daveslash

Low quality comment here, but this line in the article "Back in the day, a computer was something so special and expensive that you only had one, and it was set up in a way that everyone had access to it." reminded me of that line in Back to the Future - the scene where Marty makes reference to having multiple TVs in the house and the dad correcting him: "Oh Honey, he's teasing you, nobody has two televisions."

Our track coach would do the same thing! And he got really frustrated with me because the foot that I led with seemed to vary by day. I'd be fairly consistent on any given day, but another day I'd be consistently the other foot.

Came here to make the same comment. I have a copy of The Red Atlas. Fantastic. Here's a link to the comment thread about it here on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15378422

Re >> Can you check this is correct for me?

That's the part that really gets to me. It's one thing to say Hey friend, you could have quickly gotten the right answer yourself. It's another thing to say Hey buddy, you asked me a question which I COULD answer, but instead of giving you the CORRECT answer, I'm going to give you AN answer, and let you figure out if it's correct <-- with the unspoken expectation that if it is the wrong answer and I run with it because you gave it to me, it's still my fault.

I'm similar. I do very little with both hands, but I'm split between left and right on individual things. Throw is right, write is left. Where I especially get hung up is learning something to do with feet - surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, etc... I struggle to figure out which one is my preference. I usually find that I'm equally bad at both.

I think I heard somewhere (can't find reliable source right now) that he created Captain Planet as a revenge. He had some renewable energy initiative/deal that he was trying to get pushed through that got clobbered by big oil lobbyists. So he created Captain Planet as some revenge scheme.

Came here to say the same thing. Folks have been saying for a while "it's a tell tale sign of AI!" and I've been thinking - have people forgotten about Microsoft Word (and other word processors) automatically changing a hyphen to an em-dash?

Agreed. Although alternative to a chunk of Earth as a result of a natural impact, I wonder if it could have been a poorly sanitized space probe from the 60s or 70s?

The Author also missed the fact that in the 2001 Movie they went to Jupiter, whereas in the book they went to Saturn.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/177/why-is-the-des...

I learned a long time ago to be very careful with mock, dummy, or test data.... because some people will just push anything to prod, take screenshots during your demo and paste it into the official documentation... you name it.

I was giving a demo on how to set up multiple computers in a federated setup using Active Directory, ADFS, etc... I had about 5 VMs named things like Hank, Peggy, Bobby, Boomhauer, Bill, and a test user HHill, 123 Rainy Street, Arlen, TX -- someone screenshotted and took notes during the demo and now that's in some formal training somewhere material. Thankfully, it's all internal.

When I and doing dev work and I need an available port, just any port, I use 666 -- because it's never used by anything and also DOOM. I gave a sprint demo and I used 660 instead of 666 to demo that the customer can specify the port number of screen X. Someone put that in the internal and also customer facing documentation... so now my company's product is default setup on 660, even thought it's completely user-configurable. Thank God I didn't demo with 666...

It might be appropriate if you're a children's cartoonist/artist and you're sending out proofs? But yeah, I get your point and agree.

Agree. It's social, but also semi-anonymous. It's a nice balance. It's not anonymous like 4chan, because on Reddit you still have a username and post/comment history, so you have a reputation. But it's largely anonymous because most people don't actually know people and it's not filled with "influencers". Though... it does have a bot problem. Glad to know you know of poop knife! My internet culture goes back to whitehouse.com and towel.blinkenlights.nl. :) Nice term for, uh... citrus parties.

Regarding "work out of the box".... I started using Ubuntu with Breezy Badger (5.10). In those days, I had been goofing around with Mandrake (RIP, now Mandriva), Fedora Core 4, Knoppix 3.4, and Suse 10. Back then, it was so frustrating to just play an mp3 file, get Wi-Fi working, etc... Maybe it's because I was a lot younger and didn't know what I was doing. But it was also because a lot of drivers and codecs were protected under Intellectual Property rights. Ubuntu let you click a button to install all the codecs! They said "Hey, you legally aren't supposed to use these codecs. Are you sure you want to install them? [Yes] [ No]" -- and we all just hit yes. That's all it took to get your multimedia to play! Boom, easy! Even if not strictly legal. That was a needle mover for Ubuntu adoption, imho.

Regarding Reddit, I completely agree. I recognize that it is technically "social media", but I consider it to be a different animal from the majority of social media (Facebook, Twitter, Insta, etc...). Glad you're largely enjoying it! If you're still relatively knew to Reddit, there are some Reddit Classics with which you should be familiar -- namely, the infamous Poop Knife. https://www.reddit.com/r/poopknife/comments/1d5f1sq/original...

