lmao, I was just thinking about this yesterday. My parents would do the same thing and I would try to correct them and explain how they can get better results just typing keywords and not sentences. And here I am in 2026 typing full sentences in Google search so that AI can present me the exact answer directly in the search results.
These letters matter a lot to kids. I sent my video game idea to Nintendo as a little kid and I had the same reaction seeing that envelope from Nintendo in the mailbox addressed to me. I think it was also a bit more special pre-internet as these companies felt a bit more magical and mysterious. You can only read about them through video game magazines and see their names in the credit scenes at the end of the games. Unless you were one of those weird kids that called Nintendo Power helpline of course!
When I was thirteen I sent an email to Tom Fulp (creator of Newgrounds.com) telling him I wanted to make my own website with Coldfusion (which I had learned about through a pirated copy of DreamWeaver) and MySQL, and asked if would help me make it. [1]
He responded back extremely politely and said that my idea seems like a great idea, but he's far too busy running Newgrounds to build any other websites right now, but once I build it he would love to see it.
I never ended up building the website, but I look back and think it was cool how encouraging he was to some random kid who emailed him.
Kids will pick the weirdest people as "heroes" sometimes, and it's cool when your heroes turn out to be decent humans. Sometimes just responding to an email is all it takes.
[1] I honestly do not remember at all what the website was supposed to be and I don't have the email anymore. Knowing thirteen year old me, it was probably a forum about Donkey Kong Country or something.
My job entails me writing mostly Coldfusion all day long.
I write new code in Coldfusion script. Its syntax heavily inspired by javascript, right down to the optional terminating semicolon.
I still have to support a fair bit of code written in Coldfusion tag syntax. That I dislike especially given the code base was written by amateur developers and just makes me feel like bad php from 2003.
Oh I am very familiar with Coldfusion. My first job after dropping out of college [1] was doing Flash and Coldfusion work for a Martial Arts management company.
I have very mixed feeling on the language as a whole, both the tag and script language, though they’re mostly negative nowadays. I joined the CFML Slack a few months ago, which I was surprised to find, and the people on there were very nice and I respected their passion for the platform, but I personally still find the language pretty irritating, even with the scripty version.
Granted, I am very removed from web stuff now, and mostly work in data-land.
[1] I have a degree now, but that came considerably later.
Six year old me sent an idea to McDonnell Douglas for an airplane with turboprops to back up the jets in case of engine fire. There was also a fire suppression system. They sent me some nice brochures about the DC-8, -9, and -10, but looking back on it they could have mentioned that the jets are already redundant and will usually stop burning when the fuel is cut.
I hope they at least acknowledge that it was quite impressive for a six year old to understand the distinction between different types of engine and consider engine fires.
Anyway, YC's Heart Aerospace's intended commercial airframe design now does use a turboprop as a backup (for range extension beyond the capabilities of their battery electric engine), so six year old you was clearly onto something :)
Teenage me sent a letter to a US airline maintenance department asking why they don't put a one-directional fin on the landing gear tires to cause them to rotate in the air, so they wouldn't create as much smoke when they contact the runway. I don't remember what the reason was, but they wrote me back so I appreciated it.
I so much wish we could all get together as engineers and make a site where kids can write to and send videos etc on and we just praise them and tell them their ideas are good as a community.
i will never stop finding it weird when American software developers/IT people call themselves 'Engineers'. I am actually an 'Engineer' in the UK and it's a very different term here that basically implies someone who works on physical projects, in CAD or by hand. i am also a software developer...but in my experience software developers often make very bad 'engineers' as we would define the term just because they're not very practical/don't have a STEM background etc.
In the UK we even have protected and quite difficult to achieve things like 'chartered engineer' which similar to 'chartered accountant' etc originates from royal charter but it carries with it ethical and legal implications etc. You need a STEM degree and 6 years relevant professional experience before you can even consider applying lol. I am not chartered but have worked with many CEng engineers.
It is easily the weirdest thing about HN that Americans seem to equate writing code/handling infrastructure to designing eg Superyachts or Peristaltic pumps - 2 things I've done as an 'engineer'!
Engineering in general to me just means 'designed' by specification per an area study. Whether software or hardware/industrial application. I know UK is all about titles though as if they're 'worth' something. A lot of stuff we use in modern day was made by someone who claimed to be an engineer but was really a hobbyist on to something.
That said in the US there are some specifications of a license engineer that you have to earn. Electrical/Petroleum/Nuclear/Structural etc those areas do have licensing associated that is different state by state. The main issue with software engineering is it forgoes that completely there just wasn't time to make a process about it. It was/is always about time to market.
