People seem to keep making the mistake of building a social network in mongo. It's entirely unsuitable for that.

Source: I've helped 3 companies move their social networks from MongoDB to OrientDB when they figured out that MongoDB prevents them from shipping features that users expect, e.g. friend-of-a-friend style queries

What server language were you using and where were you deploying?

I've been using node.js (I develop the official driver - https://github.com/codemix/oriento), but there's pretty good libraries emerging for other languages too. Most people I've worked with are deploying to AWS, one company was running on the bare metal.

Do you have any advise for someone thinking of deploying on GCE?

My use-case would be for an online code editor (Plunker, if you've heard of it) with users, projects, packages, collections (of projects), comments and project versions (stored as content-addressable git-compatible objects).

I'm also interested in understanding if there is any built-in compression mechanism because I will be storing a large volume of very similar text files. Any hints?

Have you used the lucene indexes much? If so, can you do any of the crazy faceting delivered by ElasticSearch?

No, sorry, I've never used that. However, generally - like all dbs, Orient is happiest when it has access to a lot of RAM. Also the Write Ahead Log can take up a significant amount of disk space, those are two things to be immediately aware of.

> I'm also interested in understanding if there is any built-in compression mechanism because I will be storing a large volume of very similar text files. Any hints?

Sadly it doesn't yet do leveldb style document compression, and I've seen no hints that it's on the horizon, but the OrientDB guys are pretty responsive and would probably be open to the suggestion.

> Have you used the lucene indexes much? If so, can you do any of the crazy faceting delivered by ElasticSearch?

I'm just starting to use the lucene indexes now so I can't give much feedback on those yet. It should be possible to do faceting using SQL to a limited degree, but I don't think there's native support for it yet. I think that will get improved in the next few versions because people are crying out for it.

The egregious part is that, by turning something into a language feature, those who don't use it are often forced to take it into account in their code; especially library authors.

No, `class` is syntactic sugar for the most common way of doing classes in ES3 and ES5. There is no semantic difference between:

    function Thing () {}

    Thing.prototype.greet = function () { alert("hello"); };

    class Thing {
      greet () {
        alert("hello");
      }
    }

If I look at most of the libraries commonly used in production JS, pretty much none of them apply classic OOP principles.

You've drank way too much Kool-Aid here.

First of all: there are many different styles of OO, some more cumbersome than others, some so far removed from "classic OOP principles" that it takes effort to see how are they related. It's utterly useless to talk about "OOP style" as if it was a well defined, canonical set of rules - because it's not.

Second: there's nothing that makes OOP and FP be in opposition to each other. You should be aware - and if you're not, you should feel ashamed - that closures, one of basic FP tools, were supported in Smalltalk 20 years before Haskell.

Third: just as with OOP, things coming from FP are not uniformly "better" in any sense. Just as with every other paradigm, FP languages frequently have features needed only because they are FP. It makes very little sense to adopt those. Many really interesting features meant for solving real problems (and not for solving problems with a paradigm) are steadily coming to non-FP languages anyway.

> If I look at most of the libraries commonly used in production JS, pretty much none of them apply classic OOP principles.

Once again: either you have no idea what OOP is or you have no idea how JS libraries look like. For every http://ramdajs.com/docs/ you get hundreds libraries which implement their own kind of OO, starting from jQuery and Backbone.

To drive the point home, you can implement lamdbas (and thus Haskell) without using closures. In fact, this is easy in a pure language since bindings are static. One way to do this is to compile the language into a basis of combinators like SKI. These no longer have any notion of binding so we don't need closures. Likewise, you could compile it into a categorical semantics and maybe implement this on FPGAs—again, no need for closures.

Lamdbas are merely a syntax and theory. Closures are merely one interpretation given a Von Neumann machine.

GP wrote that - in short "everything in OOP is bad, let's use FP only". I responded with an argument that, in fact, certain OOP languages used FP features long before Haskell (because that's the example GP provided). I don't think the fact that closures are just one interpretation of an abstract concept of "lambda" is very relevant to this argument.

And about "shaming" people: I meant to gently point out that advocates for some cause should at the very least get their facts straight. Bashing some concept without knowing it well is the thing I objected to, a "not knowing it well" part by itself wouldn't be anything one should feel ashamed of.

