Professional Hacks: Tricks of the Trade | Hacker News Reader

Professional Hacks: Tricks of the Trade

themorningnews.org

113 pointsSapphireSun16 comments

This post was the precursor for http://www.tradetricks.org/, which used to publish user-submitted tricks every day. Start here and click through:

http://www.tradetricks.org/archives/001915.html

(I can't find an index page.)

FTA: "...the gap between software engineers and birthday clowns is almost negligible."

True.

"... Mapmakers will often use “copyright traps,” bits of information in their maps that are purposefully wrong ..."

Very true. I once had to re-do a map for this exact reason though I'm not sure the "purposeful" fit was to get the major intersection on the page or to catch people out.

"... In Australia, the butchers have a secret language called “rechtub klat” ..."

keew txen tuo siht yrt ot gniog.

I think you mean "gniog ot yrt siht tuo txen keew" :)

"... gniog ot yrt siht tuo txen keew ..."

Yes. I did this the first time but read the original as 'talk butcher' not 'butcher talk'.

From the article it appears that in "rechtub klat" the letters in a word are reversed, but the words have the same order in the sentence. So it would be:

  "gniog ot yrt siht tuo txen keew"

He probably just did a str.reverse instead of str.split(' ').map {|w| w.reverse}.join ' '

"... He probably just did a str.reverse instead of str.split(' ').map {|w| w.reverse}.join ' ' ..."

Nothing so elaborate, just in my head.

Heh, I started measuring my fingers after reading this. It's kind of mind boggling how symmetrical your left and right hand are.

This is a great article and where I got the inspiration for the term Acting Sober: http://blog.figuringshitout.com/oct-28th-day-16-acting-sober...

I know it's not quite the same thing, but I have a t-shirt (from an Irish pub) that has the great W.B. Yeats quote:

"The problem with some people is that when they aren't drunk, they're sober."

“and I’m thinking of incorporating some XML functionality” - is it still 1999? =)

"Published August 24, 2004"

The updated example would be "incorporating Cloud API".

Or "rewriting the whole thing in Rails, using agile development practices, of course."

That's a couple of years out of date. These days it would be more like "server-side doesn't matter, we use jquery on the front end to build a rich front end without proprietary products." Though, since I've actually said that myself, I'm not willing to admit that's a trick yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com