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mega_dingus | 7 days ago | on: Little Free Library

I've known Rick since 2001 and was around when he & Todd kicked this off. We've both since moved and it's been a pleasure watching this take off (inter)nationally. In parens b/c I can only verify the "national" part, personally. :) I look for them whenever I visit new places

mega_dingus | 1 year ago | on: Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all

It's about TCO and time to market. Depending on what you're building, it's all YMMV. This article just quotes some individual costs

As somebody who worked at a mid-tier company trying to run databases, I can attest that RDS was a godsend. Trying to hire both a DBA and an Ops team that knew how to write the chef cookbooks for a proper multi-node cluster postgres was a nightmare. Like, we never succeeded, and something that's ootb with RDS

You must not forget that also, many (most?) companies that run things themselves do not do it right. Like, with proper off-site backups that you're regularly testing and know you have options to easily spin up replicas or restore point-in-time backups

Jeff Atwood's been saying this from the initial SO podcasts from 2008. If you have the right people who are motivated, and provide the right equipment and resources, you've always had the opportunity to have lower TCO doing it yourself

I have since moved on to a small top-tier company and still prefer to "outsource" my DBA work by way of using Aurora. Yes Aurora is more expensive. No, I don't have the mental or monetary budget to hire up a proper ops team. I know my limits

mega_dingus | 1 year ago | on: Pyenv – lets you easily switch between multiple versions of Python

This is not the way you're supposed to be using pyenv

You're supposed to install a specific version of python in a specific place, with a specific name. Say, /usr/local/python-3.10.6

Use pyenv to use that python. Control that by creating a `.python-version` file that says 3.10.6

You now have a project that uses 3.10.6. Unless, of course, somebody installs a different version in that path - at which point you've got bigger issues

Using pyenv to use `/usr/bin/python3` and hoping for the best misses the point

mega_dingus | 2 years ago | on: Google's New AI-Powered Browser Could Mark the End of the Human Internet

I was talking to somebody who worked HR at a multi-disciplinary shop, and she said you could always identify the emails coming from programmers

It was a complaint, definitely not a compliment. She said programmers listed things out in bullet points and bluntly to-the-point. She complained they were dry, intimidating, and she hated dealing with them

I still write concisely and with bullet points, when writing to other programmers. But I now expand things when talking to everybody else. And I've found I get better responses

mega_dingus | 2 years ago | on: Windows NT 3.1 on Dec Alpha AXP

Compiler was definitely somewhat to blame. I was on the C/C++ team at the time, and C++ was definitely an afterthought on the existing C frontend, of a big 3-stage compiler

I was on Digital UNIX so I didn't deal with VMS or Windows much. But Digital UNIX couldn't get out of their way with object file formats (COFF vs ELF and whatever else), on top of the compiler inefficiencies

A recipe for disaster when the MS company employee doesn't want to do it in the first place, and you give them an artisan product that's hard to use properly

mega_dingus | 2 years ago | on: Windows NT 3.1 on Dec Alpha AXP

DEC's relationship with MS was fascinating

DEC sued MS due to Cutler's contribution to NT. DEC thought they could sue themselves into MS's good graces. They had embroidered polo shirts saying "Strategic Relationship", and saw several employees wearing them, and the phrase was repeated often

DEC couldn't figure out why Office performed worse on Alpha than x86. They sent an employee to MS, only to find MS had a single build server stashed under some desk. MS was compiling Office with -O0, obviously doing the absolute bare minimum to check a box and move on with their lives.

Source: I'm a former DEC employee

mega_dingus | 3 years ago | on: Michigan Terminal System

And in 92, EECS280 made you do your first program in Pascal and then it was C for the rest of the curriculum. Lots of people were pissed they learned Pascal for one program.

mega_dingus | 3 years ago | on: Tell HN: Vim users, `:x` is like `:wq` but writes only when changes are made

OP said exactly "I've twice encrypted my file with password like `cd tmp`"

Not sure how you get "irrevocably bricked your system" from "encrypted my file", but you do you, I guess

You should also let the OP do the OP. They said they made a mistake. Simply, without complaining, and they do something else now. It's that simple

mega_dingus | 3 years ago | on: Cleaning a Spoon Is Complex

Key words being "I take to be..."

You're outright admitting you can't understand the post, or the point of the post, as you want to steadfastly hold to the original premise

If the reply post talked about the petroleum and other natural resources used to extract and transport the sodium hydroxide et al to your home, would that placate you?

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