I think that's a different thing. Yes it's a possibility. I'm just saying a site where say there's a group of engineers/scientist that are just there to listen and praise. No judging No competition just a place to keep kids interested and not dither away their creativity watching other kids play roblox on youtube.
In 1997 I typed up a letter to Maxis in Microsoft Creative Writer about how much I liked their games and wanted to move to America and work at Maxis when I grew up:
Unfortunately I made the mistake of mentioning that it'd be cool if you could print out an image of your city in SimCity 2000, as you could in the previous SimCity game. That was enough to get me only this letter from legal as a response:
Since there doesn't seem to be any record in the Internet by the way, this is what printed cities looked like in SimCity 1 (these are my own scans of some printouts from 1996):
Presumably they are implying that if they read creative suggestions, they open themselves to the possibility of being sued if they ever implemented anything similar to what was suggested. Doesn't sound too complicated to explain to a kid.
I always thought the catch-22 was funny where they say they saw that I was suggesting an idea ¾ of the way through the letter, so they chose to return the letter without reading it.
Fair enough. I think I cracked the case though: they probably have someone who isn't "them" read the letters though, a third party like another law firm or some contractor that offers that service specifically.
I wasn't joking. I don't think that was a form letter. I think someone took the time to write a personalized, thoughtful letter to a wide-eyed 10-year old.
Pretty terrible in my experience. The good stuff for kids mostly moved to tablets and phones, but no keyboard and mouse is a limiting format, and you have to sift through a hundred bad apps to find the good one. Not much that runs easily on modern PCs comes close to the old magic. Though Tux Paint is actually very good, retaining the sense of whimsy that most modern software lacks.
It's hard to describe but it almost feels to me like media today - this applies to games and films and everything - is often created at a meta level, a simulacrum of the real thing. Like in the 80s and 90s people were trying to make things that were fun and interesting and probably based on their life experiences. And now they're trying to make things that are the best distillation of whatever was most successful before. But that makes it feel dishonest, corporate.
Even Microsoft in the 90s could still make stuff that felt fun and unique. There was a counterpart to Creative Writer called Fine Artist that was equally good.
>>It's hard to describe but it almost feels to me like media today - this applies to games and films and everything - is often created at a meta level, a simulacrum of the real thing.
Miyazaki had a line in a documentary I watched a couple years ago which is now only a vague echo in my mind and I am struggling to search for it, but the gist of it was that early animators had an appreciation and an eye for people, the world, real movement of real bodies, whether reflected in cinema or just in everyday life, while later, he said, were raised on animation, so the product is a second-order imitation.
The same must be true with software. Early painting/desktop publishing/presentation software retains a link to how those things were done with your hands and scissors and paint brushes, trying to fit them into the screen for the first time, to be used by someone who might not have used a computer before. Now it’s a foregone conclusion that you’ll be working on the computer, and nobody involved had ever flipped through a literal book of clip art or made a slideshow on transparent paper.
This is a timely post. Just last night my 8 y/o asked if she could create a presentation on my laptop like they do at school. I have no idea what software they use at the elementary school.
I've let her play around with Google Docs before. But what I really wanted was something like Creative Writer that is more kid friendly. I used Gemini (sorry) to suggest some software and it suggested "Book Creator" which is intended for schools/teachers. I signed up as a fake teacher and added my kids as students and they did create some really creative books, importing images, and adding their own drawings. But it's still missing that kid-friendly vibe like Creative Writer.
Check out Canva. It might even be what they're using at school already. It doesn't have the simplicity and fun of the old stuff, but it's intuitive to use even for kids. A lot of features where they're broken convention in ways that actually make more sense than the standard, for example resizing images keeps the aspect ratio by default instead of stretching.
you can get a lifetime fan just by replying to a letter - like you see here. That's a very effective marketing.
I got a rejection letter once from a company I submitted my resume to (online) and I still remember that and in a positive light even though it was a rejection.
Now they just ghost you even if you went through 5 rounds of interviews and spend a bunch of your time.
Probably a smart move. Writing and mailing a letter takes a lot more time and effort than a phone call or comment online. If a person took the time to write a letter, they're probably worth taking the time to respond to.
I don't have a cool story about sending a letter as a kid, although I had drafted one to send to Lego, but have been on the receiving end before. My office is across the street from an elementary school that we have a relationship with, evidenced by the annual trick or treat we host for them. One day roughly every third cubicle or so had a letter at the desk from one of the kids with a cute note. It was clear that our leadership provided the names and we weren't looked up, because mine had my nickname. Anyway, even though it was clearly a class assignment, it was really neat, and I made a reply with official company letterhead and everything in hopes of making the day of the kid who wrote me. Turns out that other peers had the same idea, because when I went to leadership to ask how to return it to the kid (I didn't know his classroom or anything. Just a first name and school address), they had letters from several other employees that they were going to return to the school.
