throwaway154

Corps have a dev environment sitting right in Excel that doesn't need special (management, management's management, adding to a registrar of projects, budgeting or project manager assigned, etc) approval for non-stock software. The stack's Excel, plus Sharepoint if you're really looking for a networked data store that also has a web interface.

From that end-user direction, solutions emerge. And they're in VBA.

I'm not impressed by the USB. That it's possible to put transaction details on a USB stick means it's possible for customer data to go walking out the door on a USB stick, too. I'm pretty sure infact this goes against data security requirements of US regulators.

I hate scalpers. I'm too busy doing HFT to deal with the problems they make.

The positive part of snaps, and I don't like snaps for myself, is that snaps keep updating on an unmaintained server. So as a default for VPS providers seeking to hand hold users Ubuntu perhaps makes sense.

At least that's what I understand.

However on a server I use Debian (stable) as I purposefully don't want to be at the 'cutting edge'. [I also use Debian on my laptop because it just works.]

No just major Chinese bank, but the biggest bank in the world measured by assets. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_banks

You'd probably be better off downloading an edition of wikipedia for that purpose. Entropy, and stuff.

+1 useful.

Seconding Zettlr. It also handles citations smoothly with a linked .bib file. The sidebar (a sidebar, there's more than one) also does directory tree structure like your favourite code editor too.

You mean kicking back over some eggs benedict, a meat and cheese charcuterie board, with some champagne on the side, sitting back in your pine-panelled centrally heated chalet overlooking mountain landscapes relaxing having risen at 4.30pm for a hill run and vigorous workout isn't fitting what most Europeans do on a Sunday morning?

The call-in was an anonymous, apparently, call to the company's switchboard stating a bomb package had been left in the vicinity of the desk. We were evacuated to a separate part of the building for a few hours while it was dealt with.

I once worked with new awful in-house software that (thankfully) depended on 3rd party software. We had the legacy in-house system parallel running, which was even more awful. The legacy's awful came from it being unable to do anything it didn't already do without extensive re-wiring, and a team who believed if they don't share their knowledge of it they had a job for life. The replacement's awful came from it being inefficiently programmed with large DB latency due to the team's belief at throwing more CPU behind queries instead of re-writing queries.

The teams sat next to each other but didn't speak.

The legacy team called in a bomb threat to a package left under the IT director's desk. It was taken very seriously. While their cause was already lost, that didn't help them personally.

The new system team eventually called Oracle, who came and re-wrote their queries.

I quit Ubuntu for Debian.

It works for what I need: What I need: Browser (Firefox), Email (Thunderbird), Notes (Zettlr) + Reference (JabRef), Python, Postgres, Shell, occasional LibreOffice, the odd podcast (gPodder) and feeds (Liferea), very occasional audio and video editing.

What do you need?

An octopus could set my SAAS pricing too.

How can I be sure this is not better than an octopus?

Yes. You choose your god(s). They're in your head.

Paul Graham uses Twitter still?

> That's exactly what I'd like to be able to do again

Dreamhost.com (or one of the many others).

Pick 'webhosting' as the option. You may even get a free .com for a year, just like back in the day.

Github pages and CDNs and CMSs and one-click install and VPSs and all that jazz don't fix an unbroken problem: Hosting static files on a webserver that likely hosts hundreds or thousands of sites effortlessly.

None of that jazz is needed. FTP your files. With FileZilla. Like back in the day.

Skills based education:

Learn how to push a button A on a machine to start it, how to push button B to stop it. This can be learnt (and tested) perfectly. It is the ultimate in skills-based education.

Along the way, having worked on a few machines, a worker may piece together some information about 'starting' and 'stopping'. However, this is beyond what's needed.

Should schools be about skill based education? Or about that beyond what's needed? Beyond what's needed won't get the employer a greater short term fungible labour marginal return, why pay for it? Shareholder value!

Does it matter that no one learns Flutter? Teaching Turing [1] may be a step too far in taking programming away from real life. So it's a balance. But so so much more goes into learning computer science than programming language of the day that can be learned from Udemy. From O(n log n) to O(n), how a computer works under the bonnet, what a LLM is, to legal aspects, there's a lot more to computer science as a skill. The challenge of the education system is balancing sketchy employers and pitch-fork public, and the influence they have, that want a cheap quick fix vs actually empowering and inspiring high schoolers' futures.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_(programming_language)

It hasn't. Surfing the web without an adblocker is almost as bad as 20 years ago without Firefox or Opera and popups galore. Less immediate, acute security risks than then, more videos on autoplay.

