Hacker News Reader

mrlycon Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

Good grief, not that again. One of Edison's contemporaries said that Edison would have found a working lightbulb faster if he had put more thought into his investigations.

What works for me is a series of plan -> do -> review sequences with about 10 to 15% planning, 80 to 85% doing and 5 to 10% reviewing.

mrlycon FBI Is Building a Watchlist That Gives Companies Real Time Updates on Employees

>> We've already lost when an arrest is equivalent to a conviction.

> It's not, under the law, of course.

It is under some circumstances. For example, the US visa waiver program:

> We do not recommend that travelers who have been arrested, even if the arrest did not result in a criminal conviction, attempt to travel visa free under the Visa Waiver Program.

(From https://uk.usembassy.gov/visas/visa-waiver-program/additiona...)

mrlycon That Old-Time Hucksterism: The Oddest Doohickeys of Industrial-Age Entrepreneurs

My favourite ones from my own family history were the plugs to put into wall sockets to stop the electricity leaking out.

mrlycon Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

Thank you. Stephen was quite deaf (60dB loss) so we emailed each other all day, even though we were sitting together. When I noticed he was straining to hear during a conference call, I started summarising what each speaker had said. He thanked me afterwards. When he looked confused about something I said, I made sure to repeat it using the exact words I had used as he hadn't heard one or more of them. I noticed that other people thought he hadn't understood, not that he hadn't heard, and repeated what they had said using different words, which confused him even more.

Stephen's deafness did not affect his work, of course, until management made him a quality engineer for our voice over IP project. With that kind of thinking, the company wasn't making any money and owed all of us six months wages. You learn a lot about motivating your team under those circumstances. I did it by emphasising the importance of what we were doing. Of the ten software and five hardware engineers, we were the only ones joining the software to the hardware.

Apart from not being paid, it was a great place to work and I'm glad it gave me an opportunity to develop my management and people skills. Until then, I had been much better at programming computers than working with people and I was feeling a bit lopsided.

mrlycon Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

I did most of an electronic engineering course and discovered that I like software more than hardware. After programming portable barcode readers and interactive voice response systems, I wrote a Windows device driver at one company then applied to write Linux device drivers at another. I was strictly honest during the job interview, saying I wanted to write device drivers but I had done only one for Windows and none for Linux. The interviewer said "Writing Linux device drivers is exactly the same as writing Windows device drivers" and hired me. I found that it wasn't and faced the kind of learning curve that requires mountaineering equipment.

I succeeded and even trained someone else how to do it. When we started, he didn't know C all that well so I split the drivers into hard and easy parts and gave him the easy ones. We wrote about six drivers together. I made his parts harder and harder until he was able to write a driver on his own.

Perhaps I haven't been reading the right software architecture books but it seems to me that very little mention is made of changing the design to suit the ability of the individual programmers, the way band leaders like Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller did with their arrangements.

mrlycon Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

It depends on where you live. Embedded and device driver jobs disappeared after Australia's electronics industry died and went to China. Six of my friends working in that area moved overseas, four to the States and two to England.

I wish I had learned C++ but my KISS alarm went off when I looked at the language, which is a bit of a worry as we say downunder. I avoided learning C# as I found Microsoft's business practices to be utterly repugnant.

mrlycon Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

When the tech world moved away from me (doing mainly embedded C for the last thirty years might not have been the best idea for my career), I became an aged carer for my disabled mum. I learned a lot about cleaning, gardening and adding subtitles to films as she is going deaf. I also learned a lot about editing spoken word audio files for pacing, volume and noise reduction as she wrote a memoir then recorded an audio version.

In the future, I could be an aged carer as I really like looking after people, although it doesn't pay well and there can be a lot of poo to deal with. On the other hand, one of my former managers has been working at Google for about ten years and is quite enthusiastic about my working with him there. Unfortunately, they are in California and I am in Melbourne so I'd have to move.

mrlycon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2017)

Location: Melbourne, Australia

Remote: no

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: embedded Linux/C for EFTPOS terminals and networks, medical equipment and an air traffic control system.

