edmccard

I guess I have a different perspective on HN than you do; because I've never noticed the "cool kids" wasting their time by griping about stupid questions (presumably they just scroll past them), and I've never seen anyone I consider one of the "cool kids" give warning that they were going to leave HN because of stupid questions.

EDITED to add: And I do know smart, successful, insightful people who don't post on HN precisely because of the kind of behaviors that you want to "let slide".

So I'll be more clear; assholes that hide behind weaselly language are not imaginary; maybe I attach too much importance on not being mistaken for an asshole, and if that makes me a snowflake then so be it.

Fair enough. I suppose there's a certain type of person you've never had to interact with; but can you imagine the existence of such a person who, when they said "many people will just write you off as a hopeless dweeb", what they actually meant was "many people including myself..." or "all the people whose opinion matters..."?

In other words, the sort of person who, when they want to make a personal attack, hide behind the kind of language that lets them claim they're just stating a fact about what other people think?

After our little back-and-forth, I don't believe that you are that kind of person; and maybe its a problem with me that I'm too ready to connect insulting language with ill intent; I just find it easier all around to frame things in a way that avoids any misapprehensions (for example, by pointing out "stupid" questions by saying "HN users don't appreciate questions that could be easily answered by reading the article and using Google")

So if instead of calling you an ass, 'mixmastamyk has said to you "many people would think you're acting like an ass for commenting like this" -- would that also be something you wish people had said you back in the day? Or are you so convinced of the value of your "advice" that you wouldn't care what many people would think?

EDIT:

>I wish someone had said it to me back in the day. If someone had, it would have saved me a lot of pain.

I am genuinely sorry that people treated you so badly for asking questions.

In this case, the other person said "Many people will just quietly write you off as a hopeless dweeb if you expose your laziness in this way."

Is that not a personal attack because it's hidden behind one layer of indirection?

>if we don't approach the problem this way, it's a downward spiral

I get that it's not easy moderating a site like this when there's only two of you to do the job, but once you've shown up in the thread, is it that much more work to call out everyone involved instead of just picking the last nasty comment?

Nope; many CD players, like the first one I got in 1986, had only a two-digit led display for the track number -- there was no time display at all.

EDIT: It was a Fisher Studio Standard that looked like this, so I guess it did show an "index number" while scanning through a track.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/J08NITOv2FA/hqdefault.jpg

http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/_cd8_/alto/.index.html

http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/_cd8_/alto/.mu.run!2.ht...

but I don't know if there's any way to transfer it from a disk image to an actual Alto disk?

[1] Go to https://xkcd.com/archive/, hover over the title of a comic, and a tooltip will show the date

EDIT: I see 'mikeash beat me to it.

Good, yes, desirable, often, but I wouldn't call it "essential" to the art of programming.

I once worked for a company whose data was managed by a COBOL application on a mainframe a couple hundred miles away; there was no walking down that abstraction ladder (without shelling out a five-figure support fee), so our in-house IT department had to take advantage of the fact that the 3270 terminal emulator we used to access the mainframe, could be driven through a COM interface.

I'm sure there are lots of other examples of jobs that don't have the luxury of being able to step down and verify lower-level code, and I wouldn't characterize them as missing out on some "essential" aspect of programming.

Every so often the concept of visual programming comes up, where people wish that instead of editing text they could somehow directly manipulate an AST. Wouldn't it be funny if it turned out that it was Lisp they were looking for all along?

Isn't that the whole point of abstractions? Like, when you write a function call, you see "foo()" but the compiler sees all the individual instructions in the function. The same with macros, templates, etc.

And on a purely visual level, the example 'jtsummers gave just seems to be an extension of code folding and other tools that let you focus on one part of the code while ignoring another.

It was mostly because of the clock speeds, wasn't it? I seem to remember once hearing that below 20 Mhz you could play "TTL Lego" but above that you ran into problems with things like propagation delay.

Or maybe it signifies youthful inexperience?

Of the programmers that I know, the longer they have been programming, and the more varied projects they have worked on, the less they care about tabs v. spaces. Whatever standard the project they're working on uses, that's how they set up their editor for that project, because it's one less thing to have to worry about.

Yes, with such helpful suggestions as changing to a fresh directory because the original directory was "corrupt". Except that wouldn't have fixed it; the problem was eventually discovered to be a bug in npm on Windows[1], so every single "republished" package would have also been broken.

[1]https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/16734

Same here. Something about high-contrast schemes irritates my eyes; and I have trouble reading low-contrast text on dark backgrounds, so I've been using black-on-#FFFFDD since I noticed it on the Go Playground.

Those who prefer to bookmark elsewhere will be able to export their data once I fix the export link, which was disabled some months ago for peformance reasons.

As opposed to being completely dependent on public roads for transportation? Or out away from the "urban core" do you just get around on four-wheelers and snowmobiles? If so, maybe we can stop spending so much of our taxes building roads out to wherever you want to live.

I wouldn't say "replaces"; the speech patterns, body language, and credentials are there whether you're in a suit or not.

As to class mobility: if the kind of people who get promoted in your workplace are the ones that, for example, have mutual friends from the same circles (and maybe the same college) as the boss, then wearing a suit isn't going help your career.

Alas, no.

The 2005 Grand Challenge was divided into two parts: the national qualification event, where you went around an obstacle course on a closed raceway in an effort to qualify for a limited number of race slots, and the real race, which was a brutal 150 mile course through some pretty gnarly desert terrain.

Blue Team never made it past the NQE, which is why everyone's obsession with the motorbike makes no sense to those of us who actually made it to the real deal.

The Smithsonian's decision to memorialize Levandowski's engineering mediocrity is, to say the least, puzzling.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14216609

It's still understood. It's just that, it's not a very useful piece of information, since _all_ degrees are more expensive nowadays -- not just the basket-weaving ones.

When the car I still drive was as old as WinXP is now, it was part of a 3.6 million vehicle recall for the cruise-control shutoff switch. The fix involved splicing in some kind of bypass in the wiring harness; so that was potentially 3.6 million parts, installed one at a time. If Ford can do that, why can't Microsoft write a patch for XP?

...are how the state-of-the-art is advanced in other industries? Imagine if the FAA's response to an air disaster was, "Never mind root causes, you just should've bought a newer plane".

I'd guess that most hospitals don't do in-house development for the software they use. They paid someone else for it, probably at "enterprise" rates; it's hard to blame them for not having the budget or desire to replace working systems with new shiny (complete with new bugs) every X years.

Was it "orchestrated", or did the worm just spread randomly and opportunistically?

    extern(C) { void foo(); }

Nitpick: the article mentions that the cost estimates "had ballooned by nearly 50%", which is not the same as doubling (which would have involved the estimates increasing by nearly 100 percent)

  foo().pop().expected("foo length >= 1");

[1]https://gist.github.com/edmccard/8898dd397eec0ff3595c28ada52...

Then don't! Or, if you mean you don't want to know how anyone else felt about a post, and you use the Stylish browser extension, you can use this style I made which makes all comment text the same vivid #000000 --

https://userstyles.org/styles/141705/that-s-just-like-your-o...

Or as my grandmother always said, "if you want to forget something, just write it down."