There's no need for a 'GDPR' notification for non-tracking cookies. It's not even about the cookie, it's about the tracking.

What's 'ruined the web' (for many) is concentration of sites into a handful of mega-'properties' that seek to own their visitors and users. To say this is GDPR-induced is to propagate and amplify the lie.

The price of a subsidised loan has increased as the subsidy has fallen while the face value of the asset the loan's for purchase of, an asset that's blown up on financing that's been almost free (as in interest, the return on capital) for a decade+ baked with a myriad of sticky price perceptions not least vested middle class (voting class) interest to maintain its inflated discounted present value, hasn't changed much.

Next, whip out a copy of "Beginning Java 2.0". /s

Have them set a reasonable end-goal, a thing they'd like to make. Give them the tools to do this. Mark out some steps and scaffold them along the way.

When they've made that, ask what they'd like added. This introduces iterative development. Mark out a plan for that.

Then start all over with a similar but different end goal and have them gain confidence repeating/reinforcing the use of what they picked up with the first goal. Iterate in a different direction.

When adding a their project, perhaps the concept of re-use, making into modules or templates, might sound useful to them.

Then have them go less unguided by you personally with a self-paced course from Udemy or similar. They should be acquiring some self-teaching at this stage. Step in when they're having a lot of trouble.

The key theme here is building efficacy - sort of 'effective confidence' though a distinct term, and that's great for learning anything for life.

Edit: At no point be shy of printing a page of the code you're on and working through it with a pen. Things like loops and recursion might take some repetition practice on their own; introduce crazy things like while or even prove recursion through box logic if you're particularly sadistic!

Motor racing perhaps. As in, the wheels are on fire.

I believe I've heard it in relation to the internet since broadband rollout. But who knows, perhaps that's just past experience fallacy.

To see whether or not, try the Wayback Machine. Here's a search for this phrase: https://web.archive.org/web/*/blazingly%20fast

Just don't drink.

Not an easy 'just' if kicking a physiological and peer-pressure habit and especially worth it for these groups.

Are reading articles about being productive a productivity gain?

It takes tens of thousands of engineers at FAANGs to...

do webmail...

doing IM takes one FAANG... 30 people?...

to replicate what non-technical local events communities did in posting shared calendars on PHP-driven solutions two+ decades ago...

to do what Wordpress does but costing much more per user than everyone in the world having their own Wordpress install...

to create a mobile OS while a basic working Ubuntu version on vastly diverse and undocumented hardware seems to be done by three people and a shoe...

to do advertising analytics...

to create advertising platforms...

to make users a product...

to discontinue products if they don't fit into productifying the user enough...

to make itself an indispensable solution by extinguishing anything not in its network of users as products scale...

...more?

If there's anything FAANGs do, that's actually good, it's employing people to make their advertising social environments online safe. But they seem to too often shirk that. And that's not a computer-technical job no matter how someone might want to pretend they can create a Bayes filter for it.

Please read the article.

> Nearly nine in 10 killings last year took place in Latin America, with three in 10 occurring in Colombia

> Globally, one-third of victims were Indigenous people.

It's not about climate activists that 'glue themselves to roads'.

What's a global issue for most commenters here starts as a local issue for many.

Microsoft Windows was likely #1.

    body {
        font-family: sans-serif;
        font-size:  16pt;
        line-height:  1.6;
    }

    h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
        font-family:  serif;
    }

That's readable, thus a minimum standard for beauty.

Use of colour, spacing, case, image then become important for making powerful prioritisation, focus, structuring absorption/presentation of your message. A specific font may or may not be part of this, and advantage of system fonts is not just their speed, but their familiarity - this can also be a disadvantage if intentionally seeking to disjoint a user or place them in a context associated with the font.

I assumed it was an Australian amalgamation of bush and whack that can be imagined to mean exactly what it means, like a lot of words do, perhaps inspired by a loose overheard memory, perhaps not.

I can't really imagine an American saying it. I can imagine an Australian.

HN seem to be a fan of oats, as am I.