Sorry but that's total nonsense. For instance, node.js makes heavy use of classes, as does Backbone, Ember, React, etc

This comment will be very light gray ;D

* FP as I understand it doesn't much oppose imperative or even most of OO. It opposes non-composability using discipline from pure/total languages.

* Even if you want to encapsulate data and logic together like you suggest, you only need to buy 10% of OO to get that (ADTs, existential types, modules, what-have-you do it fine if not far better). The remaining 90% may be a waste or actively harmful.

* FP, as I practice it, means using the simplest possible thing in a world where simple things compose nicely. This may end up being some kind of full-scale OO, I'm eager to try to find places where it does, but so far it hasn't ever.

As a meta note, "my kind of FP" is the Haskell type of purity and other such nonsense.

I think this is definitely true, if you take 'oppose' as 'incompatible'. If we look the design concept and plot them, there will be axes, and I think this is what we'll see.

>* Even if you want to encapsulate data and logic together like you suggest, you only need to buy 10% of OO to get that

That's also true, but it's not an argument against the seed of usefulness of the 10%. We have kitchen sinks because people pick and choose features at will.

>* FP, as I practice it, means using the simplest possible thing in a world where simple things compose nicely.

Same here, and everyone should practice this when they look at any function, or object method, trying to make it as atomic as possible.

> This may end up being some kind of full-scale OO

I don't think it's any more useful shoehorning a program into "everything objects" more than "everything is functions".

My point was to say that the core goal of OOP is a great one, it simply codifies something that people have done in C when they put structs and procedures in the same header file. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.

On the other hand, most FP languages I tried feel very restrictive. The only language that is inclusive of all good ideas, seems to be F#.

There are some OO systems with effect types I suppose. Those would be interesting.

There are also OO systems that don't have mutability. But I think that it you remove mutation, all that class nonsense, and are careful with subtyping (since it breaks things badly often) then you basically have (badly typed) ML modules with open recursion.

The open recursion (a.k.a. late binding) bit is probably the most interesting thing but you can play with it in Typed LC just fine. It's just another form of recursion.

Nim has something IIRC, but I didn't look into it yet.

[0] https://github.com/6to5/6to5

> If the 12 yr old pirates $17,000 (retail price) of music, this does not mean the record companies are out $17,000... 12 yr olds don't have $17,000 to spend even if they are prevented from pirating.

Right, but it does not mean that the record companies are out $0 either. They are probably missing out on at least several hundred dollars worth of revenue for that particular person.

I might concede that this is the case, but only if we first agree that this doesn't mean you get to choose some arbitrary number in the middle and pretend that this is the "average loss".

I know of no economic science that can provide a reasonable number, either. You'd be lying if you claimed you knew of one.

> They are probably missing out on at least several hundred dollars worth of revenue

This would be the very extreme edge of the maximum. They're probably missing out on several tens of dollars.

And for this, they've hijacked the criminal justice system with bribes to congresses and parliaments, extended copyright protection so much that it now lasts a duration best measured in centuries, bankrupted innocent people with million dollar judgements, and sent people to prison for what shouldn't even be misdemeanors.

They want us to all pay, through our tax funding of the criminal justice system, for these minor theoretical losses. Why should I have sympathy for that?

Games companies specifically have broken their own works so thoroughly that it's difficult or impossible to get games just a few decades old to run. This is stealing from the public domain. It'd be like burning down your apartment just before the lease runs out, to make sure the landlord doesn't get it back.

Fuck them.

I would guess it was at least $40, else why pay $40 for a flashcart? A new gateway (the only 3DS card I'm aware of) costs $80.

People who buy 3DS flash carts never buy a game again (in my experience), mainly because new non-pirated games require upgrading the firmware, which they can't do if they want their flash carts to keep working (this may have been improved, I haven't looked in a while). Also because they 'paid for piracy' (unlike on PC), they (I believe) feel happier not paying for games in future.

I will concede that this is reasonable for a lower boundary.

However, it's not that simple. Human psychology being what it is, if he couldn't buy the $40 flashcart it's not certain that he would buy say, two $20 games that he ended up putting on that flash cart. Maybe instead he orders pizza. Being blocked from the flashcart alters decision paths that don't always lead back to video games or even entertainment in general. But with that said, again, I'll accept $40 as a rough lower boundary.

