Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

magicalhippo·

Looking back, writing interrupt service routines[1] for DOS as a self-taught teenager has been massively helpful.

Primarly because it taught me to save every other word or so, in case my ISR caused the machine to freeze.

[1]: https://wiki.osdev.org/Interrupt_Service_Routines

View on HN

Programmer from DOS times here. I've ingrained pressing CTRL + S every few seconds as a reflex. That has saved my bacon more than a few times.

I've started programming later than DOS (probably around win95 or so) but I still have a reflex to hit ctrl-s three times basically any time I stop typing.

You only need to lose hours of work once or twice to learn that lesson!

There's an option now in vscode to autosave every few seconds.

If you can't remember what you wrote a 'few seconds' ago then you have more problems than having to work in vscode!

It's called aging. Just wait until the first time you head back down the hall from the living room to the bedroom to get the thing you forgot to bring with you, get distracted for a moment by a pet or family member, and then can't remember if you were going down the hall to the bedroom or the living room.

I have ADHD bro

This doesn't dignify a reply, but the parent comment was about avoiding data loss because of crashes, and the saving is just good hygiene if you’re making frequent commits, formatting on save, etc. one less thing to think about, one less mistake made.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com