rhubarbcustard

I, like probably most other people, tend to start a habit and then it quickly fades away, not necessarily due to lack of wanting. I find that I might want to start, for example, strecthing my hamstrings regularly, I do them for some days/weeks and then I forget some days, then forget some more, and then after a while I realise I haven't done any for months.

So I wrote a webapp that I usually myself constantly now, it's very basic. I enter a habit I want to keep up and then visit the site everyday and click the "done" button when its done. It also has a calendar so I can see how often I've been doing it because not every habit is to be done every day.

I started this for exercising but i'm not using it for very basic/stupid things. One example is cleaning my glasses. I would never remember to clean them and I'd occasionally realise I'm viewing the world through a layer of grime. I now click "done" every day and the world looks crystal clear.

I guess it's just gamified habits a little bit and its working really well for me. There's a ton of habit trackers out that but I never found anything simple and quick to use.

I got my first job out of college 29 years ago. For the first 10 years or so, the process was I guess you could say agile-like in that we certainly didn't do waterfall, we just talked about stuff, built stuff and banged it straight into production. Testing was not an official thing at all, somebody had a quick look-see if they felt like it.

My first 10 years on the job was Turbo Pascal and Delphi for various shops. Working in that old DOS-based Turbo IDE felt like magic, I remember plumping for a shocking blue, yellow and pink colour scheme - I miss Pascal. The move to Delphi was a huge change, OOP, native strings over 255 long and some truly unbelievable drag-and-drop GUI building functionality.

We had no source control until we started using Delphi, I think it was Subversion but there might have been something before that. Prior to SVN it was a case of baggsying report.pas for the day.

Thinking back, and maybe I've forgotten, but I don't think we shipped anything that was particularly worse than stuff I see getting shipped today. Yeah, stuff went wrong, but it still does. Without reviews, Git, CI, etc we still shipped something that largely worked and kept customers happy.

Code quality was bad. No standards were followed across the team, so files all had different styles. It wasn't uncommon to see procedures that were 100s, maybe 1000s, of lines long. Turbo Pascal's integrated debugging was a life-saver.

Unit testing was not a thing.

I think we wrote far more stuff ourselves, whereas today there's a lot more libraries and systems to use instead of building.

Obviously there was no Stack Overflow, I signed up to that when it first came online, it has been a game-changer. I read a lot more programming books back then, you had to. I think there was a lot more try-it-and-see work going on, I used to write many small apps just to work out how some thing needed to work before touching the main codebase, that's something I still do a lot today, I'm not sure the new-bloods do?

Work-life balance was absolutely fine, there was no pressure to work extra hours but I don't find that there has ever been. I've always prioritised family-time over work, I put in full effort for my contracted hours, the second they are up, I am gone.

I certainly enjoyed programming a lot more back then, it felt closer to the metal, it felt like a voyage of discovery, I couldn't just Google to find out how to pack a file down to 50k whilst keeping read-time quick, I mostly had to work it out myself, read a book or ask colleagues. You had to work harder to learn stuff, and I don't know, it felt like that hard-won knowledge stayed with me more than something I googled last week.

Moden languages have abstracted away a lot of the complexities and that is of course a good thing but I kind of miss the pain!

In my opinion the Oticon OPN hearing aid is the best on the market, I have been wearing it for 2 years or more and have zero complaints. I have tried aids from all manufacturers over the 40 years I've been wearing them, Oticon wins. GN ReSound are also very good. Phonak is the most popular but overrated IMO, havibng said that, Costco repackage Phonak aids and are almost certainly the cheapest place you will pick up top of the range aids.

It is important to test the aid during the trial period. They are never "pop them in and go" you will find some things too loud and others too quiet, a first fitting is rarely correct and certainly not the for the first time wearer. Check wind noise, background noise in bars and pubs, check what people sound like behind you and to the side. Do all the normal things you do everyday and see how the aids perform in those situations, many are not perfect everywhere, so what it sounds liek at home may be different to the office, etc.

Bluetooth connectivity has been a solved problem for many years. Most new-ish aids will work amazingly with iPhones and most with Android.

Check the apps. GN ReSound app is briliiant, Phonak's is too. Interestingly, Oticon have very little custom tuning in their app whereas other brands do (ie. you can move the bass/mid/treble etc) I thought this was a terrible mistake when I first got the OPNs but it was not, the aids are so good I never needed to fine tune them myself.

The "OTC" (over the counter) act is happening right now, which means hearing aids will be available to buy off the shelf and online. Some places are already doing this, Gn ReSound have a reseller online (I forget the name, Amplify?). But other brands like Oticon and Widex are still only available by going to a practioner and getting a fit from them.

If you do go and see a professional and get a hearing test and a fit, be very choosy, ask a LOT of questions. Just like any other profession, there's a human element and not all audiologists and registered hearing aid fitters are equal. Some will do a hearing test, fir the aids to the defaults settings and kick you out the door, you want someone who will tweak them based on your feedback.

I haven't posted much of late but check out our hearing aid info site at www dot hearingaidknow dot com.

I prefer https://picocss.com/. Default styling just seems nicer.