> People who buy 3DS flash carts never buy a game again (in my experience),

Anecdotal, of course, but this seems reasonable. I don't dispute it.

In my own personal experience, people who start downloading movies never buy DVDs again. So not only do I agree, I think we can generalize it either to most entertainment, or all entertainment.

> Also because they 'paid for piracy' (unlike on PC), they (I believe) feel happier not paying for games in future.

Morally, they bought physical goods that employed other people and let those people earn a living. Additionally, those claiming to have been wronged here still earned millions and billions in profit.

Who can fault them for feeling as if no bad outcomes occurred?

And how is being unable to run games designed for a different system and different time stealing from public domain? Just because tape players are not common today doesn't mean that people who made tapes 20 years ago have somehow stolen from a public domain - you just have to get a tape player. If a game was written for Dos, then well, you have to get a dos system or an emulator. If a game was written for DirectX 7, how can you blame developers that it doesn't run on the latest DirectX 11 system, with the operating system 5 generations ahead? If you are a software developer - how could you predict and counteract this?

Yes, they went too far, but for fucks sake, it is really hard to imagine that these acts hurt a company?

You've never bought one from me.

Can I claim that you've hurt me? After all, you've never bought any. (I can show you my bank account balance, I really am hurting).

The sticking point, the part that will make it feel to you as if my statement above is non-sensical, is somehow you've managed to attach the idea that they're selling something to the idea that other people have a (very) similar something but haven't paid. So to you that feels like "theft". But it wasn't always this way.

The way you feel has been cultivated, just in the last few decades. And though they've cultivated it for music and movies and video games, I haven't (bothered, been able to, had enough influence) to cultivate the idea that if you haven't bought doodads from me that you've stolen from me.

Many of the people I talk to would never buy a doodad anyway. Those result in zero harm. Some of them were going to buy a doodad, were non convinced, and bought anyway. Those also result in zero harm. But some were going to buy a doodad and then decided not to. That's harm.

Piracy is the same. Many pirates were never going to buy the thing anyway. Many people purchase anyway. But some non-zero number of people would have purchased but now don't.

Say you created those doodads using your time, efforts and resources. Your doodads provide people some value. People usually buy doodads as recompense for that value. But if someone "pirates" your doodads, it means they acquired the value without fairly compensating you.

So you: invested time, effort and resources to provide value to others. The pirates: benefited from that value and gave nothing back. Is that not unfair?

What if those pirates further shared your doodads with their friends (or, you know, random people on the Internet) further depriving you of people who should be paying you for the value your doodads provided. Now can you not claim that the pirates are hurting you?

You may focus on the zero marginal cost of copying digital music and movies and video games. However, observe that the value is not in the bits you copy but the experiences they provide to your mind. If they are truly worth zero to you, I don't see why you should be wasting your time experiencing them in the first place.

If I were to guess, you have not "cultivated that idea" because you've never created something that people found useful, something which you'd think you deserved compensation for, but which was taken without giving anything in return.

Like if they make their own doodad, after seeing mine?

I'm not entitled to compensation for being the first to do something. A society that sets itself up such that people who do something first are entitled to become rent-seekers for all eternity is dysfunctional.

> What if those pirates further shared your doodads with their friends

That'd be awesome. Unless they did a half-assed job of the sharing. I reserve the right to beat them bloody if they release the music as 32k VBR mp3s. I may murder if they're wma format.

No jury in the world could convict me.

Copyright used to encourage the creation of more works that would enter the public domain in less than three decades.

Now it's used to fund bribing Congress to get longer copyrights.

> If I were to guess, you have not "cultivated that idea" because you've never created something that people found useful,

Yeh. You'd like to believe that, because it's easier to see me as some filthy thief than as someone whose ideas might be correct. The former lets you just call me names and move on, the latter would mean changing your mind and thinking about issues like this critically.

Someday I hope that people like myself strip you of all political influence and make this part of the world a better place. You can go live in Singapore with its thousand year copyright durations and felony download laws.

That's fine. You can make a car that looks like a Mercedes and no one will bat an eyelid, if you really made it with your own hands.