Back then the working class was simply more powerful. Companies had to have good PR, hence feeling 'magical' or 'mysterious.' Of course now in the later stage of capitalism, these execs, investors, etc can just do full-on mask slips.
I think some of this is definitely childhood nostalgia, but its also very different world today. I don't know any kid that sees Nintendo as magical as I did. The Legend of Zelda was this weird, dark, and mysterious thing. So many games were oddly mysterious or weirdly ported from places like Japan, which had their own design language and often the translation was odd which only added to the mystique. Games came out with little to no fanfare and you just had to sort of figure them out. There were cheat books and magazines and such, but generally you had to approach this art with an open heart and open mind and sort of drink it in. If everything is a google or AI search away, then there's no real mystery anymore.
Kids today are forced to be savvy and 'realpolitick' at a young age. They just complain about the pricing and more 'inside baseball' about games and absolutely get a little brain fried by youtube gaming culture that often runs on outrage so no game is good enough. Suddenly, everyone is a critic and magic and love are hard to cultivate in a highly critical environment. Its like everyone is stuck in a Philosophy 101 class with an overly argumentative professor, forever, and its unrelenting and makes us miserable.
Also kids aren't ignorant, in fact they can be very savvy. Games constantly begging them to buy DLCs or sell them microtransaction items absolutely hurt the 'magic.' How can you develop these feelings when you feel like you're locked in the room with a shady used car salesman constantly?
I don't know if kids today can even experience that old magic. At least not in games. It seems now its only in books and getting lost in novels where magic exists now. A book can't beg you to buy an extra chapter or make you pay gems for the next sentence.
I disagree actually. There certainly are games that I have felt are pretty 'magical' as you put it but they tend to me almost childlike in some of their design choices. Monument Valley for example was amazing. I was so impressed by that game and how it mixed the childishness of magic toyboxes and Escher inspired puzzles with the adult complexity of some of the puzzles and the eeriness of the setting.
"Of course now in the later stage of capitalism, these execs, investors, etc can just do full-on mask slips."
Just a reminder: we've supposedly been in/near late/end stage capitalism for over a hundred and fifty years now. Marx was proposing this back at the end of the nineteenth century.
I think starting in the 30s and esp after WW2/cold war era helped reset it somewhat. It started to pick back up in the 80s and into overdrive with the internet
In sixth grade language arts class we wrote letters and there were rumors that some companies, if you sent them letters saying you liked their product would send you coupons for free candy/chips/soda/etc.
We did Flat Stanley in second grade[1, circa ~2000], including mailing him to someone to send him on an adventure. I sent my Stanley off to Volkswagen and he came back bearing little toy pull-back VW Beetles and smelled like a new car…
We went down a different path. We used to write to chocolate companies and they would send us free stickers etc. They advertised the product of course but it was fun.
I had this same question recently. There's mesh networks like meshcore. But you would be limited to just sending text messages to other users. I would imagine the government would be able to easily identify and destroy such a network as well.
Programming a VCR was pretty trivial for me as a kid, but a bit annoying.
But then VideoGuide [1] was released (available from RadioShack). I begged my parents for that and honestly it was the most amazing product and worked flawlessly. I felt like I was living in the future.
I believe that's always been a thing. A long time ago I read this teardown article [1] of real vs counterfeit Beats headphones. And even the counterfeit versions had metal weight added to make it feel like the real Beats headphones!
I consider myself above average with UI design, but I still got confused with that dang "i" icon in the Preview app just yesterday.
I had to add my signature and write in the date so it looks like it was handwritten. So the plan was to just draw the date with a pencil tool and if that failed use the text tool to write the date.
First I instinctively clicked the pencil icon which turned out to be a highlighter. That's a great example where if they had added color for the tip and line it would have clearly looked like a highlighter. After that failed, I clicked that "i" icon because it looks like it's for inserting text. Honestly I was in such a rush I didn't even see the info pane popping up and was dang confused when nothing was happening.
I'm very familiar with info icons and have used them in my own apps, yet I had never seen one without the circle around it.
Are there any plans for supporting other databases? Our company primarily uses and has experience managing MySQL deployments. I evaluated Temporal some time ago as it seemed like a good fit for what we're building so I'm watching this closely. Thanks!
Our primary focus is Postgres. DBOS Python recently added SQLite support, we'll add this to other languages if it proves popular, but no current plans for MySQL.
That said, while DBOS requires Postgres for its own checkpoints, it can (and often is) used alongside other databases like MySQL for application data.
