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Isn’t it fair to say that most of the biggest open source projects and/or most useful projects are developed by people employed by either universities or compan
by bmitc 4y ago
Isn’t it fair to say that most of the biggest open source projects and/or most useful projects are developed by people employed by either universities or companies?
> And just to put it at scale, the engineers of Apollo were so early before our times that they had to code the timestamps in negative.
I don’t understand how this relates to the scale of open source software or Apollo software engineers. I guess I know the Unix epoch is 01/01/1970, but how does that relate to Apollo and negative timestamps? Those timestamp definitions came after the first several Apollo missions, didn’t they?
- cratermoon 4y ago> Isn’t it fair to say that most of the biggest open source projects and/or most useful projects are developed by people employed by either universities or companies? Yes, except that largely those projects are tangential to the "real" research. Larry Wall, creator of Perl and other useful things, is a linguist who was "studying linguistics with the intention of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it."[1]. Perl was just a side project. 1 https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/225 https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/225
- andyjohnson0 4y ago> how does that relate to Apollo and negative timestamps? I'm not certain, but perhaps the parent commenter wasn't being literal. Maybe just a way of saying that the Apollo engineers did their amazing work before what the rest of us consider to be the "beginning of time"?
- eastbound 4y agoYes, GP here, it was a joke, Unix is so young that the moon landing is pre-historic to it, it already belonged to another epoch literally. I took the joke from this comic: https://www.commitstrip.com/2015/10/06/before-timestamp-0/ https://www.commitstrip.com/2015/10/06/before-timestamp-0/