If you look at a game, and make your own that looks similar(or even exactly the same) - again, no one will bat an eyelid. But if you pirate the CAD files used to make said Mercedes and produce it using that then yeah, you stole their work without paying for it. If you pirate the game someone made without paying for it, you are also a scum. Whoever made it is not entitled to compensation, but you are not entitled to use other people's products for free.

http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1085935_spanish-police-bu...

Copying bits verbatim is not "making" anything. Also we are now conflating patents and copyright, but...

>A society that sets itself up such that people who do something first are entitled to become rent-seekers for all eternity is dysfunctional.

That may be a valid concern in theory, but current and historical evidence overwhelmingly prove this wrong. The most technical innovation has been happening in countries with stronger IP laws, as opposed to, say BRIC. It's not a coincidence.

>If I were to guess, you have not "cultivated that idea" because you've never created something that people found useful...

Way to quote incompletely. Also, nice dodge. Have you created something valuable only to have it ripped off?

>Yeh. You'd like to believe that, because it's easier to see me as some filthy thief than as someone whose ideas might be correct. The former lets you just call me names and move on, the latter would mean changing your mind and thinking about issues like this critically.

Conversely it's easier for you to rationalize your piracy than to acknowledge that your actions could be harmful. I have no stake in this issue, since my livelihood does not depend on copyright. I have been thinking critically and looking at the evidence. Have you?

As a business owner, which would you prefer I do? Would option 2 not result in a loss of potential revenue? Would it not be super-harmful if everyone who wanted to use your product chose option 2?

But are you a promised customer, one that I own as some sort of cow to be milked when I see fit?

Certainly if I repair cars, you don't claim that I get to do all your car work and be paid for it, nor could I sue if you did it yourself. But this is what you're claiming with entertainment...

Think about it. I might make the claim that if you know about how to fix an engine, it was only because I discovered those ideas first. Therefor, even if you fix the engine (or arrange little magnetic islands on a hard drive in a particular sequence), you're still stealing from me.

If you fix the engine the same way I'd fix it, you're just copying my motions and actions.

These are highly comparable, but most people now balk at the idea (even though such absurd restrictions have existed in various times and places throughout history).

Copyright isn't some fundamental human right (time for the weenies to point out that the UN thinks it is). Its formulation was originally a practical matter, so now that it's become impractical it should be abolished or once more limited to reasonable terms.

Of course not. See option 3. Again, which option would you prefer I take if you are the business owner? Which would you prefer that I didn't take?

For the vast majority of ordinary people, entertainment dollars are fixed. People have what they have to spend on entertainment, and when it's gone that month, it's gone.

What happens is the various content producers compete for their share of those dollars.

There just aren't billions out there for entertainment purposes. Wages being flat in the US speaks right to that. People don't have it.

In a perfect no piracy world, people would just consume much less, not spend billions more. Again, because they just don't have it. The money doesn't exist.

So that person pirating a lot of music might spend real dollars on video games instead, much more than they would just spend more on the music.

Even if it was a completely fixed budget, "entertainment" is a diverse category. Movies aren't just competing with other movies, or even just with TV and books and music, but also with things like cake and vodka. Even if the pie is fixed, is it unreasonable for a movie company to try to take some of vodka's pie?

The idea that piracy causes zero lost sales as is ridiculous as the idea that every act of piracy is a lost sale. At best you could make the argument that piracy is a net zero (or gain) because the advertising aspects of piracy match (or outweigh) the losses. But to just declare that piracy does nothing at all is crazy. It may be small, it may be negligible, but it's not zero unless your product is so unpopular that nobody was going to buy it anyway.

But there aren't the billions of dollars out there claimed as losses.

And yes, fixed maximum, though there are a lot of options, so people do hit that maximum fairly often.

A quick look through the majority of my peers shows this. They make trade-offs each month. The ones who are better off can flex their entertainment budget considerably. Those who are not, center in on a fairly modest amount, and when it's spent, it's spent. They do other things.

I agree with you about it being equally wrong. It's not zero lost sales, and it's not all lost sales.

However, one must also factor in the network effects of sharing. Mindshare is worth something, and those who have it sell more, and getting it happens through sharing and piracy as much as it does other efforts.