Résumé/CV: http://bit.ly/2iC4JsX

Email: mrlbp@bigpond.com

mrlycon Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

I learned that putting more pressure on myself wasn't working, that there isn't a linear relationship between pressure and results. Instead, there is what I call a sweet spot, beyond which more pressure decreases results instead of increasing them.

mrlycon Canadian journalist's detention at US border raises press freedom alarms

I see the actual goal as showing the populace who is in charge as well as getting them used to searches and interrogation. Combined with the newly militarized police, it decreases the probability of another revolution.

mrlycon Ask HN: What are the bibles of Computer Science?

The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg. It considers programming as a human activity and introduces the concept of egoless programming.

mrlycon Software Developers: how to get a raise without changing jobs

When my contract was up for renewal, what worked for me was to mention to my manager that people doing my job in other companies were being paid $20 more per hour than I was. I was hoping for a $5 increase or maybe even a $10 one but he gave me the whole $20 and made me promise not to tell anyone.

Six months later, we got a new CEO and my contract was terminated because I cost too much.

mrlycon Rules for Writing Safety Critical Code (2006)

When I was writing safety-critical embedded programs for medical equipment and an air traffic control system, I found MISRA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MISRA_C) and Lutz's "Targeting Safety-Related Errors During Software Requirements Analysis" (http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstream/2014/35179/1/93...) useful.

mrlycon Humans once opposed coffee and refrigeration: why we often hate new stuff

Extending the list,

9) New technology can be very expensive. For example, a colleague's father purchased a DVD player in 1998 that cost $3,000 in today's dollar.

10) New technology often has bugs. After Microsoft releases updates, I always wait a few days to see if there are any reports of problems before updating Windows (I run Windows 7 so I can still do that).

mrlycon Canonical Is Considering Dropping Support for 32-Bit PCs After Ubuntu 18.10

It's much sooner than 18.10. From the article, "Starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak release, there shouldn't be any 32-bit Desktop and Server ISO images available for download."

mrlycon Ask HN: Do you spend more time coding or debugging?

It depends on what I'm writing. For portable data terminal programs, it was 90% coding, 10% testing and debugging. For the air traffic control software, it was 10% coding and 90% inspection, testing and debugging.

mrlycon Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

PC Outline. It's a DOS-based outliner. In 1986, my manager said "Here, you're organised. You'll like this" and he was right - I did. So much so that I bought my own copy. I still use it every day in a DOSBox DOS emulator on Windows 7 and Linux. I use it for passwords, todo and done lists, keeping track of work done for clients, functional decomposition, shopping lists and the steps for configuring and compiling the Linux kernel.

mrlycon Ask HN: Current state of programming embedded devices?

I've done a few safety-critical embedded devices for medical equipment and an air traffic control system. We used Linux/C so we didn't kill people.

The combination of "medical device" and "touch-based user interface" started me twitching. Some things to bear in mind are (1) will the interface work if the users are wearing rubber gloves? (2) there could be a problem with an infectious agent transferring from a patient to a doctor's gloves to the screen then to another doctor and another patient.

mrlycon Google Fiber Phone

Anecdata: my Internet drops out for about fifteen seconds three or four times a day. That's not a problem when I'm reading web pages or even downloading files but it would cause problems during a phone call. My ISP offered me a bundled Internet/IP phone combination for about $7 less per month than an Internet/existing landline one. I'm glad I decided to keep the landline.

mrlycon An administrator accidentally deleted the production database

I've found that it's important to do my own backups and not rely on IT to do them. I once returned from my holiday to find that the sysadmin had wiped my hard drive. He said he thought I had left the company. Fortunately, I had backups on computers in other states that he didn't know about.

mrlycon Ten years on LinkedIn

I've found LinkedIn to be very useful for keeping track of former teachers and managers. For example, a tutor who helped me a great deal in 1980 is now the head of his department and I have watched the slow but steady decline of a former manager who was a real challenge to work with.

