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dullroar | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

One that knocked me upside the head once was, upon remarking "That's going to take a long time, like a year" to accomplish something, as if that made it not worth doing, being told, "That time is going to pass anyway." In other words, you can either start working towards it now, and be in a better place in a year, or let that length of time discourage you and then, when next year rolls around, still be discouraged. So just start.

dullroar | 5 years ago | on: Software Development: Mistakes I Made

Back in the 1990s, when I was a software engineer at a database company in the Bay Area (rhymed with "PsyBass", if you pronounce "bass" as a musical instrument :), there was a joke among some of the architects along the lines of, "I DREW the boxes and arrows! If you can't implement it, that's you're fault!" Now, as a "software architect" in a really, really small shop, I basically just try and lead by example, and make sure my ideas work as code before inflicting them on anyone else. But that sorta sounds like keeping it all to myself until I am sure it works, per the article. I like to document (more than most), but have found over the years the only person who reads my documentation tends to be me. So writing docs or writing code, either way, tends to help me refine my ideas.

dullroar | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are you learning?

dotnet interactive (aka Jupyter notebook with a C# kernel). Been using it along with XPlot.Plotly to chart various CV datasets from JHU, the NYT, etc,

dullroar | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Recommendations for Working from Home?

I worked from home full-time from 1996-2000, part-time from 2000-2005. My main advice would be, "Learn how to go home at night." In other words, if you have an actual home office, close the office door and "commute" home, and leave work behind you. If you don't have a home office, close the laptop instead, again thinking, "I am now commuting home." After reveling in the fact you now have a two-second commute, go do what you do every evening after you get home (presuming you don't just drudge away some more after you get home).

Whatever you do, especially if you work for a global company like I did, don't check email right before bed! Otherwise you will get sucked into this - https://www.xkcd.com/386/ - and won't be able to go to sleep.

In fact, it was after one of those episodes, bored with TV so casually checking email and exclaiming, "How could those engineers in [some city six time zones away] be so dumb?!?! I must stop them before we lose all of tomorrow cleaning up what they're doing!!!", that I instituted the "commute home and leave it behind you" rule. Because it was fine - they weren't dumb, I was misunderstanding something, but the resulting email flurry back and forth got me worked up to the point of not being able to sleep. So I lost all the next day due to bad productivity anyway.

dullroar | 6 years ago | on: Punched Cards

I am old (I have seen things). I still have my first program from college, in FORTRAN, on a card deck. I also worked as a "computer operator" (an extinct species) while going to college, putting card decks in the readers, running decks that were output from the punches through "interpreters" (which printed the characters across the top of cards), and remembering that you always (ALWAYS) drew a diagonal line across the top of a deck of cards with a pen, in case you dropped them (colloquially known as a "floor sort"). If you wanted to be really fancy, you'd use different colored cards for different sections of a program, but that was rarely worth the effort. Good times.

Besides card punches, readers and interpreters, other quaint machines I dealt with on a daily basis were chain printers (with carriage tapes - look it up), reel-to-reel tapes (which required cleaning the heads with isopropyl alcohol and cotton swabs once a shift), and the most evil of all, decollators (again, look it up). All controlled via consoles that didn't have cursor keys, so to this day I have the TERRIBLE habit of backspacing to nuke and fix typing mistakes rather than cursoring and surgically correcting them. I bet the Backspace key on my keyboard is probably in the top 10 keys in my usage profile. :)

dullroar | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software?

My ex-wife worked for a legal software firm. One thing to note is they were threatened with lawsuits ALL THE TIME, because, after all, their customers were lawyers. So any bug or whatever else would end up with some nasty email from some customer exclaiming, "We're going to sue!" In reality, not many (if any) actually carried through with it, but if that sort of threat makes you queasy, better be (or have) a really good lawyer yourself if you go this route, and not just as a domain expert for the software itself.

dullroar | 6 years ago | on: Show HN: Hacker News Trends

Nice. One thought I had is it would be cool to be able to click on any (non-zero) point on the graph and see a list of the articles from that day, sort of a drill-down on WHY was that term peaking in popularity then?

dullroar | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Do you ever contact people who have had a positive impact on you?

Yes. Two teachers (one elementary, one college). A former boss. Each helped me by not just expecting more of me, but mentoring me in ways that allowed a bullied kid with little self-respect recognize and grow into my talents. I think it is a great idea and recommend it. As OP said, the conversations that arose from each were great.

dullroar | 6 years ago | on: Mozilla lays off 70

Thanks for the reply. I see my comment got downvoted (I figured it would), but I was still curious as to what your response would be and I appreciate it.

dullroar | 6 years ago | on: Mozilla lays off 70

Would be interested in hearing more about your views on this. I use Firefox and Thunderbird almost exclusively, and every time I think about donating money I then remember all the wasted time and effort they've poured into what seem to be pipe dreams over the years. I WANT them to succeed. I WANT there to be an alternative on the desktop to Chrome (now that Edge is basically rebranded Chromium), and on iOS to both Chrome and Safari, I WANT to support their excellent documentation portal (which everyone else rides on the back of - even MS points to it a lot now). But man, I just don't trust the powers-that-be there to make non-braindead strategic decisions, year after year. Talk me out of that prejudice against them, please?

dullroar | 6 years ago | on: API Practices If You Hate Your Customers

Here's one from a vendor I currently integrate with - have multiple APIs (in this case, a SOAP one, a REST one returning JSON, and then some language SDKs that wrap the latter for convenience), and have their feature sets be an interesting Venn diagram with various intersections but no unions. Just today I found out that the in the extensive integration we've written using the SDK (which wraps the REST API, remember), I will have to shell out and use SOAP because one (1) parameter on one (1) object in their extensive object hierarchy isn't supported by REST or the SDK, just by the SOAP protocol. Nice.

dullroar | 6 years ago | on: Show HN: Space Invaders in C

Space Cadet on the old versions of Windows supported bumping, too. You could avoid tilt by alternating which side you bumped. Two in a row from the same side would tilt, but alternating sides never did (for me).

dullroar | 6 years ago | on: Intentionally Blank Page

Back in the day, StorageTek, a company started by ex-IBMers, used something along the lines of "This page left intentionally almost blank." Which is, of course, more accurate. :)

dullroar | 6 years ago | on: Carbonite To Be Acquired by OpenText for $1.4B

Yup - this was the CA (Computer Associates) working model for decades. And as further commenters in the thread show, sometimes for enterprises reliably staying the same year after year is a GOOD thing.

dullroar | 6 years ago | on: Carbonite To Be Acquired by OpenText for $1.4B

Yup, Crashplan. I pay for the small biz option, but that let's me back up the machines I need to backup. AND, I have restored a total of three different machines from Crashplan over the years, and it "just works." I am a fan.
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