barefootcoder

Be careful when playing the bird songs. A few days ago I clicked on the cardinal song that was in my identification list and the male cardinal nesting in my hedge went NUTS and I’ve not seen either of them since, and used to see them daily. They’re very territorial.

I’m afraid that I scared them away from an active nest by accident just playing around with the app. :(

I'm in complete agreement with you. I use i3 (still using Xorg) and find the ability to have multiple desktops that I can move atomically between monitors to be far better than having to position windows individually. I put reference material, chat, etc, on the side monitor and then can very quickly move it back to the primary monitor when I need it. I find a normal 16:9 monitor to be just right for two side by side windows, or a tile of three, with one tall window taking half of the screen and two terminals top and bottom on the other side.

I hate using the mouse to manage windows, and having one huge ultrawide just feels like a nightmare to manage -- I'd need some way to split it logically into 2 or 3 virtual monitors.

Already been done, I was one of the recipients of the 1984 tomato seeds and we planted, grew, and ate them...

https://parkseed.com/seeds-in-space/a/13/#:~:text=In%201984%....

Funny, if not helpful, error message:

     pw = getpwuid(getuid());
     if (!pw)
        usage("You don't exist. Go away!");

I find it interesting that originally each command was a separate executable.

Oops. Autocorrupt got me. Houseflies.

I think I had one lay eggs in my house. A few weeks ago, on a day when I hardly opened a door for more than a few seconds I suddenly found at least 100 horseflies in my house. I was sucking them up with a hand vac and releasing them outside, and every few hours I’d go suck up about 30 more — and every single day after that I found at least 30 or so more for at least a week. I’m still seeing 1-2 per day, but at least that’s manageable. Hopefully these last stragglers are the last that I’ll have. It’s nuts!

I think you've overlooked the realistic useful lifetime of the product, and how long the novelty factor would last -- if you price it according to that duration I think that you'd find the hourly rate to be far higher.

Because the query is an interruption. Frustratingly, about 30% of the time (or more!) the person who sent me the hi doesn’t send their actual question even if I respond almost instantly after it’s sent, so I’ve stopped responding to a bare hi.

Moreover, now that I’m interrupted I can’t really go back to what I’m doing because I know that (presumably) a question is coming very soon, so the interruption clock has already started and I have to sit and wait while they painfully slowly type the actual question.

And then there’s the frequent case where I get a bare hi, but cannot get back to it until a few hours later, and then that person is offline — but I don’t know what they needed, so I cannot ask them and cannot send a response. If they’d have just included their question then I could just answer it and we’d all be better off.

I’ve just gotten to where I just refuse to answer a bare hi… if that’s all you’re willing to type, then I guess you didn’t need anything.

I'm not the one that you responded to, but I had no idea that HN had rate-limiting -- shows how little I comment or post!

That doesn’t bother me quite as much as when partial results are displayed and then change a few ms before you can tap the one you want such that you touch the wrong one.

Ugh, the resistance to such a simple and useful thing drives me nuts. I’ve also used the soap dispenser as an indicator, but I can’t get my wife to do the same or pay attention to the signal when it’s set. Moreover, she half pre-washes everything so I often can’t tell whether they’ve been fully washed or not.

About 4 or 5 years ago I was working at one place as a consultant where I’d previously been an employee. Being a consultant I provided my own hardware. I needed really beefy hardware for the project, so I bought a brand new Thinkpad P50, completely maxed out.

One day the IT guy was making the rounds distributing new laptops. I got to chatting with him about the new hardware and he said something like “yeah, these are great compared to that old thing, 8 GB, dual core, 256 GB SSD… blah blah…”, while pointing to my brand new Thinkpad. I started telling him the specs on my Thinkpad (which are still good today, but were especially good then) — quad core i7, 64 GB RAM, RAID striped dual M.2 SSDs, … he just said something like “Oh” and walked away without continuing the conversation. Haha…

So “we had to call an ambulance because the car was installing updates” is a real potential scenario?

More than just speed sensitive volume now. Replacing the stereo in my van requires a conversion box (Maestro) that deals with the various car settings that are done through the stereo, such as dome lights out duration, dash clock setting, auto door locking, etc.

The stereo is way too tightly coupled with the rest of the vehicle.

