simmons

Sure, I've been using RSS (or Atom) for... probably around 18 years or so. In that time, I've moved from Thunderbird to Liferea to Google Reader to Newsblur. I subscribe to many feeds related to my work, but also various Google Alerts and general news sources. I don't do much publishing to RSS, except for making sure that my (currently very neglected) blog has RSS and Atom feeds available.

I can't think of any burning pain points, off hand.

I have a distinct memory of very early Linux kernels being able to use higher-resolution native VGA text modes. This would have been around the early 1992 / Linux 0.12 time frame. After being used to my PC showing 80x25 text in MS-DOS, the skinny letters and information-packed display made Linux look like something from the future. :) I suppose it was just a feature of some VGA cards around that time, and Linus decided to support it for a while. The computer historian in me sometimes wonders whatever happened to it.

I haven't had to do any business travel since the pandemic started, but I agree that proximity to a good airport can be an important consideration. There are probably a number of other reasons keeping me in the Denver area, but the ability to walk out my front door, take a train to an airport where I can travel anywhere in the country quickly and cheaply... it's a killer feature.

Some friends recently moved to Asheville, NC, which seems to be an attractive destination these days. But it's hard for them to find affordable flights, and they end up with out of the way connections that make travel onerous. Once when I was visiting Deadwood, SD, I talked to a guy who recently moved there from Denver and travels for work. But his company doesn't want to pay the high prices to fly out of Rapid City, so he found himself driving six hours back to Denver to catch flights!

If I was considering a move to a smaller metro or a rural area, I'd need to think hard about how well I could push back against my customer's requests for travel.

I've been doing this for over 20 years, and it hasn't really been a problem. During the occasional real-life interaction that requires someone to confirm my address and they express surprise, I just tell them that it's correct and I have advanced email needs. It never takes more than a few seconds -- nobody has ever said "please tell me all about your advanced email needs!" :)

> I use a password manager for passwords but I also need to use it to remember the associated emails.

I do this, too. It never occurred to me that you might not populate the email/username field -- it's kind of the password manager's job to keep track of that. :)

> The truth is no one really sells your email – at least no legitimate companies.

I think that on the whole, this is true. However, I have had a number of these addresses start receiving spam over the years. I think this is due to the companies' databases being compromised due to poor security. At the end of the day, the cause of the leak isn't greatly important, and I'm glad I can simply turn off those particular addresses.

> How does a client know whether a provider that charges double is also twice as efficient? I suppose it might work if you have a long relationship with said client, but if you are talking to a new client, it seems they'd just go with the lowest price per hour that seems reasonable.

The same way that a client (or potential client) would know whether the existing rate is proper -- I (or my network references, word of mouth, etc.) must be able to sell them on the notion. If I can't sell it, then I might need to question whether that efficiency was really providing value to clients after all. I don't think people hire me because they're looking for the lowest bidder, so I'm not too concerned about that.

I've thought about this before. Some people will be likely to try to "milk the contract" by taking more time to deliver than is needed. Besides being necessary to deal honestly with one's clients, I strongly think it's in my self-interest to avoid such milking. Instead, I try to provide as much value as possible per hour, and if I can increase efficiency I'll be better able to negotiate higher rates at some point down the road.

(Besides the fact that there's no shortage of software work, so it would be really hard to run out of things to do no matter how efficient you are.)

> I've yet to take a holiday cause I always think this week of holiday will cost me $$$

I'm a long-time hourly freelancer, and it's absolutely true - the lack of revenue for that period will indeed cost you money. But not taking the holiday will cost you a vacation. I personally think about the value lost from not working, and the value gained from the vacation, and usually conclude that taking the vacation is the clear winner. It's all about establishing a proper value system and being honest with yourself about it.

I've been working as a freelancer for many years, billing hourly. I have absolutely no hesitation to take vacations. If anything, it makes me more likely to take a few more days off, since I don't feel bad about a client paying me for that time. I routinely take months-long sabbaticals between gigs, and use them to learn new things. I take extra long vacations over the winter holidays.

If someone is feeling an urgency to work more hours beyond what provides true value for their life, the problem isn't how one's invoices are arranged. The problem is one's attitude.

From the Wikipedia description, Heaven's Vault sounds fascinating. Thanks, I'll keep an eye on it!

Thanks for the suggestion! That does sound like an interesting game, and I'll add it to my list.

I also get the impression that the 1986 game Starflight may have a little bit of this, but I've only barely started playing.

Wow, what a great question -- it seems like everyone here has been sitting on a wish list for a while. :) Here's one of mine:

Ever since reading Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth as a kid, I've thought some elements of that story would make a great game. The player plays an archaeologist in the distant future trying to unravel the mysteries of humanity's origins -- a galaxy-scale adventure of exploration and discovery where a rich tapestry of future history is slowly revealed. As a bonus, such a game could be very positive and not even require violence like many other games. :)

> I'm also pretty sure (I'm not an accountant) the first year you're self employed you won't get penalized for not paying quarterly taxes.