And the opportunity to sell continues to exist despite the piracy too. A few are out there working on that premise.

But even assuming it's true, piracy would still hurt individual companies or even entire industries. Industries you can't pirate so easily would see a disproportionate share of the spending.

DRM would still be very important. People would pirate the stuff that is easy to pirate, and buy the DRM stuff.

This varies some, but most people are locked in for most of their dollars. They may have savings, and can vary that budget some, but there just aren't the billions of dollars out there often cited.

There is a delta from what is being sold now. But it's not multiples. Perhaps additional fractions.

As for the hard to pirate industries, who says?

They must compete with easier, more flexible options. They might actually get less spending than they would otherwise with a more flexible and accessible scheme.

Apple showed this with iTunes and the removal of DRM actually drove more sales. Why? Sharing.

I had a few floppy disks with these titles on them, but again, having played them for so long, I chose to start my own little endeavour to create games instead of playing them, so I eventually removed everything but ROTT for as much disk space as I could get (being my first computer and such, I believed it might've helped performance, was still learning at this point). When I wasn't writing crappy interactive textventures, I was writing up stories in general in EDIT. My reasoning was also that when my stepdad would come into the room, he could never say I was "off playing those bloody games" again in an argument, and that I could argue that I was studying the books I'd picked up from the library.

I did play a lot of ROTT in my spare time. It was an early copy (1.0) which had some features removed from the final game such as alternatively coloured pushpillars and the such, but as my system had no speakers, the pc speaker became more and more annoying over time as well. That much I definitely remember, but since we went through so many shareware games in the 1990s, I don't remember what was ultimately on the system when it was given to me (nor when it was thrown away). I would give everything I owned to get it back, but unless someone chose to salvage and restore it, that system is long gone and crushed up.

You'd be surprised what happens after 10 years or so. There are games I played as a kid countless times, in arcardes and on my PC, and yet I coulnd't remember their titles at all when I was at university age and such.

I only rediscovered some of their titles with luck and queries on Google later (in my 30's).

E.g.:

"game where a frog tries to cross the road" was apparently Frogger.

"game where you have a crosshair and hit people" is Prohibition.

"pc game where a cat jumps in an neighborhood" is Alley Cat, etc.

Or try an arcade related forum or subreddit. I'm sure someone out there can help you.

The other game I can't remember was contra/turrican like game with main character like a robot and you could go in all directions on a map. I remember there were egyptian motifs around levels and I vaguely remember that game had a name Phoenix or something similar. Same time period, same nondescript arcade cabinet. Both in Europe / Croatia.

First, a 486 with 64K RAM is ridiculous as they typically had multiple megabytes of memory.

Second, he worked with that PC for 7 years and isn't quite confident of how much memory it had? This doesn't sound quite right either. I can clearly remember the amounts of RAM my first few PCs had, starting from 1999.

I don't know how much processing power nor memory it had. I had never owned a computer, and my dad left it behind for me after the divorce so I had something to use. I had no idea what was inside.

I'd agree that this would be a very relevant factor if I had programmed a "true" operating system (since most true programmers would probably be knowledgeable with the amount of memory usage going on etc), but to take things a bit more indepth, I suppose I haved't actually coded an operating system, but rather a dos Shell of sorts that is a facsimile of an 80s-style operating system. It merely uses the same commands as dos and interprets them into a visually descriptive feature on the screen (such as a split-screen with directory and file listings for example), as well as a few commands of my own that I added in. My terminology is not fantastic, but I suppose indicative of what I considered to be an OS. A Graphical shell might have been a more accurate term.

I remember the specs of all the systems I've had since then, but with the 486, I didn't spec it out myself, and was merely a kid with a computer at that point.

A more mainstream option would be python. The free courses at udacity.com would be an easy way to get started.

I'm close to someone who I've been watching slowly discover their passion for programming over the last six months or so. They never realized they'd care so much, or be any good at it. I've been giving consistent positive reinforcement, and I dread the day that they roll out their first real achievement to the masses. They might just throw their hands up in the air and give up entirely, judging by how people usually act.

