> But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol).

IIRC they had a partnership with Yahoo around that time. Interesting to hear it went that deep. Notable: Yahoo Messenger was shutdown in 2018.

Yeah, the part that I was most surprised at from this sort was the 2015; when they said Yahoo Messenger I had been assuming it was like a decade earlier.

Mozilla ended up switching from IRC to Matrix. Maybe they tested Yahoo Messenger at some point but I'm pretty confident there was never any switch to it (I left in 2016).

There is a type of videos, where people mock US-citizens for their ignorance about the rest of the world and how things are working there. Those mocking EU for their efforts, usually have that same smell.

HN is full of people which EU is fighting against, so of course is there little chance to find sane discussions here. You could try some european subreddits, or local tech-sites from Europe, there is usually a better chance to find people who benefit from EU-regulations and have a more rational view on them.

KDE4 killed too much momentum; many promising features and apps disappeared for whatever reason or slowly faded out into irrelevance. Stuff like KIOSlaves is still around, but never really evolved beyond what it was 20 years ago.

Well, Trinity Desktop is alive and kicking and is a fork of the 3.5.12 series. over 16 years of steady releases now.

Isn't Trinity just maintenance and small improvements of KDE3? I don't remember to have heard about any revolutionary changes, or even just significant evolutionary improvements.

Definitely not revolutionary. Plenty of evolutionary changes - because linux itself has changed. the last major release brought

- LUKS encrypted disk support desktop-wide, - storage device hot plug/unplug - new Bluetooth GUI (tdebluez) - new media player (kplayer), - PulseAudio support - window tiling

A good mailclient allows a skilled user a much more efficient communication than most forums.

> It probably doesn't really change that much in this scenario but with a forum or any other topics-based platform you can at least just close and ignore these things without it affecting everyone else.

True, external moderation is a benefit of centralized platforms, but a mailclient allows personalized moderation, which allows with a well organized list to only filter out anything you are not interested in. Usenet had the benefit of both, a centralized platform with moderation, and powerful clients for further personalization. Too bad it died for most usages.

Is there a demo of such communication on YouTube, or at least some article with screenshots?

But would you give them a job? Would they even match the requirements?

> But would you give them a job?

That's what the interview is to find out, isn't it?

> Would they even match the requirements?

I would assume if they got a job at NASA working on mission critical systems, they probably exceed the requirements of my startup

I would assume they have built some key problem-solving skills that can be valuable. Training in tooling is much easier than building the right mindset.

But the required midset today is "move fast and break things"...

> Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers?

It's an isolated legacy-project with no future. Mostly everything you learn for it will be only useful for this specific project, so all time to invest there is time to can't invest into something useful. Sure, there are probably some parts to learn from this too, but It's less than what your competitors will learn on their fancy modern projects.

> You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools

Voyager is in maintenance, there is no big innovation or big progress to be made there. It's just work to hold the line as long as possible. And I guess nobody want's to be the one killing it because of a poor attempt to innovate something.

You should hire for personality characteristics, not knowledge. I'll take anyone who's worked on a weird obscure system and figured it out from first principles over Front End React Dev #8482828 with Opinions on algebraic effects.

> You should hire for personality characteristics, not knowledge.

I'm not sure what personality characteristic are supposed to be in this context. But if you mean skills, then you have a false assumption. NASA and the surrounding industry is not really the environment where they grow boring react devs. For every legacy project like voyager, they have a dozen frontier-projects and other weird obscure jobs where one can gain the same skills, but better, with more potential for further growing. And someone early in their career will naturally choose something with more potential for their future.

It would also be an interesting job, even if off the beaten track.

As a hiring manager, if I saw this on a resume interspersed with various web development work, I would be intrigued.

Understanding assembly language (any architecture) give insights into how computers work that are still valuable and relevant today. Almost nobody still writes code in assembly, but understanding it at least conceptually is still worth something.

If I were hiring, I would almost always prefer a candidate who had some experience at machine/assembly programming to one that didn't, all else being roughly equal.

I've been a developer for 20 years, I do some reverse engineering stuff on the side using assembly.

There hasn't been a single time in 20 years that it was actually relevant for real work in any way.

Unless you are doing very specific work knowing assembly is about as useful as knowing COBOL (which is also useful for a very specific kind of work that most devs will never do)

Learning new and weird things builds brain elasticity and vocabulary for you to express new ideas. I always recommend people to learn FORTH, or Lisp, or APL. Learn to think with different paradigms.

As an extracurricular activity sure, but if your resume just has FORTH on it recruiters are going to throw it in the garbage because there's no evidence you can work in a modern development environment

You don't need to push the needle as a junior though. It's a "completed project" where one can glean many insights. And the matter of transferrable skills is simply a matter of being able to say how what you learned applies in a different context. A useful skill in-and-of-itself

> You don't need to push the needle as a junior though.

Doesn't matter. Many young people have strong motivations to shine and push, especially when they are in high profile-jobs. Legacy-projects are simply not alluring enough for this.

> Voyager is in maintenance, there is no big innovation or big progress to be made there.

This is just so blatantly ignorant. As if you believe there's some other space agency taking scientific measurements out past the heliopause.

> As if you believe there's some other space agency taking scientific measurements out past the heliopause.

We are talking about the maintenance, not the research. Nobody has doubts about the scientific value of the collected data.

For being unreliable, it's working strangely well and stable. Far better than the fuel-based sources which fail all the time for various reasons.

I guess the parent wanted to say `intermittent`, as opposed to `baseline`.

These are the terms used throughout the industry.

You mean the base load? Yes, that's a common myth. European countries have no problem with their base load, even when depending on wind and solar.

The proof of the contrary is the "smart" meter in your home that reports real-time stats to the grid operator.

You just take the hard work of grid operators, ENTSO-E and everyone in-between and in the adjacent industries for granted.

Unreliable and intermittent aren't the same?

As in "intermittent fault." Hardest to debug.

Define quickly. The problems are known for 10+ years, the calling is around for even longer. Germany car-industry has been stagnating for decades, rotting through the system even today, years after all those crises have starting killing it.

No, there are never enough experts for everything. I mean, how can there ever be enough 18 year old workers, fresh from college, with 20 years experience on a technology which will only be released next month, who are willing to work for minimum wage and a rotten fruit basket while upskilling themselves in their own private time?