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Eatcats

33 karma · joined July 3, 2019

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Eatcats··on Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming
in this world of LLM coding, we jumped to architect level
Eatcats··on I Received an AI Email
so the cold email worked :) You didn't buy the service, but at least you checked out their website
Eatcats··on Show HN: Play the front page of Hacker News as interactive text games
OH MY GOD
Eatcats··on AI chatbot 'encouraged' man to sacrifice himself to stop climate change
Sad thing is that is true - we are the reason for climate change
Eatcats··on What's the worst codebase you've ever worked on?
I was working for one production company making products out of concrete, and they had this SCADA system. They had 5 factories and 5 versions of the same software. This software was made by one company, but as factories were built in different times, software was evolving as well, so when I joined the company there were 5 factories with different code bases, that were doing basically the same thing. Oldest software was written in VB6, newer in .NET 1.1.

The problem was that making changes on all factories required making changes in code in 5 codebases, and it was impossible to merge them into one because of subtle differences how the production lines were working. Also it was impossible to run this software locally, so only tests you could do on live production environment. Imagine testing your software, there is a bug, and you just wasted 2 tones of concrete...

My solution for this problem was making a checklist of all the things that need to be changed and checked before changing, codebase by codebase. Also keeping the changes in SVN helped a lot for implementation reference. Good commit messages and comments in code were essential not to drown in this mess.

In the end, I hired an employee, taught him the ropes and "sold him" to this company. He works there till now and does exactly the same thing (8 years and counting) ;)

Eatcats··on Microsoft Outlook has begun serving me ads that look like emails
Gmail does the same for a while now https://postimg.cc/CRSFcJC1
Eatcats··on Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell
I have 2 rehearsal rooms for musicians, with good acoustics and some basic music equipment. There are 10 bands sharing the rooms and paying monthly giving me 500$+ with ease. I will do more as the market for such places in my city is not saturated yet.
Eatcats··on Show HN: I am building a new Python library to read/write PDF files
Thank you, it is much needed, right now the most reliable way of generating PDF's I used not so long time ago is - create DOCX with content and some template variable strings, like {{}} - unpack document and get into text, replace text - use DOCX->PDF linux tool to generate document.

Maybe this will be the good solution

Eatcats··on Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
yep, I had two Dells, one XPS 15 from 2019 and some cheap Vostro, and both had problems with sleep state. The support is great, but I couldn't get Ubuntu to run without issues, and it sucked a lot.

Older Latitude were great for dev work, and I still use my 7450.

Eatcats··on Ask HN: What do you think about RISC-V development?
Sounds really like long way. Yes it'd be great to be able to have some "home brew" manufacturing process that could be useful. Then making CPU could switch to distributed model.

But I just read today of silicon wafer shortages, so story goes deeper...

Eatcats··on Obfuscated Tiny C Compiler
I second this