I'm only chiming in here since I've become somewhat of a reluctant expert on estimated taxes over the years (assuming we're talking about the U.S. here; apologies to those outside the U.S.). And it happens to be fresh on my mind, since I tackled my Q1 taxes yesterday. ;) I've never heard anything about an exception for one's first self-employed year, so be careful with this. (But hey, the tax code is huge and complex, so I may just not know about it.) Although if you also have withholding from a W-2 job, it may cover you.

Generally, everyone is supposed to pay a certain amount of estimated taxes throughout the year, self-employed or not. But for most people this will happen automatically through W-2 withholding. I suppose it could be a rational move to not worry about estimated taxes the first year, focus on your business instead, and eat any penalties/interest. (You wouldn't be the first to do this.) Or you could just make a guess on what you might owe, and send some money in advance of each estimated tax deadline. If you underestimate, I suppose the penalties/interest would be a lot less than if you avoided it altogether. If you overestimate, you get a refund (or if you choose, a carry-forward to the following year).

Or you can do what I did 15 years ago, and spend a weekend studying IRS documents to understand how it all works, set up spreadsheets to calculate estimated taxes using the annualized method, and perform some minimal maintenance on it each year thereafter.

I'm a bit uneasy about some things in this license (including the "fair" bit), but I doubt there's any legal problem with discriminating licensees based on revenue or head count. (Disclaimer: IANAL, etc.) Microsoft already does this with Visual Studio licensing -- the free "community" license explicitly restricts on both critiera:

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/license-terms/mlt031819/

Ah, yes. Back in the day, we'd run both xsnow and xearth on our SPARCstations, so you could see xsnow's Santa Claus sailing around the earth. :)

Greetings, neighbor! I was traveling at the time, but I did hear something about Denver getting some slight precipitation, but not enough to qualify as snowfall. Now, given your comment, I'm wondering if we got inches of snow here in Olde Town Arvada, or if maybe you're closer to the foothills.

The TV show is actually better than I expected, although after watching the trailers I had low expectations. I was totally prepared for the major surgery required to adapt a work like Foundation to the screen. However, I think my biggest problem with the show is a complete lack of subtlety that was present in the books.

In the books, the significance of the Vault is purely about ideas -- what its revelations mean for civilization. Whereas the showrunners needed to exaggerate its spectacle -- "You dumb TV watchers aren't going to get how important this is, so we have to shove it in your face. See? Giant floaty alien-looking thing? Must be important, right?"

Another example is how the decline of civilization isn't supposed to be obvious to the people living through it. At the time of the events of the first episode, the decline is supposed to be manifesting itself in extremely minor ways -- an extremely subtle "atmosphere of decay". Expressways aren't being maintained as well as they once were, and deployment of new elevator technology is held back by pessimism. People wouldn't have noticed these things any more than a Roman in 200 AD would have seen a crumbling road and caught a glimpse of the fall of Rome. But instead of showing the elevator industry resting on their laurels, the showrunners have to show a spectacular terrorist attack on a space elevator that kills 100 million people. "See! The empire is falling apart. Get it?"

The showrunners are trying to paint a picture with a paint sprayer instead of using fine brush strokes.

I was a brief DOS user for several months (in between C64 and discovering UNIX) around the early 90's, and my opinions of it from the time mostly align with yours. I think the early 90's was an especially rough period for DOS users, because people were trying to push it way beyond what it was originally meant to be.

However, while I certainly don't have nostalgia for DOS in general, there were some positive things about the platform and ecosystem. Some subset of applications had TUI interfaces that were very nice (e.g. Borland C++), and while I'm a die-hard Linux terminal user, I find myself occasionally missing some of the tightness of those interfaces. (I think the UNIX terminal heritage, such as the "alt" key translating to ESC+key, no key-down/key-up events, etc., can limit our modern TUI interfaces.)

I sometimes tinker with some 8086 emulator code for fun, which can lead me to diving into the internals of DOS. Looking at its API (and how the API evolved through the 80's), I can appreciate the simplicity that was necessary to run on machines with as little as 64KB of memory. So I may not have nostalgia for it -- there was certainly plenty of pain -- but it can still be very interesting to explore from an objective historical perspective. There may even be a few things we can learn from it.

ZIP is a product of the microcomputer era, which was filled with hobbyists, many new programmers learning the craft without the benefit of experience with mature systems and the preceding decades of CS work, and even experienced programmers who needed to take shortcuts to do a lot with a little. It was an amazing time where many unpolished programs were developed to try out all sorts of ideas, and there's a lot I find fascinating about the era. (For example, flipping through old computer magazines, it's always interesting how few advertiser addresses were in Silicon Valley.) But as a professional developer in 2021, looking back on that time and genre of computing is also a bit horrifying. ;)

Yes. My first x86 computer was a 25MHz 386 bought in 1991. Even though 486's were available, it was still the envy of the kids at school. (For a very short time.) I remember seeing some 486 systems advertised for $4-5k, which in 1991 dollars was out of reach of most people. So I can completely believe a 286 would have been a fine laptop in 1989.