One, nobody's forced to share their project/efforts on the Internet, which is essentially the entire planet, all of humanity, 24x7 for all the rest of time (info wants to live forever, etc.) We are all free to keep our things private, off-line, just among friends, etc. You're free to approach people in real life you know for feedback, tips, encouragement. They're more likely to be polite, and also you're not asking something of a total stranger.

Second, there's been a cultural change that a lot of younger people or newbs may not be aware of. For folks of the pre-Internet, "first with computers" generation, that's precisely the standard operating environment when we we learning, just starting out, taking those early baby steps. When we were first scribbling out our first programs, however naive or full of bugs or flaws, we didn't immediately go push it in the faces of millions of strangers across the world (ala Show HN, GitHub, blogs, etc), a good portion of whom would be professionals alot further along, and say "omg look at this isn't it amazing I'm a hacker now please hire me k thx" -- we couldn't because the Interent didn't really exist and most of these modern ways of publishing and sharing didn't exist. So most of that early crude, naive, sometimes embarassing stage was done in private, off-line, or only among friends or teachers known personally. Today we have the equivalent of proud (and healthily, voluntarily deluded) parents posting their kindegartener's first crayon house-and-trees-and-sun drawings out onto blogs, GitHub, HN, Reddit, YouTube, etc and then being shocked or having their feelings hurt when others aren't as eaually blown away as them, and in some cases critical or dismissive. Its just the nature of the beast. Nobody forced them to share those things, and in that public global anonymous mixed (newbs/kids and experts/pro's) of a forum. They chose that. And it makes sense you'll also get back a mix of reactions, some of which you won't like.

What the modern Internet enables today has lots of great qualities (eg. I can download all this cool software for free, Wikipedia, Kickstarter, etc etc) but it also enables lots of sucky stuff (eg. eternal September, eternal kindegarten mode, arrogant assholes, FAQs, RTFMs, trolls, flamewars, phishing, astroturfing, doxing, etc.) Its hard to enable one without the other.

No one was asking for anyone to hire anyone. I have no idea why you're saying this or belittling people's work.

If you can't be supportive, don't say anything unless you have strong reason to say it. Doesn't matter how far along the work is or how bad it is. If everyone followed this, the world would be a better place than it is, particularly the internet.

The lack of support is exactly what causes people to switch careers, because they get the impression everybody in the field is a flamer.

I learned to code in machine language, I was punching in hex codes into an Amiga, all from one reference manual. It was a painfully slow way to learn. With no IDE or other reference manuals, QBasic would be the only way to achieve any of this.

As an illustration to those that don't seem to understand, there was that year when I was a kid when my friends and I decided BASIC on the C64 was not good enough, and we tried to figure out how to get started with assembler....

Something that started with us trying to poke the character codes for BASIC statements into memory, unaware that we were not only still writing BASIC, but had "invented" a storage method substantially less efficient than what BASIC on the C64 already used (it was stored tokenized).. It took a long time before I managed to get hold of an assembler, and months more before I managed to get hold of a tutorial that got me anywhere.

This was with a group of 5-6 of us that all wanted to learn, but none of whom knew where to get the information, nor had parents that knew. My dad was programming, but only BASIC, and didn't know where to get what I wanted - few books were available, even fewer translated.

People really shouldn't underestimate how vital easy access to documentation is.

We're talking about a time when e.g. when I (years later) finally got hold of precise cycle counts for raster interrupts for the C64 (understanding precise cycle counts in the presence of sprites etc. was vital for many more advanced demo effects), it was a 3rd or 4th generation photocopy of a handwritten diagram that someone had partially learned from others, partially reverse engineered through countless hours of adjusting interrupts a cycle at a time to study the results.

None of the books I'd managed to get hold of contained even a fraction of the amount of detail.

Frankly I remember playing with qbasic/basic and being put off by how unwieldy it all was. Kudos to any kid that makes anything in basic.

I didn't become interested in programming until I managed to get a copy of Modula-II off of a BBS.

Relevant: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2033318/black-annex-is-the-be...

Homepage of this (incomplete) game: http://www.blackannex.net/

Conventional memory was limited to 640kb. Access to higher amounts of memory either required switching to protected mode or using XMS.

Additionally, there was the segmentation limit of 64k for pointers, which may have limited things in qbasic.

It's a bit like Australian Woolworth's.