Put it on your own terms. Every time I've purchased a car for the last 15ish years, I decided on the model, specs, and price I want to pay. I then searched inventory at every dealer within 2 hours of driving and emailed their internet sales manager an offer. I take the lowest two, try to negotiate a few more times via email, sending the lowest quote to the next lowest, etc... once I'm happy with the price, I ask for an out the door itemized price, agree on it, and agree on a meeting time. I show up, sign some papers, drive away.

How is Tesla's process much easier than that?

I get a bit frustrated whenever a Google search for some how-to item leads to a YouTube video leaving me thinking "this should have just been text with some pictures", but I've come to the conclusion that it's all about the money -- content creators get paid more for video content, even if it's 80% "like and subscribe and listen to me ramble" overhead, and there just isn't a good place to host well-written howto content.

Diversity brings value by bringing different perspectives to the problems we solve and the solutions we seek. We all have blind spots, and having a broader perspective can help us see more than we would otherwise, even where we’re unaware that we currently cannot see.

I have an honest question for you and others who are directly impacted by this, and would love to hear your perspective.

I work on a software team that has the usual level of diversity, an almost equal mix of East Asian, Indian, Middle-Eastern, and White developers, a few women, and not a single black developer. Here's the problem though... I've been part of the screening and interviewing process and we've only had ONE black person apply, he was an immigrant from Africa. He made it all of the way through the interview process, but did not get the job for reasons that I am unaware of, though I did give him a yes vote as he seemed competent and friendly to me.

Given that we have screened and interviewed hundreds of applicants and as far as I'm aware he was the only black developer to apply, how can we as individuals on the team make a difference to try to be more inclusive?

This has been true everywhere that I've worked. In my entire career spanning > 25 yrs I've only had the opportunity to work with one black developer. He was extremely good, but timid, very soft spoken, and too quick to self-judge, leading to him not very proactive at advertising his successes, which was unfortunate as he was doing great work, but not recognized by the majority of the team. When I later became his manager I would go out of my way to ensure that every major accomplishment of his was widely publicized, but by then the perception had already been set.

It seems to me that the root problem is further up than the hiring process -- it feels like it's something that needs to start at a younger age, encouraging more people outside of the usual circle to consider tech as a career in the first place, but maybe I'm not blind to my own short-sightedness and would love to be shown where I personally can effect change.

Being from that part of CA, we had classes and field trips about Ishi almost every year through primary school. Such a sad story.

The word netiquette was used a lot in the very early 90s. I suspect few of today’s users have even heard the word. It’s an unfortunate digression.

No video, making me even more suspicious of the claim.

Why do you say that it's good vs email? In my mind they're for different purposes.

Slack for urgent matters, email for asynchronous communication that isn't quite as urgent. Email is also better for things that the recipient may want to refer back to in the future.

Regardless, I wish that my co-workers would stop sending a message only saying "hi, name" and then waiting for me to stop working to respond before they type their actual question. "not only am I going to interrupt you, but I'm going to make you acknowledge the interruption before making you wait while I SLOWLY type the actual incomplete question".

<Grumble, grumble, I hate when people misuse Slack>

I love the keepass ecosystem, but would never recommend it to family who isn't very computer literate, and the iOS offerings are poor, with kypass being the only full functioning one, and it's closed source and a little buggy. I worry a little bit about using it to manage my passwords.

The problem is that they don't even give you the option to add the names yourself. You can use it, very crippled, without giving them your entire contact list, but it's almost unusable.

Thanks for that. It's a great idea to let people try the feature out.

Good old archie... http://archie.icm.edu.pl/archie-adv_eng.html

I shared mod privileges with somebody on reddit and my subreddit was closed for excessive spam within days -- I learned my lesson!

No. I have no control over the software stack for this project, so for now I'm focusing on what they use first.

Did you even read what I said?

"anywhere from UI down to the bare metal"

I've done a lot of frontend work, including iOS, Android, MFC, OpenGL, Qt (with and without QML), etc... My UI work has often been praised, and I've salvaged many failing projects, including fixing completely broken UIs. I'm not sure where you got "not having to keep up with new UI technologies" or "downplaying the skills of front end programmers" from anything I said.

If anything, the frontend developers get a lot of credit for what the backend developers do. I enjoy backend work more, and it is frustrating when a GUI developer spends a few days and slaps a few screens on that update in response to signals that took months to implement, but they get all of the credit for the feature. It goes both ways, you know?

Strange that you feel that's what I was saying given that my original post said that I've worked in a variety of different languages and environments.