It wasn't like today, where if you're going to buy a new computer, you might as well always get the latest and greatest.

One thing that keeps me driving an older car (2002 Honda Accord) is the greatly increased total cost of ownership of newer vehicles. Whenever something needs replaced -- windshield, tires, whatever -- it's often dirt cheap, and the car itself is extremely reliable. On the other hand, my wife's newer Mazda seems to be a perpetual money sink. Everything is so much more expensive to replace. The windshield has special sensors, so it was super expensive to replace. Tires are a lot more expensive. (A nail impact that was just right to destroy the tire cost us close to $1000, but I guess a lot of that is admittedly due to the AWD requiring replacement of all tires.) For these newer cars, the initial cost seems to be a much smaller part of the TCO.

I agree with the safety concerns others have mentioned about older cars, and I would gladly pay more for safety. But I do feel a bit frustrated when getting the safety also requires a huge TCO increase for frivolous features. (E.g., are the automatic windshield wipers really worth the 4x cost bump at the glass shop?)

Well... at least you synced! Your comment about Solaris reminds me of the time I learned the hard way that "killall" doesn't do quite the same thing on Solaris as it does on Linux.

I switched away from Roku to an Nvidia Shield (an Android TV device) precisely because of the Roku HBO Max thing. Maybe these smaller players don't have the sheer number of captive eyeballs needed to demand such commissions. Although I guess HBO would still have the Play Store fees? In any case, I haven't noticed this sort of customer-hurting hard negotiations yet.

I think the rotation thing is explained by tidal locking.

I was reading an article about the Z-Machine recently [1], and I was quite surprised that in addition to being a virtual machine, it also implemented virtual memory! Thus, pages could be swapped in and out of disk as needed. (Since CPUs like the 6502 didn't have a hardware MMU, I guess this was an explicit software step -- i.e. a called function that would check if the page was loaded, and if not, arrange for its load.)

With a virtual machine, virtual memory, and (for the time) a great natural language parser, it shows that the Infocom folks learned their craft in world of academia, high-end computer hardware, and ideas, instead of the more amateur (at the time) world of microcomputer enthusiasts.

[1] https://www.filfre.net/2012/01/zil-and-the-z-machine/

Whenever I get Windows-curious, the one thing holding me back is all the telemetry and privacy compromises I hear about on forums like HN. One thing I'd love to see in a "switch to Windows" list is a simple list of steps to harden the privacy characteristics of a fresh Windows 10 installation. I occasionally see automated solutions for this, but it's hard for me to judge the reliability and trustworthiness of such tools. A simple, clear list would be great.

When I was a kid growing up in a small town in the 1980's, radio was my way of finding out about the outside world. I would stay up late at night listening when I was supposed to be sleeping.

I often ended up listening to Larry King's late night radio show. Although unlikely for the medium and time slot, he was somehow able to attract amazing guests, and I learned about a lot of things. I especially remember his interviews with Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams, which introduced me to those authors. RIP.

A number of devices in this category seem to have popped up recently. I picked up an RG351P a few weeks ago, which I'm guessing is similar to this device. It really is a lot of fun playing around with it, and it's hackable like a Raspberry Pi.

I think working less than 100% time, even as low as 50% time, is sort of a holy grail for software engineers, and can be well worth the reduction in pay. Any of your extra time you choose to spend on education will pay dividends in the future. I've managed to pull this off on occasion.

I'm a freelancer and not an employee, so you'd think it would be easy to negotiate such. However, I keep running into the same issue: few people need just a little software engineering. If someone needs some software engineering, they usually need a lot of it. Several times, I've been hired by customers with the promise of "we just need 10 hours a week", but somehow get talked into working full time pretty quickly.

This may not be a useful answer for you depending on your situation, but the best money I've spent on professional development has been funding sabbaticals between gigs where I engage in deep study on topics that are harder to learn in small doses.

I'm about as close to a free-speech absolutist as there is, and it's very frustrating that the market for these platforms seems to be settling into ruts where we have to choose between the hyper-conformity of highly managed platforms and the dumpster fires of the unmanaged platforms. I think the feedback loop you describe is a big part of it. I also wonder if we're experiencing a decline in education and critical thinking skills that could be fueling these ruts.

This greatly saddens me. Can't there be some way to build a platform that encourages intelligent, reasonable, polite debate? Discussions of ideas based on their merits instead of personal attacks and tribal allegiances? Some way to provide free speech without providing free amplification? Has society devolved to a point where this is no longer possible?