It is but, for me anyway, it's a world away from Facebook, Insta and similar sites in terms of quality and usefulness. I do find myself opening my phone and having a quick look down the HN homepage listing but I'm fairly safe in the knowledge that anything I do read will of decent quality and have some benefit.

The other big difference is that HN doesn't got out of its way to make you consume more or want to constantly come back, that's not their business model.

I travelled a fair distance to sign a contract with a third-party that I was contracting though for a major bank. They handed me a bunch of documents to sign and left me in a room for a while, I read them all thoroughly (took hours) and flagged up several things that were just plain wrong, stuff that made no sense and, similar to the OP, some clauses that suggested they wanted my first-born.

They were happy to change the details to fit what I wanted and we all went away happy. The thing that surprised me was when their intiial response was, "No-one has ever mentioned these before and we've been using these for years". I mean, the wording of the contracts could have gone very badly for me if things had gone south and we ended up in court.

Kind of makes me wonder if anyone actually bothers to read what they are signing.

Thanks for sharing that, its got some amazingly deep articles on audiology. It's really hard though, to find out what Crescendo actually is and how to buy it!

With most new hearing aids users, multiple tunings are required as they cannot handle the new volume and intensity of sounds that hey haven't heard for years.

An audiologist will typically test someone, see that they need amplications across the range but send them away with a much lower amplification for a weeks to get used to things. Then bring the volume up as time goes by.

People amy also need to get used to the aid's noise reduction algorithms as they can seem unatural at first and is a nightmare for anyone who used to wear an old analog hearing aid with no noise reduction.

So, yeah, hearing aids are rarely plug-and-play from day one - the user needs time to adjust.

A non-linear loss should not be an issue for any modern hearing aid, they are designed specifically to deal with that. I've never seen an audiogram with a complete flat (linear) loss, I'm sure some have it but its not common.

I have a severe sensorineural loss in both ears and wears hearing aids with a lot of success. My loss was the result of some unknown illness when I was younger - a loss resulting from illness or drug reaction tend to present randomly across the frequencies, whereas an age-related loss is almost always a "ski slope" loss, which means the high frequencies are mostly lost and the lowers are mostly fine.

Your experience is very common with new hearing aid users. The aids are able to increase volume at specific frequencies as defined by your hearing test(s) and the other features of the aid, e.g. noise reduction and compression are able to give a great quality of sound. The problem is usually in the person's ability to comprehend these new sounds, i.e. their brain, not their ears. A person with a hearing loss typically takes seven years to try out hearing aids, in those years their brain has got used to not hearing certain frequencies and sounds altogether and it can take time and training to get that ability back.

There is not really a great set of tools for brain training part of the hearing problem at the moment, in my opinion its badly overlooked by the hearing industry.

This is a very interesting book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0262045869

I agree with this and I haven't done enough of these kind of projects but I did create this parkrun map as the one on the parkrun website was not very good.

https://www.moreofless.co.uk/map-of-parkrun-5k-running-event...

It's really simple but I use it often myself and other people are finding it too, which is nice.

Just tried https://andisearch.com/ and I like it. Felt like a fresh look on results instead of the same old SEO ones. For example, searched for a few Java queries and found very informative website/results that weren't dominated by Bealdung. Searched for "soccer scores", "chelsea FC", "prince andrew", "WP export" and found things that would never have been on Google's first page, but were excellent returns. Nice work.

Pleased to see this pop up here today as I'd just finished the book yesterday.

I've been putting off buying it for a long time as I'd assumed it was another great blog turned into a book that contained 90% filler.

As someone else said below, there's a small amount of filler in here, but it feels like the right amount and allows you to take the time to absorb the content more fully.

I honestly feel like this book has fundamentally changed the way I view work, side projwects and tasks in general. I've procrastinated on a number of things as they felt like huge efforts that were not achievable - reading Mr Clear makes me realise that I can achieve those by not focusing on the end goal but getting into a habit, a system, and chipping away at it over time.

You could say the book's content is obvious stuff, but it's certainly opened my eyes and changed my thinking.

Highly recommend.

Hearing aids have been doing this for 20+ years. The big players in the market have been fine-tuning their algorithms and hardware for a long time to be able to fit even severe hearing losses with a good sound. Modern aids also very impressive with sound localisation and context-switching between people speaking in groups.

Edit: That's not to say this isn't a cool project, it is VERY cool.

It's not really the age as such, but how long you've left an untreated hearing loss for that can be an issue.

You have the classic "ski slope" hearing loss, which is common with age. Your hearing aids should be boosting the high freequencies to fit your loss profile and not somewhat less than you need to make you work for it. I would go back to your provider and ask for an increase in the high freqs. Alternatively, lots of hearing aids these days come with a smartphone app which lets you set base/mid/treble so you could alter them yourself but you don't get the flexability the provider would.

Chuffed to not only see a hearing related post on the front page of HN but also that you used my Audiogram Creator to generate your results.

Sounds like you have Auditory Processing Disorder. You might be able to train yourself to do better in noise with something like https://neurotone.com/lace-auditory-training-program

Love the look of the landing page, is that a purchased theme you used or created from scratch?

