tjpick

Navigation is pretty handy, but the thing I really love about a smartphone is having a decent portable camera always with me. To quickly take a snap to share with family (mms, email or social media), when you otherwise would have missed that is pretty cool.

it's probably safer to just remember to use mv instead, because there's a very high chance that you'll do the wrong thing on a terminal that doesn't have that alias available.

why don't you set your default search engine to wikipedia?

realistically, at 27 one is a long way away from senior.

> how do you prevent yourself from wasting hours on Facebook/Twitter/HackerNews/YouTube

Have kids.

Well, the classical engineering domains are all pretty different anyway (electrical, structural, civil, etc). I remember my grandfather saying he thought it was ludicrous that they were all covered by a single qualification.

Building software with an engineering approach is a real thing. Not everyone subscribes to it, but doesn't mean it isn't a real thing.

For the record, I do a lot of gardening too, and building software has fuck all to do with that.

I also don't get how everyone who argues against software-as-engineering talk like buildings and bridges never fall over. They do.

> When you're pissing your diapers in an old people's home, what good is your retirement money?

As I've understood, the point is to blow all your retirement money between the age of 65(standard retirement age), and as you so eloquently put it, the age when you are pissing yourself in an old folks home. With a little luck, you've got about 30 years there.

> Stuff.co.nz (Fairfax Media) is a more credible news source IMO.

If you are interested in the most credible celebrity gossip news source, that is. Stuff is terrible.

> Building something interesting requires a surplus of time and money. Salaried jobs provide neither.

Standard negatory bullshit. You should be able to achieve building something interesting, using someone elses time and money. If you can't, maybe you've got an attitude problem, not a job problem.

Original source FOR the "orders of magnitude" claim seem to usually point back to Fred Brooks Mythical Man Month (5-10x) or Robert Glass (Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering) 28x. I don't think either of these multipliers are accurately expressed as "orders of magnitude", regardless of them being supported by evidence.

There is some discussion of the topic in "Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It."