily much less the entire supply chain.
Well paid engineers congregate in CA because that's where the companies that hire well paid engineers congregate, and they (mostly) want those well paid engineers to come to the office every couple of days. I don't know how you could get the causality so completely backwards on this.
Anecdotal evidence: I moved to CA twice as an engineer.
Once to get my masters after college. Stayed for 13 years. Left during COVID.
Second time to raise kids.
Our reasons include weather, intellectual atmosphere, safety (in many regards), schools, and job opportunities.
The geo area sandwiched between Berkeley and Stanford is only rivaled by Boston. You think Stanford and Berkeley are in the Bay because they’re told to?
And I would also question: what’s the point of living in US if you’re not in California? Once you decide to not live in CA, a bunch of other countries rank better than other US states. Such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
If I were to not live in CA, even the imperial units would quickly become annoying.
I think you're wrong. The concentration is for a host of reasons. Witness the large number of cities and countries that have tried to create a local Silicon Valley competitor unsuccessfully over the last 25 years.
The data centers I think prove this point, and disprove yours -- huge spend has gone into data centers, but places like Wenatchee remain stubbornly not Silicon Valley.
Intel has not made Portland into SV. Austin, while a tech hub and one of the US supply chain centers for hardware, is multiple orders of magnitude less productive than SV for tech startups. Productive as in numbers of unicorns, total value creation, however you want to spin it.
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