Do you think this is a better option than Apache Cordova? I've been starting to look at Cordova to build some pretty simple apps for business applications.

Does anyone have an opinion on whether Flutter would be a better choice? Why?

I also looked at Xamarin but that seems a little in-depth for what I need, which is basically some data-input screens (using standard Web-style controls) and then to upload the data to an API.

I see your point: people who market themselves better do better, regardless of their skillset to back up their claims.

Which happens a lot everywhere, not just with programmers.

But it should be relatively easy to beat the scammers, learn how to market yourself properly, get testimonials to back up your claims, build your marketing message to answer questions and problems that your potential customers have. In other words: build your authority as a freelancer.

> "Until shit breaks, or doesn't fit your exact requirements or the project dies, etc, etc, etc and believe me it does happen in which case you will need to know the lower level stuff. But yeah don't reinvent the wheel."

This.

That is true and can be a problem when recruiters just keyword match technologies from your CV.

When I've recruited I've always tried to assess the candidate on ability to get things done rather than knowing a specific framework. I'd look at how deep their knowledge goes and see if they can ship stuff - if they've been using jQuery but I need React then I'm not too fussed if they've shipped quality products using jQuery and have taken the time to learn pretty deeply how it works, the keenness to learn and ability to build things should easily translate to React and I'd rather have this person that someone who has skimmed the top of React for a few Hello Worlds.

I would hope and prey that interviewers would take a similar approach, if they are just ticking off keywords from your CV then it's a pain.

I have used Spring before and I like it quite a bit. I have tended to use vanilla Servlets for most of my projects recently and use libraries like Gson, Apache Commons, PdfBox etc etc where appropriate.

I think if anyone wants to go down the route of using Spring, Play or similar then you MUST spend the time learning it in pretty deep detail. I've seen so many people with "Spring experience" on their CV who can make a webpage appear using the tech but as soon as something goes wrong or they are asked to do something a little different they are screwed as they don't know the framework well enough.

I only use vanilla Servlets and my own stuff because I have been building up my own libraries and ways of doing things over time and I've been burnt enough times with old-school frameworks (like JSF and Seam) that just add so much unnecessary work and ball-ache.

I like to write the fewest lines of code possible and also use the fewest dependencies possible. I find that plain ol' Servlets gives me that for most of the stuff I do.

That shipping stable software that works and meets requirements is what people really want. In other words, what the non-tech business people want, or your customers want, is software that fixes their problems, makes their lives easier or makes them more money.

It's easy for us programmers to become fixated on using a newer JS framework, a slightly tighter Java loop or the latest cool language. Took me a few years to realise that even though I care a lot about those things, other people do not. They are interested in the outcomes, not how it got built.

I'm running my own business and building things for myself these days. I use vannilla JS on the front-end and Java 8 on the back. Since I gave up chasing the new cool tech I have built a bunch of stable systems that have been great, well received, products.

If you become someone who has a history of shipping things that work, you will do a lot better than someone who knows how to write hello world in every JS framework.

Hasn't that been a common thing in bitlocker malware for ages too?

Did they just manage to craft so really persuasive emails this time?

What's special about WannaCry that has made this such a widespread thing? I presume there's has been plenty of malware for a while that can propagate itself around a network of unpatched old Windows machines and people have been trying to get users to clicks on emails to infect themselves for years.

So why now? What's so special now?

It can be very isolating. I try and make sure I'm in situations where I know I will have a good chance of hearing so I can stay in the mix.

Imagine sitting around the table with 20 people, everyone else is speaking Chinese and you maybe know a few words of the language - you might grab the odd word or phrase that people have said but you are not in the conversation really. You quickly lose track of what is being talked about and as time goes on, more and more topics are discussed, you realise you don't want to say anything yourself in case what you are about to say has already been talked about and you will look stupid. So you fade in to the background and just hope no-one pipes up with, "hey, Bob, what do you think about that?".

Modern hearing aids give you great tools to combat these situations and they do work.

I guess the difference for me really is that hearing is now hard work, it's not something I can relax and do passively, I need to concentrate on words, listen hard, lip read and fill in the gaps of context I missed. It can be exhausting, especially in big groups. I've just upgraded to a pair of GN ReSound Linx 3D aids, which are a massive help to me.

"teachable moments"

Amen to that. If more people were open and talkative about their hearing loss and aids then it would be a huge help towards complete social acceptance.

I guess you've looked in to CROS and biCROS hearing aids?

http://phb.secondsensehearing.com/content/hearing-aid-review...

I'm pretty sure you can get an in-the-ear version of these, which would mean you could wear and almost invisible aid in your other ear.

https://www.phonak.com/uk/en/hearing-aids/phonak-cros-II.htm...

Kids can be evil and I got teased a bit too when I was at school. I've never experienced a negative reaction to my hearing aids as an adult though. Missing what someone has said has caused problems when they've maybe thought I was being rude and ignoring them or they said something and I answered with completely the wrong thing. So, I think as an adult not being able to always hear has caused reactions in people but not the visible hearing aids themselves.