To build on what Peter said, we need to stay focused and make one backend solid before expanding. But architecturally, nothing prevents us from supporting more engines going forward.
The OP is real time ray tracing which is running between 30-60FPS on my macbook air while moving the camera and objects around.
Your link appears to be a basic ray tracer which anyone who has taken an intro to computer graphics course in college is likely required to implement and would only need a javascript canvas. To be honest I have no idea how much OPs real-time ray tracing differs in complexity from traditional ray tracing.
You could simulate pixels with divs if that's all you had. Or you could create an image in memory and save to file. You could write the text for it and save as SVG.
For a CPU based ray tracer, you don't need any output capability at all(unless you want it to be interactive, which school assignment raytracers usually don't have to).
I've used several MVC UI frameworks in the past both on the desktop and web, and they all had the same problems. When the view becomes out of sync with the model, it becomes a nightmare to figure out why that's happening.
You have your model (data), and conceptually, you just want to bind that model to the view. But you have to write all this imperative code to do that. It's very simple with an imperative UI to have infinite loops even with very simple UIs. "When this field changes, I want to update this other field". But that other field has it's own event listeners that trigger other effects. The event listeners work fine in their own silo, but the interactions between fields cause unintended effects that are not obvious reading the code.
When the component is mounted, the behavior is very hard to reason about and you spend lots of time in a debugger tracing through all the event listeners just to reach the initial state of the UI. Additionally, in these frameworks the developer is typically responsible for cleaning up all the event listeners. It's very easy to forget to clean these up properly.
Once a UI reaches a certain complexity, you try to rewrite the imperative code so that it almost reads declarative and you wish you could simply use a declarative UI framework. I can't speak for React as I have not used that in a long time, but in Vue.js I never write the UI to use global state. All state is local to the views that it pertains to and with defineModel introduced back in late 2023, you can write small UI components without all the plumbing required in earlier versions. I've never experienced such a simple and reliable UI framework previously.
> "When this field changes, I want to update this other field".
That's the problem MVC solves, and that not just a vast majority of so-called MVC frameworks (that are nothing of the sort) get fundamentally wrong, but also a lot of people talking about MVC, in particular those who want to "fix" this non-problem of MVC (see: React).
In MVC, fields never update other fields. The model also doesn't update any fields.
1. UI events update the model, and only the model
2. The model notifies the UI that it has been updated, and the UI is now inconsistent. It does not initiate an actual update, nor does send data to the UI.
3. The UI fixes the inconsistency by updating itself from the model. This can be a full update, or it can do something more clever to only update parts it knows have changed. This may be in response to an update notification or not.
No update loops. No inconsistencies (well except the temporary ones until the UI has updated itself, but those are part of the deal). Solved in the 70s.
I wrote about this here: Model Widget Controller (MWC) aka: Apple "MVC" is not MVC
The update loop occurs as a result of step 3 in which the UI updates itself from the model which then, due to a combination of developer inexperience, UI framework design/complexity, or application complexity, the UI then automatically triggers updates to the model. In my experience, this was a common defect in all applications I've seen that used various MVC style frameworks or home grown MVC architectures.
In a declarative framework, while it is still technically possible, it is very rare. The current app I'm working on is one of the largest front-end apps I've worked on (multiple years of dev). We've had a single infinite loop issue reported that was trivial to fix. We have very junior UI devs compared to teams I've worked on in the past, yet our UI defect rate is incredibly low.
> The update loop occurs as a result of step 3 in which the UI updates itself from the model which then, due to a combination of developer inexperience, UI framework design/complexity, or application complexity, the UI then automatically triggers updates to the model.
In an actual MVC framework, that can't happen.
By which I mean: it cannot and does not happen as a side effect of normal processing that you need extra skill and care to avoid.
Because updates to the UI only come from the model (but pulled by the UI when it is ready) and do nothing else. Changes to the model from the UI only come from user input and only from user input.
As an example, I can't recall every having to deal with this problem in NeXTstep/AppKit/Cocoa in the last 35 years.
If this situation is something that can and does happen just as an emergent effect of normal processing and takes extra care, effort and skill to avoid, then I would argue what you have is not a real MVC framework.
You can obviously always add bugs to programs by just putting them in manually, like, abort() or while(true) {}.
> It's very simple with an imperative UI to have infinite loops even with very simple UIs.
That's something that reactive UIs inherited from the imperative events by design. It's not a differentiator here. You may be able to debug them better, but infinite event streams are pretty much still an issue, and about as easy to get.
Anyway, almost every problem in the article is a react problem, not a FRP problem. Vue may not have them, I don't know it well enough to say (but some do really look like a FRP in javascript problem, so they should apply there too).
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