It's strange how consistently true this has been. I wonder how many games Notch plays, especially during his prime when he was making Minecraft.

1. http://www.twitch.tv/notch/profile/past_broadcasts

While I played a bunch of games on it, they weren't games to play to death. Once I finished the levels of Loderunner, for example, it looped back to level 1, and I stopped playing it. The game instead was to figure out neat thing to do, then do it.

The comments on the reddit link are often uninformed, both the negative ones (few hobbyists of the era used source control) and the positive (the projects did not make real use of the hardware, and show no special 'knack' - I certainly am from that era but have no knack for the demoscene).

I'd know where my school was, I'd just 'go there', I didn't know the street name.

I'd turn on the TV, I didn't know what brand it was.

I'd just turn on the computer and play Escape Velocity, didn't know it was called that.

There are lots of exceptions, like I wouldn't miss the name 'teenage mutant ninja turtles' or ever forget it. But especially for things like computer games when I was 8, I'd just 'doubleclick the game icon with the picture of a car' not having a clue what that racing game was called.

I've had so many questions about my story with people saying "I call bullshit because he wasn't able to remember (minor detail X)" etc. It's only through absolutely racking my brains to bits and insane amounts of googling, facebook messages to old friends and such that I've managed to answer a few of these. It's good to know that my memory is not just deteriorating rapidly as I'd initially thought.

Some things stand out more than others. I was suspected of having ADD for a while, then the diagnosis was shifted to Aspergers Syndrome (something they apparently didn't know much about back then, or was not as commonly diagnosed/referred to as it is nowadays), but a potential giveaway for this was that I had an eidetic memory for some things, and a lot of other stuff that should've been important but I didn't care about was instantly discarded. I can remember down to a millimetre what few toys and possessions I owned, and what they looked like, yet I can't remember what my own BEDROOM looked like because it wasn't the bedroom itself, it was what interested me within it. The same went for most of my house, I barely remember what it looks like or what the furniture placement was. I put this down to perhaps some kind of mental block for traumatic memories. The old house appears in my dreams as a very very very large building and often in pitch black darkness so that I cannot really see what it looks like save for an insanely dim and flickering flashlight. I guess the mind has a funny way of dealing with inabilities to recall events.

Yet I can recreate in my head in incredible detail the structure of the school I attended as I spent quite a considerable amount of my time every day there, and I found the absolutely enormous building to be very interesting and different compared to the bland 1970s brick and tan buidings of my primary school years (I actually went on to recreate it in 3d from memory recently and was able to source some photos of it from the school themself).

http://i.imgur.com/eXb430f.jpg http://i.imgur.com/BDpt6wt.jpg

And yet, I can't remember how much RAM my system had, because it wasn't of any interest to me. It was just "the computer" to me at the time, not "the 486 DX2". Any time I would've seen how much memory the system had (I don't recall if I even used the MEM command, assuming it existed in that version of DOS) but if I had, it would've been "Oh I have X amount, okay" and then I probably never checked it again.

I also don't remember what exact games I had installed on the system, as I barely ever played most of them. I remember which ones I'd played at that point, but I do remember I definitely had Rise of the Triad shareware on there as it served as a key inspiration for writing a "3d" raycaster/FPS style engine. Interesting how selective memory can be, and how it will remember utterly useless details and points of information (or worse, remind you of the moments you did something embarassing or stupid) yet when it comes to crucial or vital events, it can draw a blank on something that was so striking to witness that you would think it would burn the image into your head for an eternity.

The only reason I knew anything about the hardware of the classic Macs at the time was that I was an Amiga user, and Macs were occasionally dragged in on the periphery of the war of the 68k based machines that was primarily an Amiga vs Atari thing.

Beyond knowing it too had a 68k, that it had laughable small screen and was monochrome and cost a ridiculous amount, that was it.

That was despite hanging out at the local computer store every few days, and reading every computer magazine I got my hands on (I can thank Commodore Computing International for a lot the earliest English I learned)

Most PC users of the era certainly had no reason to know much more about Apple than the name Mac, and know it was some other computer.

Yep, especially in Australia...

Edit: Also just wanted to point out that writing a few games has in a way ruined playing games for me. I still load up a new or classic game every now and then but it's more to admire what the developers have done and not so much as to play the game. I don't really 'play' games any more.

