bartread

28 ms·

421.
by bartread 1y ago
I have to say, I love the industrial design of these 80s machines from Atari, and also from contemporary Commodore offerings. As an example, the original Amiga 1000 is beautiful , and I'd be incredibly happy to have a machine with t
422.
by bartread 1y ago
You're misunderstanding my meaning with pipeline: you're thinking it's just the CD part of the equation. I'm thinking about it as the whole software development and delivery process (planning, design, UX, dev, test, PR r
423.
by bartread 1y ago
I don't know about that: I'm a manager, I'm aware of Taylorism (and isn't that guy discredited by sensible people anyway?), and I don't think the factory view holds up. Manufacturing is about making the same thing (
424.
by bartread 1y ago
And except that the factory analogy of software delivery has always been utterly terrible. If you want to draw parallels between software delivery and automotive delivery then most of what software engineers do would fall into the design an
425.
by bartread 1y ago
Yes, and with an aging population the bill gets ever more expensive so people have to work longer to cover it. I don’t like it either but can well imagine I’ll be working until 70, if I last that long.
426.
by bartread 1y ago
> The company’s founder Sachin Dev Duggal stepped down as chief executive earlier this year but retained his board position and title of “chief wizard”. If only there were some signal in the behaviour of a person who calls themselves “ch
427.
by bartread 1y ago
Fascinating map. I was about to ding it for missing all of the Swiss narrow gauge railways (of which there are many), but then I zoomed in a bit more and they all started to appear. Very cool.
428.
by bartread 1y ago
You might be underrating my ardour on this as I've said my piece at greater length before. I've always been in favour of (something like) the license fee to fund a non-commercial national public service broadcaster. Public service
429.
by bartread 1y ago
> It's not a loop. It's the main() function. No it isn't. I regularly use my car to travel to multiple destinations in a single "session". The reason I use GPS is because the apps built on top of it often know ab
430.
by bartread 1y ago
A big part of having good communication skills is knowing your audience. HN is a forum for people do discuss stories, not a forum for prompting LLMs. Moreover that discussion is supposed to be civil. You might see that civility as a waste o
431.
by bartread 1y ago
No, I do too, and I’m happy to do so. I’ve always felt it’s a useful brake on over-commercialisation of other channels, although perhaps less effective now than it once was. I do enjoy quite a bit of the BBC’s output as well.
432.
by bartread 1y ago
That’s true but also a bit reductionist. And even in that regard, what they federally do is assist managers. So, for example, if a manager has an underperforming team member HR will ensure that manager follows process in applying performanc
433.
by bartread 1y ago
> but when that audience is a weak communicator the entire process disintegrates. That is, what I suspect is happening with the blog post author. That’s a pretty rude and disrespectful take on this piece, don’t you think? How can you rea
434.
by bartread 1y ago
> I've not really been the outer control loop of the vehicle. An automated system tells me what to do. That’s not really true, is it? Who tells the GPS where you’d like to go? You, I imagine. You don’t just follow GPS instructions u
435.
by bartread 1y ago
I suppose the hot take on this is something like: there are detractors, but I think for the majority of software engineers - and certainly those using premium plans of the various available providers - this is not news. Being perhaps a litt
436.
by bartread 1y ago
Pfft. If I’ve booked the room and you’re loitering in there I don’t care what your perception of defaults or the meaning of the minute hand’s position on the clock face is. That room is mine for the time I’ve booked it. Be off with you!
437.
by bartread 1y ago
Try Poppler’s pdftohtml command line tool. For me that seems to do a good job of spitting out multi-column text in the right order. Then you have the much easier task of extracting the text from the HTML. Also, if it does come out in the wr
438.
by bartread 1y ago
It does have a feature to do the opposite. You can, in theory, extract tabular data from PDFs with Excel (note: only on the Windows version; this function isn’t available in macOS Excel). In practice I’ve found it to be extremely unreliable
439.
by bartread 1y ago
> but that’s completely optional and only serves as auxiliary metadata, it’s not at the core of the PDF format. This is what I kind of suspected but, as I said in my original comment, I'm not an expert and for the PDFs I'm read
440.
by bartread 1y ago
Yeah, getting text - even structured text - out of PDFs is no picnic. Scraping a table out of an HTML document is often straightforward even on sites that use the "everything's a <div>" (anti-)pattern, and especially on
441.
by bartread 1y ago
I can only give a personal perspective but I don’t necessarily trust reviews from large, established mainstream outlets, as opposed to independent creators and reviewers. My taste in games tend to lag by at least a few years, so I’d often f
442.
by bartread 1y ago
Commodore BASIC (which was really a variant of Microsoft BASIC IIRC) was so awful. No drawing commands. No real control over the computer's graphics modes. Very limited control over sprites. No great commands for the SID (arguably th
443.
by bartread 1y ago
That is a great tip. Thank you! I wonder if they’ll ship to the UK?
444.
by bartread 1y ago
I'm in the process of resurrecting an old blog of mine, which had used hexo back in the day with all the raw posts being markdown files that are statically rendered to HTML... and to be honest I'm pretty tempted by this very simpl
445.
by bartread 1y ago
> put text on screen I get where you're coming from but that's actually quite a bit of an oversimplification even for many web apps outside of the 1% for which a lot of modern web development solutions and frameworks seem to
446.
by bartread 1y ago
That ship has sailed. The web is nowadays an application delivery platform and there is no going back. Dynamic loading, iframes, and a whole host of other features all have their uses within that context - the issue is really their misuse
447.
by bartread 1y ago
This has given me flashbacks. I went down this rabbit hole prepandemic with a Dell laptop I had for work at the time. I got tired of getting on the train to find my laptop dead. Back then Windows would default to a crap version of sleep but
448.
by bartread 1y ago
I can sort of buy it but, honestly, this argument would be a lot more convincing with more concrete examples that are relateable to ordinary people. Some CEO getting busted for insider trading is not "ordinary people". There'
449.
by bartread 1y ago
This sort of queuing system is also widely used in Post Office and bank branches in the UK since at least the 1980s.
450.
by bartread 2y ago
Interesting. So when I tried the “Indiana Jones” prompt I got an image back that looked a lot like Indiana Jones but with a face much more similar to Nathan Drake. Whereas the predator prompt generated an image of the predator but, unlike t

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