a4isms

18 ms·

241.
by a4isms 4y ago
My first program was written in FORTRAN on punch cards, back in those days we tied an onion to our belt—no, we didn’t do that, and I was just a kid, so Truthfully what I observed was that in those days mainframes had a “machine room” where
242.
by a4isms 4y ago
I’m from Toronto. Twenty years ago, I had some business in SF, and I scheduled it for the same time as MacWorld SF. My partner and I flew to Chicago, where we caught the California Zephyr to Oakland. We had a small cabin, but it was great.
243.
by a4isms 4y ago
Sharecropping also has a strong parallel to making apps for somebody else's walled garden. You do the labour to create the app, you do the labour of finding the right product-market fit, you take all the risks, and the landlord takes 3
244.
by a4isms 4y ago
There is a term-of-art for using English to write programs: "The English-Likeness Monster." The poster-boy for this terrible UX is--ironically--AppleScript, a programming language from a company that otherwise prides itself on goo
245.
by a4isms 4y ago
It's slightly different. Programming languages are for the most part deterministic tools that programmers generally understand and can debug. For this audience, the interpreter or compiler is not a "black box" that we only in
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by a4isms 4y ago
I find that interesting, even if I abhor its existence. Feels a little like SEO tea-leaf reading. "If I prompt this, I get that." It's like reverse-engineering the model so you can game it into doing something specific, witho
247.
by a4isms 4y ago
Paula Progressive: "You mean there's a shortage of people willing to work brutal hours for subsistence wages." Charlie Conservative: "If your job can be replaced by AI, you deserve to starve, you aren't creating val
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by a4isms 4y ago
Absolutely. Also aged people who no longer qualify to drive their own vehicles, people with other disabilities that prevent them from driving under any circumstance, people who have disabilities that permit them to drive with specially modi
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by a4isms 4y ago
> I really believe that with that attitude, we'll never be "ready" for driverless cars. Is that a problem? And if it is, are you implying that we cannot one day have driverless cars without imposing life-threatening extern
250.
by a4isms 4y ago
The solution is recognizing that we are nowhere near ready for driverless cars. With "ordinary" software, you can look at all of the use cases and if you solve 5% of them in a really good way, you can be successful, users will sel
251.
by a4isms 4y ago
Yes, and old fogies like me can walk around such places proudly wearing our tee shirts that read: "To you, it's retro. To me, it's nostalgia."
252.
by a4isms 4y ago
Time to rediscover the drive-in restaurant. Only in 2023, it has: 1. Fast charging in every spot; 2. Espresso and high-margin dessert-in-a-cup drinks served right to your vehicle; 3. Free high-speed unlimited WiFi for customers. Why get out
253.
by a4isms 4y ago
Classical itself has progressed, because the composers who grow up listening to it in any one generation get familiar with what has been done so far, and then inject novelty into it to satisfy their own tastes. Repeat every twenty years ove
254.
by a4isms 4y ago
In a lecture about the universal characteristics of classical architecture, professor Nathaniel Walker argued that human beings crave two things: order and variety. If there's too much order, it's boring and oppressive. If there&
255.
by a4isms 4y ago
> Boy does this remind me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 That is HN's version of "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
256.
by a4isms 4y ago
I am not interested in defending or advertising the product or company. I am on Hacker News, a site for people interested in startups that serves as a something of a feeder for Ycombinator. My interest is in discussing the dynamics of makin
257.
by a4isms 4y ago
We'll have to agree to disagree about non-optimal purchases. Lots of purchases are non-optimal, but how often do people climb onto their soapbox and say that everyone buying Apple hardware is making a "non-optimal" purchase?
258.
by a4isms 4y ago
PagerDuty engineer here. PagerDuty is not a messaging platform. You are correct that there are free products that can schedule people and send them messages, and with some elegant baling wire and duct tape, anyone can put together something
259.
by a4isms 4y ago
Beautifully said.
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by a4isms 4y ago
Greenspun’s Tenth Rule is evergreen: Any sufficiently complicated framework-free program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a framework.
261.
by a4isms 4y ago
It’s the same “F,” but I pronounce it “Fine.”
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by a4isms 4y ago
Wayback machine link, if the paywall blocks you from reading TFA: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://nymag.co... The article itself is about 50% Elon’s management misadventures, which is
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Elon Musk and the Sad Mod Theory of Social-Media CEOs(nymag.com)
7 points by a4isms 4y ago|5 comments
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by a4isms 4y ago
I spoke about crypto speculation , and I was explicit about that. I choose not to debate speculative claims about crypto's potential for becoming a useful "store of value" or "currency for commerce" at this time an
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by a4isms 4y ago
In the movie “Quicksilver,” Kevin Bacon plays some kind of (commodities) trader who lost an enormous amount of money betting the wrong way and retires from trading to become a bike courier. He has a friend over at his loft, and while lookin
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by a4isms 4y ago
Perhaps McDonalds lies to you in your jurisdiction, but no, I have never seen an ad where they claim that their hamburgers are so-and-so many millimetres tall. I have seen plenty of claims from them about things like the uncooked weight of
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by a4isms 4y ago
> everything is staged and dolled up Dolled up, yes. Staged as in, "Portrayed in the best light?" Yes. But staged as in "As fake as the Apollo 11 moon landing?" No. McDonald's Canada did an entire video showing h
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by a4isms 4y ago
That's a reasonable model to work from. My observations: First, "Anticipating and preventing problems ahead of time" is of a manifestly different character to either "Preventing a problem that has already occurred from g
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by a4isms 4y ago
> the truth is the advertising industry cares about the opinion of users like the thanksgiving industry cares about the opinion of turkeys Nobody asks for the steak’s opinion when planning a BBQ.
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by a4isms 4y ago
PagerDuty engineer here. There is much to discuss with respect to "Websites of all sizes are designed to largely self operate with no manual intervention for decent periods of time." The phrase "decent periods of time" i

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