3 ms·

I had the most wonderful déjà vu the other day. I needed to do some serious-ish network programming for the first time in 20 years. I googled around a bit for a

by gspr 6y ago

I had the most wonderful déjà vu the other day. I needed to do some serious-ish network programming for the first time in 20 years. I googled around a bit for a refresher. What do I find? Beej's guide – the same Beej's guide that was my first introduction to the topic 20 years prior! It was wonderfully poetic to me that the same document that taught me how to make a wildly dangerous IRC bot in my teenage room for the lulz also re-taught me the stuff I needed to deliver a low-latency ML offloading demo at my serious(-ish) job 20 years later. Gave me a real warm fuzzy feeling :-) PS: HN disucssion anno 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9445692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9445692 Anno 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13983212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13983212

gspr 6y ago
I thought I'd add: I know that this is a very normal thing in some sense. Many textbooks remain relevant for decades and decades (I'm a mathematician, we know this perhaps better than most). But still, it's rarely the case for an online document – one about computer technology even more so!
toast0 6y ago
> It was wonderfully poetic to me that the same document that taught me how to make a wildly dangerous IRC bot in my teenage room for the lulz also re-taught me the stuff I needed to deliver a low-latency ML offloading demo at my serious(-ish) job 20 years later. Gave me a real warm fuzzy feeling :-) My experience with CTCP flooding large channels channels and causing netsplits in my youth provided a perfect base of understanding for when my production servers started flooding status updates to each other and couldn't stay connected. PS sorry, undernet admins and users. Also, thanks to the admin on #quebec who asked me to flood his channel so he could tune his bot to block flooders.

by gspr 6y ago

gspr 6y ago

I thought I'd add: I know that this is a very normal thing in some sense. Many textbooks remain relevant for decades and decades (I'm a mathematician, we know this perhaps better than most). But still, it's rarely the case for an online document – one about computer technology even more so!

toast0 6y ago

> It was wonderfully poetic to me that the same document that taught me how to make a wildly dangerous IRC bot in my teenage room for the lulz also re-taught me the stuff I needed to deliver a low-latency ML offloading demo at my serious(-ish) job 20 years later. Gave me a real warm fuzzy feeling :-) My experience with CTCP flooding large channels channels and causing netsplits in my youth provided a perfect base of understanding for when my production servers started flooding status updates to each other and couldn't stay connected. PS sorry, undernet admins and users. Also, thanks to the admin on #quebec who asked me to flood his channel so he could tune his bot to block flooders.