Just speaking for myself. Facebook was fun when it was the underdog to MySpace. But I closed me account just a few years later and haven't looked back. Was never engaged on twitter, but have an account just so I can verify "yes, they actually posted that"

Aside from Reddit, my only social media is Instagram. On my Instagram, I only follow people I personally know or national-park/state-park/non-profit conservation accounts. I only like posts of people I personally know and nothing else, and I never comment on anything. I only post pretty pictures of nature with no people visible in a recognizable way. My feed is almost exclusively nature and animals (lots of seals and sea lions) with a lot of scuba diving mixed in. I also get a lot of xennial humor posts too, which I send to my wife and a buddy.

It's a very limited level of engagement, and I'm very happy with it. I don't need anything more.

And then they have OneDrive, SharePoint, Office365, and Teams as ways to share files... which are all the same thing/infrastructure under the hood.

But what are electrolytes!? Da ya even know?

I went there as a kid. One visit was actually a school field trip. I have not been to one in nearly 30 years. And I should have more clearly said that I've only actually been to one, but have seen others while traveling. That was my mistake in saying that I've been to a few.

I remember paying $200 (in adjusted 2025 dollars) for a 32GB USB thumb drive.

Speaking of nature parks instead of zoos, the San Diego Wild Safari Park is just that. Very large enclosed pastures with multiple species living alongside each other.

Big Zoos, yes. And they do some great research, as well as preservation and rehabilitation. But I've also been to a few small zoos in rural America that are essentially someone's private animal collection that they charge you a fee to see. I think those are less common than they used to be, but they do exist.

I was commenting to my wife the other day... it seems to me that there are very few wild animals that just die from being too old. Not an expert, but it seems to me that most animals in the wild live until they are brutally ripped apart and eaten alive by another animal, and it's only a matter of time -- very rarely reaching an age old enough to just die.

Same. The only thing that sticks is converting from format X to .mp4. Everything else I need to look up every single time.

Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1168/

I'm not a KSP pro, but I have tried and tried to fly into the sun and have yet to succeed. Even if I do my best to lose as much of the planet's orbital velocity as I can until I'm out of fuel, and I begin to fall towards the sun.... I still always miss and then just go into an elongated elliptical orbit. It's really hard.

I hear you. And thank you for posting the archive link. It's like buying gas in California. Before you can start pumping, you've gotta answer 20 questions.

  1. Are you using grocery store rewards points?
  2. Would you like to sign up for rewards points?
  3. Would you like a car wash?
  4. Do you want to apply for our Credit Card?
  5. Are you buying lottery tickets?

Ha, that's a good point. We were broke kids in a rural town without drivers licenses a hundred miles from anywhere that sold physical VHS or DVDs. We didn't have money, and if we did we didn't have the means to get to a store, and if we did it was far far away, and if we could I don't think most of us had DVD players at home. The phone bill, on the other hand - parents pay for that. ;-) IIRC, our dial-up ISP was a "local call", which was free then. I'm pretty sure my friend capitalized on the phone line during night times when the house was asleep.

Downloading The Matrix over a 28k dial-up modem (on a shared house/family line) was an exercise in patience! I didn't, but a friend did... and we all waited weeks for it to finish.

Agreed. The same with Music - with the rise of services like the iPod and more modern streaming services like Spotify, the effort just wasn't worth it. It turns out that people will happily pay for that content if its in an easy and convenient format.

Regarding video specifically, one problem I see with the streaming services is the increasing push of New content. Streaming services like Netflix or Hulu or Paramount+ are really dependent on new subscribers, which means they tend to focus on new and exclusive content to draw in new people, so they prioritize that (to a fault imho).

Many of us still want to rewatch those shows from the 90s we loved. Paramount+ specifically is "The Star Trek Streaming Service", and I know the folks over on reddit have their beef with P+ for seemingly de-prioritizing it instead of milking an extensive library like a cash cow. The past few years I've been digging into older movies - some black and white, silent, foreign, or weird avant-garde stuff. Streaming really drops the ball there, but I can understand how the business model doesn't really favor that.

Agreed. It's very important to maximize cross-functional coherence to capitalize on strategic imperatives for maximal growth opportunities.

I think it was Joel Spolsky who said that a manager is someone who moves the chairs out of the way so that the individual contributors can do their work well.

I'm not a manager by title, but when I'm managing something, my objective is to get as many hassles out of the way as possible and reduce as much cognitive load off people as I can. The rest usually takes care of itself.