user911302966's comments

I'm confused. I see the word "engineer" appear several times, but the company appears to offer MP3 recording technology and a "share" button.

Where are the moving parts?

Thanks for the perspective. All of us greatly needed your two cents as guidance.

Travels the world taking photos... whoop-de-doo. That's been going on for decades, and only because technology has only recently made it possible.

Post again when she does something original, like traveling the galaxy taking photos. Only then will whatever follows your first two sentences be read.

Leave Portland for Smug-n-Con Alley? Why on Earth would he want to do that?

Yes, many companies are guilty of it. It comes down to ego inflation. "Engineer" lends an air of prestige and esteem, but it's a title that's undeserved by most who use it in modern times.

Of course, this gets severely down-voted because many people on HN and similar sites think of themselves in this fashion, and their ego takes a hit when they run across a comment such as mine.

"Engineer, engineer, engineer"

Good thing you guys aren't a Canadian company, lest you be fined into non-existence. Seriously, folks, call your employees what they are. Programmers, DBAs, Sysadmins.

I personally appreciate the work that Heroku has done with PostgreSQL, but I'm ate up when I see technology companies (whom are employers of the previously listed titles) refer to their employees as 'engineers'.

{Net,Free,Open}BSD... which one? All three?

I'm a NetBSD user that uses a tiling window manager (i3 - not ion3, it's different). ALT+1 and ALT+2 are where I keep my urxvts, ALT+3 my web browser, etc. The switch happens instantaneously.

Am I mistaken in my understanding of your issue, or is this helpful?

All quotes save for one-liners are out of context. The points you make stand on their own.

I don't dismiss the entire article; I appreciate thought and innovation in the space of the terminal, but I disagree with your ideas. Thanks for putting them out there to begin with.

"And we, the users, play along, pretending our machine is a video terminal presenting a grid of ASCII characters in all of 256 colours. This is ridiculous."

Not everybody uses their terminal to churn out HTML pages and add 'Nyan mode' to our 'newly discovered' emacs program. For those who do that, just buy a Macintosh or whatever is this week's hip flavor of Best Buy PC. Otherwise, use a language that doesn't require >256 different colors to be represented meaningfully.

"Typography is the future"? Thank goodness X.org/XFree86 has supported custom fonts since the 1990's.

"Opening a man page would scroll gently to the top of the page, letting you scroll down and read, or search through it as you would any text"

See: MANPAGER.

"We then add syntax highlighting and hyperlinks, so you can easily navigate between man pages"

Many terminals and shells support these features already.

"Finally we add visualisations so you can view plots of lines of code, etc., without having to context-switch."

Huh? I read that as 'code folding' and clang compilation.

I think the main takeaway here is that most of his "ideas" can be easily achieved within the current ecosystem of available programs, most of which are stock on modern UNIX-like OS distributions. I do think he misfiled this article under "Ideas"; it's more akin to a polite rant.

edit: colours/color killed due to conflict with reality (and irrelevance anyway).

Every single time I see news about window managers, I'm surprised that i3 (i3wm.org) isn't mentioned. i3 is the supreme tiling window manager. It's mature, fast, feature-ful and it's BSD-licensed. This looks like an advert, but I'm just a pleased user that's been on the i3 train since 2009.

You subverted your argument by including the term 'low-level'. Of course, that's all written freshly in C to this day.

Assuming that you meant only 'non-trivial': aside from the embedded space, C and GCC still represent the first-tapped resource in many companies. C is terse, well-known, fast and predictable.

I'd go marginally further and claim that, done correctly, gmake and a proper directory hierarchy remain the most effective way of organizing and maintaining a large software project.

My suspicion is that this is not a C programmer at all. Claiming that you've "written loads of it" certainly lends the author a cloak of credibility, but I don't buy it.

"This one, you really can't tell."

A competent C programmer can absolutely discern what is happening... more importantly, though, is that the two examples don't do the same thing.

I stopped reading at that point.

0 ^ 0 = 0, on all architectures.

I think that the GNU+Linux attribution is accurate and deserved. The author of this page thought it fair to use SLOC as his unit of measurement; I think that "fundamentality" is a far fairer unit.

Anyone that thinks that "GNU" should be dropped from the "GNU/LINUX" should be using alternate cp, rm, ln, etc. Or just use NetBSD (do this anyway).