So, how’s that retirement thing going, anyway? | Hacker News Reader

So, how’s that retirement thing going, anyway?

joelonsoftware.com

27 pointsdmazin18 comments

Rich guy gets to hang around in Manhattan condo without a full time job. Sounds fun, where can I sign up?

I would suggest that this blog entry was posted out of idolatry rather than being posted for its insightful content. I don’t know what anyone’s supposed to get out of this.

I got out of it a bit of elder-slang -- "NORC". Apparently an acronym pronounced just as one might guess:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturally_occurring_retireme...

NORC = place where young people can't afford to live?

Self segregation.

Upvote for the solderless breadboard.

Was a time when people actually had boards for bread, and kids swiped them to pound nails into, the which to solder wires from tube sockets and coils onto. No tubes, no coils, no bread, but still the same thing.

The holes to poke wires into are weirdly reminiscent of the tube sockets.

As many times as I've used breadboards, I wondered where the name came from. Thanks for sharing this! Wikipedia seems to agree and has a few example images.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadboard

Yup. That's why they're really called "solderless breadboards" although most people drop the "solderless" part.

When I was about 12 or so I had an electrical kit that used screws with caps to connect the wires and components. I don't remember what the substrate was, but it could very well have been wood.

Whatever happened to wire wrapping?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_wrap

Just "too permanent" for rapid prototyping / playing around?

I still use it for hookups, though the days when whole computers would be built that way is long over.

The big problem is high speed signals.

A few years back, I re-wired the electrics in my guitar using a semi-complicated setup of a 6 way switch for pickups in-phase or out, and parallel or series, tone and volume pots, and distortion. There was also some choice to be made about what capacitors to use, and picking a diode for passive distortion.

After a first pass trying to just wire it directly, I ended up hot gluing a tiny breadboard into the compartment. That went much better and allowed me to swap candidate parts until it was right.

Man what I wouldn't give to read a blog post on what Prashanth is doing differently.

You mean besides overseeing the removal of a popular moderator, which caused other moderators to publicly quit in protest?

Exactly what I was thinking.

> For the last couple of months, Prashanth Chandrasekar has been getting settled in as the new CEO of Stack Overflow.

Not just Monica, this coincides pretty perfectly with multiple bad decisions made by the company. I don't understand how Spolsky can think he's going a good job.

As a long time Fog Creek customer, the game plan seems to be driving the customers to other services. They have other products in the new company portfolio, but we are moving to Atlassian. Between the products not having been updated in 5+ years, frequent service outages, and support requests not even being answered, we are done with FogCreek.

If anyone needs any tools for migrating from Fogbugz to Jira, I did our last QA load on Thursday, and finished the wiki to Confluence migration last night. :-)

Does that mean FogBugz is dead? I remember reading a lot about it on Joel’s blog back in the day but here its not mentioned at all.

We sold off FogBugz around the time that we renamed Fog Creek to Glitch. Glitch is now our sole focus.

Anil - whats been the biggest challenge in going single product? Or has it been smooth sailing?

Hey Anil, I’ve been playing around with Glitch and following the company and think you and team are doing a great job.

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