Hacker News Reader

20thCBon Writing books is not really a good idea

Reading books has always been a niche activity. Many (most?) people don't have any books, and haven't read any since they were forced to at school. Of course HN readers will skew towards readers but they are the minority.

20thCBon Ask HN: What's your keyboard and what you love and hate about it?

I think you are right. I never think about my keyboard at all. None of my co-workers do either <shrug>.

20thCBon Windows 95 – How Does It Look Today?

My kids just type the calculation into Google.

20thCBon Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

- I'm not young

There's your answer.

20thCBon It Can Happen to You

C string processing is the other "billion dollar mistake" we are all paying for decades later (in terms of slow programs, time wasted, power used etc).

20thCBon Learning Ruby: Things I Like, Things I Miss from Python

"If you learn for Rails, start with 5.2.3, webpacker and the other black magic in Rails 6 will frustrate you and currently eliminates a lot of the ease of getting started and building relatively sophisticated web apps quickly."

Anyone else agree with this?

20thCBon Show HN: Shopify's Top 90 Most Successful Startups in 2021

Exactly. Really odd to see them on this list.

20thCBon Short fat engineers are undervalued

Gotta laugh at the HN definition of "failure". Plenty of "short and fat" jobs provide a good career. Not everyone wants or needs anything else.

20thCBon Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

Martin Campbell-Kelly was my lecturer for "History of Computing" at Warwick University in 1986. Nice guy, and one of the few CS courses I actually enjoyed :-)

20thCBon What If You Could Do It All Over?

My 20s were spent living the single bachelor party life in London in the 90s. Noughties I had 3 kids and emigrated to Australia. Then I hit 40...then 50. Now I'm 52, still in good health. I have a job, a partner, family, a few savings. Sure I haven't written the next great novel or got a PHD, but I sure as hell don't worry about what might have been.

20thCBon What If You Could Do It All Over?

52 here, beat that.

20thCBon Developing a CLI Music Player in C# using Terminal.Gui

Gorillas.bas :-) Remember it well. Chucking bananas was fun!

20thCBon Comments by a developer inside the Windows Media Player source code

It's not common at all.

20thCBon WSL Getting GUI Support

Dual boot takes way too much time. WSL2 literally fires up instantly and then you have an actual Linux VM running actual Ubuntu or whatever. Just no GUI. You can then use Visual Studio Code (the Windows app) to develop for Linux or Windows. If you do Linux GUI work it's obviously not ideal.

20thCBon WSL Getting GUI Support

True. It's unfortunate that most people don't seem to realize this, based on WSL1. MS really haven't marketed WSL2 that well.