Two other similar things ring similar to me. I was big into haunted houses when I was younger, volunteered at them and hung out around the online "haunting" community every season, and to this day visiting haunted houses is more about admiring what is being done than being scared. I recognize the animitronics from the catalog, know to expect that panel to drop, and know how that illusion is done, but I still enjoy visiting a good haunted house.

The other really sad thing, is that living in downtown Atlanta where there is a moving/tv show being filmed within a block of my place every other week it seems, I've seen the sausage being made. Knowing how long it takes to setup and shoot a scene that may only be 30 seconds in the movie, it's "ruined" watching TV shows/movies, as I can't help but think about the filming process. I was blissfully unaware how much work went into filming a simple shot of two people walking down a city street.

Knowing how it's done and how difficult it is, don't you start looking at things such as lightning, cut techniques etc. in a more informed manner?

It's not usually the same movies (or music, or games) that gets popular with the professionals in the industry is popular with regular folks, for this very reason.

A handful of maps to go through and I've completed plutonia on UV. Next, I'm probably playing Back to Saturn X ep1. It's amazing there's so much new, inspiring stuff for this old game..

Has anyone ever built a non trivial application on MongoDB and been happy with their decision, say, 1 year later? If so, what kind of use case was it? I am genuinely curious.

The impression I've received is that Mongo is ridiculously easy to get started with but the flaws become more and more of a hindrance over time, eventually making certain types of application features virtually impossible to implement.

Slide 4 shows eBay's MongoDB cluster size: Hundreds of nodes, > 50TB, > 2 billion ops/day

http://www.mongodb.com/presentations/storing-ebays-media-met...

Here's another deck from 2012: http://www.slideshare.net/mongodb/mongodb-at-ebay

It depends on how you perceive writing. For example, "Old Man and the Sea" might be the greatest essay about criticism ever written, despite the fact that it's not an essay. You have to see through the story to get to the essay.

I think the reason so many people enjoy Paul Graham's writing is not only due to the subject or the genre, it's that he transcends the category, much like Hemingway did when he wrote "Old Man and the Sea."

Right, except Joanna Public does have this expectation and continues to do so because of manifestly poor public education about the risks of the internet. We should literally have lessons about this stuff in schools.

And as another commenter stated, these things were not "online", they were "on a computer". If I can have no expectation of privacy for things I put on a computer then that is going to lead to no expectation of privacy under any circumstances. This stuff is going to have profound social consequences and something has to change.

I still remember when we where first given these, because our teacher gave a very long warning about using the internet. I remember the exact phrase "whatever you put on the internet will be there forever, and you can never take it down. Think about that before doing anything."

This was about a decade ago, but I grew up in Redmond, Washington, so my education is probably very different from other peoples (at least regarding computers).

Would you mind sharing the details of how you achieve this?

Faster than Node.js + Express?

> It has enabled millions of people to become web developers.

Factually (probably) correct, but irrelevant to the quality of the language itself. Bit of a pointless argument, as it wasn't the crappiness of PHP that made it popular; it was just the only accessible platform around and happened to be crappy.

> It powers about 90% of the web

Appeal to popularity, not a valid argument. Says nothing about language quality.

Absolutely, yes. Take a newbie and ask them to create a web page using express, then ask them to try in PHP. They are worlds apart in terms of usability and approachability. (I say this as someone who almost exclusively writes in node these days)

> it was just the only accessible platform around and happened to be crappy.

How can it be crappy if it's the only accessible platform around? An alternative view point is that PHP is the best, most empowering platform, because it's accessible to newcomers, and every other language is crappy in comparison because they have failed to match PHP's accessibility.

> Appeal to popularity, not a valid argument. Says nothing about language quality.

You seem to be talking about PHP the language. There is no doubt that PHP the language is flawed. That is totally irrelevant. What matters is how effective PHP the ecosystem is, and it is undeniably incredibly effective. That's why people use it, because it is a practical way to get things done.

So, if we're talking about PHP the ecosystem, then popularity is absolutely a valid metric here. It's easy to hire for, has tons of libraries etc, this stuff matters a lot more than the associativity of the ternary operator.