I also use it to keep track of former colleagues who were difficult to work with and avoid applying for jobs where they are working now. Even if I don't end up working with them again, it's an indication to me that those companies have a defective HR department so they've probably hired other difficult people too.

mrlycon One Question You Should Ask About Every New Job

I look for three things at a new job: interesting work, nice people to work with and a financially stable company. I often have to pick two out of three.

mrlycon The best icon is a text label

I have two modes of thinking when I use a computer program: text mode and graphics mode. I am in text mode while I am reading or writing. I find icons confusing as I have to change from text mode to graphics mode to figure out what the icon means.

The only time I prefer icons is when I am already in graphics mode while using graphics software.

mrlycon Podcasting is getting huge

I don't have much time to read but I do have a lot of time to listen, usually while I'm doing housework or travelling, so I'm subscribed to a lot of podcasts and YouTube channels. When a YouTube channel has something new that looks interesting, I download the video, convert it to an MP3 and add it to my collection. When I come across a book I want to know more about, I look up the author's name on YouTube to see if there's an interview with them. That usually presents the main ideas of the book without having to read it. I download the video, convert it then subscribe to that channel if it has other videos I'm interested in too.

mrlycon Ask HN: In what order did the best and worst periods in your career come?

My best period was when I got my first job as a programmer.

My worst period is now. I am 61, have been unemployed for two years and I sometimes wonder if I've retired and just don't know it yet.

mrlycon Making It Easier to Upgrade to Windows 10

I'm annoyed that I had to spend quite some time tracking down and removing gwx.exe as well as reconfiguring the registry and Windows Update of our Windows 7 PCs so we wouldn't be surprised by Windows 10 or multiple 3 GB dents in our capped broadband.

I downloaded the Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft and tried it in a virtual machine. Meh. It's not so bad that I would rip it out of a new computer but it's not so good that I feel any urge at all to upgrade.

mrlycon Police Stingray Tools Can Indeed Record Calls

My Samsung Galaxy Ace 3 can be set to WCDMA only.

mrlycon Ask HN: How to Be a Good Technical Lead?

What worked for me was to learn to listen to people, to let them explain the problem and sometimes find an answer as they were talking. What helped was to do lots of peer reviews of both code and documentation so the the young ones could learn from the old ones and the old ones could get new ideas or more up to date ways of doing things from the young ones. I came to realise that programming is flow based while leading a team is interrupt driven so I had to learn how to do context switching quickly and to block out areas of time when I could do my own programming. I had to learn to help people do their work and restrain myself from rushing in to do the work myself. And I had to learn that my team members were people who had lives outside work that affected the work they did.

For example, I had a team member who was a good programmer but had trouble coming to work on time. He was getting married so I bought him a clock radio as a wedding gift. That fixed the problem.

mrlycon Transatlantic divide: how U.S. pays three times more for drugs

The price difference can be a lot more than three times. For example, the cheapest U.S. price of Ventolin is $36.99. It costs us $4.45 in Australia.

mrlycon Ask HN: What podcasts are you listening to?

92Y Talks http://92ytalks.libsyn.com/rss

All About Books http://feeds.feedburner.com/all_about_books

Authors on Tour Live! http://feeds.feedburner.com/AuthorsOnTour-Live

Conversations with Richard Fidler http://abc.net.au/queensland/conversations/conversationspodc...

Freakonomics Radio http://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio

Get-It-Done Guy's Quick and Dirty Tips to Do More http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/xml/getitdone.xml

Great Lives http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/greatlives/rss.xm...

HBR IdeaCast http://feeds.harvardbusiness.org/harvardbusiness/ideacast?fo...

Listen to Lucy http://podcast.ft.com/rss/18/